2022 Reprint of VOLUME ONE of the 1926 Edition. Facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This volume, subtitled Form and Actuality, comprises the first volume of Spengler's monumental treatise on the Decline of the West. The Decline of the West was very well received upon publication and was widely read by German intellectuals. It has been suggested that it intensified a sense of crisis in Germany following the end of World War I. The critic George Steiner has suggested that the work can be seen as one of several books that resulted from the crisis of German culture following Germany's defeat in World War I, comparable in this respect to the philosopher Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia (1918), the theologian Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption (1921), the theologian Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans (1922) and the philosopher Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927). Illustrated with three folding plates.
What American critics have said of The Decline of the West:
"This grand panorama, this imaginative sweep, this staggering erudition, this Nietzschean prose, with its fine color and ringing force, mark a work that must endure."- Henry Hazlitt, New York Sun.
''Here is one of the mighty books of the century, which, sooner or later, will be read by all who ponder the riddle of existence ... it is a truly monumental work, at once depressing in its pessimism and exhilarating in its compelling challenge to our accepted ideas."- Arthur D. Gayer, The Forum.
"As one reads Spengler the thought keeps recurring, ever more insistently, that here again is one of those universal minds which we had come to think were no longer possible.''- Allen V. Peden, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"Audacious, profound, crochety, absurd, exciting, and magnificent." Lewis Mumford, The New Republic.