Mrs Thatcher’s Spengler

Tom Nairn

  • An Unfinished History of the World by Hugh Thomas
    Hamish Hamilton, 700 pp, £12.50, November 1980, ISBN 0 241 10282 0

In the Preface to Book I of The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler proudly declared that his work was ‘a German Philosophy’. There was no incompatibility between this and a history of the world. For universal history showed the Germans to be the most important people in the ‘Faustian Civilisation’ of Europe, itself the motor of modern development. German philosophy alone had scaled the mental heights where the whole of this mighty process could be comprehended. Hence world-history was Teutonic self-understanding, and part of its preparation for dominance in the coming Age of Caesarism.

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