Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German polymath whose areas of interest included history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history. He is best known for his two-volume work The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history. Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilizations are akin to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan. He predicted that Western civilization would enter the period of pre‑death emergency around the year 2000, which would lead to 200 years of Caesarism (extra-constitutional omnipotence of the executive branch of government) before Western civilization's final collapse.
Spengler is regarded as a German nationalist and a critic of republicanism. He was a prominent member of the Weimar-era Conservative Revolution. While the Nazis had viewed his writings as a means to provide a "respectable pedigree" to their ideology, Spengler criticized Nazism for its racialist and antisemitic elements, and he came to be considered a persona non grata by the Nazi regime. He saw Benito Mussolini and entrepreneurial types, such as the mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, as examples of the impending Caesars of Western culture—later expressing disappointment in Mussolini's colonialist adventurism.
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was born on 29 May 1880 in Blankenburg, Duchy of Brunswick, German Empire, the oldest surviving child of Bernhard Spengler (1844–1901) and Pauline Spengler (1840–1910), née Grantzow, the descendant of an artistic family. His elder brother was born prematurely in 1879, when his mother tried to move a heavy laundry basket, and died at the age of three weeks. Spengler was born ten months after his brother's death. His younger sisters were Adele (1881–1917), Gertrud (1882–1957), and Hildegard (1885–1942). His paternal grandfather, Theodor Spengler (1806–1876), was a metallurgical inspector (Hütteninspektor) in Altenbrak.
Spengler's maternal great-grandfather, Friedrich Wilhelm Grantzow, a tailor's apprentice in Berlin, had three children out of wedlock with a Jewish woman named Bräunchen Moses (c. 1769–1849) whom he later married, on 26 May 1799. Shortly before the wedding, Moses was baptized as Johanna Elisabeth Anspachin; the surname was chosen after her birthplace—Anspach. Her parents, Abraham and Reile Moses, were both deceased by then. The couple had another five children, one of whom was Spengler's maternal grandfather, Gustav Adolf Grantzow (1811–1883)—a solo dancer and ballet master in Berlin, who in 1837 married Katharina Kirchner (1813–1873), a solo dancer from a Munich Catholic family; the second of their four daughters was Spengler's mother. Like the Grantzows in general, Spengler's mother was of a Bohemian disposition; before marrying Spengler's father, she accompanied her dancer sisters on tours. In appearance, she was plump. Her temperament, which Spengler inherited, was moody, irritable, and morose.
When Spengler was ten years of age, his family moved to the university city of Halle. He received a classical education at the local Gymnasium (academically oriented secondary school), studying Greek, Latin, mathematics, and sciences. He developed his propensity for the arts—especially poetry, drama, and music—and came under the influence of the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche. At 17, he wrote a drama titled Montezuma.
After his father's death in 1901, Spengler attended the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, and the University of Halle as a private scholar, taking courses in a wide range of subjects. His studies were undirected. In 1903, he failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus—titled Der metaphysische Grundgedanke der heraklitischen Philosophie (The Fundamental Metaphysical Thought of the Heraclitean Philosophy) and conducted under the direction of Alois Riehl—because of insufficient references. He took the doctoral oral exam again and received his PhD from Halle on 6 April 1904. In December 1904, he began to write the secondary dissertation (Staatsexamensarbeit) necessary to qualify as a high school teacher. This became The Development of the Organ of Sight in the Higher Realms of the Animal Kingdom (Die Entwicklung des Sehorgans bei den Hauptstufen des Tierreiches), a text now lost. It was approved and he received his teaching certificate. In 1905, Spengler suffered a nervous breakdown.
Spengler briefly served as a teacher in Saarbrücken then in Düsseldorf. From 1908 to 1911, he worked at a grammar school (Realgymnasium) in Hamburg, where he taught science, German history, and mathematics. Biographers report that his life as a teacher was uneventful.
In 1911, following his mother's death, Spengler moved to Munich, where he lived for the rest of his life. While there, he was a cloistered scholar, supported by his modest inheritance. Spengler survived on very limited means and was marked by loneliness. He owned no books, and took work as a tutor and wrote for magazines to earn additional income. Due to a severe heart problem, Spengler was exempted from military service. During the war, his inheritance was useless because it was invested overseas; thus, he lived in genuine poverty for this period.
Spengler began work on the first volume of The Decline of the West intending to focus on Germany within Europe; however, the Agadir Crisis of 1911 affected him deeply, so he widened the scope of his study. According to Spengler the book was completed in 1914, but the first edition was published in the summer of 1918, shortly before the end of World War I. Spengler wrote about the years immediately prior to World War I in Decline:
At that time the World-War appeared to me both as imminent and also as the inevitable outward manifestation of the historical crisis, and my endeavor was to comprehend it from an examination of the spirit of the preceding centuries—not years. ... Thereafter I saw the present—the approaching World-War—in a quite other light. It was no longer a momentary constellation of casual facts due to national sentiments, personal influences, or economic tendencies endowed with an appearance of unity and necessity by some historian's scheme of political or social cause-and-effect, but the type of historical change of phase occurring within a great historical organism of definable compass at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago.
When the first volume of The Decline of the West was published, it was a wild success. Spengler became an instant celebrity. The national humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), followed by economic depression in 1923 and hyperinflation, seemed to prove Spengler right. Decline comforted Germans because it could be used as a rationale for their diminished pre-eminence, i.e. due to larger world-historical processes. The book met with wide success outside of Germany as well, and by 1919 had been translated into several other languages.
The second volume of Decline was published in 1922. In it, Spengler argued that German socialism differed from Marxism; instead, he said it was more compatible with traditional German conservatism. Spengler declined an appointment as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen, saying he needed time to focus on writing.
The book was widely discussed, even by those who had not read it. Historians took umbrage at his unapologetically non-scientific approach. Novelist Thomas Mann compared reading Spengler's book to reading Arthur Schopenhauer's works for the first time. Academics gave it a mixed reception. Sociologist Max Weber described Spengler as a "very ingenious and learned dilettante", while philosopher Karl Popper called the thesis "pointless". The first volume of Decline was published in English by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926, the second in 1928.
In 1924, following the social-economic upheaval and hyperinflation, Spengler entered politics in an effort to bring Reichswehr General Hans von Seeckt to power as the country's leader. The attempt failed and Spengler proved ineffective in practical politics. A 1928 Time review of the second volume of Decline described the immense influence and controversy Spengler's ideas enjoyed during the 1920s: "When the first volume of The Decline of the West appeared in Germany a few years ago, thousands of copies were sold. Cultivated European discourse quickly became Spengler-saturated. Spenglerism spurted from the pens of countless disciples. It was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathize or revolt. It still remains so".