Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler (1880 to 1936) was a German polymath whose interests ranged across history, philosophy, mathematics, science and art, and who is best known for the two-volume The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922. His organic theory of history holds that human cultures and civilizations resemble biological entities, each with a limited, predictable and deterministic lifespan, and he predicted that Western civilization would enter a period of emergency around the year 2000, to be followed by two centuries of Caesarism. Born in Blankenburg in the Duchy of Brunswick, he studied at Munich and later lived there as a cloistered scholar supported by a modest inheritance. A German nationalist and a critic of republicanism, he belonged to the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar years, yet he criticized Nazism for its racialist and antisemitic elements. He died of a heart attack in Munich in 1936.