A passage (section V, including some translator's notes) from the chapter titled The Soul of the City in Vol. Spengler saw the West as having entered that latter phase in the nineteenth century: a phase in which, in the words of the synoptic chart appended to Volume 1 of The Decline of the West, “The body of the people, now essentially urban in constitution, dissolves into formless mass.” Urbanism, the emergence of “megalopolis,” or “cosmopolis“-the world city-is a distinguishing and crucial feature of that declining civilization. Civilization's preoccupation is with the enjoyment of material comforts the sequence from “culture” to “civilization” represents the very antithesis of progress. “Civilization,” in Spengler's vision, was a stage that follows cultural flowering-creative manifestations of the culture's unique soul expressed in art and thought.
In Spengler's interpretation, imbued with cultural and historical pessimism, the West was exhibiting symptoms found in earlier civilizations in decline.
(It remains in print.) It presents an enormously ambitious tableau of universal history seen as the unfolding of the fates of eight cultures, with a focus on four main strands: Indian, Classical, Arabian, and Western. The Decline of the West, published in 19 (English translation, 1928), in its time attracted much public and professional attention. The German historian Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), whose membership in the academic fraternity of his discipline has often been questioned, was an exception. Historians are professionally averse to grand civilizational themes, especially where predictions may be entailed.
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