Oswald Spengler [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION After the passage of nearly three quarters of a century, can Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West still speak to current concerns? Four decades ago I thought so-and wrote the study of him and his work that is now being reissued. Today I am even more convinced than I was then. I have found that if I subject his leading concepts to a minimum of readjustment and updating, they begin to resonate with contemporary anxieties. Take Spengler's military metaphors-the age of iron he foresaw and the harsh discipline he thought appropriate to it. The "Ceasars" he predicted are currently in short supply: our worries are predominandy economic. Hence we need to shift the axis of Spengler's thought. Once we have done so, matters fall into place. It is no secret that the media resound with statistics demonstrating the West's (and more particularly America's) loss of industrial leadership. They also stress slackness and failure of nerve, perhaps an analogue to Spengler's aesthetic insistence on cultural exhaustion. However far apart our language and his, they have in common a note of warning. A further point of convergence: the perils of technology. If much that Spengler wrote strikes us now as dated, one of his minor works has gained rather than lost in relevance as the years have passed. The short book Man and Technics, which he published in 1931, attracted little notice and for the most part was dismissed as an embarrassment. At the time it appeared and into the 1950s, few questioned the virtues or the cumulative triumphs of technology. Spengler did so-in his own idiosyncratic style. Be- vii