The Decline of Ye West

In Munich, in the fractured aftermath of the First World War, an impoverished writer published what would become one of the most famous works of cultural analysis of the 20th century. Oswald Spengler’s two-volume Decline of the West drew on the sensibility of two of the great German Romantics, Goethe and Nietzsche, to offer a sweeping trans-historical account of the cyclical pattern of rise and fall in civilisations.