Unlike Decline, which withholds evaluative judgments in favor of matter-of-fact narration of a fate that will transpire “with the individual or against him,” Spengler’s political writings urge their readers to take control of their fate and consider the alternatives if they do not. For example, in the second volume of Decline, Spengler describes the conflict between “the leading powers of a dictatorial money economy and the purely political will of the Caesars” as “the final battle between economics and politics in which the latter reconquers its realm.” These are successive phases of world history, and the victory of “blood” over money is the only possibility; money corrodes the soul in such a way that its defense attorneys become helpless against the brute power of Caesars. In Prussianism, by contrast, Spengler suggests that things might turn out otherwise. “Caesarism is our fate,” he writes, “just as much as it was the fate of the Romans, the Chinese, and every other mature civilization. But billionaires or generals, bankers or bureaucrats of the highest order—that is the eternal question.” Considering that Spengler elsewhere defines Caesarism as “the triumph of the politics of violence over money,” his few passing references to “billionaire Caesarism” are difficult to comprehend. If they are not just intended to arouse fear of Anglo-American hegemony in readers, then they refer to an internally contradictory formation.
After the Cold War, American readers of Decline—who were now no longer literary critics but journalists and international relations realists—read Spengler through the lens of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. They argued that Spengler did not realize or else underestimated the possibility that his Caesarist epoch could turn out to be a liberal-democratic imperium of billionaires and bankers. This is the marquee claim of John Farrenkopf’s Prophet of Decline (2001)—the best work of Spengler scholarship available in English—and has been echoed by journalists like Robert Merry, onetime editor of The National Interest. “Oswald Spengler’s vision of global history and of the West’s fate generates little resonance in today’s world except insofar as it is updated to account for the rise of America in the era that began in 1945,” Merry writes. “He refused to accept that America could thwart his country’s rise as the West’s last nation and global hegemon.” Readers like Merry and Farrenkopf felt the need to “revise” Spengler such that Caesarism is compatible with a neoliberal globalism spearheaded by the United States. That is very far from Spengler’s idea.
A century after the first English translation of Decline, Spengler’s outline of Caesarism as a revolt against a global monetary regime by conservative martyrs of Western culture is coming into focus, while notions of a liberal-democratic end of history strike us as myopic fantasies of the 1990s. This is especially intriguing when one considers that Spengler imagined Caesarism as a twenty-first century phenomenon. He finally addresses us from his grave. Do we hear him?