Oswald Spengler: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

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, and 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 what he considered to be 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.