Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vfjqv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T09:00:09.246Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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: ben.lewis@sheffield.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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
2.See Hughes, H.S. (1952) Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (New York: Scribner); J.F. Felleny (1972) Twilight of the Evening Lands: Oswald Spengler – a Half Century Later (New York: Brookdale); K.P. Fischer (1989) History and Prophecy: Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West (New York: Peter Lang).Google Scholar
3. Farrenkopf, J. (2001) Prophet of Decline Spengler on World History and Politics (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press).Google Scholar
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
5. Graf, R. (2008) Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik. Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918-1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg), pp. 104–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. Felken, D. (1988) Oswald Spengler. Konservativer Denker zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Munich: C.H. Beck), p. 114.Google Scholar
7. Adorno, T. (1950) ‘Spengler nach dem Untergang’, Der Monat, 20, pp. 115–128, p. 117. And see also P. Lensch (1915) Das englische Weltreich, Mächte des Weltkrieges, Fünftes Heft (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts Paul Singer); P. Lensch (1915) Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und der Weltkrieg (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts Paul Singer).Google Scholar
8. Sieferle, R.P. (1995) Die konservative Revolution. Fünf biographische Skizzen (Frankfurt: Fischer).Google Scholar
9.Letter to H. Klöres, 27 December 1918, cited in Helps, A. (Ed.) (1966) Spengler Letters: 1913-1936 (London: George Allen & Unwin), p. 71.Google Scholar
10. Naeher, J. (1994) Oswald Spengler (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt), p. 84.Google Scholar
11. Spengler, O. (1920) Preußentum und Sozialismus (Munich: Beck), p. 54. All subsequent references to this text will be placed in parentheses in the main text.Google Scholar
12. Spengler, O. (2009) Politische Schriften (Leipzig: Manuscriptum), p. 15.Google Scholar
13. Jenkings, R. (1992) Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge), pp. 74–84.Google Scholar
14. Sieferle, R.P. (1995) Die konservative Revolution (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag), pp. 104–107.Google Scholar
15. Lübbe, H. (1974) Politische Philosophie in Deutschland (Munich: dtv), p. 185. The intellectual role model in this respect was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose Speeches to the German Nation during the German Wars of Liberation were seen as exemplary for intellectuals serving the German war effort in 1914.Google Scholar
16.See J. Hawes’s recent book Englanders and Huns, which outlines the development of this Anglo-German antagonism and draws on various press sources on both sides of the English channel to make his case. Hawes, J. (2014) Englanders and Huns: How Five Decades of Enmity Led to the First World War (London: Simon and Schuster).Google Scholar
17.Quoted in Falck, M. (Ed.) (2013) Zyklen und Cäsaren. Mosaiksteine einer Philosophie des Schicksals. Reden und Schriften Oswald Spenglers (Kiel: Regin Verlag), p. 79.Google Scholar
18. Lukács, G. (1954) Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag), p. 375.Google Scholar
19.K. Marx (1972) ‘Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte’. In: K. Marx and F. Engels (Eds) (1972) Werke, 8, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag).Google Scholar
20. Spengler, O. (1922) Untergang des Abendlandes vol. 2 (Munich: C. H. Beck), pp. 579–580.Google Scholar
21. Engels, F. (1972) ‘Zur Kritik des sozialdemokratischen Programmentwurfes’. In: K. Marx/F. Engels, Werke vol. 22 (Dietz: Berlin), p. 235.Google Scholar
22. Michels, R. (1911) Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens (Leipzig: Werner Klinkhardt).Google Scholar
23. Maehl, W.H. (1980) Shadow Emperor of the German Workers (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society).Google Scholar
24. Lensch, P. (1918) Drei Jahre Weltrevolution (Berlin: Fischer).Google Scholar
25.On P. Lensch, see Lewis, B. (2014) The SPD left’s dirty secret. Weekly Worker, 1016, 26 June 2014. pp. 10–11.Google Scholar
26.Not all Marxist thinkers of the 1920s thought in such terms, however, for more information see: Fankhauser, A. (1924–1925) Spengler und Marx. Rote Revue: Sozialistische Monatsschrift, 4(1), pp. 29–35.Google Scholar
27. Barraclough, G. (1979) Culture and civilisation. New Republic, 181, pp. 25–28.Google Scholar
28. Spenger, O. (1933) Jahre der Entscheidung (Munich: C. H. Beck), pp. 104–105; reprint at: http://tinyurl.com/ppmbk43. Last accessed 19 May 2015.Google Scholar