Feilbogen’s review essay examines the second volume of Spengler’s philosophy of history, moving from a critique of its historical method to an indictment of its reactionary politics, before conceding its value as a warning against cultural decline. Its central distinction is between accepting collapse as an inevitable destiny and recognizing dangers that historical criticism can help a society confront.
The opening treats the chapter on Arab culture as scientifically important and potentially stimulating for younger historians, yet especially revealing of Spengler’s methodological hazards. Feilbogen argues that Spengler stretches this culture from Babylon through Judaism, early Christianity, Roman jurisprudence, and Charlemagne to secure a roughly thousand-year lifespan. That construction, in turn, permits him to represent contemporary Faustian culture as approaching the end of its allotted millennium. His synchronisms likewise subordinate evidence to intuitive analogy: Muhammad, Cromwell, and Pythagoras become representatives of the same cultural phase, while Spinoza, the Baalschem, and Otto Weininger are enlisted as representatives of an allegedly enduring Jewish mysticism.
Doch Spengler selbst ist ein Mann von Geist, und auch der Unsinn hat bei ihm Methode.
English translation: Yet Spengler himself is a man of intellect, and even his nonsense has method in it.
The concession sharpens rather than softens the criticism. Spengler’s intellectual ingenuity gives coherence to doubtful constructions; disciples adopting his intuitive procedures could dissolve chronology into arbitrary groupings across periods and regions. Feilbogen nevertheless leaves detailed refutation to specialists, because the more urgent danger lies in the political authority such a compelling historical narrative acquires among educated readers.
Spengler’s attack on socialism expands, in the second volume, into an attack on democracy itself, understood as merely a transition to domination by money and military force. Feilbogen identifies this polemic as an inheritance from Nietzsche’s contempt for the many, particularly dangerous among German academics still attached to Wilhelmine assumptions.
Und sie wendet sich gegen die letzte Hoffnung unserer Zeit.
English translation: And it turns against the last hope of our age.
That hope is democracy, which Feilbogen regards as the bourgeoisie’s only future. Spengler instead denies the bourgeoisie positive standing, privileges nobility and priesthood as primordial estates, and celebrates aristocratic blood and instinct. His recurrent exaltation of warriors over thinkers consequently places the work’s intellectual power at the service of reaction.
Feilbogen’s strongest conceptual move is to expose a contradiction within Spengler’s own account of historical agency. Spengler distinguishes peoples possessing a creative culture, who act as subjects of history, from peoples reduced to passive objects of others’ power. Yet the cultural creativity that sustains this distinction depends precisely on the intellectual activity his cult of action disparages.
Und wessen Leistung ist diese Kultur? Ist sie ein Werk des Säbels oder der Politik?
English translation: And whose achievement is this culture? Is it a work of the sabre or of politics?
Feilbogen answers by locating culture in the patient work of thinkers, poets, scholars, and inventors—often heroic despite their nonmilitary vocation. Spengler’s elevation of instinctive action thus conflicts with the cultural criterion that makes his historical hierarchy possible. His recommendation that Russia return to primitive Muscovite tsarism supplies a concrete political consequence: a speculative account of the Russian soul becomes an endorsement of archaic autocracy.
The conclusion preserves a limited but consequential achievement. Neither Spengler’s prediction of unavoidable collapse nor his conception of mutually uncomprehending, self-contained cultures needs to be accepted for his diagnosis to matter. Feilbogen opposes the discouragement such fatalism could spread in Germany, while reclaiming the recognition of decline as a practical service.
Und als Warner hat er uns gelehrt, die Symptome des Verfalles zu sehen, die aufzuweisen und als Warnungszeichen ihrem Zeitalter vorzuhalten schon seit Tacitus eine der wichtigsten Aufgaben der Geschichtsschreibung ist.
English translation: And as a warner he has taught us to see the symptoms of decay, the pointing out of which, and the holding up of which to their age as signs of warning, has ever since Tacitus been one of the most important tasks of historiography.
The essay’s relevance lies in this separation of warning from prophecy. Historical writing can expose symptoms of decay without sanctioning authoritarian remedies or declaring renewal impossible. Feilbogen retains Spengler’s diagnostic provocation while resisting the methodological and political machinery that converts it into destiny.
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