About the Work
The Hour of Decision is a work of political philosophy and historical prophecy by Oswald Spengler, the German thinker best known for The Decline of the West. This volume, subtitled “Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution,” was translated into English by Charles Francis Atkinson and published in London in 1934. The book originated from a lecture Spengler delivered in Hamburg in 1929 under the title Germany in Danger, and he began developing the theme into its present form in November 1932. By January 30, 1933, the text was printed to page 106, and Spengler deliberately altered nothing thereafter, writing not for the months immediately ahead but for the future. The title was changed during this process, and the book appeared with a changed title reflecting its broader concerns.
“The great game of world politics is not over.”
The work is structured as a sustained argument rather than a conventional academic treatise. It opens with an introduction dated Munich, July 1933, in which Spengler addresses the recent national revolution in Germany, and proceeds through four substantial chapters: “The Political Horizon,” “World Wars and World Powers,” “The White World-Revolution,” and “The Coloured World-Revolution.” The book carries a motto from Wagner’s Siegfried: “On the world’s loom / Weave the Norns doom, / Nor may they guide it nor change.” This epigraph signals the book’s fatalistic tone and its insistence that vast historical forces move independently of human will or desire.
Spengler explicitly states that the volume offers no wish-picture and no program, but rather a clear picture of facts as they are and will be. He positions himself as a diagnostician rather than a reformer, claiming to see further than others, including dangers that others do not perceive. The book is, in his own words, a danger-signal. It does not celebrate the events of 1933 but warns that the real dangers facing Germany date from 1918 and earlier and persist regardless of political changes. The national seizure of power, he insists, is not the solution to Germany’s problems but merely the clearing of ground for struggles that lie ahead.
Context
Spengler wrote The Hour of Decision during one of the most turbulent periods in modern European history. The introduction is dated Munich, July 1933, a few months after the National Socialist seizure of power in Germany. Spengler states that he looked forward to the “national revolution of this year” with great longing, having detested the “sordid Revolution of 1918” as a betrayal by the inferior part of the people of the strong part that had risen in 1914. All his political writing, he claims, aimed at overthrowing the forces that had entrenched themselves with enemies’ help on German misery, and he hopes it contributed to that end.
Yet the book is not a work of triumphalism. Spengler warns that the national revolution of 1933, while a mighty phenomenon “Prussian through and through,” was not a victory, for opponents were lacking. It was a promise of future victories, clearing the ground. He cautions that leaders bear full responsibility and that the real task lies beyond Germany’s borders, in world politics. Germany, he insists, is bound up with the fate of all other nations. The book repeatedly stresses that Germany is not an island and that its destiny is woven into the world’s destiny more than any other country’s, due to its geography and lack of natural boundaries.
The intellectual context of the work extends back to Spengler’s earlier writings, particularly The Decline of the West and Man and Technics, as well as his 1919 book Prussianism and Socialism. In the introduction he references this earlier work, pointing to the moral necessity of Prussian standards. The book also engages with the broader European intellectual tradition, drawing on classical historians such as Polybius, whose observations on the decline of the Roman Republic Spengler finds directly applicable to the modern situation. He repeatedly draws parallels between the present age and the period from Cannae to Actium in classical antiquity, when the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire.
The book appears at a moment when Spengler believes the “great game of world politics” is only now reaching its highest stakes. He asserts that every living nation must rise to greatness or go under, and that the events of 1933 allow hope that Germany may again be a subject, not an object, of history, as in Bismarck’s day. But he immediately qualifies this hope: greatness and happiness are incompatible; no one will be happy, but many can control the significance of their life-course. Those seeking comfort, he declares bluntly, do not deserve to exist.
Structure of the Book
The book’s structure reflects its argumentative purpose. It opens with an introduction that establishes Spengler’s stance toward the events of 1933 and his method of analysis. He will neither scold nor flatter, he announces, refraining from judging recent events, for true valuation is only possible decades later. No ripe understanding of Napoleon was possible before the end of the last century, and no final opinion on Bismarck yet exists. Facts stand firm; judgments waver.
The first chapter, “The Political Horizon,” examines Germany’s perilous position in the world. Spengler criticizes the short-sightedness and noisy superficiality within Germany, where provincial viewpoints dominate when major problems emerge. He catalogs the superficial solutions proposed by Germans: establishing a ring-fenced Third Empire or a Soviet State, abolishing the army or property, granting independence to small provinces, or proclaiming a dictatorship. All these, he argues, ignore Germany’s actual situation as a frontier against Asia, as it was after the thirteenth century. German political and economic thought must extend beyond its borders.
The second chapter, “World Wars and World Powers,” traces the decay of the European state system from the eighteenth century through the First World War and into the post-war period. Spengler examines the balance-of-power system that arose with the Holy Alliance, the role of Bismarck as the last great practitioner of grand diplomacy, and the approach of the First World War. He then surveys the positions of the major powers after the war: Russia, Japan, America, England, France, and Germany itself. The chapter includes extended reflections on the transformation of warfare, both at sea and on land, and the decline of universal conscription.
The third chapter, “The White World-Revolution,” develops Spengler’s analysis of internal decay within Western civilization. He examines the rise of party politics, the subordination of politics to economics, the nature of the “masses” in the great cities, and the phenomenon of Bolshevism as an internal Western development rather than an import from Russia. He discusses the meaning of property, the distinction between true possessions and mere money, and the levelling downward of society to the standard of the vulgar mob.
The fourth chapter, “The Coloured World-Revolution,” addresses the rising peoples of Asia and Africa and their relationship to the white races. Spengler examines the position of Japan, the nature of Bolshevik rule in Russia as a form of Asiatic absolutism, and the situation of the “Fellaheen” peoples of India and China who, he argues, can never again act independently among the great powers. The book concludes with reflections on the coming struggles and the fate of the white world.
Inside the Book
The Political Horizon
Spengler opens by asking whether any man among the White races truly perceives the immensity of the danger looming over that mass of peoples. He is not speaking of city crowds or voters—between whom and those they elect no qualitative difference remains—but of the ruling classes and statesmen. Germany’s peril is greater than any other nation’s, and yet the country is consumed by provincial viewpoints and noisy superficiality whenever major problems arise. He catalogues the shallow solutions offered by Germans: a ring-fenced Third Empire, a Soviet State, the abolition of the army or of property, the granting of independence to small provinces, or the proclamation of a dictatorship. All of these ignore the fundamental fact that Germany is not an island. It is woven into the destiny of the world more than any other country, by virtue of its geography and its lack of natural boundaries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Germany was “Central Europe,” but in the twentieth it has again become a frontier against “Asia,” as it was after the thirteenth century. German political and economic thought must therefore extend far beyond its own borders.
Germany’s past is taking its revenge: seven hundred years of petty provincial rule by small states. Bismarck’s work, Spengler argues, failed to train the coming generation for the new political realities. Germans applied a particularist and partisan outlook to their greater country, a small-mindedness dating back to the Hohenstaufen emperors and the Hansa, both of whom fell for lack of internal backing. Since then, Germans have shut themselves in innumerable little fatherlands, and the phrase “German idealism” was invented to dignify this condition. Spengler attributes almost all political ideals and Utopias of the Weimar State to this petty thought—International, Communist, Pacifist, Ultramontane, Federal, and even “Aryan” visions alike. Trade unions failed to see beyond the industrial area and never grasped that economic imperialism was the basic premise for the working man, a point the English workman had long understood. German democracy’s enthusiasm for disarmament stops at the French frontiers; Federalists would split the country into dwarf states; National Socialists ignore the world and build castles-in-the-air without considering foreign reaction.
This reveals a universal dread of reality, a spiritual weakness of the “Late” man of higher civilizations, who is cut off from the peasant and the soil. Such a man cannot bear the relentless course of history and takes flight into solitude, faith, or suicide. He buries his head in hopes and ideals like a grotesque ostrich, setting wish-pictures of the future in place of facts—from the children’s “Land of Do-Nothing” to “World Peace and Workers’ Paradise.” The forces that will sway the future are the same as those of the past: the will of the Strong, healthy instincts, race, and the will to possession and power. Justice, happiness, and peace are dreams that hover ineffectively over these realities. Since the sixteenth century it has become harder to grasp world politics, and true statesmen have grown rarer. Most political doings were the work of semi-experts and amateurs with luck, who could rely on the people’s instinct. Now that instinct is weak, and a true statesman will be prevented from acting by the opposition of “know-betters.” Frederick the Great experienced the first type of opposition; Bismarck almost fell victim to the second. Germans are great at suspecting and criticizing creative action, lacking the historical tradition that is congenital with English life. Spengler calls Germany “A nation of poets and thinkers—in the process of becoming a nation of babblers and persecutors.”
We are living in the “Age of Rationalism,” which began in the eighteenth century and is now nearing its close. This is the arrogance of the urban intellect, detached from its roots and despising the wisdom of peasant stock. Everyone can read and write and “knows better.” This mind is obsessed by concepts and sets up programs for a better world, labelling it “Human Progress.” The fear of reality was overcome by intellectual arrogance, producing “world-alien stupidity”—called common sense in English offices, esprit in French salons, and Pure Reason in German philosophers’ studies. This doctrinaire thinking produces schemes and a craze for organization that creates bureaucracies which destroy living order. Rationalism is only criticism, and the critic is the reverse of a creator. The process began with Rousseau and Kant, passed to scientific constructions in the nineteenth century, and lost itself in problem novels and party programs in the twentieth. Idealism and materialism are equally parts of Rationalism—Kant, Voltaire, Holbach, Novalis, Proudhon, the ideologues of the Wars of Liberation, and Marx all belong to it. Both fail to realize that destiny depends on robuster forces. “Human history is war history.”
Romanticism is also an expression of rationalist arrogance. In every outstanding Materialist a Romantic lies hidden. Romanticism is a sign of a weak, self-detesting intellect; Romantics are infantile men who remain children, impelled by the morbid idea of reforming society through noble talk rather than Russian-style violence. Their art is feminine and weak. Spengler mentions the “Youths” with their “old German” coats, including Jahn and Arndt. Stein’s romantic taste prevented him from using his practical experience in diplomacy. They talked about German nature, not railways and customs unions, and were an obstacle to Germany’s future. They did not know the name of Friedrich List, who committed suicide in 1846, but knew the names of Arminius and Thusnelda. These “Youths” are present again today, writing about politics, fired by uniforms and badges. There is a social Romanticism of sentimental Communists, a political Romanticism, and an economic Romanticism. They feel only in the mass.
Misreading the International Situation
Contemporaries misread the current international situation. After the American Civil War, the Franco-German War, and the Victorian Age, existence among the White races was so calm and secure that no historical parallel exists. Those who lived through that period regard it as normal and see the present as a disturbance of a natural state, wishing things will “look up again.” This will not happen. Three factors led to this unsustainable condition: standing and expanding armies made war so incalculable that no statesman dared to make one; technical economic development was feverish and bound to end due to dependence on vanishing conditions; and grave unsolved problems were pushed onto future heirs so successfully that people ceased believing in their reality. The peace from 1870 to 1914 rendered all White men self-satisfied, covetous, and incapable of bearing misfortune. Utopian conceptions appear in every demagogue’s program, disregarding limits of possibility or duty. No statesman, party, or political thinker can speak truth today. Leaders announce an “up-branch of the cycle” and “prosperity” based on stock exchange flutterings, declare unemployment ended when a hundred men get jobs, and claim “mutual understanding between the nations” when the League—”that swarm of parasitic holiday-makers on the Lake of Geneva”—passes resolutions.
This is the greatest age Western Civilization has ever known, corresponding to the Classical Age from Cannae to Actium. The World War was merely the first flash from a fateful thundercloud. The form of the world is being remoulded from its foundations. People are diminutive compared to the age; they cannot bear tragedy and crave happy endings. The coward’s security of 1900 is ended. Only those who can take risks count.
The Anarchic Intermezzo of Party Rule
The passage opens by contrasting the earlier revolutionary archetypes—the idealists of the Wars of Liberation and the rationalistic Bastille-stormers, both of whom converged in 1848—with the need for a conservative attitude toward reform. Following this, political parties formed in every country, and alongside individual idealists arose groups of business politicians of dubious origin and ethics: journalists, advocates, financiers, literary hacks, and party agents. These groups governed by representing their own interests. Monarchs and ministers had been responsible to someone, if only to public opinion, but these party groups alone were accountable to nobody. The press, originally the organ of public opinion, came to serve whoever subsidized it, and elections, once expressions of opinion, brought victory to the party with the most money. Where State order and conscientious authority still existed, it resided in remnants of eighteenth-century forms: the monarchy, however constitutional; the officer-corps; diplomatic tradition; and in England, the age-old parliamentary usage of the Upper House and the two-party system. Everything the State achieved despite parliaments was due to these remnants. Had Bismarck not relied upon his king, he would have succumbed to democracy.
Political dilettantism, whose era was parliament, regarded these traditional forces with suspicion and hatred, opposing them without restraint. Home politics thus made demands on experienced statesmen out of all relation to its importance, wasting their strength and causing them to forget the original meaning of statesmanship: the direction of external policy. This condition is described as the “anarchic intermezzo” known as democracy, which leads from the destruction of monarchical State supremacy through political, plebeian Rationalism to the Caesarism of the future. Signs of this Caesarism appear in contemporary dictatorial tendencies, destined to assume unlimited mastery over the ruins of historical tradition.
Economics Versus Politics
Among the gravest signs of decaying State authority was the nineteenth-century conviction that economics was more important than politics. Political power came to be regarded as serving the nation’s economics, expected to conform to the desires of economic leaders. Politics and economics cannot be separated—they are two sides of the same life—but they stand as navigation relates to freight: the captain, not the merchant, has priority. Economic leadership appears more powerful only because political leadership has degenerated into partisan anarchy. When one house stands amid earthquake ruins, it is not necessarily the most important. In well-ordered history, the economic leader has never made decisions; he adapts to political considerations, and without strong policy there has never been a healthy economic system. Adam Smith, the founder of political economy, treated economic existence as true human life and statesmen as dangerous animals—yet England became economically foremost through genuine politicians like the two Pitts, whose foreign policy was carried through against short-sighted economists. Pure statesmen carried on the struggle against Napoleon to the verge of financial crash, seeing beyond next year’s budget.
Now, inadequate statesmen with interests in private concerns allow business to intervene authoritatively in decisions. This includes not only banks and firms but also Labour parties concerned with wages and hours—the logical result of the first, showing the tragic side of economic systems trying to be their own political security. This was first seen in 1789 among the Girondists, who made bourgeois business interests the justification for State power, and later realized under Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king. The motto “Enrichissez-vous” entered political morals, obeyed by trade, politicians, and the wage-earning class alike in 1848. The economic tendency became uppermost in democracy’s stealthy revolution, demonstrated through revolts by ballot or barricade, upsetting cabinets and voting down budgets. In England, the Manchester school’s Free Trade doctrine was applied by trade unions to labour, receiving theoretical formulation in the “Communist Manifesto” of Marx and Engels. This completed the dethronement of politics by economics, of the State by the counting-house, of the diplomatist by the trade-union leader. Here, not in the World War’s sequelae, lie the seeds of the present economic crisis.
Historical Examples of Political and Economic Power
No economic enterprises attained their end without politically ambitious government support. The Vikings’ “raids”—with which Western command of the sea began—were for booty, but the Viking ship was a State in itself; its plan, high command, and tactics were pure policy. When ships grew into fleets, states were founded with pronounced authority, as in Normandy, England, and Sicily. The German Hansa would have remained an economic great power had Germany become political; when this federation ended, Germany fell out of Western world-economic combinations. Only in the nineteenth century did it return, through Bismarck’s political achievements, which inspired German economic imperialism.
Maritime imperialism—the expression of Faustian striving toward infinity—began when the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 politically barred the Asian economic outlet. This motivated the Portuguese discovery of the oversea route to the East Indies and the Spanish discovery of America, with great powers behind them. The dominant motives were ambition, adventure, battle-delight, and thirst for gold—not “good business.” Discovered countries were to be conquered and ruled, strengthening Habsburg power. The empire over which the sun never set was a political vision. England won primacy not through economic strength but through the wise regimen of the nobility, Tory and Whig alike. England gained wealth by battles, not bookkeeping. The English people, despite “Liberal” talk, remained the most conservative in Europe, preserving all past forms of power. This instinct saved England repeatedly; if it dies out, both political and economic position will be lost. Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Metternich, and Wellington understood nothing of economics; how much worse if economic experts had dictated politics! Once imperialism falls into the hands of economic businessmen, its fate is sealed.
The Transformation of War at Sea and on Land
The passage then discusses the evolution of naval warfare. From earlier ship types, ever larger and more powerful “floating fortresses” evolved at a feverish pace, each becoming obsolete within a few years. Due to their coal requirements, these ships became increasingly dependent on coastal bases. The old rivalry between sea and land power began to incline landwards: whoever held the naval bases, with their docks and material reserves, ruled the sea, regardless of fleet size. “Rule Britannia” depended on England’s colonial wealth, which existed for the sake of the ships, not vice versa. This gave importance to Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Singapore, the Bermudas, and other strategic bases. The meaning of war—the decisive battle at sea—was lost. The enemy fleet was shut off from the coast to render it helpless. There was never a naval equivalent of a general staff’s operations plan, nor a decision fought to the end by battle squadrons. The theoretical dispute over Dreadnoughts after the Russo-Japanese War arose because Japan had built the type but not tested it. In the World War, battleships lay quiet in harbors, as if they did not exist. The battle of Skagerrack (Jutland) was only a surprise, an offer of battle that the English fleet evaded. Few great ships decommissioned as obsolete in the last fifty years had fired a shot at an equal enemy. The development of the air arm makes it doubtful whether the day of armoured ships is past; “Corsair warfare” may be all that is left.
On land, a transformation occurred during the World War.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
The author grounds his analysis in two quotations from Polybius’s Histories, which describe the cycle of democratic decay. The first depicts how power-hungry individuals without merit ruin their estates and corrupt the populace, creating an appetite for gifts that leads to the abolition of democracy and its replacement by mob rule. The people, accustomed to living at others’ expense, eventually find a penniless but ambitious leader and institute a reign of massacre and plunder until they degenerate into savagery and submit to a new master. The second quotation places the blame squarely on the populace itself, which, puffed up by flattery and stirred to fury against the ruling caste, demands the lion’s share. The state then adopts the finest-sounding name—freedom and democracy—while its nature becomes the worst thing: mob-rule.
Spengler asserts that this dictatorship is not a future threat for white races but an accomplished fact, calling it the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” specifically of its profiteers: the trade unions and party officials. This condition was what Marius aimed at but failed to achieve due to his lack of statesmanlike ability. His nephew Caesar succeeded, ending the revolution through a “dictatorship from above,” replacing partisan anarchy with the authority of a superior personality. From Caesar’s reign onward, the struggle was solely for absolute power, not for gold or class hatred. The fight between “Capitalism” and “Socialism” is thus irrelevant. The big financiers, the Roman equites, had an understanding with the populace, funding elections and bribes, while the populace provided armed bands. This alliance between the stock exchange and trade unions exists now as it did then, arising from a shared hatred of State authority and the leaders of the productive economy. Sulla, the nationalist dictator, organized a butchery of financiers after storming Rome; after Caesar, they vanished as a political element.
This revolution has nothing fundamentally to do with economics. It is a disintegration-period in the Culture’s life as a living body. The individual’s doings form an element in this development, and confusing it with economics is a sign of decay. The revolution’s scene is the Megalopolis of the Late period, where crowds of uprooted peasant folk form the “masses”—formless human sand. In this world, the instinct for family permanence is extinct, and an abundance of children becomes tiresome. This egoism of the Megalopolitans is the opposite of the urge to live on in posterity. Cold intelligence, the “weed of the pavements,” sprouts in these masses—the intelligence of daily papers and assemblies, gnawing away genuine Culture.
Society, Rank, and Honour
Culture is a growth. A nation’s organic disposition by status and rank, from peasantry to urban patriciate, signifies its life. Society is constituted by rank, not economic classes. The material, English point of view, developed since Adam Smith and formulated by Marx, dominates white nations’ thought but is a sign of decline. Under this standard, only the amount of money counts, not social position—the standpoint of proletarians and parvenus. “Society” implies having Culture and form, a code built by discipline over generations, and a strict moral outlook. Among Germanic races this is called honour. Personal honour was the sense of responsibility for social, professional, and national honour. Duty, rights, and dignity all trace back to honour. Those lacking it are “vulgar,” the opposite of nobility.
Into the old aristocratic society of Western Europe, the Anglo-Puritan bourgeoisie thrust its shoots in the eighteen-forties, seeking to merge with the nobility. The planters of Spanish South America and English North America formed aristocracies; the latter was annihilated in the Civil War of 1861, replaced by New York and Chicago parvenus. From 1870, the new German bourgeoisie spread into the Prussian officer class. A live society renews itself with precious blood from below, but when its form becomes unsure, revolution begins from above, making way for revolts from below. Society rests on the inequality of men—a natural fact. “Equal rights” are contrary to nature and indicate decline. The intention of the revolution is to destroy, not improve. Degenerate elements sink to the bottom: the dregs of great cities, the mob, the underworld—political and literary Bohemia, wastrel nobility, adventurers, criminals, prostitutes. They unite in hatred of the noble world. The word “Liberty” takes on a bloody significance, meaning liberation from all bonds of civilization. The opposite of noble is not poor but vulgar. The underworld uses the uprooted masses, inoculating them with “class consciousness” and “class hatred,” while the ruling classes are shown as criminals. “People’s rights” are demanded by the disinherited but are meant for the dregs of the self-designated “people’s representatives,” who form a Radical bloc fighting the Culture’s formative forces.
Nihilism and the Vulgar Age
Nihilism is described as an “abysmal hatred” from the proletarian toward higher forms—culture in its essence, society as its upholder and historical product. The Nihilist resents that others possess “form,” master it, and feel comfortable with it, while common people feel fettered. Tact, taste, tradition, and inherited cultivation provoke a “dull fury.” Earlier this fury crept into corners “foaming at the mouth in the manner of Thersites,” but now it is diffused through white nations as an actual world-outlook. The Age itself has become vulgar; most people are unaware of their own taint. Evidence includes the bad manners of parliaments, connivance at shady business transactions for money without work, jazz and Negro dances as spiritual outlets in all circles, women painted like prostitutes, and writers ridiculing well-bred people for popularity. The “vulgar mob” now gives the tone. One half of the world smiles at well-bred forms, not regarding them as imperative; the other half unchains destructive hatred and envy of everything not available to all. Refinement—beauty, grace, taste in dress, easy manners, elegant speech, self-discipline—irritates the vulgar soul. A finely formed face or a slim foot’s dainty step contradicts democracy. Otium cum dignitate is set against boxing matches and six-day races; fine art, poetry, and well-kept gardens must be burnt, smashed, and stamped out. Culture is the enemy because of its superiority. No one educates the masses to true culture; instead, society is levelled to the populace’s standard. General equality means everything equally vulgar: the same money-getting, the same pleasures—panem et circenses. Superiority, manners, taste, and inward rank are crimes. Ethical, religious, and national ideas, marriage for children, family, and State authority are dismissed as “old-fashioned and reactionary.”
Bolshevism’s true origin is not Moscow. Its home is Western Europe, where the English materialist world-view found expression in Continental Jacobinism. Nineteenth-century democracy already amounted to Bolshevism, lacking only the courage for logical conclusions. From the Bastille and the equality-demanding guillotine to 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto, and then to the fall of “Western Tsarism,” Bolshevism does not menace us—it governs us. Its equality equates people and mob; its liberty breaks loose from Culture and society.
The Liberal Formula and Its Development
The passage opens by tracing the Liberal formula of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” back to eighteenth-century English materialists, including devout theologians such as Paley and Butler. This formula, the text argues, developed logically into the Bolshevist formula of the reign of proletarian masses. Innate differences of rank are no longer discussed; only quantity matters—quantity of happiness and of happy people—while qualities do not count. A footnote cites Thomas Aquinas on the Christian theological ideal that the blessed in heaven may watch the tortures of the damned, which the passage compares to revolutionaries gloating over the unhappiness of the once-mighty, wise, aristocratic, and rich.
The Target of Class War Shifts to “Capitalism”
Around 1789, class war targeted “tyrants”—kings, squires, parsons. Beginning about 1850, when political struggle transferred to the economic sphere, the target became “Capitalism.” The passage argues this catchword cannot be defined; it carries moral, semi-Christian implications expressing economic evil, the sin of superiority, the devil disguised as economic success. In middle-class circles it became abuse for anyone disliked: persons of rank, entrepreneurs, tradesmen, judges, officers, scientists, even peasants. It denotes everyone not a “worker” or labour leader—everyone who has not failed through inferior ability.
Capitalism as a Way of Looking at Things
“Capitalism” is not a form of economy but a way of viewing things. Economists have found it in Charlemagne’s time and in primitive villages. Since 1770, economists viewed economic systems from the standpoint of the English merchant, whose nation was monopolizing world commerce—hence the reputation as a “nation of shopkeepers.” The merchant is only a middleman making himself the centre around which producers and consumers revolve. Adam Smith described this position of power as his “science.” Economics thus starts from prices, envisaging goods and markets rather than economic life and active human beings. Labour counts as goods, wages as its price. There is no room for higher executive work, inventors, or peasants—only manufactured goods, oats, and pigs. Eventually, as with Marx, mankind divides into two categories: wage-earners and “exploiters.”
The Artificial Division of Humanity
The passage describes an “artificial division of humanity” into producers and purchasers, falsely contrasted as capitalists and proletarians, bourgeoisie and labour, exploiters and exploited. The trader—the real capitalist—is not mentioned; the manufacturer or farmer is the visible enemy because he hires labour and pays wages. The notion is senseless but effective; the stupidity of a theory never prevents its effective use.
Capitalism and Socialism as Related
“Capitalism” and “Socialism” are of an age, intimately related, produced by the same outlook. Socialism is “the capitalism of the lower classes.” Both Cobden’s Manchester Free Trade doctrine and Marx’s Communist system were born in 1840 in England. Marx even welcomed free-trade Capitalism, as a footnote quotes from 1847: protectionism is conservative while Free Trade destroys nationalities and sharpens the proletariat-bourgeoisie contrast, precipitating social revolution.
“Capitalism from Below”
This phrase describes labour wishing to sell paid labour at the highest price regardless of purchasing power. Socialists hate quality-work and piece-work, seeking to abolish distinctions between skilled and unskilled pay. Strikes force up manual labour prices—the first general strike occurred in England in 1841. Ultimately, expropriating factories and mines would place wage-fixing in the hands of labour-leader bureaucracies controlling the State—the under-meaning of State Ownership. Property acquired by talented people is labelled “stolen” so it may be appropriated without work. Class-war theory was economically constructed for the worker’s vote and politically for the labour leader’s benefit—a short-range aim. Class war meant destruction only, clearing away traditional forces for the underworld’s revenge and dominion.
Attack from Above and Below After 1840
Economic life faced attack from two sides. From above: “high finance”—financiers and speculators—pervaded it with bonds, credits, and boards of directors, making entrepreneurs dependent on financiers’ interests. The economic employer sank to being the financier’s slave. From below: unions fashioned by labour leaders worked to destroy the economic organism. The theoretical weapons were “Liberal” economics and the Communist Manifesto. Both represent the “International”—purely Nihilistic and negative, directed against the bounds of nation, State, and national economies.
Theories Now Out of Date
Both theories are discredited since 1918 by failed prophecies concerning New York or Moscow. Though quoted, no one believes them. The world revolution began under their shadow, has perhaps reached its height, but is far from ended, assuming forms free from theoretical twaddle.
The Revolution’s Successes
The Revolution has reached its goal—it triumphs, it has won. The success is enormous and terrifying for all white nations. The first part of the journey from Liberalism to Bolshevism was traversed fighting political forces; today these are destroyed. As in the Rome of the Gracchi, what statesmen and conquerors created through centuries has been gnawed away by “human vermin.” Old State forms lie in ruins, replaced by formless parliamentarism. Dynastic sovereignty gave way to elections bringing “hordes of the unfit” into State affairs.
Labour’s Dominance
Everywhere, Labour and trade unions have set the fashion—pursuing political aims with economic means and vice versa. Hardly a party dares suggest it represents anyone but the working class.
The Attack on Industry
The professional revolutionaries of Marx’s generation deliberately worked to destroy industry once they realized that, in North-West Europe, industry’s dependence on coal had become vital to economic life. The existence of growing national masses depended on industry’s flourishing. The doctrinaires viewed the world diagrammatically as bourgeoisie and proletariat, assuming the same development must occur everywhere. The author notes the narrowness of their horizon, asking how this stood with Spain and Italy (which had no coal), France, or Russia. They never included Africa, Asia, or Latin America in their researches, nor considered coloured workers of tropical colonies. They talked of “humanity” but stared fixedly at a few European countries whose State and society they intended to destroy. A footnote states that in the 1882 preface to the second Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels set up a theory of evolution contradicting Capital: the road to Communism was to run via the peasants’ village Communism instead of absolute bourgeois domination. Moscow labour leaders, however, fought the peasants for a working class that hardly existed.
Reducing Hours and Raising Wages
The systematic attack on industry began by forcibly reducing daily hours of wage-earners in factories, in contrast to executives, inventors, and engineers. A footnote explains that intellectual work cannot be limited to fixed hours; it pursues its victims during rest, travels, and sleepless nights, causing mental collapse among able men. In the eighteenth century, the working day exceeded twelve hours. In early nineteenth-century England it was limited to twelve hours; about 1850 the Ten-Hour Bill reduced it further, fiercely opposed by the workers themselves, who did not wish to be prevented from making full use of their working power. When passed, revolutionary circles acclaimed it as a victory for the working class and, rightly, as the crippling of industry. Trade unions then exerted increasing pressure to reduce hours further and extend the rule to all wage-earners.
The Inevitable Two-Front Struggle
The argument begins with a fundamental political axiom: opposition presupposes a counter-party. Just as one State is impossible in a stateless world, one party is impossible within a State. Political frontiers, whether of country or mentality, always separate two powers. The belief in triumphant unity after a revolution is dismissed as the “infantile disease of all revolutions,” for the age’s problems demand discord. The “Total State,” an Italian catchword with international vogue, was actually realized by the Jacobins during the two years of the Terror. After annihilating the old regime and founding their dictatorship, they split into Girondists and Montagnards. Leaders fell victims to the Left, and successors treated the Left likewise. With Thermidor came the period of waiting for a successful general. A party can be destroyed as an organization and salaried bureaucracy, but not as a movement—it is a spiritual and intellectual force. The struggle transfers within the surviving party, forming two fronts. This applies to Fascism and movements after its model arising elsewhere, such as in America. Every individual faces an inevitable choice: Right or Left; history will decide for those who do not. Conciliation is impossible, as in the time of the Gracchi.
The Meaning of “Left”
Western Bolshevism is dead nowhere except Russia. Its fighting organizations may be destroyed, but it lives as the Left wing of the conquering party, as a mentality capable of self-deception, and as a movement that can break out suddenly. “Left” means belief in parties—a Liberal form of class war since 1770, longing for majorities, quantity over quality, the herd against the master. True Caesarism of a declining Culture stands on small, strong minorities. “Left” has a program, presupposing an intellectual, rationalistic, Romantic belief in controlling reality by abstractions. It is noisy street-corner agitation, the art of overwhelming crowds by strong words and weak arguments, dating to Gracchan Rome when Latin prose developed into Ciceronian rhetoric. “Left” is enthusiasm for the mass as a foundation for individual power, leveling everything distinctive. A party is antiquated as a form; its mass ideology is antiquated. Finally, “Left” means lack of respect for property—though no race has so strong an instinct of possession as the Germanic, because it is the strongest-willed. Will-to-possession is the Nordic meaning of life, from the conquering expeditions of semi-mythical kings to the family form, which dies when property fades. Where this instinct lacks, “race” is not.
The Coming Danger and the Nature of Caesarism
The great danger for mid-century is prolonging what could be overthrown—a generation of semi-solutions and transitions. While possible, Revolution is not ended. Future Caesarism will conquer by force, not persuasion. Only when majorities are felt as a pretext and despised; when someone arises able to look down on mass, party, programs, and ideologies—then Revolution is overcome. Even Fascism contains the Gracchan fact of two fronts: Left (lower-class town population) and Right (nation graded from peasantry to ruling classes), kept under by the Napoleonic vigor of one individual. This polarity cannot be liquidated; it will emerge in bitter struggles among his Diadochi when that iron hand leaves the helm. Fascism is also a transition: it originated in city mobs as a mass party with noise and mass oratory; Labour-Socialist tendencies are not unknown to it. While a dictatorship has “social service” ambitions, asserts existence for the “worker’s” sake, courts street favor, and is popular, it remains interim. Future Caesarism fights solely for power and empire, against every party.
Mussolini and the Prussian Archetype
Every ideological movement believes in the definitiveness of its achievements, lacking Caesarian skepticism and contempt for humanity. Mussolini’s creative idea was grand with international effect: revealing a possible form for combating Bolshevism. But this form arose from imitating the enemy—revolution from below, armed party-militia (paralleled by Clodius and Milo’s bands in Caesar’s Rome), subordination of intellectual and economic leadership to executive working-out, disregard of others’ property, and confusion of nation and mass—the Socialistic ideology of the last century. What anticipates the future is not Fascism as a party but the figure of its creator. Mussolini is no party leader though formerly a labour leader; he is lord of his country. Lenin would probably have arrived at that point had he lived longer, having cool ruthlessness toward his party and the courage to retreat from ideologies. Mussolini is a statesman, ice-cold, sceptical, realist, diplomat, ruling alone, seeing everything—the rarest gift in an absolute ruler. Even Napoleon was isolated by his entourage. A ruler’s most difficult victories are over his own supporters—the praetorians, the “Ras” in Italy. Perfection of Caesarism is the dictatorship of one man against all parties, above his own. Revolutionary movements reach victory with praetorian vanguards, thereafter dangerous; the real master dismisses them ruthlessly. The French Revolution ran contrary: no one had power, everyone wanted it; everyone commanded, no one obeyed. Mussolini has Southern cunning like Renaissance condottieri, staging his movement in consonance with Italy—home of opera—without being intoxicated, though Napoleon was not free of this weakness; for Rienzi it was fatal. Mussolini appeals rightly to the Prussian archetype: he is closer to Frederick the Great and Frederick’s father than to Napoleon.
Prussianism and the Failure of Leadership
The passage contrasts English chauvinism (supported by a navy cult) and French chauvinism (supported by the army, evident in the Dreyfus Affair) with America’s lack of such a unifying force, which it needs to endure the coming clash between Communism and “high finance.” The “Prussian idea” is opposed to both finance-Liberalism and Labour-Socialism. It is conservative and “Right,” rooted in Nordic life-forces: the instinct for power and possessions, inheritance, fecundity, and family. Its mortal enemy is Rationalism. Present-day Nationalism is a transition, a preliminary step towards Caesarism, abhorring Liberal and Socialist party systems, popularity, and mass movements. All truly great leaders in history go “Right,” citing Cromwell, Mirabeau, and Napoleon. The World Revolution ends not in victory or defeat, but in the masses’ resignation; their ideals become boring. Those who talk of the “end of the bourgeoisie” are still proletarians. A “non-bourgeois” society can only be maintained by Terror for a few years, as people grow sick of it and labour leaders become new bourgeois. Socialism is antiquated; the century of the worker cult is ending. The worker will step back into the nation as the lowest grade in urban society.
The Great War’s shock created spiritual chaos. Those born around 1890 were denied the sight of a commanding figure like Bismarck or Moltke, and the War produced no important monarch or statesman. This led to a lack of the sense of authority among returning millions, seen in youth’s unrestrained criticism and lack of self-criticism. The chaos manifested in people screaming for a dictatorship on their own lines, choosing and rejecting leaders like Primo de Rivera, d’Annunzio, and Ludendorff. Leadership was discussed, not accepted. The “youth” of Germany, England, and Spain hoped to end a two-century process of world change through Bolshevism. Their revolutionary outcry against “individualism”
The Coming of Caesarism
The argument reaches its most extreme conclusion as Spengler considers the possibility of ending the white world entirely. He asserts that the two great revolutions—the white proletarian uprising and the coloured revolt against the white Imperium—will not disdain each other’s aid, even though each side despises the other’s supporters. A common hatred, he writes, extinguishes mutual contempt. The enemies of the existing order, however different their grievances, will find themselves fighting on the same side.
Spengler then turns to a singular figure: the white adventurer, the man whose wild soul cannot breathe in the hothouse of civilization. Such a man seeks danger in colonial ventures, among pirates, or in the ranks of the Foreign Legion. But this restless spirit might suddenly perceive the grand goal of the coloured revolution before him. It is through such natures, Spengler claims, that history springs her great surprises. The loathing of strong men for current conditions, combined with the hatred of the disillusioned, could grow into an annihilating revolt—a phenomenon not unknown in Caesar’s time. The archetype of the renegade leader who turns his martial skills against his own civilization is, for Spengler, a recurring and decisive force.
The Coloured Rising and the White Collapse
Spengler’s predictions grow more specific and more ominous. When the white proletariat finally breaks loose in the United States, he writes, the Negro will be on the spot, and behind him the Indians and the Japanese will await their hour. The internal collapse of the great white powers will be the signal for the coloured world to strike. Similarly, a “black France”—a France whose African colonies have turned upon the metropolis—would outdo the horrors of the Parisian revolutions of 1792 and 1871. The white leaders of the class war, he insists, would not hesitate to use coloured outbreaks for their own purposes. Even if Moscow’s voice were silenced, its work would continue independently, carried forward by the logic of events rather than by any central command.
Spengler reminds his readers that whites have waged their wars and class wars before the eyes of colour, humiliating and betraying one another, even summoning coloured peoples to participate in their conflicts. That colour should now act on its own initiative would be no surprise at all. The white world has taught the lesson of violence too well.
The End of the Parliamentary Interlude
At this point, Spengler declares that advancing history towers high over economic distress and internal political ideals. The elemental forces of life enter a fight for all or nothing. The prefiguration of Caesarism will become clearer, more conscious, and unconcealed. The masks will fall from the age of the parliamentary interlude—that brief period when elected assemblies and party politics seemed to govern the destiny of nations. Party attempts to contain the future will be forgotten, swept aside by forces they cannot comprehend.
The Fascist formations of this decade, Spengler writes, will pass into new, unforeseeable forms. Present-day nationalism will disappear, having served its purpose as a transitional stage. The only remaining formative power is the warlike, “Prussian” spirit—a spirit that exists everywhere and not in Germany alone. This ethos of discipline, duty, and readiness for sacrifice is the last vital principle left in a world exhausted by materialism and class conflict.
Caesar’s Legions Return
Destiny, once compacted in meaningful forms and traditions, will now make history through formless individual powers. The old structures—states, parties, institutions—have lost their creative force. What remains is the will of solitary, commanding men. “Caesar’s legions are returning to consciousness,” Spengler writes. The age of the dictator, the man of destiny who seizes power through personal authority rather than institutional legitimacy, is about to begin.
Possibly within the present century, the ultimate decisions are waiting for their man. Current political aims sink to nothing in the face of this coming struggle. He whose sword compels victory here will be lord of the world. The dice are ready for this stupendous game—and Spengler leaves his reader with the question: who dares to throw them? The book ends on this note of open possibility, a challenge flung at the future. The hour of decision has come, and the only question that remains is whether any man will prove equal to it.
Main Arguments
The central argument of The Hour of Decision is that the white races of the world face an unprecedented danger, and that Germany, as the key country of the world, stands at the center of this danger. Spengler asks whether any man among the white races sees the immensity of the danger looming over this mass of peoples. He speaks not of city crowds or voters, between whom he sees no quality-difference remaining, but of ruling classes and statesmen. The forces that will sway the future, he insists, are the same as those that swayed the past: the will of the strong, healthy instincts, race, and the will to possession and power. Justice, happiness, and peace are dreams that hover ineffectively over these forces.
Spengler argues that the period of peace from 1870 to 1914 was an anomaly, a deceptive calm that rendered all white men self-satisfied, covetous, and incapable of bearing misfortune. Three factors led to this unsustainable condition: standing and expanding armies made war so incalculable that no statesman dared to make one; technical economic development was feverish and bound to end due to dependence on vanishing conditions; and grave unsolved problems were pushed onto future heirs so successfully that people ceased believing in their reality. This peace, he insists, is over, and the world has entered the age of world wars, which will outlast the present generation and probably the next.
The book argues that the “world crisis” is misunderstood when it is seen as a crisis in production, unemployment, currency, war debts, reparations, or as the result of the World War. These are symptoms, not causes. The catastrophe was the inevitable close of a century of Western development working toward it since Napoleon. The World War was merely the first flash from a fateful thundercloud. The form of the world is being remoulded from its foundations, and people are diminutive compared to the age. They cannot bear tragedy and crave happy endings, but the coward’s security of 1900 is ended. Only those who can take risks count.
A related argument concerns the relationship between politics and economics. Spengler contends that in the nineteenth century, economics came to be considered more important than politics, and that this inversion was a sign of decay. Political power came to be regarded as serving the nation’s economics, expected to conform to economic leaders’ desires. But politics and economics cannot be separated; they are two sides of the same life. They stand as navigation relates to freight: the captain, not the merchant, has priority. Economic leadership appears more powerful only because political leadership has degenerated into partisan anarchy. In well-ordered history, the economic leader has never made decisions; he adapts to political considerations. Without strong policy there has never been a healthy economic system.
Spengler further argues that the revolution of the masses is not primarily economic but represents a disintegration-period in the life of a Culture. The revolution’s scene is the Megalopolis of the Late period, where crowds of uprooted peasant folk form the “masses”—formless human sand. In this world, the instinct for family permanence is extinct, and cold intelligence, the “weed of the pavements,” sprouts in masses, gnawing away genuine Culture. The intention of the revolutionaries is to destroy, not improve. Degenerate elements sink to the bottom: the dregs of great cities, the mob, the underworld—political and literary Bohemia, wastrel nobility, adventurers, criminals, prostitutes. They unite in hatred of the noble world.
The book also argues that Bolshevism is not a Russian import but a Western European development. Moscow’s streets show the goal, but no spirit from Moscow conquered. Bolshevism’s home is Western Europe, since the English materialist world-view found expression in Continental Jacobinism. Nineteenth-century democracy already amounted to Bolshevism, lacking only courage for logical conclusions. Bolshevism does not menace us, Spengler declares; it governs us. Its equality equates people and mob; its liberty breaks loose from Culture and society.
Key Concepts
Several distinctive concepts structure Spengler’s analysis. The first is the distinction between Culture and Civilization. Culture is a growth, a nation’s organic disposition by status and rank, from peasantry to urban patriciate. Society is constituted by rank, not economic classes. Civilization, by contrast, is the late stage in which the material, English point of view, developed since Adam Smith and formulated by Marx, dominates thought. This point of view is a sign of decline. Under its standard, only the amount of money counts, not social position—the standpoint of proletarians and parvenus.
Closely related is the concept of “race,” which Spengler uses not in a biological sense but as a spiritual and moral quality. Race is among the forces that will sway the future, along with the will of the strong, healthy instincts, and the will to possession and power. The English nation, he argues, lacks the racial foundation of a tough peasantry, and the ruling upper class of Germanic or Celtic race has been used up. The original population mass—erroneously called Celts—has risen to dominance with a “French” life-feeling. Race, in this sense, is a matter of character and tradition rather than blood.
The concept of “Prussianism” (Preussentum) is central to Spengler’s vision for Germany. He insists that Prussianism is important, not “Socialism” of any description. Germans need educating to the Prussian standard shown in 1870 and 1914, a standard reached through living example and moral self-discipline of a ruling class, not words or force. This is the moral necessity he pointed to in his 1919 book Prussianism and Socialism. Germans have no educative past and must awaken dormant character.
Spengler introduces the concept of “Caesarism” to describe the coming form of rule. Advancing toward the Caesarism of the Faustian world, world-improvers end their amble, leaving mountains of printed paper. The Caesars will take their place. High policy, the art of the possible, will grip the world like a good horseman. Caesarism is the instinctive revolt of the blood and race-instinct against money and intellect, the way from democracy to plutocracy. It is the form of rule that emerges when the “anarchic intermezzo” of democracy has run its course.
The concept of the “Megalopolis” describes the great city of the Late period, the scene of the revolution. Crowds of uprooted peasant folk form the “masses”—formless human sand. In this world, the instinct for family permanence is extinct; an abundance of children becomes tiresome. This egoism of the Megalopolitans is the opposite of the urge to live on in posterity. Cold intelligence, the “weed of the pavements,” sprouts in masses—the intelligence of daily papers and assemblies, gnawing away genuine Culture.
Spengler also develops a distinction between true property and mere money. Property belongs necessarily to a ripe Culture. Its original sense is old, permanent possession, inherited or acquired through heavy devoted work, cherished for descendants. True possessions are soul; through soul, Culture. Estimating by money value is incomprehension or desecration. Real property is always immovable, clings to owner, consists of things. “Fortune” is merely invested, defined quantitatively, has no home. Rising families seek a family seat; descending families turn it into cash. This marks a difference between Culture and Civilization. Money, by contrast, is pure sense of values in market language, measured mathematically by currency. Its charm is that one can come into it overnight—through gambling, burglary, political deals, speculation—or throw it away. Proletarians and parvenus agree here; there is an inner relationship between Bolshevism and Americanism.
Themes
The book’s deepest theme is the inevitability of historical destiny and the futility of attempting to escape it. Spengler’s motto from Wagner sets this tone: the Norns weave doom, nor may they guide it nor change. History recks nothing of human logic; nations may perish but the earth continues revolving. The man of action is limited in vision, driven without knowing the real aim. The historical expert’s task is to understand facts and envisage the future, which comes whether we will or no. This fatalism pervades the entire work, giving it a tragic quality. Spengler repeatedly insists that nothing once a fact can be withdrawn, and that what the individual will not do, History will do with him.
A related theme is the incompatibility of greatness and happiness. Spengler states this explicitly in the introduction: greatness and happiness are incompatible; no one will be happy, but many can control the significance of their life-course. Those seeking comfort do not deserve to exist. This theme recurs throughout the book in various forms. The author declares this the greatest age Western Civilization has ever known, corresponding to the Classical Age from Cannae to Actium. The World War was merely the first flash from a fateful thundercloud. People are diminutive compared to the age; they cannot bear tragedy and crave happy endings. Only those who can take risks count.
The theme of Nordic world-feeling runs through the book as a counterpoint to the decadence of the present. Spengler describes a Nordic world-feeling reaching from England to Japan that embraces destiny joyfully. This tragic view appears in the Mahabharata, Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Germanic sagas, Shakespeare, certain Shu king songs, and the Samurai world. Tragedy is the deepest form of brave pessimism. This world-feeling is contrasted with the cowardice of those who need pious falsehoods to protect them from reality. Buddhism and its offshoots arose in Indian Culture from such cowardice, and these cults are now becoming fashionable. A Late religion of the West may be forming, whether under Christianity’s guise none can tell.
The theme of the return of barbarism is closely connected. Primeval barbarism, hidden under the form-rigour of a ripe Culture, is awake again now that Civilization has set in. This spirit abounds in Western European peasantry, American prairies, and northern Asian plains, where world-conquerors are born. Spengler repeats his claim that man is a beast of prey. Moralists are beasts with broken teeth. Pacifists shout “No more war” but desire class war; they object to executing murderers yet secretly enjoy political murders; they raise no objection to Bolshevist slaughters. Conflict is the original fact of life.
The theme of German particularism and its consequences is developed at length. Spengler claims Germany’s past is taking revenge: seven hundred years of petty provincial rule by small states. Bismarck’s work failed to train the coming generation for the new political realities. Germans applied a “particularist and partisan outlook” to their greater country. This small-mindedness dates from the Hohenstaufen emperors and the Hansa, who both fell for lack of internal backing. Since then, Germans have shut themselves in “innumerable little fatherlands,” and the phrase “German idealism” was invented for this condition. The author attributes almost all political ideals and Utopias from the Weimar State to this petty thought, including International, Communist, Pacifist, Ultramontane, Federal, and “Aryan” visions. He describes Germany as “A nation of poets and thinkers—in the process of becoming a nation of babblers and persecutors.”
The theme of the vulgar age pervades the book’s cultural criticism. The Age itself has become vulgar; most people are unaware of their own taint. Evidence includes: bad manners of parliaments, connivance at shady business transactions for money without work, jazz and Negro dances as spiritual outlet in all circles, women painted like prostitutes, writers ridiculing well-bred people for popularity, and nobility and princely families discarding social restraint and custom. The “vulgar mob” now gives the tone. Refinement—beauty, grace, taste in dress, easy manners, elegant speech, limb control, education, self-discipline—irritates the vulgar soul. A finely formed face, a slim foot’s dainty step contradict democracy. Culture is the enemy because of superiority; creations not available to all must be annihilated.
The Author’s Conclusions
Spengler concludes that the white world faces a struggle for existence more fundamental than any since the age of the Roman Republic. The throwing of the dice for world-mastery has only just begun. Germany, without leaders or weapons, impoverished and torn, cannot count on existence. Millions slaughtered in Russia and starved in China were mere newspaper reports. When Columbus discovered America and Vasco da Gama the East Indian route, the London steelyard closed at English merchants’ request, and German merchantmen vanished—no German flag flew from their masts. Germany became too poor for international policy, fought wars with foreign money in foreign service over “miserable scraps.” The question is whether Germans will again be dreamers swallowed by events.
The book ends with a warning about the coloured world-revolution. The ancient “Fellaheen” peoples like Indians and Chinese can never again act independently among great powers; they change masters but always succumb to another, never producing their own political existence. Their rebelliousness—liberty, equality, parliament, republic, Communism—is imported from Western Europe and Moscow. They are objects and war resources, their countries battlefields for foreigners’ decisive battles. But the rising peoples of Asia represent a force that the white races must reckon with. Russia and Japan watch these peoples’ potential uses, working secretly by methods whites neither know nor see.
Spengler’s final position is one of guarded hope mixed with profound anxiety. He states that he has a right to criticism, having demonstrated what must happen. A decisive series of facts is set in train; nothing once a fact can be withdrawn. What the individual will not do, History will do with him. The book is a danger-signal. His fear for Germany has not grown less; the March victory was too easy. No one knows what forms will arise. Every revolution worsens a country’s external situation, requiring statesmen of Bismarck’s order. We may stand close before a second world war. Germany is not an island. Germany is the key country of the world, geographically on Asia’s borders—today the most important continent—and because Germans are young enough to experience world-historical problems inwardly, while other nations are too old and rigid to do more than raise defences. The attack holds greater promise of victory.
Significance
The Hour of Decision occupies a significant place in the intellectual history of the twentieth century as a document of the crisis of Western civilization between the two world wars. It represents the application of Spengler’s cyclical philosophy of history, developed in The Decline of the West, to the immediate political situation of the early 1930s. The book is notable for its refusal to celebrate the National Socialist seizure of power even while welcoming the end of the Weimar Republic. Spengler’s insistence that the revolution of 1933 was not a victory but a promise, and his warning that “woe betide those who mistake mobilization for victory,” set him apart from many contemporaries who saw the events of 1933 as a final solution to Germany’s problems.
The book’s significance also lies in its analysis of the internal decay of Western societies. Spengler’s diagnosis of the levelling downward of society, the dominance of money values, the rise of the masses, and the decline of authority anticipated many themes that would occupy later cultural critics. His distinction between true property and mere money, his critique of the subordination of politics to economics, and his analysis of the relationship between democracy and plutocracy remain provocative. His claim that Bolshevism is not a Russian import but a Western European development, and that it governs the West rather than menacing it from outside, offers a distinctive perspective on the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century.
The book is also significant for its geopolitical analysis. Spengler’s insistence that Germany is a frontier against Asia, his examination of the positions of Russia, Japan, England, France, and America, and his warnings about the coloured world-revolution address questions that would become central to world politics in the decades after the book’s publication. His analysis of the decline of British sea power, the rise of air power, and the changing nature of warfare anticipated developments in military technology and strategy. His observation that England has ceased strategically to be an island against air attack, and that “England as mistress of the seas sinks into the past along with the heavy battleship,” proved prescient.
The book’s significance is also historical, as a document of its time. Written in the months surrounding the National Socialist seizure of power, it captures the hopes and fears of a German intellectual who welcomed the end of the Weimar Republic but distrusted the forces that had replaced it. Spengler’s warnings about the dangers of the movement becoming rigid from principles, going under in anarchy, or doubling back, and his observation that in Paris in 1793 it was felt “que ça changerait,” reflect the uncertainties of a revolutionary period. His insistence that intoxication is followed by disillusionment, and that elements may regard power’s enjoyment as an event, speaks to the dynamics of revolutionary movements generally.
The book’s final significance lies in its challenge to its readers. Spengler offers no comfort and no program. He presents a picture of facts as they are and will be, and demands that his readers rise to the level of their historical situation. The book is a call to greatness in an age that Spengler sees as diminutive, a demand that nations and individuals accept the tragic nature of existence and act with courage and clarity. Whether one agrees with his analysis or not, the seriousness of his engagement with the largest questions of politics and history commands respect. The book remains a powerful example of the attempt to think systematically about the fate of civilizations and the responsibilities of those who live through their decline and transformation.
