Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was born in Blankenburg, Germany, on May 29, and attended the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Halle, where he studied mathematics and the natural sciences, which led to his becoming a secondary school teacher of mathematics in Hamburg. He abandoned teaching in 1911 to work on his magnum opus—The Decline of the West (1918–1922)—which he did steadily during the World War I. He intentionally published the first volume to coincide with the German military defeat and industrial collapse of 1918, and the second four years later. From this time until his death in Munich on May 8, he wrote other, shorter books and pamphlets on social and political subjects, including Man and Technics (1931).

Despite his marginal status in the German academic world and the controversy with which his ideas were greeted, Spengler's influence on social science was far greater than that of those who tried furiously to...