The German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) is famous for his Decline of the West. He held that civilizations, like biological organisms, pass through a determinable life cycle and that the modern West was approaching the end of such a cycle.

Oswald Spengler was born at Blankenburg am Harz on May 29, 1880, the son of a postal official. Although mathematics and natural science were his major subjects at the University of Halle, he received his doctorate for a dissertation on Heraclitus in 1904. After recovering from a nervous breakdown in 1905-1906, Spengler taught in secondary schools until a small inheritance from his mother allowed him in 1911 to move to Munich as a private scholar. Spengler never married.

Exempted from military service because of poor health, Spengler wrote the major part of The Decline of the West during the war years under conditions of great economic hardship. The first volume appeared in...