Prussianism and Socialism by Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler was born in Blankenburg, Germany, in 1880, and became one of the most contentious historians of the twentieth century. At Munich and Berlin, he studied mathematics, philosophy, and history. He published nothing before the first book of The Decline of the West, which came out when he was thirty-eight, except his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus. The Agadir crisis of 1911 offered an immediate impetus for his extensive research into our civilization's genesis and beginnings. Spengler decided on his main title in 1912, completed a first-volume manuscript two years later, and published it in 1918.

In 1922, the second and last volume was published. The Fall of the West (Vol. 1) was first published in the United States in 1926. 1), as well as 1928 (Vol. 2); the shorter edition was originally published in 1962 in this country.

He traveled to the Harz Mountains and Italy on occasion. He died of a heart attack three weeks before his 56th birthday in Munich in 1936.