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<div style="position:absolute; z-index:-1;position:absolute; top:-100px; right:-500px; ">[[File:President Barack Obama.jpg]]</div>'''Oswald Spengler''' (1880–1936) was a German historian whose '' Der Untergang des Abendlandes,'' (translated as ''Decline of the West'') (1918-22) was a very influential study of the cyclical nature of western civilization that strengthened the pessimism of the 1920s.  It opened the new field of comparative world history and influenced many conservative writers.

'''Oswald Spengler''' (1880–1936) was a German historian whose '' Der Untergang des Abendlandes,'' (translated as ''Decline of the West'') (1918-22) was a very influential study of the cyclical nature of western civilization that strengthened the pessimism of the 1920s.  It opened the new field of comparative world history and influenced many conservative writers.

==Career==

==Career==

Spengler was born at Blankenburg in the Harz Mountains and studied philosophy, history, mathematics, and art, taking his PhD at Halle in 1904. He taught mathematics at a gymnasium in Munich until 1911, when an inheritance allowed him to concentrate on his scholarship. ''Decline of the West'' made him an instant intellectual celebrity throughout the world in the 1920s. His other books were much less influential, and included ''Der Mensch und die Technik'' (1931; ''Man and Technics'', 1932) and ''Jahre der Entscheidung'' (1933; ''Hour of Decision'', 1934). Spengler spoke to the political and spiritual predicament of Germany after World War I, explaining Germany was no longer "the people of poets and thinkers" but could become a useful land of engineers, industrialists, and technicians. In the Weimar era he took a highly conservative position and criticized parliamentary and constitutional rule, as well as individual rights, as un-German.  Spengler found the Nazis' racism stupid, their economic policies shortsighted, and their "socialism" far removed from the old-fashioned Prussian state-capitalism Spengler intended by that name. His refusal to support [[Nazism]] led to his ostracism when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Spengler was born at Blankenburg in the Harz Mountains and studied philosophy, history, mathematics, and art, taking his PhD at Halle in 1904. He taught mathematics at a gymnasium in Munich until 1911, when an inheritance allowed him to concentrate on his scholarship. ''Decline of the West'' made him an instant intellectual celebrity throughout the world in the 1920s. His other books were much less influential, and included ''Der Mensch und die Technik'' (1931; ''Man and Technics'', 1932) and ''Jahre der Entscheidung'' (1933; ''Hour of Decision'', 1934). Spengler spoke to the political and spiritual predicament of Germany after World War I, explaining Germany was no longer "the people of poets and thinkers" but could become a useful land of engineers, industrialists, and technicians. In the Weimar era he took a highly conservative position and criticized parliamentary and constitutional rule, as well as individual rights, as un-German.  Spengler found the Nazis' racism stupid, their economic policies shortsighted, and their "socialism" far removed from the old-fashioned Prussian state-capitalism Spengler intended by that name. His refusal to support [[Nazism]] led to his ostracism when the Nazis came to power in 1933.