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| Oswald Spengler |
This year it will mark one century
since the publication in 1918 of the first volume of the book The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler.
The second volume was published five years later, in 1923. This book was the
first to raise the idea that our famed Western civilization is in decline. What
can we say about it, a hundred years later?
The great historian of the
twentieth century, Arnold J. Toynbee, agreed with Spengler on his fundamental
idea, although not in the details. For Toynbee, Western civilization collapsed in the
twentieth century, when the two world wars proved its inability to face
new challenges. Of course, for Toynbee, the collapse of a civilization does not
mean its disappearance, it does not even prelude it. We still have ahead -
according to him - a few centuries of what Toynbee calls the Universal
Empire, linked, however, to a certain cultural stagnation.
The first thing we have to notice
is: if Spengler actually managed to detect the decadence of our civilization, it
means that the decline
had begun much earlier. Evolutionary movements, both biological and
cultural, are imperceptible at the beginning. When they become visible, they
are quite advanced in their development.
