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Spengler’s Prussian Socialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2017

Ben Lewis
Ben Lewis*
Affiliation:
Germanic Studies, University of Sheffield, Floor 4, Jessop West, Upper Hannover Street, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S3 7RAE, UK. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was one of the most significant thinkers of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democracy. His work, notably the two-volume, 1200-page Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West, 1918/22), had a profound influence on the intellectual discourses of the time in Germany and beyond.1 Yet, despite the high esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries, his thought has been seriously under-researched. In English, only four major studies have appeared in the last 70 years.2 This is all the more surprising in that the historical period in which he wrote has been extensively covered by both English- and German-language scholars and that some of the thinkers who drew critically on his ideas, such as Heidegger and Adorno, have become household names in Germany intellectual history.

Type
Articles
Information
European Review , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 479 - 493
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2017 

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References

References and Notes

1.See Gasimov, Z. and Lemke Duque, C.A. (Eds) (2013) Oswald Spengler als europäisches Phänomen. Der Transfer der Kultur- und Geschichtsmorphologie im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit 1919-1939 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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4.The following recent studies are worth mentioning: Armin, M. and Weissmann, K. (2005) Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932. Ein Handbuch (Graz: Ares), S. Maaß (2013) Oswald Spengler. Eine politische Biographie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot); M. Falck (Ed.) (2013) Zyklen und Cäsaren. Mosaiksteine einer Philosophie des Schicksals. Reden und Schriften Oswald Spenglers (Kiel: Regin).Google Scholar
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