QuestionsDoes history have a direction?Cultures are born, ripen and die: the decline of the West
Does history have a direction?Cycles

Cultures are born, ripen and die: the decline of the West

The Decline of the West

Oswald Spengler 1880 · 1936He describes cultures as organisms that are born, ripen and decline: the West's is in its winter.
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What it claims

The West is entering a decline comparable to that of Antiquity, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium: each culture's history is a cycle, and the West does not escape it.

Why

Each culture lives like an organism from childhood to old age and ends as a rigid civilisation; the West is entering that phase.

The same idea through history
Giambattista Vico1744Vico had already made nations pass through successive ages and a return (see his argument). Spengler differs: he does not describe a single course for all nations but separate cultures, each with its own soul, and no return: civilisation is an end.
In short

"Cultures are born, ripen and die: the decline of the West" is an argument by Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West, vol. I (1918, revised edition 1923), Introduction) on the question "Does history have a direction?" (answer: cycles). Its claim: The West is entering a decline comparable to that of Antiquity, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium: each culture's history is a cycle, and the West does not escape it. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Decline of the West, vol. I (1918, revised edition 1923), Introduction
Valid with an implicit premise

Oswald Spengler, a former German schoolteacher, wrote his book before and during the First World War; it appeared in 1918. In it he proposes replacing the usual scheme (Antiquity, Middle Ages, modern times), which puts Europe at the centre, by a comparison of eight cultures: Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Classical, Arabian, Mexican and Western. Each is an organism with its childhood, youth, maturity and decline, and ends as a "civilisation", rigid and urban. Because the phases resemble one another, the historian could, he holds, foresee the decline of the West in broad outline. Note: we cite the revised German edition of 1923 and the English translation of 1926 (Atkinson).

P1World history is not the single line Antiquity, Middle Ages, modern times around Europe: it is made of separate worlds, cultures, which weigh as much as one another in the whole.
P2Every culture passes through the age-phases of an individual man: it has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age.
P3Civilisation is the inevitable destiny of a culture: a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion.
P4 · implicit premiseIf the West is a culture of the same kind as the others, it too is in the last phase of its cycle.
Therefore the West is entering a decline comparable to that of Antiquity, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium: each culture's history is a cycle, and the West does not escape it.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where all past cultures have a life cycle, but ours is of another type and goes on: a model valid for the past only.
Valid with P4. P4 makes the West comparable to other cultures, and so applies their phases to it. Without P4, one can grant that past cultures followed a cycle without concluding that ours will. It is also the most contested premise: it assumes eight cases suffice to found a law, and that our culture is of the same type.
Analogy. A doctor who has followed eight patients from birth to death and draws a table of the ages of life, then examines a ninth whose age he knows. He can say where the patient stands and what lies ahead. His critics ask whether eight cases are enough.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Karl Popper 1957 · attacks premise 4

One cannot test a universal law if one is forever confined to observing one unique process. Yet Spengler and others apply to societies the life cycle of an animal or plant, as if the life laws of civilisations could be studied like those of a species. Human history, however, is a unique process, and observing one unique process does not let us foresee its continuation either.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1957, after the author's death (1936).
The debate goes on (our summary) Before Popper, Toynbee (A Study of History, from 1934) had taken up the comparison of civilisations, widening it to about twenty cases and presenting it as empirical, while rejecting an inevitable decline: a civilisation breaks down when its creative minorities no longer answer challenges. Popper holds that Toynbee classifies as civilisations only entities that conform to his a priori belief in life cycles. The core disagreement opposes those who see the comparison of civilisations as an empirical method and those who see a scheme imposed on facts. (Our summary.)
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: do eight or about twenty civilisations suffice for a law, and is their classification neutral? Spengler and Toynbee also differ on the inevitability of decline. Open point: no direct reply to Popper from a defender.
Francis Fukuyama 1989 · attacks the conclusion

What we see is not the decline of one culture among others, but the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government. If liberal ideas win the world, the West is not a cycle that closes, but the end point of the evolution of ideas.

a defender replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1989, after the author's death (1936).
S
Samuel Huntington defender of the argument · 1996
Summary: Huntington argues that the idea of a universal civilisation on the Western model is false: modernisation does not mean Westernisation, and the world remains divided into great civilisations that keep their own values. He also judges it dangerous, because it pushes the West to impose its values on others.
A
Amartya Sen 1999
Summary: Sen answers that democracy is not a Western peculiarity. He cites traditions of public discussion and tolerance in India and the Islamic world (Ashoka, Akbar), and recalls that the West itself came late to democracy.
The debate goes on (our summary) Fukuyama does not answer Spengler in this passage; he reads history as an evolution of ideas, not as the cycle of separate cultures. Spengler would hold, on the contrary, that what looks universal (democracy, science, law) is the trait of a civilisation in its late phase. (Our summary.)
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: are liberal ideas universal or proper to a civilisation in its late phase? Huntington (1996) denies Western universalism; Sen (1999) holds democracy to be a value that is not specifically Western. Open question, at the heart of the Fukuyama-Huntington debate.
T
Theodor W. Adorno 1950 · attacks premise 3

Adorno grants that events have often borne out Spengler's forecasts. But Spengler turns history into natural destiny and decline into blind fatality. This vision makes the existing order and power look unavoidable, and forgets that what declines also carries the possibility of a freer life.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1950, after the author's death (1936).
The debate goes on (our summary) Adorno writes in 1950, after the defeat of Nazism, and reads Spengler in the light of that history. Spengler, who died in 1936, had distanced himself from the regime. We found no reply to this text from a defender of Spengler. (Our summary.)
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: is the decline of a culture a natural destiny, or the result of human choices that can still be changed? Open point: no widely accepted reply.