Spengler Today 305

Spengler Today
By T. W. Adorno

It has been suggested that the history of philosophy does not con-
sist so much in having its problems solved as it does in having them
forgotten by the intellectual movements they have themselves set in
motion. Oswald Spengler's doctrine has been forgotten, and with
the speed that he hirnself ascrihed to world history when he said
that it was fast developing the momentum of a catastrophe. After
an initial popular success German public opinion very quickly turned
against the book. Official philosophers reproached it for superfici-
ality, the specific official sciences branded it incompetent and charla-
tan, and, during the hustle and bustle of the period of German
inflation and stabilization, the thesis of the Decline of the West1 was
none too popular. In the meantime, Spengler had laid hirnself open
to such an extent in a number of smaller studies arrogant in tone
and full of cheap antitheses that a negative attitude to hirn was made
easy for those who wanted to go on as they were. When in 1922 the
second volume of the main work appeared, it fell far short of attraet-
ing the attention that had been given to the first, though the second
was actually the volume that concretely developed the thesis of the
decline. Laymen who read Spengler as they had read Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer before hirn had become estranged from philoso-
phy. The professional philosophers soon clung to Heidegger who
gave their listlessness a more sterling and more elevated expression,
ennobling death (which Spengler had decreed somewhat naturalistic-
ally) and promising to change the thought of it into an academic
panacea. Spengler had had his trouble for nothing. His little book
on man and technics was not allowed to be in the same class as
the smart philosophical anthropologies of the same time. Hardly
any notice was taken of his relations with National Socialism, bis
controversy with Hitler, or his death. In Germany today he is pro-
nounced a grumbler and reactionary in the manipulated, National
Socialist sense of this word. Abroad, he is regarded as one of the
ideological accomplices of the p.ew barbarism, a representative of
the most brutal type of Prussian imperialism.

'We refer 10 the translation by Charles Francis Atkinson, Vol. 1, New York 1926;
Vol. 2, New York 1928.
306 T. W. Adorno

But in spite of all this, there is good reason once again to ask
whether Spengler's teaching is true or false. It would be conceding
too rnuch to hirn to look to world history, which stepped over hirn
on its way to the New Order of the time, for the final judgment upon
the value of his ideas. There is, however, even less occasion to do
this, for the course of world history has itself vindicated his imme-
diate prognoses to an extent that would be astonishing if these prog-
noses were remembered. The forgoUen Spengler takes his revenge
by threatening to be right. His oblivion bears witness to an inte11ec-
tual· impotence comparable to the political impotence of the Weimar
Repuhlic in the face of Hitler. Spengler hardly found an adversary
who was his equal, and forgeUing hirn has worked as an evasion.
One has· only to read Manfred Schroeter's book, Der Streit um
Spengler, with its cornplete survey of the literature up to 1922, to
become aware of how cornpletely the German niind failed against
an opponent to whoma11 the suhstantial power of the German phil-
osophy of history seemed to have passed. Pedantie punctiliousness
in the conerete, wordy conformist optimism in the idea, and, often
enough, an involuntary eoncession of weakness in the assuranee that
after a11 things are not yet so bad with our cu:lture, or in the sophistie
trick of undermining Spengler's relativistic position by exaggerating
his own relativism-this is a11 that German philosophy and science
could bring to bear against a man who rebuked them as a sergeant-
major would dress down a rookie. Behind their consequential help-
1essness oneeould almost suspect the presence of a seeret impulse
to obey the sergeant-major in the end.
It becomes the more urgent to take a stand against this phil-
osophy. Let us try, therefore, first to see the force of Spengler by
comparing some of his theses with our own situation; then, to search
out the sources of power that give such a force to his philosophy,
the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of which are so plainly
evident; and let us fina11y ask, without being assured of a positive
answer beforehimd, what considerations might possibly be able to
hold their ground against Spengler without a false posture of
strength and without the bad conscience of official optimism..
In order to demonstrate Spengler's force we shall at first not
diseuss his general historieo-philosophical concept of the plant-like
growth and decay of eulture, but the way he directed this philosophy
of history to the imminent phase of history before us, which he
termed Caesarism, in analogy with the Roman Empire period. His
most characteristic predictions pertain to questions of mass domi-
nation, such as propaganda, mass culture, forms of political manipu-
lation, partieu1arly to eertain tendeneies inherent in demoeraey that
 Spengler Today 307

threaten to make it turn into dictatorship. In comparison with these

elements, specifically economic predictions playbut a minor. role,
in accordance with Spengler's general view that economy is not a
basic social reality but rather an "expression" of particular "soul-
doms." The question of monopoly is not raised, although Spengler
is acutely aware of the cultural consequences of the centralization
of power. Yet, his insight reaches far enough to disclose certain
noteworthy economic phenomena, such as the decline of money
economy.
A few trains of thought which relate to civilization in the era
of Caesarism have been selected from his second volume. We begin
with some quotations on the "physiognomics" of the modem me-
tropolis. Spengler says of the houses of the big city: "They are,.
generally speaking, no longer houses in which Vesta and Janus,
Lares and Penates, have any sort of footing, but mere premises
which have been fashioned, not by blood but by requirements, not
by feeling but by the spirit of commercial enterprise. So long as
the hearth has a pious meaning as the aetual anll genuine centre of
a family, the old relation to the land is not wholly extinct. But
when that, too, follows the rest into oblivion, and the mass of ten-
ants and bed-occupiers in the sea of houses leads a vagrant exist-
ence from shelter to shelter like the hunters and pastors of the
"pre"-time, then the intellectual nomad is completely developed.
This city is a world, is the world. 001y as a whole, as a human
dwelling-place, has it meaning, the houses being merely the stones
of whieh it is assemhled."l The image of the latter day city-dweller
as a second nomad deserves special emphasis.·It expresses not only
fear and estrangement but the dawning "history-Iess" charaeter of
a situation in whieh men experience themselves oo1y as objects of
opaque processes and in which, between sudden shock and sudden
oblivion, they are no longer eapable of any continuous sense of
time. Spengler clearly sees the interconnection between pauperiza-
tion and the new type of man that has fully revealed hirnself in the
totalitarian outhreaks: "But always the splendid mass-cities harhour
lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and man-
sards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw
man."2 He knows little about the basic conditions responsible for
this poverty. But he sees the more clearly the frame of mind grip-
piIig the masses outside the actual process of production, matters
usually referred to under the head of "leisure time." ''Tension,

'11, p. 100.
'11, 102.
 308 T. W. Adorno

when it has hecome intellectual, knows no form of recreation hut

that which is specific to the world-city-namely, detente, relaxation,
distraction. Genuine play, joie de vivre, pleasure, inehriation, ar':.
products of the cosmic beat and as such no longer comprehensihle
in their essence. But the relief of hard, intensive brain-work by
its opposite-conscious and practised fooling--of intellectual ten-
sion by the bodily tension of sport, of bodily tension by the sensual
straining after 'pleasure' and the spiritual straining after the 'excite-
ments' of betting and competitions, of the pure logic of the day's
work by a consciously enjoyed mysticism-all this is common to
Lhe world-cities of all the Civilizations."l Spengler built this idea
into the thesis that "art itself becomes a sport.,,2 He knew neither
Jazz nor Quiz, but if one· were to summarize the most conspicuous
trends of our present mass culture, one could not find a more preg-
nant category than that of sport, the hurdling of rhythmical ob-
'stacles, and contest or competition either among the performers or
between production and audience. The full force of Spengler's con-
tempt is hurled at the victims of the advertising culture of our
epoch. The "residue is the Fellah type."s
Spengler describes this Fellah type more concretely as resulting
from an expropriation of human consciousness through the central-
iZed means of public communication. He still conceives of it in terms
of money power, though he foresees the end of monetary economy.
According to hirn, mind, in the sense of limitless autonomy, can
exist· only in relation to theabstract medium of money. However
this may be, his description is fully correct ai! regards conditions
under the totalitarian regime, which has declared an ideological
war against both money and mind. One could say that Spengler
became aware of traits in the press that were fully developed only
later, when the radio came on the scene, just as he raised objections
. against democracy that attained their full weight only when dictator-
ship established itself."Democracy has by its newspaper com-
pletely. expelled the book from the mental life of the people. The
book-world, with its profusion of standpoints that compelled thought
to select and criticize, iil now areal possession only for a few. The
people reads the one paper, 'its' paper, which forces itself through
the front doors by millions daily, speilbinds the intellect from morn-
ing to night, drives the book into oblivioil. by its more engaging
layout, and if one or another specimen of a book does emerge into
'11, 103.
"1,35.
"11, 105.
 Spengler Today 309

visibility, forestalls and eliminates its possible effects by 'reviewing'

it.,,1 Spengler has a sense of the dual character of enlightenment in
the era of universal domination. "With the political press is bound
up the need of universal school-education, which in the c1assical
world was completely lacking. In this demand there is an element-
quite unconscious--of desiring to shepherd the masses, as the ob-
ject of party politics, into the newspaper's power area. The idealist
of the earIy democracy regarded popular education, without arriere
pensee, as enlightenment pureand simple, and even today one finds
here and there weak heads that become enthusiastic on the Freedom
of the Press-but it is precisely this that smooths the path for the
coming caesars of the world-press. Those who have learnt to read
succumb to their power, and the visionary self·determination of Late
democracy issues in a thorough-going determination of the people
by the powers whom the printed word obeYS."2 The things Spengler
ascribes to the modest press magnates ofthe first worId war have
blossomed into the technique of manipulated pogroms and spon-
taneous popular demonstrations. "Without the reader's observing it,
the paper, and himself with it, changes masters"8-this has literally
come true under the Third Reich. Spenglercalls it the "style of the
twentieth century. Today, a democrat of the old school would
demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press;
but meantime' the leaders have changed themselves' into parvenus
who have to secure their postion (position em. TWA) vis-A-visthe
masses."4 He prophesies Goebbels: "No tamer has his animals
more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it
will storm through .the streets and hurI itself upon the target indi-
cated, terrifying arid breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and
it will become quiet and go home. Thepress today is an army with
carefully organized arms and branches, with 'journalists as 'officers,
and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier
obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without
his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know,
the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to
play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot
be imagined. Formerlya man did not dare to think freely. Now he
dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think
to or<1er, and this is what he feels as his liberty."G

'11,461 •
. '11, 462.
'11, 462.
'11, 462.
'11, 462 f.
310 T. W.Adomo

The specifieally politieal prognoses are no less astonishing. First

of all a military prediction, which, incidenta11y, may have been inßu·
eneed by eertain experienees of the German army command during
the first world war, experienees that have been put into practiee in the
meantime. Spengler regards the "demoeratic" prineiple of universal
military service as obsolete, together with the taetieal means derived
from it. uThe place of the permanent armies as we know them will
gradually be taken by professional forces of volunteer war·keen sol·
diers; and from millions we sha11 revert to hundreds' of thousands. But
ipso facto this second century will be one of actuallr Contending States.
These armies are not substitutes for war"-as was the case, aceord·
ing to Spengler, during the nineteenth eentury-"they are for war
and they want war. Within two generations it will be they whose
will prevails over that of a11 the comfortables put together. In these
wars of theirs for the heritage of the whole world, continents will be
staked, India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam called out, new
technics and tactics played and counterplay«:,d. The great cosmo-
politan foei of power will dispose at their pleasure of smaller states
--:-their territory, their economy and their men alike--all that is
now merely province, passive object, means to end, and its destinies
are without importanee to the great march of things. We ourselves,
in a very few years, have leamt to take little or no noiice of events
that before the War would have horrified the world."l But the era
to which Spengler refers as that of contending states is followed,
according to hirn, by aperiod that is "historyless" in a most sinister
sense. This paradoxical prognosis is clearly paralleled by the ten·
dency of present economy to eliminate the market and the dynamics
of eompetition. This tendeney. is directed towards static conditions
whieh no longer know of erises in the strictlyeconomic sense of the
term. The labor of others is appropriated, without any intermediary
processes, by those in command of the means of production, and the
life of those who do the work is maintained planfully from above. 2
What Spengler correctly prophesies for the smaIl states as political
units also begins to materialize among men themselves in the large
states and particularly among the inhabitants of the powerful totali·
tarian Ones.· Here, men have become mere objects. That is why
history appears to be extinguished. Whatever happens, happens to
them, not, strictly speaking, through them. Even the greatest strategic
exploits and triumphal marches retain a touch of illusion and are
not quite real. The events take place between the oligarchs and
their specialists in murder. They are not engendered by the inherent
'11,429.
·cf. F. Pollock, "State Capitalism", in this issue.
 Spengler Today 311

dynamics of society butrather subject the latter to an administration

which sometimes goes so far as to imply annihilation~ Night.bomber
attacks on cities which are left practically defenseless even if they
put up some sort of defense-this is the sort of history that has been
established today. Hitler's edifices in Nürnberg, forsaken as they
are on days other than party congresses, have something Egyptian
about them which ought to have delighted Spengler. They are like
the monuments of a foreign conqueror, strangely isolated in the sub·
jugated country. Even Hitler's voice, sounding as if it ca me from
an ivory tower, has the ring of this isolation..
As objects of political forces men will lose their political will
and spontaneity. "Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no
more political problems. People. manage with the situation as it is
andthe powers that be. In the Period of Contending States, torrents
of blood had reddened the pavements of all world·cities, so that the
great truths of Democtacy might be turned into actualities, and for
the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living.
Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved
even by punishment, to make use of them. n1 Spengler's prediction
of an essential change within the structure of political parties has
been corroborated to the letter by National Socialism: the party has
become a mere "following." His "physiognomics" of the party are
extraordinarily impressive, visualizing the kinship between the
party system and middle class liberalism. "A noble party in a par·
liament is inwardli just as spurious as a proletarian. Only the
bourgeoisie is in its natural place there.,,2 He stresses the inherent
mechanisms which tend to make the party system turn into dicta tor-
ship. Such considerations have from the begiilning been familiar
ones to the "cyclical" philosophies of history. Macchiavelli in par-
ticular developed the idea that the corruption of democratic insti-
tutions will in. the long run engender dictatorship again lind again;
But Spengler, who in a certain sense revives at the end of an epoch
the position Macchiavelli held at the beginning of that epoch, shows
hirnself superior to this early political philosopher in that he has
had experience of the dialectics of history, though he never calls it
by name. To hirn, theprinciple of democracy develops. itself into
its opposite by force of its own implications. "The period of real
party ~overnment covers scarcely two centuries, and in our case is,
since the World War, weIl on the decline. That the entire mass of
the electorate, actuated by a common impulse, should send up men

'11, 432.
'11, 450.
312 T. W.Adomo

who are capable of managing their afiairs-which is the naive as-

sumption in all constitutions-is a possibility only in the first rush,
and presupposes that not even the rudiments of organization by
definite groups exist. So it was in France 1789 and (in Germany
TWA) in 1848. An assembly has only to be, and tactical units will
form at once within it, whose cohesion depends upon the will to
maintain the dominant position once won, and which, so far from
regarding themselves as the mouthpieces of their constituents, set
about making aH the expedients .;>f agitation amenable to their
influence and usable for their purposes. A tendency that has organ-
ized itself in the people has already ipso facto become the tool of
the organization and continues steadily along the same path until
the organization also becomes in turn the tool of the leader. The
will·to.power is stronger than any theory. In the beginning the lead-
ing and the apparatus come into existence for the sake of the pro·
gram. Then they are held on to defensively by their incumbents for
the sake of power and booty-as is already universaHy the case
today, for thousands in every country live on the party and the
offices and functions that it distributes. Lastly the program vanishes
from memory, and the organization works for its own sake alone."l
Pointing to Germany he foresees the years of miriority governments
that helped Hitler into power: "The German Constitution of 1919-
standing by virtue of its date on the verge of the decline of democ-
racy--'-most naively admits a dictature of the party machines, which
have attracted aH rights into themselves and are seriously respon-
sible to no one. The notorious system of proportional election and
the Reichsliste secures their self·recruitment. In place of the 'people's'
rights, which were axiomated in the Frankfurt Constitution of 1848,
there is now only the right of parties, which, harmless as it sounds,
really nurses within itself a Caesarism of the organizations. It must
pe allowed, however, that in this respect it is the most advanced of
all the constitutions. Its issue is visible already. A few quite small
alterations and it confers unrestricted power upon individuals."2
Spengler speaks of the manner in which the course of history makes
men forget the idea and reality of their own freedom. "The power
that these abstract ideas"--embodied, according to Spengler, in the
Contrat Social and the Communist Manifesto--"possess, however,
scarcely extends in time beyond the two centuries that belong to
party politics, and their end comes not from refutation, but from
boredom-which has killed Rousseau long since and will shortly
kill Marx. Men finally give up, not this or that theory, but the be-
'ß.452.
'11. 457. note 2.
 Spengler Today 313

lief in theory of any kind and with it the sentimental optimism of

an eighteenth century that imagined that unsatisfactory actualities
could be improved by the application of concepts."l "For us, too,-
let there be no mistake about it-the age of theory is· drawing to its
end."2 His prediction that the power to think will die terminates in
a taboo on thinking which he attempts to justify on the basis of the
inexorable course of history.
This touches upon the Archimedean point of Spengler's scherne.
His historico-philosophical assertion tha t the mind (Geist) is dying
away, and the anti·intenectual consequences deriving from the as-
sertion, do not relate merely to the "civilization" phase pf history
but are basic elements of Spengler's estimate of Man. "Truths exist
for the mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment-
in my terminology physiognomie tact-is decided by the blood, the
gift of judging men broadened out into past and future, the innate
flair for persons and situations, for the event, for that which had to
be, must have been. It does not consist in bare scientific criticism
and knowing of data."3 The decisive factor here is the gift of
judging men, for which the German text has one precise term:
Menschenkenntnis. We find implieit the Maeehiavellian assumption
of an unehangeable human nature. One has only to reeognize human
nature as base onee and for an in order 110 be able to dispose of it
once and for an in the expectation that it will ever be the same.
The gift of judging men in this sense amounts to contempt for men:
they are like that. The guiding interest of this view is domination,
and an of Spengler's categories are shaped to fit this concept. No
matter what period he deals with, an his sympathy lies with those
who rule. The disillusioned philosopher of history, when he dis-
cusses the intelligenceand the iron will of modern industrialleaders,
is apt to flounder like one of the pacifists for whom he professes such
stubborn contempt. Kinship with the ideal of domination permits
Spengler the deepest insight whenever the potentialities of this ideal
are in question and blinds hirn with hatred as soon as he encounters
impulses that go beyond the relationships of domination prevailing
in history up to now. The German systems of idealism tended to
make fetishes of prodigious universal concepts and, unmoved, to
sacrifice human existence to them in their theories. This tendency
-whieh Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Marx attacked in Hegel-
Spengler enhances to the point of taking undisguised joy in human
sacrifice. Where Hegel's philosophy of history speaks in stark
'n, 454.
'II, 454.
'II, 47.
314 T. W. Adorno

sorrow of "the slaughter-bench of history," Spengler sees nothing but

facts; facts, indeed, which according to our temperament and mood
we might deplore, but which we should best not trouble about if
we are compliant with historic necessity and if our physiognomics
take the side of the stronger batallions. "Spengler"-says J ames
Shotwell in his remarkable review-"isinterested in the great and
tragic drama which he depicts and wastes little idle sympathy upon
the victims of the recurring night. '01
Jumping about among cultures as if they were multicolored
stones and operating, quite disinterestedly, with Fate, Cosmos, blood,
and mind, the vastness of Spengler's conception itself expresses the
motif of domination. He who unhesitatingly strips an phenomena
down to the formula that "all this has happened before" thereby
practices a tyranny of categories an too closely akin to the political
tyranny over which Spengler enthuses so much. He juggles history
in the columns of his five thousand year plan the way Hitler shunts
minorities from one country to another. At the end there is no re-
mainder. Everything fits, and every resistance offered by the concrete
is liquidated. H6wever inadequate may have been the criticism
raised against Spengler by the individual cultutal sciences, they
demonstrated a good instinct on one point. The mirage of Spengler's
historical Grossraumwirtschaft can be escaped only by the unique
elements whose stubbornness defies dictatorial pigeonholing. Spen-
gler, by virtue of his perspective and the sweep of his categories,
might be superior to those restricted individual sciences. But he is
also inferior to them by virtue of this very same sweep which he
achieves by never honestly carrying through the analysis of the inter-
relationship of concept and detail, preferring to evade it by a con-
ceptual structure that utilizes the "fact" ideologically in order to
('rush the thought, without ever casting more than a first coordinating
glance at the actual fact. There is an element here of the spurious
and pompous that is not unlike the Wilhelmian Siegesallee. Only
wheo actuality itself chaoges ioto a Siegesallee does it take on the
form Spengler wishes to attribute to it. The superstition that the
greatness of a philosophy is a function of its grandiose aspects is a
bad idealistic heritage, equivalent to the belief that the quality of a
picture depends upon the sublimeness of its subject matter. Great
themes do not guarantee greatness of insight. H, as Hegel insists,
the whole is the truth, it is the truth only if the power of the whole
enters completely into thc cognition of the particular. Nothing of
this can be found in Spengler. The particular never reveals any-

'From Essays in Intelleetual History, New York and London 1929, p. 62~ .
 Spengler Today 315

thing to him that he would not have been aware of beforehand

through the tables of bis comparative survey of cultural morphology.
He boasts about the physiognomie character of his method. Ac·
tually his "physiognomies" are bound up with the pretention to
totality inherent in his categories. Everything individual, no mat·
ter how remote it may be, becomes to him a cipher of the big, the
culture. The world is conceived as being so completely govemed by
the classification into cultures that nothing is left that would not
readily yield to the greatness of the categories and even essentially
coincide with them.1 This contains an element of truth in so far as
each historical society up to now tends to crystallize a "totality"
which does not allow any freedom of the individual item.· Totality
may be characterized as the logical form of oppressive society.
Spengler's physiognomies have the merit of directing attention
towards the "culture" expressed by the individual even where
the latter assumes an air of freedom behind which universal depend.
ence is hidden. But this merit is more than counterbalanced. His
insistence on the universal dependence of the individual items upon
the whole, upon the totality oi the culture which they are supposed to
express, makes the concrete dependencies which determine the life of
men disappear in the broad generalizations of them. Hence Spengler
plays up physiognomies against causality. His physiognomic8
equally dweIl upon the passive mass reactions and the concentra·
tion of power producing them without stressing their causal inter·
connection and, perhaps, interaction. If this causal interconnection
is dropped, it becomes possible for Spengler to level relationships
of social power and dependence down to Destiny and to the quasi.
biological hour of the cultural soul. He succeeds in metaphysicalIy
burdening the impotent mass·man with the ignominy historicalIy
thrust upon him by the Caesars. The physiognomie glance loses
itseH by coordinating the phenomena with a few headlines function·
ing as the invariants of his "system." Instead of plunging into the
expressive character of the phenomena, he swiftly seIls under shrill
advertising slogans the phenomena he has uncharitably raked to·
gether. For purposes of sale, he rummages through the individual
sciences on a grand scale. If one were to characterize Spengler him·
seH in the form.language of the civilization he denounces, one
would have to compare the Decline 0/ the West to a department
store in which the intellectual agent offers for sale dried literary
sera ps which he has bought up cheaply from the bankrupt estate
of culture. Spengler re~eals the embittered resentment of a German

'cf. Karl Joel, "Die Philosophie in Spenglers 'Untergang des Abendlandes'" in Logos,
Vol. IX, p. 140.
316 T. W. Adorno

middle class scholar who finally wants to make capital of the treas-
ure of his leaming and to invest it in the most promising branch
of business, that is, in heavy industry. His proclarnation of the
.collapse of culture is wishful thinking. The mind hopes to be
pardoned by taking. the side of its swom enemy, power, and by
self-denunciation trains itself to provide anti-ideological ideologies.
Spengler fulfills Lessing's aphorism about the man who was prudent
enough not to be prudent. His insight into the helplessness of liberal
intellectuals under the shadow of rising totalitarian power makes
hirn desert them. The introduction to the Decline 0/ the West contains
apassage that has become famous: "I can only hope that men of the
new generation may be moved by this book to devote themselves to
technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-brush, and
politics instead of epistemology. Better they could not dO."l One
might easily imagine the personages to whom this was spoken-
with a respectful side glance. Spengler concurs with their opinion
that it is high time to bring the young folks once and for an to
their senses. He begs for the favor of the same leaders who
later became the sponsors of Realpolitik. Yet Realpolitik does not
suffice to explain his wrath against paintings, poems and philosophy.
This wrath betrays a deep sense of the "historyless" stage that
Spengler depicted with horrified gratification. Where there are no
longer "political problems" in the traditional sense, and perhaps
not even irrational "economy," culture mightcease to be the harm-
less fa~ade which Spengler moves to demolish, unless its decline can
be secured in time. Culture may then explode the contradictions
that have apparently been overcome by the regimentationof eco-
nomic life. Even now the officially promoted culture of Fascist
countries provokes the laughter and scepticism of those who are
forced to swallow it. The whole opposition against totalitarianism
finds its refuge in hooks, in churches, and in the theater plays oI the
classics which are tolerated hecause they are so classical and which
cease to he classical when they are tolerated. Spengler's verdict
strikes .indiscriminately at official culture and its non-conformist
opposite. The moving pictures and expressionism are hrought to-
gether hy the same death sentence. The undifferentiated verdict
fits in perfectly with the frame of mind of the wardens of National
Socialist culture. They scom their own ideologies as lies, they hate
truth and can sleep quietly only when no one dares to dream
any longer. '
'I, 41.-lt may be noted that Guillaume Appolinaire wrote in France Le poete
assassine elaborating precisely the same thesis by means of the surrealist shock. It may
be safely assumed that the German nationalist and the radical French avantgarde writer
did not know of each other. Both insist that they drafted their books before the world war.
 Spengler Today 317

The special cultural sciences, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon

countries, usually visualize Spengler as a metaphysician who is ready
to assault reality with the arbitrariness of his conceptual construc-
tions_ Next to the idealists, who feel that Spengler has disavowed
progress in the consciousness of freedom, the positivists are Spen-
gler's most irritated opponents. There is no doubt that his philosophy
does violence to the world, but this is the same violence the world
must daily suffer in reality. Formerly, history refused to unfold
itself according to the Hegelian scheme. It now appears to be the
more willing to freeze according to the Spenglerian one. Whether
a philosophy is metaphysical or positivist cannot be decided im-
mediately. Often enough, metaphysicians are only more far-sighted
or less intimidated positivists. Is Spengler at all the metaphysician
that he and his enemies like to consider him? He certainly is,
as long as one remains on a formalistic level. His concepts
outweigh the empirical exactitude of his data, their "verification"
is difficult or impossible, and the epistemological tools of his method
stem from a somewhat rough and primitive irrationalism. H, how-
ever, one goes by the substance of these concepts, one always meets
positivist desiderata, above all the cult of the "fact." .Spengler does
not allow any occasion to pass without slandering the transcendent
character of truth and without glorifying that which is thus and so
and no other way, that which only has to be registered and accepted_
"But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts-no
truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no
final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should
write books on politics-let him not try to make politics."l Essen-
tially critical insight into the impotence of truth in previous history,
insight into the predominant power that the mere existent has over
all attempts on the part of consciousness to break through the circle
of mere existence--this degenerates in Spengler into a justification
of the mere existent itself. The fact that something which has power
and succeeds might yet be wrong-this is an idea utterly inconceiv-
able to Spengler. Or rather, it is an idea that he spasmodically for-
bids himself and others. He is seized by rage whenever he comes
across the voice of the powerless, and yet he has nothing to offer
against that voice except the statement that it is powerless once and
for all. Hegel's doctrine that the actual is rational becomes a mere
caricature. Spengler maintains the Hegelian mood that the actual
is pregnant with meaning and rigor and he holds on to Hegers
irony against the reformer of the world (Weltverbesserer), but at
the same time his thinking in naked categories of domination robs
'II,368.
318 T. W. Adorno

reality of the claim to sense and reasonableness on which alone the

Hegelian mood is based. Reasonableness and unreasonableness of
history are the same to· Spengler, pure domination, and fact is
wherever the principle of domination manifests itself. He inces·
santly imitates Nietzsche's domineering tone, though he never ab·
solves hirnself, as Nietzsche did, from conformity with the world
as it iso Nietzsche says at one point that Kant used the means of
science to defend the· common man's prejudices against science.
Something very similar applies to Spengler. With the tools of meta·
physics he has defended from the critical opposition of metaphysics
the positivist cult of facts, their pliancy to the "given." A second
Comte, he made positivism into a metaphysics of its own, submissive·
ness toward existing fact into an amor fati, swimming with the
stream into "cosmic tact," and the abnegation of truth into truth
itself. From this derives his force .
. Spengler stands, together' with Klages, Moeller van den Bruck,
and also Jünger and Steding, among those theoreticians of extreme
reaction whose criticism of liberalism proved superior in many re·
spects to that which came from the left wing. It would be worth
while to study the causes of this superiority. It is probably due to
a different attitude towards the complexof "ideology." The ad·
herents of dialectical materialism viewed ,the liberal ideology which
they criticized largely as a false promise. They did not challenge
the ideas of humanity, liberty, justice as such, butmerely denied
the claim of our society to represent the realization of these ideas.
Though they treated the ideologies as illusions, they still found
them illusions oftruth itself. This lent a conciliatory splendor, if
not to the existent,' at least to its "objective tendencies." Their doc·
trine of the increase of societal antagonisms, or their statements
about the. potential relapse into. barbarism, were hardly iaken seri·
ously. Ideologies were unmasked as. apologetic concealments. Yet
they were rarely conceived as powerful instruments. functioning in
order to change liberal competitive society into a system of imme·
diate oppression. Thus thequestion of ho~ the existent can possibly
be changed by those who are its very victims, psychologically muti·
lated by its impact, has very rarely been put except by dialecticians
of the Hegelian tradition, such as Georg von Lukacs. Concepts such
as those of the masses or of culture were largely exempt from dia·
lectical criticism. No one cared much about how they were involved
within the total process of our society. There was no realization that
the masses in the specific sense of the term are not merely the ma·
jority of exploited toilers but that their characteristics as "rnasses"
are themselves due to the present phase of class society. Nor was
 Spengler Today 319

there acknowledgment of the extent to which culture is changing

into a regulative system of class domina ti on. Above all the leftist
critics failed to notice that the "ideas" themselves, in their abstract
form, are not merely images of the truth that will later materialize,
but that they are ailing themselves, amicted with the same injustice
under which they are conceived and bound up with the world against
which they are set. On the right, one could the more easily see
through the ideologies the more disinterested one was in the truth
these ideologies contained, in however false a form. All the reaction-
ary critics follow Nietzsehe inasmuch as they regard liberty, human-
ity, and justice as nothing but a swindle devised by the weak as a pro-
tection against the strong. As advocates of the strong they can very
easily point to the contradiction between those ideas-ailing as they
necessarily are--and reality. Their critique of ideologies is a com-
fortable one. It consists mainly in shifting from the insight into a
bad reality to an insight info bad ideas, the latter supposedly proved
because those ideas have not become reality. The momentum in-
herent in this cheap criticism is due to its firm bond of und erstand-
ing with the powers that be. Spengler and his equals are less the
prophets of the course of the world spirit than its devoted agents.
Tbe very form of pro gnosis practised by Spengler implies an admin-
istrative deployment of men which puts them out of action, The
theories against which he rages do not, strictly speaking, prophesy
at all. To them history is not an eternal interplay of political "power
relations"; ·they seek to put a rational end to this selfsame blind
interplay of powers. Tbey expect everything of men and their
action, but do not arrange and classify them and figure out what will
happen. Tbe latter attitude is an index of the very reification of men
which they strive to overcome, and Spengler emphasizes this atti-
tude. He insists that what matters to the true historian is to reckon
to the largest extent with unknown quantities. But one cannot
reck on with the unknown of humanity. History is no equation. It
is no analytic judgment at all. To conceive it as such excludes a
priori the potentiality of Novelty, around which the whole of dia-
lectical materialism is centered. Conversely, Spengler's prediction
of history ever repeating itself reminds us of the myths of Tantalus
and Sisyphus and the oracular responses that always presage evil.
He is a fortune teller rather than a prophet. In his gigantic and
destructive soothsaying the petty bourgeois celebrates his intellectual
triumph. Tbe morphology of world history serves the same needs as
graphology in Klages' denunciation of consciousness. Tbe malicious
desire of the petty bourgeois to read the future out of handwriting,
out of the past, or out of the cards implies the same thing that
320 T. W. Adorno

Spengler rancorously hlames the victims for: the renunciation of

conscious seH-determination. Spengler identifies himseH with power,
hut his theory hetrays the impotence of this identification hy its
soothsaying attitude. He is as sure of his case as the hangman after
the judg~s have spoken their verdict. Thehistorico-philosophical
world formula immortalizes his own impotence no less than that of
the others.
This characterization of Spengler's way of thinking may allow
of some more fundamental critical considerations. We have en-
deavored to elahorate the positivist features of his metaphysics, his
resignation to that which is what it is and no more, his elimination
of the category of potentiality, and his hatred of any thinking that
takes the possihle seriously as against the actual. On one decisive
point, however, Spengler suspended his positivism-so much so that
some of his theological reviewers feIt entitled to claim hirn an ally.
This point occurs when he speaks of the moving power within his-
tory which he views as the "Seelentum" (soul~om), the enigmatic
yet thoroughly interna1 quality of a special type of man that, quite
irrationally, enters history at times. Incidentally, Spengler some-
times calls this quality "race," though his concept of race has
nothing to do with that of the National Socialists; one does not he-
long to arace, he once declared, one has race. Despite all his
stress on "facts" and all his skeptical relativism, Spengler hyposta-
tizes the doctrine of cuItural souls as a metaphysical principle that
serves as the. ultimate explanation of the historical dynamic. He
often asserts that it is closely related to the concept of entelechy of
Leibniz and Goethe, "geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt."
This metaphysics of a collective soul which, like a plant, unfolds
and dies off makes Spengler a neighbor of the Lebensphilosophen,
Nietzsche, Simmel and particularly Bergson whom he stigmatizes
most ruthlessly. It is easy to see why the talk about soul and life
fits Spengler the tactician. It enables hirn to call materialism shal-
low when actually he objects to it only because it is not positivist
enough for hirn, the materialists wanting the world to be different
from what it iso Yet the metaphysics of souldom has more than
merely tactical import within Spengler's doctrine. One might call
it a hidden philosophy of identity. With a liule exaggeration one
might also say that to Spengler world history becomes a history of
"style." He cOllsiders the historical experiences of mankind to be
as much the product of men's inner selves as works of art. The man
of facts in this ca se fails to recognize the part played throughout
history by material needs. The relation between man and nature,
which engenders the tendency of man to dominate nature, repro-
 Spengler Today 321

duces itself in man's domination of other men. This is hardly

realized in the Decline 0/ the West. Spengler does not see to what
degree the historical fate glorified by his approach results from
human interaction with nature. The image of history becomes com·
pletely esthetic to hirn. Economy is a "form-world" precisely like
art; a sphere that is the pure expression of the specific soul of a
culture, essentia11y independent of the desiderata involved in the
reproduction of material life. It is not an accident that Spengler
becomes helplessly dilettantish whenever he touches upon economic
problems. He discusses the omnipotence of money in the manner
of a sectarian agitator denouncing the world-conspiracy of the
bankers. He fails to appreciate that the means of exchange never
determine the underlying structure of an economy, and is so fasci-
nated by the factade of money, by what he ca11s its "symbolic power,"
that he mistakes the symbol for the substance itself. He does not
balk at statements such as that the object of the workers' movement
"is not to overcome the money-values, but to possess them."l As
categories, slave economy, industrial proletariat, and machine tech-
nics are to hirn not fundamenta11y different from plastic arts,
musical polyphony or infinitesimal calculus. Economic realities dis-
solve into mere marks of an internal entity. While the cross-con-
nections thus created between the categories of reality and symbol-
ism often shed a surprising light upon the unity of historical epochs,
they lead to complete misstatements about everything that does not
originate freely and autonomously from the power of human expres-
sion. What cannot be reduced, as a symbol, to sovereign human
nature survives in Spengler only in vague references to cosmic
interconnections.
Thus, the determinism of Spengler's conception of history ap-
pears to yield a second realm of freedom. But it only appears to
do so. A most paradoxical constellation arises: everything external
becomes an image of the internal, and no actual process occurs be-
tween subject and object in Spengler's philosophy of history. His
world appears to grow organica11y out of the substance of the soul,
like a plant from a seed. By being reduced to the essence of the
soul, history gains an unbroken organic aspect, closed within itself.
In this way, however, it becomes even more deterministic_ Karl
Joel declares in his article in the Spengler issue of Logos that
it is "the whole illness of this significant book that it has forgotten
man with his productivity and liberty. In spite of a11 interioriza·
tion he de-humanizes history and makes it rattle off as a sequence

'II,506.
322 T. W. Adorno

of typical natural processes. In spite of a11 animation (Durchsee-

lung) he makes history into something hodily (verZeiblicht) hy
aiming at its 'morphology' or 'physiognomies' and thus at a com-
parison of its extemal appearances, its forms of expression, the par-
ticular features of its phenomena."l History, however, is de-human-
ized not "in spite of all interiorization" hut hy means of it. Speng-
ler's philosophy disdainfully thrusts aside the nature with which
men have to struggle in history. Instead of this struggle, history
itself becomes a second nature as blind and fated as vegetable life.
What we may call the freedom of man consists only in the human
attempts to break the rule imposed by nature. If that is ignored and
the historical world is made a mere product of human essence, free-
dom will be lost in the resulting all·humanity (Allmenschlichkeit)
of history. Freedom develops only through the natural world's re-
sistance to man. Freedom postulates the existence of something
non-identical. As so on as it is made absolute and its essence, the
soul, is elevated into the goveming principle of the whole world,
this selfsame principle falls victim to mere existence. The idealist
arrogance of Spengler's conception of history and the degradation of
man implied in it are actually one and the same thing. Culture is
not, as with Spengler, the life of self-developing collective souls but
rather the struggle of men for the conditions of their perpetuation.
Culture thus contains an element of resistance to blind necessity: the
will for self-determination through Reason. Spengler severs culture
from mankind's desire to survive. Culture becomes for hirn a play
of the soul with itself. Resistance is eliminated. Thus his very ideal-
ism becomes subservient to his philosophy of power. Culture fits
snugly into the realm of blind domination. The self-sufficient
process that originates from mere inwardness and terminates in
mere inwardness becomes Destiny, and history decomposes into
that aimless up and down of cultures, that timelessness which
Spengler blames upon the late civilizations and which actually
constitute the nucleus of his own world.plan: Pure soul and pure
domination coincide, as the Spenglerian soul violently and mer-
cilessly dominates its own hearers. Real history is ideologically
transfigured into a history ofthe soul only in order that the re-
sisting, rebellious features of man, their consciousness, might be
the more eompletely subordinated to blind necessit)'. Spengler once
more reveals the affinity betWeen absolute idealism~his doctrine of
the soul points back to Schelling-and demonic mythology. His
penchant for mythological ways of thinking ean be grasped at cer-
tain extreme points. The regular time-intervals in different cul-
'Karl Joel, loc. eil., ibid.
 Spengler Today 323

tures, the periodicity of events of a certain meaning "is yet another

hint that the Cosmic Bowings in the form of human lives upon the
surface of a minor star are not self·contained and independent, but
stand in deep harmony with the unending movedness of the uni·
verse. In a sma11 but noteworthy book, R. Mewes, Die Kriegs. und
Geistesperioden im Völkerleben und Verkündung des nächsten Welt·
krieges (1896), the relation of those war.periods with weather·
periods, sun·spot cycles, and certain conjunctures of the planets is
established, and a greatwar foretold accordingly for the period
1910·20. But these and numerous similar connections that come
within the reach of our senses . • . veil a secret that we have to
respect. n1 With a11 his ridicule of civilized mystics, Spengler,
by such formulations, comes very close to astrological superstition.
Thus ends the glorification of the soul.
The recurrence of the ever identical pattern, however, in which
such a doctrine of fate terminates, is nothing but the perpetual re·
production of man's offense against man. The concept of fate that
subjects men to blind domination reflects thedomination exercised
by men themselves. Whenever Spengler speaks of fate he is deal·
ing with the subjugation of one group of men by another. The
metaphysics of the soul· supplements his positivism in order to
hypostatize as eternal· and inescapable the principle of a relentless
self.perpetuating rule. Aptua11y, however, the inescapability of fate
is defined through· domination and injustice. Spengler brings. in
justice as the bad counter·concept to fate, the sublime in history.
In one of the most brutal passages of his work he complains that
"the world.feeling of race; the political (and therefore national)
instinct for fact ('my country, right or wrong!'); the resolve to be
the subject and not the .object of evolution (for one or the other it
has to be )-in a word, the will.to.power-has to retreat and make
room for.a tendency of which the standard·bearers are most often
men without original impulse, but a11 the more set upon their logic;
men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen
who believe that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might
of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason. It begins with
the everlastingly fearful who withdraw themselves out of actuality
into cells and study.chambers and spiritual communities, and pro·
claim the nullity of the world's doings, and it ends in every Culture
with the apostles of world.peace. Every people has such (historic.
a11y speaking) waste·products. Even their heads constitute physiog·
nomica11y a group by themselves. In the 'history öf intellect' they

'11, 392, note 1.

324 T. W. Adorno

stand high-and many illustrious names are numhered amongst

them-but regarded from the point of view of actual history, they
are inefficients."l After this, opposition to Spengler would mean
historically overcoming the "point of view of actual history" ; .it
would mean realizing what is historically possible, what Spengler
calls impossible only because it has not yet been realized. In sober
terms and yet with the deepest understanding James Shotwell's re-
view gets to the hub of this question: "Winter followed Autumn
in the past because life was repetitive and' was passed within lim-
ited areas of self-contained economy. Intercourse between societies
was more predatory than stimulative because mankind had not yet
discovered the means to maintain culture ,without an unjust de-
pendence UPOIl those who had no share in its material blessings.
From the savage raid and slavery down to the industrial problems
of today, the recurring civilizations have been largely built upon
false economic forces, backed up by equally false moral and relig-
ious casuistry. The civilizations that have come and gone hilve been
inherently lacking in equilibrium because they have built uponthe
injustice of exploitation. There is no reason to suppose that modern
civilization must inevitably repeat this cataclysmaticrhythm."2 This
insight is capable of shattering Spengler's whole concept of history.
If the fall of antiquity were dictated by the autonomous necessity of
life and by the expression of its "soul," then indeed it takes on the
aspect of fatality and by the analogy this aspect carries over to the
present situation. If,however, as implied by Shotwell's statement,
the fall of antiquity can be understood by its unproductive system
of latifundia and the slave economy related to it, the fatality can
bemastered if men succeed in overcoming such' and similar struc·
tures of domination. In such a case, Spengler's universal,structure
reveals itself as a false analogy drawn from a bad solitary hap.
pening--solitary in spite of its threatening recurrence. _
This, however, involvesmore than a belief in continuous progress
andthe survival of culture. Spengler has stressed the raw nature of
culture, andwith an emphasis which ought once and for all to shake
naive confidence in its conciliatory effect. More strikingly than
almost anyone else, he has demonstrated how this. rawness of cul·
ture again and again drives it toward decay and how, as formand
order, culture is affiliated with that blind domination which,
through permanent crises, is ahvays prone to ilnnihilate itself and
its victims. The es~nce of culture bears the mark of Death--deny.
ing this would beweak and sentimental, given Spengler's theory
'II,I86.
'100. eit. p. 66f.
 Spengler Today 325

whieh has spilled as mueh of the secrets of culture as Hitler has of

those of propaganda. There is no chance of evading the magie eircle
of Spengler's morphology hy defaming harharism and relying upon
the healthiness of culture. Any such straightforward optimism is
proscrihed hy the present situation. Instead, we should heeome
aware of the element of harharism inherent in eulture itself. 0nly
those eonsiderations that ehaIlenge the idea of eulture no less than
they ehaIlenge the reality of harharism have a chance to survive
Spengler's verdiet. The plant·like culture·soul, the vital "heingin
form," the uneonscious world of symbols, the expressive power of
which intoxicates him-all these marks of triumphant life are meso
sengers of doom wherever they actuaIly manifest themselves. For
they aIl hear witness to the eoereion and saerifice whieh culture lays
upon man. To trust them and to denyimpending doom means only
to he entangled the more deeply within their deadly jungle.
Spengler has the prying glance of the hunter who strides merci·
lessly through the cities of mankind as if they were the wildemess
they actuaIly are. But one thing has escaped bis glance: the forces
set free hy deeay. "How does everything that is to he appear so ill"
(ceWie scheint doch alles Werdende so krank") -this sentence of
the poet Georg Trakl transcends Spengler's landscape. There is a
passage in the first volume of the Decline 0/ the West that has ~een
omitted in the English translation. It refers to Nietzsche. "He used
the word decadence. In this hook, the term Decline of the West
means the same thing, only more comprehensive, hroadened from
the ease hefore us today into a general historical type of epoch, and
looked at from the hird's.eye view of a philosophy of Becoming."l
In the world of violence and oppressive life, this decadence is the
refuge·of a hetter potentiality by virtue of the fact that it refuses
obedience to this life, its culture, its rawness and sublimity. Those,
according to Spengler, whom history is going to thrust aside and
annihilate personify negatively within the negativity of this culture
that which promises, however weakly, to break the speIl of culture
and to make an end to the horror of pre.history. Their protest ia
our only hope that destiny and force shaIl not have the last word.
That which stands against the decline of the west is not the surviving
eulture but the Utopia that is silently embodied in the image of
decline.

'4th edition, Mtmich 1919, I, p. 394.