![]() ![]() ![]() He draws from Spengler the moral for America that in the present age we must become hard-boiled and imperialistic as a means of self-preservation. ![]() Dakin has done a useful job of intelligent abridgment. But tor the vast majority even ot the educated classes who will never read Spengler from cover to cover Mr. One misses, ot course, some of the quality of any work if one does not read it through without abridgment. The first volume, subtitled Form and Actuality, was published in the summer of 1918. There is therefore a good case tor giving the American public a sort ot topical Spengler, the excerpts from his enormous work which bear most directly and most compellingly on the events and trends that are reflected in today’s headlines. The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes more literally, The Downfall of the Occident), is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler. Like Marx, Spengler is difficult reading, with his typically German combination ot erudition and prolixity. It is a more accurate forecast of the main features of the contemporary fascist state than Marx’s Capital is a prediction of what has actually been done in Marx’s name in Russia, although Spengler, unlike Marx, was more interested in interpreting history than in making it. It ranks with Marx’s Capital, with Darwin’s Origin of Species, with Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. OSWALD SPENGLER’* Decline of the West belongs in the limited shelf of books that have both anticipated and influenced the trend of human thought, the development of political and economic institutions, the general course of human history. ![]()
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