THE HOUR OF DECISION—Oswald Spengler—Knopf ($2.50).
When Oswald Spengler speaks, many a Western Worldling stops to listen. His monumental Decline of the West galvanized the attention of European and U. S. intellectuals, caused a hopeful pricking-up of Asiatic ears. Uncompromising pessimist, Spengler sounded the knell of Western civilization, which he said had passed maturity, was beginning a swift senescence. No defeatist, in The Hour of Decision he rings a tocsin.
Spengler believes that today we are in history's grandest age but sees no reason for individuals to be happy about it. "Greatness and happiness are incompatible and we are given no choice. No one living in any part of the world today will be happy. . . ." Conscious of his prophet's mantle, he says: "I see further than others ... I write not for a few months ahead or for next year, but for the future. . . . Among the few genuine historians of standing, none was ever popular. . . ." The old idealistic order is nearly over; the new day will be realistic. "The dreary train of world-improvers has now come to an end of its amble through these centuries, leaving behind it, as sole monument of its existence, mountains of printed paper. The Caesars will now take its place. High policy, the art of the possible, will again enter upon its eternal heritage, free from all systems and theories, itself the judge of the facts by which it rules, and gripping the world between its knees like a good horseman."
Pacifists will find scant comfort in Spengler's pages : "We have entered upon the age of world wars. It began in the 19th Century and will outlast the present and probably the next." Economists will not agree with his derogatory attitude towards economics, which he makes subservient to politics: "This whole crushing depression is purely and simply the result of the decline of State power." Marxists will be enraged at Spengler's flat statement that the World Revolution "has reached its goal," is an accomplished fact. They may regard as an undeserved compliment his charge that "the world-economic crisis of this year and a good many next years is not, as the world supposes, the temporary consequence of war, revolution, inflation, and payment of debts. It has been willed. In all essentials it is the product of the deliberate work of the leaders of the proletariat." Laborers will not like his diagnosis of the cause of unemployment: "Unemployment stands everywhere in exact proportion to the height of the political wage-tariffs. . . . In Russia, Japan. China, and India there is no lack of work, because there are no luxury wages." Many a disputatious citizen will take umbrage at: "One has only to glance at the figures in meetings, public-houses, processions, and riots; one way or another they are all abortions, men who, instead of having healthy instincts in their body, have only heads full of disputatiousness and revenge for their wasted life, and mouths as their most important organ. ... It is from the intellectual 'mob,' with the failures from all academic professions, the spiritually unfit and the morally inhibited, at its head, that the gangsters of Liberal and Bolshevist risings are recruited."