So, Oswald Spengler. I recently read
The Decline of the West, and that led me to read a brief bio of him (
Prophet of Decline). Something I found very interesting is that he apparently tried to get into politics in the 1920's - evidently he was involved in discussions between right-wing financiers and military leaders about organizing a coup, with Spengler to be "Minister of Culture" or some equivalent in the new government. These discussions hadn't actually gone anywhere by the time Hitler took power, and despite Spengler's right-wing statist views he despised the Nazis, so he spent the last decade of his life writing more books rather then playing politician. And the Nazis and other fascists took up all the ideological space in the right-wing statist category, so "Spenglerism" never really became a political ideology as such.
The purpose of this thread is to examine what if it had: both what if "Spenglerism" emerged as a significant political ideology in the twentieth century, and, correspondingly, what if "Spenglerists" had taken power in Germany instead of the Nazis. In general, what if Spengler ends up as a right-wing version of Marx?
For those not familiar with Spengler's beliefs, here's a quick overview as of them as of
Decline of the West. (We have some actual Spengler fans on this site, so you guys, let me know if I get any of this wrong.) His views did change later in life - becoming, actually, even more pessimistic - but I suspect a lot of that was due to his failure to break through politically, and he would stick more closely to his original beliefs if he had had more success. First, he was a cyclical macrohistorian: he divided societies up among various "cultures", each of which has a lifespan of about a thousand years or so, explicitly analogous to a biological organism. Western society - which he calls "Faustian" - emerged around 1,000 AD, and is now in terminal decline: our possibilities in art and philosophy and so on are largely exhausted, and there is no hope of rejuvenation. Faustian society has now left the "cultural" phase, which is active and growing, and entered the largely-stagnant "civilization" phase. In particular, we are approaching the point at which our civilization will finally petrify into a world-empire. ("World" in this case meaning the "world" of Faustian civilization, not necessarily the literal entire world - Rome was a "world-empire".) A world-empire may actually last much longer then a millennium, but history - in the sense of growth and meaningful change - will have ended. What is left to us is to face our destiny of decline and stagnation with boldness and heroism, even though we know that our end will be tragic. Spengler wanted to see Germany become the founder of that world-empire. He therefore emphasizes foreign policy as the real purpose of government; domestic policy's role is solely to keep society "in form" to serve foreign policy.
Now, I can't imagine Spengler ending up as the President or Kaiser or whatever of Germany, nor do I think he wanted that role. Even if successful, I think he would play more the role of party ideologue. However, there are a few things that make him unusual among right-wing statists: first, he was
very smart, and while I disagree intensely with his beliefs, he had clearly put a lot of thought into them. This is very different from your typical fascists, who seem to have mostly been a bunch of gangsters and thugs for whom ideology was more of an excuse then a reason. Second, he was not particularly afraid of the communists, who he thought were serving the cause of right-wing statism even if they didn't realize it. In fact, he was a bit of a Russophile, and thought that Russia was a young, emerging culture that, in a few hundred years, would displace Faustian civilization. Russian communism he saw as a Faustian transplant to Russian soil that, as a foreign species, would inevitably wither and die of its own accord. Third, while he was a racist and anti-Semite by modern standards, by the standards of 1920's right-wingers he was positively tolerant: he thought "race" was a cultural rather then biological construct, and he didn't think there was anything
wrong with other races, he just thought we could never really understand them, and any attempt to mix two races would therefore end in tears. This includes the Jews, who he saw a representatives of "Magian" (roughly, mid-eastern) culture - I suspect he would end up supporting Zionism as a way to get the Jews out of Europe.
All in all, while I disagree with Spengler intensely about almost everything, I find him just absolutely fascinating -
The Decline of the West is one of the most
interesting books I've read lately. So: what if Spengler actually makes some headway?