Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
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Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
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Re: Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
#2> His criticism of the Weimar Republic, of Marxism, pacifism and democracy intellectually aided the Nazis in their ideological advancement to the top of German politics
Not just 'his criticism' -> he himself actively worked against the Weimarer Republik and he promoted a dictatorship (similar to the Fascism in Italy). Spengler was one of the most influential conservative thinkers supporting the destruction of the democracy and thus helped the rise of the Nazi movement. He also promoted anti-semitism.
Re: Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
#3Controversial in United States because americans don't like to read the writing on the wall
Re: Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
#4I recommend reading the passage on Spengler in Poppers 'The open society'.
Re: Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
#5Interesting that the essay fails to mention his support of Mussolini or that he considered Judaism to be an disintegrating element and that Jews are guilty of "money thinking".
Re: Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
#6Interesting that the essay fails to mention his support of Mussolini or that he considered Judaism to be an disintegrating element and that Jews are guilty of "money thinking".
I find the writer‘s glowing admiration for Spengler disturbing. He was an antidemocratic thinker, whose books
are pure speculative fiction. What the author calls „unorthodox“ methods, used to get a „holistic“ picture of historical developments, are (scientifically speaking) plain rubbish. Spengler wanted a dictator. He did not like Hitler, but was a Mussolini fanboy.
Re: Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
#7> His criticism of the Weimar Republic, of Marxism, pacifism and democracy intellectually aided the Nazis in their ideological advancement to the top of German politics Not just 'his criticism' -> he himself actively worked against the Weimarer Republik and he promoted a dictatorship (similar to the Fascism in Italy). Spengler was one of the most influential conservative thinkers supporting the destruction of the dem…
Nazi ideology was to a large extent a vulgarisation of the work of the intellectuals associated with the Konservative Revolution . The notion of the Third Reich, also popularized by Spengler, was elaborated in Das Dritte Reich (1923) by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. He used the term to propagate a conservative "socialist" ideal that could unite all classes under an authoritarian militarist regime. Together with Spengler's Preussentum and Sozialismus , it formed one of the building blocks of the doctrine of National Socialism .
As Von Klemperer argues in his classical history of ideas of the Conservative Revolution, the Nazi movement was ideologically fueled by these conservative intelligentsia:
>It mattered in these days that both movements were counter- revolutionary agents in the Republic and appealed to the worst instincts of the population. The vicious charges of the neo-conservatives against the political parties, the Weimar "system," or the Western powers, their mere use (with whatever mental reservations) of the new glittering vocabulary words like "myth," "totality," and "race" were but grist for the Nazi propaganda mill. That is why the initial alienation of the neo-conservative forces from the Republic was so fatal an event. It paved the way for the Rightist intelligentsia to serve the aims of the Nazi revolution. [1]
Re: Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
#8Interesting that the essay fails to mention his support of Mussolini or that he considered Judaism to be an disintegrating element and that Jews are guilty of "money thinking".
I agree, failing to mention that when talking about Spengler is a bad look. Thanks for pointing it out.
Re: Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
#9Interesting that the essay fails to mention his support of Mussolini or that he considered Judaism to be an disintegrating element and that Jews are guilty of "money thinking".
I find the writer‘s glowing admiration for Spengler disturbing. He was an antidemocratic thinker, whose books are pure speculative fiction. What the author calls „unorthodox“ methods, used to get a „holistic“ picture of historical developments, are (scientifically speaking) plain rubbish. Spengler wanted a dictator. He did not like Hitler, but was a Mussolini fanboy.
> He was an antidemocratic thinker
I do not consider that disqualifying by itself. Plato and Socrates viewed democracy critically, too. I do agree, howeve, that the author paints an awfully one-sided picture of Spengler.
Re: Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
#10I recommend reading the passage on Spengler in Poppers 'The open society'.
People online should know that George Soros is a capitalist who loves Karl Popper and named his foundation after the Open Society. Trumpism is breaking apart the Reagan coalition of economic liberalizers and social conservatives. George Soros would have been part of the Reagan coalition, but Trump feeds resentment that economic liberalizers in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s forced social conservatives to take the shorter end of the stick. A lot of people online think Soros & his foundation are purely for identity politics, but he's more of a Popper partisan than anything else.