Introduction

Spengler rejects the traditional view of history as linear progress from 'ancient' to 'medieval' to 'modern', calling it a Western-centred 'Ptolemaic system'. In its place he proposes a 'Copernican' view: human history consists of some eight independent high cultures, Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Classical, Arabian, Mexican and Western, each like a living organism with its own soul, passing through spring, summer, autumn and winter, birth, growth, maturity and decline, over about a thousand years. When a culture's creative power is spent it enters the stage of 'civilisation', with its world cities, the rule of money and imperialism. Western culture, he declares, entered that stage in the nineteenth century and is heading for inevitable decline. The book shook post-war Europe and influenced the historical work of Toynbee and others. This volume translates its most important parts.