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This chapter discusses the life and work of Oswald Spengler, whose fame is based on his The Decline of the West, a monumental historical study that endeavored to show that all human civilizations live through similar phases of evolution. Spengler also dabbled with politics and attempted, in a series of essays, to promote the idea of a conservative renaissance in Germany. The rise of National Socialism put Spengler in a situation of ideological opposition and, after he criticized the regime because of its racial theory and its populism, made him a persona non grata until his death in 1937. After the Second World War, Spengler’s elitism and expectation of a German-dominated Europe dominated the reception of his work. This somewhat masked the complexity of his thought, which prefigures such modern debates as the criticism of technology, ecological issues, interreligious questions, the rise of Asia, and prehistoric human evolution.

This chapter addresses the philosophy of history and the so-called crisis of historicism. For proponents of the Weimar “crisis theology,” the breakdown of historical norms and values had led to a “permanent Krisis of the relation between time and eternity.” In this void “between the times” the work of Spengler, Barth, and Gogarten came to signify a “crisis of historicism”: not merely of the empirical research paradigm of practicing historians, but rather a crisis in the foundations of historical thinking, of Nietzsche's question about whether history itself has any meaning for life. It is this crisis that came to shape German historical thinking in decisive ways during the Weimar era, especially in the work of four philosophers of history: Oswald Spengler, Ernst Troeltsch, Heinrich Rickert, and Martin Heidegger.

The author analyzes Friedrich Ratzel, imperial Germany’s leading geo-politician, and Oswald Spengler, the founder of Germany’s conservative revolution. The Roman Empire was central to their arguments. Invested in the distinction between organic Kultur and inorganic Zivilisation, they criticized imperialism, privileging the political logic of empires. Ratzel emphasized the durability of the ancient empire and its ruins. Spengler’s law of ruin asserts that Rome’s trajectory from empire to imperialism and, finally, death, was the inescapable fate of all empires. He proposes Caesarism as the only political form powerful enough to decelerate imperialism’s rush toward its inexorable end. Spengler also explored the West’s imperial imaginary as a visual regime, and claimed that historical thinking and ruin consciousness was unique to the West. A radical conservative critic of European modernity, Spengler positioned himself as the West’s ultimate ruin gazer. Conjuring the modern barbarian, Spengler’s many ruin scenarios reassert scopic mastery. Spengler also developed a model of neo-Roman mimesis. Criticizing European neo-classicisms, he celebrated Rome’s heroic style as the form of genuine imitation. Reconnecting with the author’s analysis of Louis Bertrand’s theo-politics of empire and enmity, the chapter concludes with Spengler’s Years of Decision, his conservative-revolutionary manifesto, and his implication in fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism.

While the first two chapters explored the development of an extinction imaginary that viewed extinction as the natural, inevitable, and progressive result of competition between species or peoples, Chapter 3 documents a shift that took place at the turn of the twentieth century to a more pessimistic interpretation of extinction. Events like the decline of European empires and above all the advent of the First World War shook Western confidence in inevitable progress, and biological theories of extinction reflected this gloomier outlook. Cultural themes of apocalypse and cyclical decline mirrored scientific views of extinction as the inevitable outcome of evolutionary processes that applied to even the most dominant groups in the history of life. In particular, fascination with the demise of the dinosaurs was frequently the source of analogies with the collapse of great civilizations, illustrated in particular by Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and in scientific theories of racial degeneration and non-progressive evolutionary cycles.

This chapter understands lateness as a mode of ‘decline’. Tracing the category through the cultural criticism of Oswald Spengler, Nicholas Berdyaev, Hellmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen, it explores the extent to which Western modernity of the 1920s is ‘at the end of the Late period’. Playing on the German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, Spengler argues that what he terms ‘Faustian’ modernity must be understood as a late, senescent civilization, rather than as an early, vigorous culture. Berdyaev, meanwhile, sees Europe as entering ‘a period of senility and decay’—in his view an exclusively Western European phenomenon, predicated on the after-effects of the Renaissance. Plessner famously defines modern Germany as the ‘belated nation’, while Gehlen analyses modernity as a Spätkultur moving towards the ‘end of history’. In their differing ways, all these thinkers suggest the enduring currency of historiographical theories of lateness across the first half of the twentieth century.

This chapter examines Leonard Woolf's critique of the two volumes of Oswald Spengler's treatise on history, The Decline of the West, published, respectively, after each volume appeared in English translation in 1926 and 1928. As a set, both volumes were purchased and read by Yeats soon after he published the first edition of his occult philosophy, A Vision, in 1925, and this reading impacted the rewritten 1937 second edition, where aspects of Spengler's comprehensive outline were cited. Woolf critiqued Spengler as an agent of intellectual quackery, first, in two “World of Books” columns (in 1926 and 1929) in The Nation & The Athenaeum, which he edited, and then, famously, in his book Quack, Quack! (1935).

This chapter examines the purpose of Philosophical Investigations, with particular emphasis on the connections Ludwig Wittgenstein saw between the philosophical problems with which he grappled in his later philosophy and the historical-cultural context in which those problems arose. It begins with an overview of Wittgenstein's development of certain themes he found in Oswald Spengler as an important connecting link between his critique of metaphysics and his concerns with cultural decline. It then considers some ideas broached by Stanley Cavell to show how Philosophical Investigations can be read as a substantial continuation from the Tractatus, both in the way it attempts to embody a nontheoretical conception of philosophy and in the way in which this conception is in the service of what can be seen as an attempt to fulfill something like the earlier work's ethical purpose. The chapter also tackles the question of how these issues intersect with Wittgenstein's attitude toward and engagement with religion.

The book leads to two main conclusive points. Firstly, representations of cultural modernity in Latin America were not simply based on the idea of progress but were also linked with notions of degeneration. These ideas were subsequently challenged in order to engender a process of regeneration through which a different and more humane modern society could emerge, arising phoenix-like from the ashes of europeísta decline. The concluding chapter stresses the long-term significance of these turn-of-the-century debates by briefly considering the enthusiastic reception in South America of Oswald Spengler’s book on The Decline of the West (1918). Secondly, the book shows the ways in which and the extent to which the cultural notion of Latinity was debated, adapted and often challenged from within and the extent to which it facilitated internal discourses of modernity as well as of regional identity. The regeneration of Latin America needed to be primarily cultural. Or, to put it differently, culture was the essential instrument for political change. This political ideal would have a long-standing resonance in Spanish American criticism, reaching its ideological climax in 1920s Mexico with José Vasconcelos’ aesthetic vision of the cosmic race.

The introduction sets forth a genealogy of disenchantment, from mid and late nineteenth-century fears of degeneration as a consequence of anthropological work, anxieties about increasing mechanisation and the concomitant growth of mass culture. The ways in which the theories of social reformers such as C. F. G. Masterman and declinists such as Oswald Spengler prefigure and inform First World War literature are outlined. The increasing predominance of mass culture, in line with improvements in literacy, meant that the novel was becoming the form in which matters of note were discussed, and writers’ views on writing are mobilised to support this analysis. Typically British pre-war enchantments are sketched out, and the book is situated within the current field of First World War Studies. A chapter outline is provided.

This chapter deals with Martin Heidegger’s thinking about empire and imperialism. Hitler, Himmler, and Speer proposed a thousand-year Reich and thousands of years of glorious ruins. Schmitt devoted himself to the neo-Roman problem of how to prolong the time before the fall by returning to the first century. Privileging ancient Greek readiness to face the end, Heidegger analyzed and criticized this Roman desire to endure. In contrast to Schmitt, when Heidegger thought about Reich, he did not return to Rome but turned to archaic Greece. Focusing on Heidegger’s Basic Concepts and his so-called Black Notebooks, the author traces the importance of Oswald Spengler’s thought for Heidegger’s understanding of imperialism and his reconceptualization of Spengler’s notion of Untergang/decline. She also studies Heidegger’s critique of neo-Roman imitation. Like Schmitt, Heidegger belongs to the tradition of conservative revolutionary thinkers of empire that the author has traced through The Conquest of Ruins. The book thus ends with Heidegger’s immersion in Spengler’s theory of Caesarist imperialism and his implicit dismissal of Schmitt’s version of the Pauline katechon.

This essay addresses W. B. Yeats’s fascism with specific reference to Theodor Adorno’s works “Theses against Occultism” and The Authoritarian Personality. Yeats’s role in the Blueshirt movement is considered alongside the Vision Papers and especially his Avatar figure, which has much in common with Oswald Spengler’s idea of the rise of Caesarism. Yet, whilst Yeats is often overt in his support of a despotic and tyrannical mode of government, he also defends personal and spiritual liberty through his idea of the Thirteenth Cone, which features in A Vision. The essay argues that Yeats sought to maintain a contradictory occult theory which problematizes any strict definition of his politics: he defended the rights of the individual whilst simultaneously supporting anti-democratic policy. Thus, Yeatsian occult doctrine is revealed to espouse neither democracy nor fascist authoritarianism exclusively, but rather seeks to oscillate between two contradictory ideologies.

The Iceman Cometh was one of the last Eugene O'Neill completed and the very last of his enduring works that he lived to see produced on stage. Its unsuccessful debut may have had less to do with the promising social conditions of the time than with the shortcomings of the director and the actors involved in the first production. Criticisms of O'Neill's plays long antedated the performance of his post-World War II productions. His Nietzschean perspective played havoc with the socialist assumption that the masses were capable of rising to class consciousness. He was also a dramatist of ideas, and the philosophical outlooks of Freidrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Oswald Spengler, and others run through his plays. In O'Neill's America, there is no clear presence of authority, no firm voice informing people what they should do or not do. Furthermore, O'Neill addressed the revolutionary Wobblies of the World War I years.

Florovsky’s application of the Greek patristic and Byzantine theological norm to the development of Russian theology constitutes his theological signature. The chapter begins by exploring different instances of a “historical synthesis” in Florovsky’s patrology volumes, The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century and The Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth-Eighth Centuries. Drawing on Oswald Spengler’s concept of pseudomorphosis, Florovsky presented the history of Russian religious thought as a drama with a long prelude consisting of a “theological silence,” and three main acts, consisting of the Roman Catholic pseudomorphosis of the Kievan school, of the Protestant pseudomorphosis under Peter the Great, a brief nineteenth century interlude during which a scholarly study of the Church Fathers began in Russia, and a subsequent German Idealist pseudomorphosis of Russian theology. The chapter critically assesses the following problematic features of Florovsky’s approach: his application of the Byzantine theological norm to Russian theology, his rejection of the distinctive character of the Ukrainian theological tradition, and his tendency to confuse the criterion of cultural identity with the criterion of truth.

This chapter focuses on the reading and reception of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West among the Rapallo poets. It shows how Spengler’s ideas resonated in W.B. and George Yeats’s A Vision, and—less obviously—in Dorothy Pound’s ideas about the capacity of aesthetic form to manifest a metaphysical idea. The chapter looks at Yeats’s essays for Dublin Magazine about the roles of state-sponsored institutions and Dorothy Pound’s attention to fascist architecture in her letters and drawings, showing how their work was responding to the large-scale cultural projects of the regime.

In chapter twenty-four the author explores how Carl Schmitt evolved into the neo-Roman theorist of empire, imperial mimesis, and imperial imaginary. With his katechontic theory of empire and imperial mimesis, Schmitt sums up the entire neo-Roman imperial tradition. Polybios developed his ideas about imperial endtimes at the moment when Rome conquered Carthage. Schmitt’s idea of the restrainer who postpones the empire’s end emerged in the early 1940s, when Werner Best, the leading theorist of “great space orders” in the SS, argued that the Nazi empire might be in the process of repeating Rome’s fall. The chapter concludes with Schmitt’s return to his concept of the Pauline katechon in the 1970s.

The chapter focuses on Florovsky’s brief participation in the Eurasian movement, especially his contribution to the three Eurasian symposia, Exodus to the East, On the Ways, and Russia and Latinity. Florovsky’s understanding of the binary between East and West was shaped by his own version of the Eurasian teaching. The movement’s anti-Catholic character is explained as a reaction to the Vatican’s expansionist policy. The reasons for Florovsky’s eventual break with the Eurasians are discussed.

This chapter reviews Theodor W. Adorno's criticism that revolves around Martin Heidegger's notion of historicity, at the core of which lay an understanding of the human being after the temporal scheme of thrownness and projection. It mentions Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and Ludwig Klages's TheSpirit as Adversary of the Soul as the popular doomsday prophecies of the Weimar era. It also analyses Heidegger's insight about moments, history and nature that were essential in understanding human life. The chapter explores the central elements of Adorno's lecture and illuminates its status as immanent critique. It connects Adorno's lecture to a doctoral thesis on Heidegger by Dolf Sternberger, who was after an immanent critique of Being and Time.

Scholars commonly separate Georges Florovsky's patristic scholarship from his treatment of Russian religious thought. Gavrilyuk reconnects these two sides of Florovsky's career by showing how the program of a “return to the Church Fathers” offered a solution to the problem of the western pseudomorphosis of modern Russian theology. The paper shows that Florovsky's participation in the Eurasian movement and his experience of emigration shaped his polemical construction of the East/ West dichotomy. Gavrilyuk points out methodological parallels as well as points of contrast between Harnack's account of the Hellenization of early Christian theology and Florovsky's account of the Westernization of Russian religious thought. The paper charts the methodological and theological contours of the neopatristic synthesis and concludes by charting two directions in which Florovsky vision takes Orthodox theology today.