The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes; more literally, The Downfall of the Occident) is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler.

Spengler recognized at least eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman, "Apollonian"), the non-Babylonian Middle East ("Magian"), and Western or European ("Faustian").

Spengler combined a number of groups under the "Magian" label; "Semitic", Arabian, Persian, and the Abrahamic religions in general as originating from them (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).

In Spengler's depiction, Western Man was a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached.

Spengler believed that a Magian pseudomorphosis began with the Battle of Actium, in which the gestating Arabian Culture was represented by Mark Antony and lost to the Classical Civilization.

In the following entry of Alexander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance and the Concert of Europe, he said that Russia was forced into an artificial history before its culture was ready or capable of understanding its burden.

He said that each Culture arises within a specific geographical area and is defined by its internal coherence of style in terms of art, religious behavior and psychological perspective.

However, he maintains a distinction between world-historical peoples, and ahistorical peoples—the former will have a historical destiny as part of a High Culture, while the latter will have a merely zoological fate.

A Culture is described as sublimating the various customs, myths, techniques, arts, peoples, and classes into a single strong undiffused historical tendency.

Spengler also compared the "world-city" and -province (urban and rural) as concepts analogous to Civilization and Culture respectively, with the city drawing upon and collecting the life of broad surrounding regions.

He said there is a "true-type" rural-born person, in contrast to city-dwellers who are allegedly nomadic, traditionless, irreligious, matter-of-fact, clever, unfruitful, and contemptuous of the countryman.

He said that city-dwellers possess cold intelligence that confounds peasant wisdom, a naturalism in attitudes towards sex which are a return to primitive instincts, and a reduced inner religiousness.

Further, Spengler saw urban wage disputes and large entertainment expenditures as the final aspects that signal the closing of Culture and the rise of the Civilization.

In his view, the Romans faced no significant resistance to their expansion, meaning it was not an achievement as they did not so much conquer their empire, but rather simply took possession of that which lay open to everyone.

Nor are scientists at one as to the relative rank of these superficial characters…[13] Spengler writes that, Comradeship breeds races... Where a race-ideal exists, as it does, supremely, in the Early period of a culture... the yearning of a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just so and not otherwise, operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives) towards actualizing this idea and eventually achieves it.

In race (Rasse haben) there is nothing material but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the march of historical Being.

In saying that race and culture are tied together, Spengler echoes ideas[clarification needed] similar to those of Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellén.

Spengler believed that Enlightenment rationalism undermines and destroys itself, and described a process that passes from unlimited optimism to unqualified skepticism.

In his view, the masses give rise to the Second Religiousness in reaction to the educated elites, which manifests as deep suspicion of academia and science.

Democracy and plutocracy are equivalent in Spengler's argument, and he said the "tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers" is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective.

He believed that the principles of equality, natural rights, universal suffrage, and freedom of the press are all disguises for class war of the bourgeois against the aristocracy.

In addition, a functioning press requires universal education, and he said schooling leads to a demand for the shepherding of the masses, which then becomes an object of party politics.

For us the time of Warring States began with Napoleon, who introduced the idea of military world domination different from the preceding European maritime empires.

Spengler selected the Chinese and Roman Empires as most relevant models for the future and argued that the modern world undergoes the same evolution towards "Caesarism" but now on world-wide scale.

In the period of Warring States, "torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world cities for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living.

[23] George Steiner 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), Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925), and the philosopher Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927).

As a member of the Frankfurt School of Marxist critical theory, Adorno said he wanted to "turn (Spengler's) reactionary ideas toward progressive ends."

However, Adorno also criticized Spengler for an overly deterministic view of history, which ignored the unpredictable role that human initiative plays at all times.

He quoted the Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914): "How sickly seem everything that grows" (from the poem "Heiterer Frühling") to illustrate that decay contains new opportunities for renewal.

Lukács argued that the work was primarily Spengler’s attempt to turn “all fields of human knowledge subservient to his philosophy of history, no matter whether he personally had truly mastered them or whether they, in themselves, had already yielded unequivocal, philosophically applicable results”.