内容简介
Since its first publication more than eighty years ago, The
Decline of the West has ranked as one of the most widely read and
talked about books of our time. A sweeping account of Western
culture by a historian of legendary intellect, it is an
astonishingly informed, forcefully eloquent, thrillingly
controversial work that advances a world view based on the cyclical
rise and fall of civilizations.
This abridgment presents the most significant of Oswald
Spengler’s arguments, linked by illuminating explanatory passages.
It makes available in one volume a masterpiece of grand-scale
history and far-reaching prophesy that remains essential reading
for anyone interested in the factors that determine the course of
civilizations.
作者简介
Oswald Spengler, one of the most controversial historians of
the twentieth century, was born in Blankenburg, Germany, in 1880.
He studied mathematics, philosophy, and history in Munich and
Berlin. Except for his doctor’s thesis on Heraclitus, he published
nothing before the first volume of The Decline of the West, which
appeared when he was thirty-eight. The Agadir crisis of 1911
provided the immediate incentive for his exhaustive investigations
of the background and origins of our civilization. Spengler chose
his main title in 1912, finished a draft of the first volume two
years later, and published it in 1918. The second, concluding
volume was published in 1922. The Decline of the West was first
published in this country in 1926 (Vol. 1) and 1928 (Vol. 2); this
abridged edition was first published here in 1962.
For many years Spengler lived quietly in his home in Munich,
thinking, writing, and pursuing his hobbies–collecting pictures and
primitive weapons, listening to Beethoven quartets, and reading the
comedies of Shakespeare and Molière. He took occasional trips to
the Harz Mountains and to Italy. In 1936, three weeks before his
fifty-sixth birthday, he died in Munich of a heart attack.