The Decline and Fall of the Free World?

Abstract

At the end of the first world war, Oswald Spengler’s ‘Untergang des Abendlandes’ attracted very considerable interest. By this he meant the collapse of the free world, as personified by the civic order of individual freedom in the modern western world. In opposition to it, he prophesied the inevitable and fateful rise of a com munity based upon military discipline, in which a strict, authoritarian leadership would direct the whole political, economic and spiritual life of the nation and everything would be subordinated to the aim of expansion and, ultimately, of world dominion. The rise of this new order, which, in essence, is, as Spengler rightly says, ‘completely amorphous’ and ‘devoid of all prejudice and inhibition’, would, he maintained, break ‘the dictatorship of wealth and its political weapon, democracy’. The individual freedoms would be brushed aside as superfluous or pernicious. Man, it would be asserted, attains his true freedom by subordinating himself willingly and completely to a leadership, which knows what it wants, possesses the power to achieve it and promises to lead the masses to a glittering future.