Abstract
With the publication of the first volume of Spengler's monumental study Le Déclin de l'Occident - Esquisse d'une morphologie de l'histoire universelle (Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, published by C. H. Beck Verlag, Munich, 1917), the attempts of European historians and philosophers to define " the essence " of their own times reached a new level. By employing the " morphological method ", which he claims to have derived from the study of Goethe's considerations in the natural sciences, the author believes he is able to represent historical processes for the first time in a form that is not only retrospective, but also prospective.
The immense response to this work gives a kind of philosophical profile to the upheavals that the First World War brought to European nations.
In the shadow of the Spengler debates, a bitterly ironic reality unfolded : a scientifically dressed futurology led to erudite declinism. The theory of decadence " no longer presented itself merely as a recrimination of cultural criticism, such as had become epidemic from the 19th century onwards - recriminations about growing materialism, derecivilization on the march, the disintegration of the family, the repression of the Christian religion, etc. - but as a purported vision of a process of civilization charged with the characteristics of a fatal, suprapersonal law. What continued to be called " the West " - often with a warlike pathos - is revealed to be the focus of a fateful mental climate shift :
What used to be old Europe now became a theater of war for intense rhetorical formations : in addition to the revolutionary progressivism of Marxist-inspired movements, the heroic pessimism of pre-Fascist thought and the artificial aristocratism of the Conservative Revolution were also manoeuvring.
Nota bene : While post-1945 Germany has tended to follow a path based on cultural optimism, fragments of Spengler's impulse have acquired persistent currency in various modes of declinism (current example : Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission).
