COVER TO COVER

THE MAN WHO READ SPENGLER

ALFRED DE BUTTON

June 12, 2025

He stumbled on an old book about the fate of civilizations and read it straight through. Its vision of a tired, self-repeating culture hit uncomfortably close to home. Maybe decline isn’t a breakdown at all, just everything continuing while emptied of meaning.

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He found the book on a gray afternoon in Barcelona at Llibreria Antiquària Farré—a strange place to encounter the apocalypse, but perhaps not an inappropriate one. The air was heavy with rain and regret, and the store was one of those narrow, overstuffed places where time seems to rot in the bindings. Between a manual on Spanish agriculture and a water-stained copy of Being and Time—Martin Heidegger’s 1927 meditation on existence—he saw it: a thick, cracked paperback in English, two volumes in one, bearing a title that read like a sentence: The Decline of the West.

He had heard of Oswald Spengler, vaguely, as one of those German doom prophets you read about in college textbook footnotes. But he had never read him. The name conjured something dramatic, terminal, possibly absurd. Still, he paid for the book and slipped it into his coat pocket like forbidden fruit.

That night, he opened to the first page. “This book is not a work of history,” Spengler announced, “but a philosophy of history.” Published in 1918, just as World War I was ending and the empires of Europe lay in ruin, The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes) made its case in mythic tones: Civilizations are not linear, progressive, or eternal. They are biological. They are born, they flower, they die.

According to Spengler, each great civilization—Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Roman, Islamic, and Western (European-American)—was a cultural organism with its own internal logic, soul, and destiny. History was not universal; it was plural. Cultures arise not through shared values or technological achievement, but through a kind of inner necessity. He called the West’s cultural soul “Faustian,” a term drawn from the character of Faust, the archetypal seeker who trades his soul for unlimited knowledge and power. In Spengler’s hands, it signified a culture obsessed with limitless striving, endless horizons, and the boundless. The Gothic cathedral pointing upward, voyages of discovery, modern physics, and, though he never lived to see it, space travel—which today can be read as a late echo of Faustian ambition—were for Spengler all expressions of a culture that seeks the infinite.

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But, Spengler insisted, this Faustian impulse had run its course. Western culture had passed from its springtime (around 1000 CE) into full summer (the Renaissance) and was now well into winter, its terminal phase. Mechanized, rational, urban, and exhausted.

The man was hooked. Not because he agreed, but because it felt like Spengler had given a name to something he had only vaguely sensed. He kept reading, page after page, Spengler’s aphorisms unfurling like prophecy. Culture becomes civilization. Religion becomes mathematics. Democracy becomes mass spectacle. Intellectual life becomes technical administration. “Optimism,” Spengler wrote, “is cowardice.”

In the second volume, published in 1922, Spengler added even more detail, tracing the life cycles of cultures with obsessive, near-mystical precision. He predicted the end of parliamentary democracy, the rise of strongmen (“Caesars”) like the Roman rulers he saw as emblematic of late-stage political power, the de-spiritualization of life. The replacement of expressive, symbolic, and spiritual art with functional, utilitarian design aimed at optimization. The substitution of reflective thought with quantifiable data and metrics.

Reading it more than a century later, the man saw too much that felt familiar. Not in its details—Spengler was not a futurist—but in its tone. A mood of historical exhaustion. The sense that culture no longer creates but repeats itself. That politics have become a parody. That technology advances, but meaning recedes. That everyone is managing a system they no longer believe in.

He began to notice the world through Spengler’s lens. The rise of algorithmic governance. The desperate recycling of old aesthetics—retro fonts, vinyl records, VHS tapes. All seemed to confirm the thesis: We are no longer producing a culture. We are restoring one.

C. H. Beck, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschicht, 1922–23

Spengler offered a model for this: not collapse, but hardening. Not disaster, but stasis. Decline can be not a fall, but a freezing. The world continues, but it no longer believes in itself. The gestures remain—elections, headlines, sermons—but they feel unmoored, detached from any deeper vision of what the world is for. Confidence curdles into performance, tradition into branding. The future, once a promise, now feels like a threat or a meme. We simulate meaning, but rarely commit to it. We scroll instead of pray, optimize instead of build, arrange instead of imagine. We preserve instead of create. We imitate instead of dream. We govern instead of living.

Spengler was not alone in this kind of thinking, but he was its most poetic, fatalistic voice. The man began to read what others had said in response.

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his massive twelve-volume A Study of History (1934–61), took Spengler seriously but disagreed with his rigid determinism. Where Spengler saw civilizations as rising and falling in locked biological patterns, Toynbee argued that societies rise and fall in response to challenges. If they fail, it is not fate—it is failure to adapt. Decline, in Toynbee’s view, is moral and creative, not structural.

Karl Popper, in The Poverty of Historicism (1944), was harsher. He saw Spengler as a peddler of historical mysticism, a reactionary prophet who masked fatalism as philosophy. To predict the future from historical patterns, Popper argued, was not just misguided—it was anti-democratic.

Still, Spengler would not go away. He haunted the twentieth century, quoted in times of crisis, invoked whenever cultures felt themselves turning gray.

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, arguing almost the opposite of Spengler: that liberal democracy, after the fall of the Soviet Union, represented the endpoint of ideological evolution. But a decade later, Fukuyama was rethinking things. In Political Order and Political Decay (2014), he acknowledged the West’s institutional stagnation. Bureaucracies had ossified. Trust had frayed. Democracy had stopped working as it once had.

More recently, Peter Turchin—a biologist turned historian—revived Spenglerian ideas using data models. In Ages of Discord (2016) and End Times (2023), Turchin proposes that civilizational instability follows a recurring pattern: elite overproduction, income inequality, social disintegration. He doesn’t name Spengler often, but the influence is clear. History as pressure cooker, decline as a systemic process.

Even Michel Onfray, the French philosopher and atheist firebrand, took up the theme. In Décadence (2017), he argues that Western civilization has entered terminal decline, not because of external enemies, but thanks to internal loss of purpose. Like Spengler, he sees the end not as a tragedy, but as a kind of inevitability. A civilization, he asserts, dies when it no longer believes in its own values.

Reading all this, the man wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. Were they right? Was decline real? Was it measurable? Was it even useful to think this way?

Part of him wanted to resist. He wanted to believe in contingency, in rebirth, in the possibility that civilization could reinvent itself. After all, weren’t the Enlightenment and the Renaissance themselves acts of renewal? Didn’t the fall of Rome give way to the flowering of new forms? Couldn’t the West—whatever that term even meant now—be entering not a death spiral, but a phase change?

The Decline of the West featured in The New York Times Book Review, 1929

And yet, he couldn’t shake the sense that something had stalled. Not a single failure, but a systemic fatigue. Everything still worked, technically, but nothing inspired. Governments governed, but without vision. Universities taught, but without fire. Museums hung things that already looked like they’d been shown a dozen times. Music sounded like an eternal return. Politics was theater. Innovation meant repackaging.

And in that atmosphere, Spengler’s cold voice echoed: “The outward forms remain—churches, parliaments, universities—but the soul has departed.”

He did not agree with all of it. Spengler was Eurocentric, dismissive of non-Western civilizations, overtly conservative, and too quick to pronounce endings. He had no space for resistance movements, postcolonial thought, or hybrid cultures. He underestimated the adaptability of democracy. He saw religion and science as mutually exclusive. He misunderstood the complexity of Rome. And above all, he saw culture as a closed organism, when in fact, history shows that cultures bleed into one another, transform, hybridize, and revive.

But what Spengler understood—and what few others dared to say—was that exhaustion itself can be a historical force. That civilizations can die not in fire but in routine. That there is such a thing as cultural senility.

And that perhaps the antidote to fatalism is not optimism, but invention.

In the final chapter, Spengler invoked the image of the “second religiousness”—a return to form, but without the original fire. The man didn’t want that. He didn’t want to preserve ruins or revive rituals. He wanted to ask different questions. What would a truly new culture even look like? What desires would it express? What forms would it invent?

He looked around at the present—a fractured digital world, where AI-generated content flooded the internet, where institutions were mistrusted, where people clung to identity because belief was too brittle. Was this what Spengler meant? Or was it simply another interlude, the chaos before renewal?

He shelved Spengler’s book. Not out of rejection, but out of respect. It had done what it needed to do. It had pulled him out of the illusion of continuity. It had made him see that history was not a treadmill. It was a field of decisions.

Now, he thought, maybe it was time to make some.

Alfred de Button (b. 1987, Montreal) is a cultural historian and occasional pessimist. He studied intellectual history at Trinity College Dublin, where he received his PhD in 2015 with a dissertation on the work of Ulrich von Kortenberg—a little-read Prussian mystic who believed that history is guided by the somatic rhythms of human societies.

Cover image: It’s not you, it’s the West