Les prédictions pessimistes de Spengler

His book was a success among intellectuals worldwide as it predicted the disintegration of European and American civilization after a violent "age of Caesarism", arguing by detailed analogies with other civilizations. It deepened the post-World War I pessimism in Europe.[7][page needed] German Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer explained that at the end of the First World War, Spengler's very title was enough to inflame imaginations: "At this time many, if not most of us, had realized that something was rotten in the state of our highly prized Western civilization. Spengler's book expressed in a sharp and trenchant way this general uneasiness."[8] Northrop Frye argued that while every element of Spengler's thesis has been refuted a dozen times, it is "one of the world's great Romantic poems" and its leading ideas are "as much part of our mental outlook today as the electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians."[9]

Spengler's pessimistic predictions about the inevitable decline of the West inspired Third World intellectuals, ranging from China and Korea to Chile, eager to identify the fall of western imperialism.[10][11] In Britain and America, however, Spengler's pessimism was later countered by the optimism of Arnold J. Toynbee in London,[12] who wrote world history in the 1940s with a greater stress on religion.[13]

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