The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality

The first volume of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West is a milestone in historiography. It is not a standard history book. Instead, it tries to explain the mechanisms that make different cultures tick. While classical culture had no concept of the past or future and was only fixated on the present, Western culture is focused on the past as memory and the future as unconquered territory.

Like organisms that are born, mature, and die, cultures are the blossoming youth while civilizatio...