# The Decline of the West [[Oswald Spengler]]'s *The Decline of the West* (*Der Untergang des Abendlandes*, 1918–1922) is a sweeping philosophy of history that treats civilizations as living organisms passing through a natural life cycle of birth, flowering, and inevitable decay. Spengler argued that Western ("Faustian") civilization had entered its winter — its late, "civilizational" phase of materialism, megacities, and Caesarism — paralleling the late stage of [[Ancient Rome]]. The book is a foundational text of cultural pessimism and has had an outsized influence on the intellectual right, from interwar conservative revolutionaries to the contemporary dissident right and [[Traditionalism]]. Its organic-decline framework is one of the deep sources of "collapse of the West" declinism and of [[Western Civilization]] anxiety. See [[Antiquity in Right-Wing Thought Hub]]. ## See also [[Ancient Rome]] · [[Western Civilization]] · [[Traditionalism]] · [[Antiquity in Right-Wing Thought Hub]]