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Introduction
The English-language studies of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) have either been biographical, or they have focused narrowly on Decline of the West. Accordingly, in popular consciousness, Spengler has earned the moniker of the 'prophet of decline',3the title of perhaps the best-known study of Spengler in English, and has become synonymous with notions of crisis and disintegration, doom and gloom.
However, as the recent revival of interest in Spengler in German secondary literature has recognized, even a cursory look at Spengler's copious writings makes it clear how much more there is to Spengler than this sole work.4Moreover, the very titles of some of Spengler's largely ignored writings, such as Die Revolution ist nicht zu Ende and Neubau des deutschen Reiches (The Revolution is not Over and Building the German Empire Anew, both 1924), indicate that his work actually contained positive proposals for the course of society and calls to political action. Accordingly, it is important to place Spengler's thought within the context of recent developments in Weimar historiography, which highlight the need to distinguish between crisis as a social condition and the evocation of crisis as a rhetorical device - as a way to disqualify the status quo and prepare the ground for something new.5
Spengler particularly foregrounds the struggle for a different social order in his overlooked pamphlet, Preußentum und Sozialismus (Prussianism and Socialism, 1919). The pamphlet serves as both a warning and an invocation: unless the German nation can come together as it purportedly did in the spirit of civil peace in the war effort of 1914, unless a genuine organic community (Gemeinschaft), beyond class and individualism, can be created in line with what Spengler deems the Prussian socialist spirit, then the German people will, he argues, be brought to its knees by the rule of 'English' banks, profiteering and speculation.
The rallying cry for this Prussian socialism was heard across the political spectrum. For the conservative Ernst Jünger, the pamphlet forged 'the first weapons [...]following the disarmament of Germany'6and provided a springboard for the Conservative Revolution - the anti-democratic and anti-Communist political movement of the 1920s in which...