What do you think?
Rate this book
Thought & Perspectives #10
Spengler: Thoughts and Perspectives, Volume Ten
Paperback
First published June 1, 2012
41 people want to read
About the author
Troy Southgate
65 books53 followersBritish author, musician and leading National-Anarchist activist and theoretician.
Southgate has been active in diverse British national organizations and is associated with the New Right and third positionism.
Southgate has been active in diverse British national organizations and is associated with the New Right and third positionism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 26, 2025
This is among the best works on Spengler I've read. Contains excellent chapters by Kerry Bolton and Alex Kurtagic. Does require some previous overall knowledge on Spengler and his works.
January 20, 2026
Academia continues to ignore Spengler, and probably the deeper explanation for this is fear.
Spengler observed that different cultures are discrete lifeforms, with phases of youth, maturity and senescence, just as individual life-forms have.
You only have to look out your window to realise which of those phases the West is in.
In the winter phase of a civilisation a Second Religiosity emerges, a yearning for something beyond the money economy (which also marks the beginning of the Caesarist phase).
As Christopher Pankhurst puts it in this volume: ‘The earlier religious impulses are now ossified, but they still provide sufficient inspiration to give impetus to the Imperium, as they are at least paradigmatically superior to the reign of money and triviality.’
In 2012, when this volume was published, some may have scoffed at this prediction, but we are certainly in that phase now.
Protestantism, associated with the money-power, is declining, and the main growth areas appear to be Catholicism and neo-paganism.
New cults will doubtless emerge, too, as they did in late Rome.
Spengler stated that ‘Western Civilisation in its Late (‘Winter’) epoch could only fulfil itself with a final great bow on the stage of world history,’ analogous to the imperial epoch of Rome.
But you can only take analogy so far.
Is Trump an Augustus…or is he rather a Diocletian, reorganising an imperial administration that had become too unwieldy?
John Michael Greer speculated recently that Trump was backed by one faction of the US deep state precisely because he is adept at taking failing enterprises and improving them by downsizing.
K.R. Bolton’s essay ‘Spengler and Russia’ looks at the most probable candidate for successor to Western civilisation.
Spengler was not a determinist, however, and that there are several courses the future may take, especially with regard to Russia.
Russia has been subject to what Spengler called ‘pseudo-morphosis’, when ‘an older, alien culture lies so massively over the land that a young culture cannot get its breath.’
The pseudo-morphosis in this case is the influence Russia has absorbed both from Rome/Byzantium and from the modern West.
To what extent will they be able/willing to shake it off?
Spengler believed the soul of Russia was the soul of the peasant (NOT the serf, which only came about in the westernised Petrine era), however also imbued with a religious sense of mission.
Spengler’s negative comments on Russia relate to Bolshevism, and not to the ‘coming Russia’ of which he saw Dostoevsky as the prophet.
According to Spengler, Russians are ‘melancholy, and have a tendency towards spirituality,’ and he expected a new religion to emerge there.
They are people of the Plain, rooted in the soil, and antagonistic to the Machine.
‘Western man looks up, the Russian looks horizontally into the broad plain.’
Russia is ‘the great East-West’, double-headed in outlook.
Bolton speculates that a new epoch might be born from ‘a symbiosis between the Faustian and the Russian.’
But again, you can only take analogy so far, and as they say, history rhymes but never repeats precisely, being irrational (or perhaps fractal) in nature.
And where do liminal lands like Poland, Croatia and Hungary stand in all this?
Interestingly, Bolton believes that Russia and China are natural enemies, and in the longer term Russia will come to ally with India, with China and the USA being allied against them.
While that would seem unlikely in the immediate moment (when the current US establishment is riddled with Indians and hostile to China), it is nevertheless quite possible.
In Russian New Age circles it is widely believed Russians are the true descendants of the Vedic Aryans who created the religions of northern India.
Spengler’s conception of race was not a zoological one, but one which he defined as ‘a character of duration’ produced by ‘rootedness of families in landscape.’
Fun fact: when the Nazis suppressed Spengler’s final book ‘The Hour of Decision’ (1933), it was partly because they thought its references to the ‘coloured world’ would offend Germany’s ‘natural ally’ Japan!
Anti-racist Nazis…
History is certainly stranger than those with a cartoon-like view of reality can readily comprehend.
Spengler observed that different cultures are discrete lifeforms, with phases of youth, maturity and senescence, just as individual life-forms have.
You only have to look out your window to realise which of those phases the West is in.
In the winter phase of a civilisation a Second Religiosity emerges, a yearning for something beyond the money economy (which also marks the beginning of the Caesarist phase).
As Christopher Pankhurst puts it in this volume: ‘The earlier religious impulses are now ossified, but they still provide sufficient inspiration to give impetus to the Imperium, as they are at least paradigmatically superior to the reign of money and triviality.’
In 2012, when this volume was published, some may have scoffed at this prediction, but we are certainly in that phase now.
Protestantism, associated with the money-power, is declining, and the main growth areas appear to be Catholicism and neo-paganism.
New cults will doubtless emerge, too, as they did in late Rome.
Spengler stated that ‘Western Civilisation in its Late (‘Winter’) epoch could only fulfil itself with a final great bow on the stage of world history,’ analogous to the imperial epoch of Rome.
But you can only take analogy so far.
Is Trump an Augustus…or is he rather a Diocletian, reorganising an imperial administration that had become too unwieldy?
John Michael Greer speculated recently that Trump was backed by one faction of the US deep state precisely because he is adept at taking failing enterprises and improving them by downsizing.
K.R. Bolton’s essay ‘Spengler and Russia’ looks at the most probable candidate for successor to Western civilisation.
Spengler was not a determinist, however, and that there are several courses the future may take, especially with regard to Russia.
Russia has been subject to what Spengler called ‘pseudo-morphosis’, when ‘an older, alien culture lies so massively over the land that a young culture cannot get its breath.’
The pseudo-morphosis in this case is the influence Russia has absorbed both from Rome/Byzantium and from the modern West.
To what extent will they be able/willing to shake it off?
Spengler believed the soul of Russia was the soul of the peasant (NOT the serf, which only came about in the westernised Petrine era), however also imbued with a religious sense of mission.
Spengler’s negative comments on Russia relate to Bolshevism, and not to the ‘coming Russia’ of which he saw Dostoevsky as the prophet.
According to Spengler, Russians are ‘melancholy, and have a tendency towards spirituality,’ and he expected a new religion to emerge there.
They are people of the Plain, rooted in the soil, and antagonistic to the Machine.
‘Western man looks up, the Russian looks horizontally into the broad plain.’
Russia is ‘the great East-West’, double-headed in outlook.
Bolton speculates that a new epoch might be born from ‘a symbiosis between the Faustian and the Russian.’
But again, you can only take analogy so far, and as they say, history rhymes but never repeats precisely, being irrational (or perhaps fractal) in nature.
And where do liminal lands like Poland, Croatia and Hungary stand in all this?
Interestingly, Bolton believes that Russia and China are natural enemies, and in the longer term Russia will come to ally with India, with China and the USA being allied against them.
While that would seem unlikely in the immediate moment (when the current US establishment is riddled with Indians and hostile to China), it is nevertheless quite possible.
In Russian New Age circles it is widely believed Russians are the true descendants of the Vedic Aryans who created the religions of northern India.
Spengler’s conception of race was not a zoological one, but one which he defined as ‘a character of duration’ produced by ‘rootedness of families in landscape.’
Fun fact: when the Nazis suppressed Spengler’s final book ‘The Hour of Decision’ (1933), it was partly because they thought its references to the ‘coloured world’ would offend Germany’s ‘natural ally’ Japan!
Anti-racist Nazis…
History is certainly stranger than those with a cartoon-like view of reality can readily comprehend.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews