Prussian Socialism and Other Essays

Oswald Spengler, in the aftermath of the Great War, gained international repute as a philosopher-historian whose apparently doom-laden forecast on the eclipse of Western Civilisation, The Decline of The West, struck a chord amidst a period of moral, cultural, social and economic decay, around which swirled increasingly violent forces of Left and Right. Yet if recalled at all today it is as a failed prophet, whose ';decline of the West' did not eventuate, and whose forecast of an ';age of Caesars' was promptly crushed by the technical power of the plutocratic states combined with the masses of the Red Army over-running Europe. The optimism of Liberalism from the pre-1914 era was revived in the post-1945 era with the defeat of the Axis, and impelled ever-more with the recent implosion of the Soviet bloc to the extent that Liberal academics predict, to use Dr. Francis Fukuyama's term, ';the end of history,' where humanity has reached the epitome of progress in a world hegemony of capitalist economics and political democracy. However, a deeper perception shows the West is in a terminal state, despite outward appearances of seeming ';health' that require an increasingly glossed appearance to hide the sickness.In this collection of essays, lectures and articles, some rendered in English probably for the first time, Spengler is shown as a key figure in the so-called ';German Conservative Revolution', who energetically promoted his views to a wide public, with particular appeals to youth. He counselled against the unthinking fanaticism of mass movements, and advised that the times required careful deliberation by a new leadership stratum that was up to great tasks.