[extropy-chat] more on Spengler

[Damien Broderick]

amazon has some thoughts, many presumably uttered in the 1920s when the 
translation came out in English:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195066340/ref=pd_sxp_elt_l1/104-4124749-8598313

e.g.:

Review
"This grand panorama, this imaginative sweep, this staggering erudition, 
this Nietzschean prose, with its fine color and ringing force, mark a work 
that must endure."

-- Henry Hazlitt, New York Sun.

"Here is one of the mighty books of the century, which, sooner or later, 
will be read by all who ponder the riddle of existence... it is a truly 
monumental work, at once depressing in its pessimism and exhilarating in 
its compelling challenge to our accepted ideas."

-- Arthur D. Gayer, The Forum.

"As one reads Spengler the thought keeps recurring, ever more insistently, 
that here again is one of those universal minds which we had come to think 
were no longer possible."

-- Allen V. Peden,

St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"Audacious, profound, crochety, absurd, exciting, and magnificent."

-- Lewis Mumford, The New Republic."With monumental learning, with an 
independence and coldness of judgment which defers nothing to great names 
or consecrated opinions, and in a style always forceful and in places 
eloquent, Spengler surveys man's cosmic march, analyzes social classes and 
the work of leaders, dissects the idea of the State... challenges the 
economic interpretation of history and appraises religion and religions, 
only to find them all, in the culture of the West, running fast to decay 
under the impetus of civilization doomed by destiny from which there is no 
escape."

-- William MacDonald, New York Times.

"Not since Nietzsche left his indelible mark upon European thought has a 
work of philosophy come out of Germany, or any other country in Europe, 
comparable in importance, brilliance and encyclopaedic knowledge with The 
Decline of the West."

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Others might prefer Braudel or Mumford, or (like Popper, I think) find the 
whole enterprise quixotic at best and toxic at worst.

Damien Broderick