Oswald Spengler

German historian and philosopher (1880-1936)

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Lived 1880–1936, aged 56Germany

Germany AcademicsWriter / Author

Fame29.1
Momentum0.5
Germany rank#128
Academics rank#118
Wikipedia30.4K

Wikipedia
66 languages
Cross-language footprint
Rank in Germany
#128
Academics
Era
1880–1936
Aged 56

Summary

Updated 2026-05-29

German polymath who drew massive attention with The Decline of the West, a sweeping two-volume history predicting Western civilization's collapse around 2000. Treated cultures like organisms with fixed lifespans—bleak, deterministic, wildly influential.

Biography

About

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German polymath whose areas of interest included history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history. He is best known for his two-volume work The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history. Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilizations are akin to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan. He predicted that Western civilization would enter the period of pre‑death emergency around the year 2000, whi…

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