Prussianism and Socialism

by Oswald Spengler, Constantin von Hoffmeister (Translator)

In this new translation of Prussianism and Socialism , Oswald Spengler reflects on the relationship between socialism, liberalism and Prussianism. For Spengler, Prussianism is a typically German disposition, which is expressed in qualities such as a sense of duty and a willingness to sacrifice oneself for the common good. In contrast to Marxism, which Spengler strongly criticises, this Prussian spirit is synonymous with true socialism. Spengler contrasts two fundamentally different views of life: English liberalism and Prussian socialism. While English liberalism is characterised by radical individualism and a ruthless desire for profit and exploitation, Prussian socialism emphasises togetherness, solidarity and national community. Both views are incompatible. Depending on which ideology gets the upper hand, power will ultimately rest either with financial interests or with states. Against this backdrop, Spengler calls on citizens of all walks of life to rise above class egoism, to affirm Prussian socialism and to unite in the struggle against the liberal world-view — the ‘inner England’ — which he sees as a threat to the continued existence of the German nation. This edition includes Spengler’s essay ‘Russia’s Double Face and the German Problems in the East’, which presents his views on Russia as a distinct culture that has not yet fulfilled its destiny.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, History, Economics, Nonfiction, Germany, Sociology

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Oswald Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg (then in the Duchy of Brunswick, German Empire) at the foot of the Harz mountains, the eldest of four children, and the only boy. His family was conservative German of the petite bourgeoisie. His father, originally a mining technician, who came from a long line of mineworkers, was a post office bureaucrat. His childhood home was emotionally reserved, and the young Spengler turned to books and the great cultural personalities for succor. He had imperfect health, and suffered throughout his life from migraine headaches and from an anxiety complex.

At the age of ten, his family moved to the university city of Halle. Here Spengler received a classical education at the local Gymnasium (academically oriented secondary school), studying Greek, Latin, mathematics and natural sciences. Here, too, he developed his affinity for the arts—especially poetry, drama, and music—and came under the influence of the ideas of Goethe and Nietzsche. He even experimented with a few artistic creations, some of which still survive.

After his father's death in 1901 Spengler attended several universities (Munich, Berlin, and Halle) as a private scholar, taking courses in a wide range of subjects: history, philosophy, mathematics, natural science, literature, the classics, music, and fine arts. His private studies were undirected. In 1903, he failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus because of insufficient references, which effectively ended his chances of an academic career. In 1904 he received his Ph.D., and in 1905 suffered a nervous breakdown.

Scholars[which?] remark that his life seemed rather uneventful. He briefly served as a teacher in Saarbrücken and then in Düsseldorf. From 1908 to 1911 he worked at a grammar school (Realgymnasium) in Hamburg, where he taught science, German history, and mathematics.

In 1911, following his mother's death, he moved to Munich, where he would live until his death in 1936. He lived as a cloistered scholar, supported by his modest inheritance. Spengler survived on very limited means and was marked by loneliness. He owned no books, and took jobs as a tutor or wrote for magazines to earn additional income.

He began work on the first volume of Decline of the West intending at first to focus on Germany within Europe, but the Agadir Crisis affected him deeply, and he widened the scope of his study. Spengler was inspired by Otto Seeck's work The Decline of Antiquity in naming his own effort. The book was completed in 1914, but publishing was delayed by World War I. Due to a congenital heart problem, he was not called up for military service. During the war, however, his inheritance was largely useless because it was invested overseas; thus Spengler lived in genuine poverty for this period.

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spengler does a great job of distinguishing between Prussian Socialism and Marxism. He exposes Marxism for the farce that it is. Explaining that while Marxism is about division, about class struggle, Prussian Socialism isn't about class struggle but about achieving a system that works for nation as a whole, socialism means ability not desire. Spengler did get one thing wrong. He believed that Marxism would die out, unfortunately he overestimated humanities intelligence and our will to greed.



"My fervent hope is that no one will remain hidden who was born with the ability to command, and that no one is given the responsibility for commanding who lacks the inborn talent for doing so. Socialism means ability, not desire. Not the quality of intentions but the quality of accomplishments is decisive. I turn to our youth. I call upon all who have marrow in their bones and blood in their veins. Train yourselves! Become men! We need no more ideologists, no more chatter about Bildung and cosmopolitanism and Germany’s intellectual mission. We need hardness, we need a courageous skepticism, we need a class of socialistic mastertypes. Once again: Socialism means power, power, and more power. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power. The path to power has already been mapped: the valuable elements of German labor in union with the best representatives of the Old Prussian state idea, both groups determined to build a strictly socialist state to democratize our nation in the Prussian manner; both forged into a unit by the same sense of duty, by the awareness of a great obligation, by the will to obey in order to rule, to die in order to win, by the strength to make immense sacrifices in order to accomplish what we were born for, what we are, what could not be without us. We are socialists.

Let us hope that it will not have been in vain."

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We no longer believe the power of reason over life. We feel that life dominates reason...The logic of the image of nature, the concatenation of cause and effect, seems superficial to us; only the logic of the organic, fate, the instinct that one feels, whose omnipotence one beholds in the change of things, testifies to the depth of becoming...From antiquity through the middle ages to modern times leads the path of evolution, at the end of which stands realized Marxism, the earthly paradise. It is worthless to refute this picture. What matters is to give modern man a new view, from which necessarily a new image follows of its own accord. Life has no goal. Humanity has no goal. The existence of the world, in which we spin off a small episode on our little planet, is something far too sublime for paltriness such as the 'happiness of most.' The greatness of the play lies in its purposelessness. This is how Goethe felt about it. But to fulfil this life that is given to us, this reality around us in which we are placed by fate, with the highest possible content, to live in such a way that something of us lives on in this consummating reality, that is the task. We are not 'human beings in themselves.' That belongs to past ideology. Cosmopolitanism is a miserable word. We are people of one century, one nation, one circle, one type. These are the necessary conditions under which we can give meaning and depth to existence, be doers, even through the word doers. The more we fill these given limits, the wider is our effect. Plato was Athenian. Caesar was Roman, Goethe was German: the fact that they were wholly and first of all so was the precondition of their world-historical effect. From this standpoint, in the midst of the German Revolution, we today contrast Marxism and socialism. Socialism, the still misunderstood Prussianism, is a piece of reality of the highest order...Ideas are not spoken. The artist looks, the thinker feels, the statesmen and soldier realize them. Ideas become conscious only through the blood, libidinously, not through abstract reflection. They testify to their existence through the style of peoples, the type of people, the symbolism of deeds and works, and whether these people know them at all, whether they speak and write about them or not, rightly or wrongly, that matters little. Life is the first and last, and Life has no system, no programme, no reason; it is there for itself and through itself, and the deep order in which it realizes itself can only be looked at and felt---then perhaps described, but not dissected according to good and evil, right and wrong, useful and desirable. Marxism is not an idea. " (p. 82-83)

Written during the chaotic aftermath of post-WW1 Germany and the coinciding beginning to what is now known as the Conservative Revolution (which, it is often forgotten, was just as much an militaristic upheaval than an intellectual one), Spengler's Prussianism & Socialism is far and beyond the most idiosyncratic take on socialism that one can possibly read. Yet in Spengler's view, it is the only possible perspective on socialism, since the very word itself expresses a unique world-historical consummation of a centuries long development of discrete cultural factors specific to Germany. What the problem of socialism raises, however, is not particular to Germany in consequence. In the first World War, the internal contradiction of Faustian civilization, which Spengler traces back to the Viking spirit (personal independence) and the Order spirit of the Teutonic knights (suprapersonal community), reached a point of existential indissolubility: the 20th century is a moment of decision on the scale of an entire civilization not paralleled heretofore, except perhaps in the ascendancy of Caesar in Rome and the birth of the Imperium. The question of capitalism and socialism is a question of plutocracy and militarism; liberalism and aristocracy; an empire of faceless mercantilism or an empire of rank; the English will to power or the German will to power.

Although virulently opposed to Marx, Spengler shares the idea of socialism as a historical inevitability. What is to be determined is the nature and character of this inevitability. He somewhat oxymoronically calls English liberalism "capitalist socialism" which in fact also parallels with similar Marxist insights being made at the time, which, like Spengler, recognized that at the level of international speculative finance and the development of credit and trust systems, capital has been properly socialized against the state and for itself. Spengler sees British parliamentarism and American democracy, with their corresponding party systems, as having their sole function in the service to this impersonal circulatory mechanism, the true ruling force in these countries. English politics is nothing other than politics of private men and private groups, and there is no other meaning to parliamentarism. He therefore finds the Anglo-American assumption that democracy ought to be exported and universalized as a political form to be repulsive in its moral impudence, since it is at root simply their own instinct to dominate, to properly socialize the rest of the world within capital. The modern State is in crisis and must necessarily be subordinated, if not by capital, then by some other, conscious means. In contrast to a plutocracy beyond the state as in the Anglosphere, Spengler sees in Germany the potential for a military beyond the state. Although Faustian civilization is in its twilight, there is still this great task: martial hygiene, the breeding of potentially the last generation capable of self-consciously taking up the Idea of its spiritual inheritance so as to heroically carry its dying light into the evening, trudging forward in spite of everything. "Roman in the pride of service, in the humility of command, demanding not rights from others but duties from themselves, all without exception, without distinction...fulfilling a destiny that they feel in themselves, that they themselves are."

"How free is the view of what is becoming!" In contrast to Marx, Spengler speaks with a mind to destiny, not necessity. An Idea hums within the soul of each and every culture: Logos and Being in the Greeks, and the insatiable will for the infinite in the Faustian. All cultures, in becoming civilized, undergo a process of involution away from their inner principle. The Idea becomes materialized and inverted. What initially was a free and singular play of soul, an unparalleled need of the spirit, is diluted into principles of economy, politics, and new social forms. The Idea becomes civil instinct. In this late stage, the Faustian will to power and eye to the infinite lives on in its brute expansion economically and militarily. Socialism, as an instinct, represents this stage of civilization, not of culture. Modern imperialism has as its object the world in its entirety; in developing civilizationally, in developing outwardly, in subjecting the world to itself, this world feeling has reached its strongest possible expression. The consciousness of this fact is what Spengler calls socialism---and it is a consciousness for us only. That is, Faustian man. Its aforementioned self-contradiction is the motor force of its destiny and constitutes the structure of modern history. Socialism in its deepest meaning is this: service through duty; the will to power; the struggle, not for individuality, but for the soul of a people; a politics of force---the self-overcoming of civilization from the strictures of material wealth for the sake of its Idea and its final inheritors. Such a struggle will be inevitably consummated in a second world war, which Spengler predicts.

I must say I expected much more from the section on Marx and was thoroughly disappointed. Its not clear that he read anything beyond the Communist Manifesto, which should hardly serve as a basis for criticizing Marx. Beyond that, I don't feel much of a need to review it here, although I will be returning to it. Its not to say that there isn't anything of value in his critique. This is a book I will be reading again, if only for fun, and because it can be read very quickly. Spengler is someone whose thought I am just beginning to penetrate, and I look forward to reading more.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spengler's "Prussianism and Socialism" is an excellent, but very dense book. In it, he outlines a number of European psyches or dispositions: English liberalism, Spanish ultramontanism, French and Italian anarchism, and Prussian socialism.

He then goes on to discuss the English and the Prussian mentalities in detail, exploring their origins, in what ways they differ, etc.—critiquing the former (while acknowledging its virtues), and defending the latter.

The final third of the book deals with Marx and communism. Spengler argues that Marx is in fact an essentially English thinker, that the class egoism of communism is antithetical to Prussian socialism (which predates Marxist thought), and that "international socialism" is a myth.

Spengler masterfully cuts through all the noise in order to bring out the essential parts of everything. At the same time, though, some of the claims he makes require further explanation—in particular the idea that the English class system is based purely on wealth, which seems like a stretch.

[Armin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erst mal sacken lassen, aber 4* sind das Minimum.

[Iohannes · Rating 4 out of 5]

eternal anglo: exposed

[James Dempsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nietzsche and his century. Symbol of time, the epitome of his time. Sensitive, passionate and historically minded. The tempest of historical event and movement. The last of the romantics. The soul of an epoch can speak louder than any fact or series of facts ever could. The job of the historian is to listen out, and to substantiate their instinctive reading.

[Minäpäminä · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marxilaisuus on työväestön kapitalismia.

Spengler ei ole parhaimmillaan puhuessaan omasta ajastaan, mutta toisaalta tätä oli mielenkiintoista lukea nimenomaan täältä 2020-luvulta käsin. Teoksen teoreettiset pääväittämät jäävät kovin epämääräisiksi, ja kuitenkin Spengler sanoo paljon terävää ja tärkeää. Mietelausemaiset iskut värittävät rönsyilevää esseistiikkaa.

Spenglerin perusväite on, että sosialismi on jotain olennaisesti preussilaista. Sosialismilla Spengler tarkoittaa oikeastaan valtiojohtoista kollektivismia. Määriteltyään asian näin, hän kehottaa konservatiiveja (monarkisteja, kansallismielisiä) liittoutumaan työväestön kanssa. Se on Spenglerin mukaan ainoa tapa välttää englantilais-liberalistinen rahan hirmuvalta, rosvokapitalismi. Marxilaisuuden Spengler hylkää materialistisena ja ytimeltään kapitalistisena.

Enemmän tai vähemmän ääneenlausumattomina taustaoletuksina ovat eliittiteoria, demokratian ja kapitalismin yhteenkietoutuneisuus sekä kansanluonteiden eli "henkisten rotujen" olemassaolo.

Kansanvallan tuntua pidetään sitä huolellisemmin yllä, mitä vähemmän tämä käsite todellisuudessa merkitsee.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outside of the wealth of historical redefinitions and examples and what I will call a characterology of European nations,

the relativization of “socialism” is central to Prussianism and Socialism. Socialism is distinct from Marxism or Communism, but is embraced as a sanitized banner of these ideas — this book is an unrealized denial of that label from the left. But this is because, to Spengler, ideology in itself is meaningless, Prussian socialism is a practical form of it resulting the Prussian character. It is not the opposite of capitalism, but opposite of anarchism or primitivism. It is denotatively the embrace of society, a collective — although an unequal, individualized one.

And so, though not known or said by Spengler, we today can see not only an expression of “fascism” — without its reactionary tendency — but specifically a preliminary framing of what would soon become National Socialism. But unlike the reactionary, destructive, and rigid attribution to this most infamous “ideology,” Spengler remains practical, suggesting a most creative, progressive, and Faustian organization of the Prussian people, one not beholden to material or to idea, but simply in service to the public.

Still, the concrete picture of what socialism is remains vague — although this is perhaps a valuable intention to remove attachments from abstract labels and ideology. While I understand that Spengler does not polarize the English from the Prussian, but rather sees the two in addition with the Spanish as the greatest expressions of European socialism(s), there is a tension between the English and Prussian that remains unresolved. But perhaps we are now seeing it dialectically play out.

[Random User · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the opening pages of Prussianism and Socialism, Spengler’s thought rings with the fervour of those old German frontiers—expressing a political spirit shaped not by class relations, as Marx would insist, but by a national psyche rooted in unity, duty, and form. His negation of Marxism does not emerge from mere opposition to economic theory, but from a deeper recognition: that class structure alone cannot encapsulate the identity of a people.

Spengler draws a sharp contrast between the mythic image of Napoleon—the destroyer of the old aristocratic order—and the emerging soul of Bismarck’s unified Germany, forged not through revolution but through realpolitik. In this vision, socialism becomes something national, something organic, where the social order is not an abstract economic arrangement but an expression of sovereign unity. Socialism is not international, but deeply rooted in the blood and will of a people.

This idea of blood becomes central to Spengler’s metaphysics of continuity. Where there is unification, there must be distinction. That which defines itself also opposes; in defining the “we,” one inevitably defines what it is not. It is through this very opposition that history gains shape. The self must be born in conflict—cultural, political, and spiritual. But this “we” cannot be merely mechanical or racial—it is the expression of historical will, the echo of memory, the binding of individuals into destiny.

And yet, already by page 32, questions begin to stir. What does Spengler truly mean by “we” and “I”? He posits a dichotomy, but offers little in the way of resolution. In condemning the Renaissance and Enlightenment as petty or decadent, he seems to overlook what made those periods so luminous: their intense striving toward excellence, self-knowledge, and cultural ascent. What was Renaissance Italy but the pinnacle of humanistic self-fashioning? What are the French if not the masters of introspection and desire—those who transformed love and longing into philosophy, poetry, and political form?

To reprimand these traditions is, in some sense, to scorn the very human impulse for greatness. For it is not the collective “we” that births culture, but the solitary “I”—those who live like lions, carving meaning from chaos. The history Spengler romanticises is itself filled with such figures. Greatness does not arise from obedience, but from will, imagination, and rupture.

By page 41, this tension crystallises in his treatment of the English. Must we continue to accept the caricature of the Englishman as a coddled individualist, driven solely by liberal virtue and material freedom? Spengler sees in the English only the merchant, the tradesman, the rational man who adapts to the world rather than reshaping it. But this view is tragically narrow. It fails to see the intricate culture of community beneath the English veneer of individualism—a subtle and deeply ingrained ethos of shared trust, civic form, and institutional stability.

The Englishman obeys not out of fear, but out of a long-standing truce with his own history. The civil service, the House of Commons, the rituals of debate and governance—these are not signs of anti-statism but the quiet choreography of a state that governs by restraint. Byron, Blake, even the Cockney wit—all attest to a society where skill, audacity, and eccentricity are not suppressed but woven into the national character.

Spengler misses this because he sees only the external. He doesn’t live inside the organism of English society; he sees only its limbs, not its nerves. His diagnosis of England as “anti-state” collapses the moment one recalls the House of Lords, the bureaucratic density of “red tape,” the elite training grounds of Eton and Oxbridge. These are not anti-statist anomalies—they are the mechanisms of quiet sovereignty. The British state governs itself not through spectacle, but through deeply internalised custom. It is a government that has trained itself not to appear as one.

And yet, to give Spengler his due, nowhere is he more lucid than in his dissection of Marx. He sees clearly what others miss: that Marxism is not a philosophy of becoming, but of negation. It cannot manifest a future without first defining an enemy. It is reactive, not creative—a system that exists only to dismantle what it calls cancerous. Marxism thrives in the presence of its foe; without it, it is formless.

The irony is bitter: those who now wield Marxist tools often rise not through revolution but through the very forms of cultural elitism they pretend to critique—through the arts, academia, the priesthood of taste and discourse. These modern Marxists claim to reject capital, yet their power does not come from production, but from exclusion. Not profit, but prestige. They do not seize the means of production—they curate the means of meaning.

They scoff at the old man for his antiquated views, not out of truth but because he no longer holds a stake in the society he once called his own. They recognise the world around them, but fail to recognise themselves. Their revolution is not one of material justice but of symbolic power, clothed in the language of critique and cloaked in the rituals of status.

Yet here too, Spengler falters. His critique of Marx is sharp, but as he turns toward his own alternative, his vision begins to blur. He transposes socialism into a Prussian ideal, casting the worker not as a liberator but as a soldier in service to the state. But who commands such service, if not a living polis? And what becomes of the individual when the state replaces conscience with duty?

Spengler applies state ethics to individual ethics, mistaking the good of all for the good itself. But goodness must begin within. People cannot be shaped solely by command or destiny. Like any organism, a society grows through the unity of gradations—each part shaping the whole, until decay emerges from within. Ethics, if it is to endure, must be internal before it becomes external. It must be lived before it is obeyed.

In the end, Spengler, much like the "We" he so ardently defends, sees ethics as descending from the outside, form imposed from above. But the true strength of a people lies not in uniformity, but in resonance—when the soul of the individual sings in harmony with the destiny of the whole. Without that, all empires, all systems, all doctrines—be they Marxist, Prussian, or otherwise—become hollow monuments awaiting collapse.

[Jack Seneca · Rating 4 out of 5]

By itself, this piece by Spengler seems to be wrought with oversimplification, polemics, and reliance on stereotypes. And perhaps some of that is true. But, when read in context of Spengler's broader work, times, and style (something Nietzschean and at times ironic in character), Prussianism and Socialism gives a rich set of insights into political culture. And these insights, I think, subsist to this day and serve to explain a lot about current affairs, demonstrating the prescience of Spenglerian thinking.
I highly recommend this piece to anyone with an interest in Oswald Spengler and political theory, though only when preceded by knowledge of Spengler's philosophy as found in his work, Decline of the West.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

True socialism according to Spengler would take the form of a corporatism in which 'local corporate bodies organized according to the importance of each occupation to the people as a whole; higher representation in stages up to a supreme council of the state; mandates revocable at any time; no organized parties, no professional politicians, no periodic elections.'

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Criticism

According to the German sociologist Stefan Breuer, Spengler was reconciling socialist vocabulary with concepts that were fundamentally liberal, namely Manchester liberal.

Spengler's trick was to declare socialism to be a form of will to power.

Spengler believed the workers' movement and the socialism they represented caused global economic crisis and mass unemployment and that the direct result of this worker socialism led to wage dictates and 'tax Bolshevism' everywhere in the industrialized countries and ruined the entrepreneurs.

Breuer describes in the view of this assignment, 'it is not surprising that the genuine, ie Prussian Socialism proclaimed by Spengler had extremely liberal features' and 'this socialism presupposed a private economy with its old-Germanic joy in power.'

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strange quotes

'Prussiandom and socialism stand together against the inner England, against the world-view that infuses our entire life as a people, crippling it and stealing its soul….

The working class must liberate itself from the illusions of Marxism. Marx is dead. As a form of existence, socialism is just beginning, but the socialism of the German proletariat is at an end.

For the worker, there is only Prussian socialism or nothing....

For conservatives, there is only conscious socialism or destruction.

But we need liberation from the forms of Anglo-French democracy. We have our own.'

.......

Spengler went further to demonstrate the difference between England's capitalist nature and Prussian socialism by saying:

'English society is founded on the distinction between rich and poor, Prussian society on the distinction between command and obedience....

Democracy in England means the possibility for everyone to become rich, in Prussia the possibility of attaining to every existing rank.'


......

blurb

In this new translation of Prussianism and Socialism, Oswald Spengler reflects on the relationship between socialism, liberalism and Prussianism. For Spengler, Prussianism is a typically German disposition, which is expressed in qualities such as a sense of duty and a willingness to sacrifice oneself for the common good. In contrast to Marxism, which Spengler strongly criticises, this Prussian spirit is synonymous with true socialism.

Spengler contrasts two fundamentally different views of life: English liberalism and Prussian socialism.

While English liberalism is characterised by radical individualism and a ruthless desire for profit and exploitation, Prussian socialism emphasises togetherness, solidarity and national community.

Both views are incompatible.

Depending on which ideology gets the upper hand, power will ultimately rest either with financial interests or with states.

Against this backdrop, Spengler calls on citizens of all walks of life to rise above class egoism, to affirm Prussian socialism and to unite in the struggle against the liberal world-view — the ‘inner England’ — which he sees as a threat to the continued existence of the German nation.

This edition includes Spengler’s essay ‘Russia’s Double Face and the German Problems in the East’, which presents his views on Russia as a distinct culture that has not yet fulfilled its destiny.

[Aarav Balsu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very (imo) illustrative sketch of what Spengler considers "socialism", how it's uniquely suited to the Prussian state's development as an organic entity, and how radically different his interpretation of it is compared to Marx's.

He traces this distinction from the ethnological roots of the two major Faustian civilizations in Western Europe: the English and the Prussian. The former delineates social classes by how much money (buying power) they have, whereas the latter does so primarily by social rank (aka how much you command and how much you obey). Parliamentarianism makes sense in the English context, but is alien when transplanted onto Germany, which has an entirely different conception of citizen-state relations. Keep in mind that Spengler was writing right after the First World War had concluded and the parliamentary Weimar Republic had just come into existence. Likewise, Spengler's criticisms of Marx primarily stem from the latter's thesis being based on English political economics, which are less concerned with the common good and moreso with the advancement of one private interest (workers) against another (bourgeoisie) with the state serving as a weak backdrop.

The distinction above can really be summed up (and this is my very crude attempt at distilling it) as: the English are concerned with the Society of private individuals, whereas the Prussians are concerned with the State of totalized individuals who (ideally) must work for the common weal.

As with most 19th and 20th century European history/philosophy writers, Spengler writes scathingly about the people he disagrees with. It's very entertaining to read. References to the simple-minded "German Michel" and the English as a practical nation of "Vikings and businessmen" abound. A glimpse of his writing:

"We
Germans, situated as we are in this century, bound by our inborn instincts to the destiny
of Faustian civilization, have within ourselves rich and untapped resources, but immense
obligations as well. To the new International that is now in the irreversible process of
preparation we can contribute the ideas of worldwide organization and the world state;
the English can suggest the idea of worldwide exploitation and trusts; the French can
offer nothing.(<--- lmao) We can vouch for our ideas, not with speeches but with our whole
existence. The knightly idea of true socialism stands or falls with Prussianism. Only the
Church still embodies the old Spanish idea of universality, the care and succor of all
nations under the wing of Catholicism. From the days of the Hohenstaufen emperors we
can hear the threatening echoes of an immense conflict between a political and a
religious universal idea. But at the present moment we are witnessing the triumph of a
third idea, the Viking idea: the world not as a state and not as a Church, but as booty for
pirates."

Short but dense, took me 3 days to read.

[Hank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prussianism & Socialism utgavs 1919 och är skriven av Oswald Spengler som enligt oss är en av det föregående århundradets mest intressanta tänkare. Den här boken bör ses som än bro mellan volym ett och två av författarens magnum opus ”The Decline of the West”.

Spengler behandlar ”Preussisk socialism” och kontrasterar det med den samtida Engelska kapitalismen:

“The Viking spirit and the spirit of the Teutonic knights are apparent here also: the ethos of success and the ethos of duty. The English people is structured along lines of wealth and poverty, the Prussian along lines of command and obedience. The meaning of class distinctions is thus completely different in these two countries. In an association of independent private citizens the lowest class is the group that has nothing; in a true state the lowest class is the group that has nothing to say. In England democracy means the possibility that everyone can get rich; in Prussia it means that the existing ranks are open to everyone. Within the structure of Prussian society the individual receives his place according to his ability, not according to the demands of tradition."

På sitt karakteristiskt kraftfulla sätt kritiserar Spengler även demokrati och protestantism:

"The individualistic ideal of private property means subjugation of the state by free economic powers, i.e., democracy, i.e., corruptibility of the government by private wealth. In a modern democracy the leaders of the masses find themselves in opposition, not to the capitalists but to money and the anonymous power it exerts. The question is how many of these leaders can resist such power."

"There is no more repulsive spectacle than the attempt of certain Protestant groups to revivify the cadaver of religion by smearing it with bolshevist excrement."

Boken är ett rent nöje att läsa och den är fylld av djupa insikter och obervationer precis som Spenglers övriga böcker. Vi rekommender självklart denna bok men om du är intresserad av Spengler bör du börja med ”The Decline of the West” innan du tar dig an detta verk.

[Chris Rohlev · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Marxism is an ideology. That this is so is evident from the way it divides up history, a technique adopted by the materialists after the strength of Christian faith had waned. The evolutionary path leads, for them, from antiquity via the Middle Ages to modern times, and at the end we are to descry the perfect Marxist ideal, the earthy Paradise. It is senseless to try to contradict this image. Our task is to give modern man a new perspective that will necessarily produce a new image. Life has no "goal." Mankind has no "goal." The existence of this universe, in which we humans play off a tiny episode on our little planet, is much too majestic a thing to be explained by such puny slogans as "happiness for the largest number." The greatness of the universal drama lies in its aimlessness. Goethe was aware of this. What we are called upon to do is to render the greatest possible meaning to the life that has been granted us, to the reality that surrounds us and into which Destiny has placed us. We must live in such a way that we can be proud of ourselves. We must act in such a way that some part of us will live on in the process of reality that is heading toward eventual completion. We are not "human beings an sich." That was a factor in yesterday’s ideology. "Cosmopolitanism" is a wretched word. We are persons of a particular century, a particular nation, a particular circle, a particular type. These are the necessary conditions under which we can give meaning and depth to existence, by being doers, even if we do with words. The more we fill out the area within these given boundaries, the greater will be our effect. Plato was an Athenian, Caesar a Roman, Goethe a German. That they were so first and foremost is the reason for their universal and timeless importance."

[Legens · Rating 1 out of 5]

Spengler, they say, was an unconventional thinker - as evidenced by his attempt to combine Prussianism and socialism, or, by his witty little sentences like "Bismarck was the last statesman of the Spanish style". But I'm not sure if he was much of a thinker - as in, somebody who thinks - at all.
Whenever I wanted to scratch my head in disbelief how an educated man could posit wild hypothesis lacking any basis in empirical fact with such apodictic conviction (and have the conservative elites of Germany regard him as the foremost thinker of his age!), I remind myself that the missing rationality is exactly what they found suspicious about the liberal and socialist reforms and revolutions since the late 18th century.
What remains is a state-centric utopia by way of national-essentialist vibes.

[Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Herr Spengler spends 150 pages to accuse me of being a socialist. I concede...

The French are a bunch of confused anarchists who strive for either revolution in order to give them a fiery new sensation or for the ideal of the ''eternal pensioner'' i.e. the abolition of any ideals (Noblesse Oblige etc) in order to calm the senses. The Anglo-Americans are driven by a mad mercantile instinct and pose as the largest threat to the world, poisoning it with parlamentarism, materialism, party politics, international capital etc etc. The book has a very interesting chapter on Russia and the ''Two Russia's'' off Petersburg (imitation/product) of the west and Moscow (the pure Russia).

Sometimes a bit ranty, at times dense at others seemingly vague. All in all interesting and very thought provoking.

4.5*

[Teddy Dodger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is, at least to people interested in history/politics and familiar with Marxism and the history of Europe in the early 20th-century, a more lucid exposition of Spengler's world view than DoW v.1 which was very global in nature and discussed a lot in relation to art/science/maths that I didn't get.

That doesn't mean there aren't any broad sweeping statements that you either spend 1/2 an hour thinking about what Spengler means like 'Socialism is something different in every country' or 'The german reformation has no inner consequences'. And so -1* because these statements can still be grating, and the meaning opaque.

But it's a good book to read for a basic intro to Spengler.

[Guille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun to see how prescient Spengler is, many of his predictions were spot on and many of his characterizations still hold true. It's also interesting to reflect on Spengler's work in the context of the regime that would rise just a decade after it was written, vaguely frightening even.

Spengler's sarcasm and biting prose was enjoyable and the work contains quite a few kernels of wisdom that are worth taking on.

[Elliott · Rating 1 out of 5]

Get a load of this fuckin’ idiot…
Grifters and charlatans are attracted to the far-right like shit to flies: Spengler, Jordan Peterson, Julius Evola… at the same time it’s fascinating how they’re all very similar. Spengler and Peterson both have a poor understanding of Marxism, and socialism for that matter and yet they air themselves as experts without ever having put in the work. Their “solutions” meanwhile are pure magical thinking.

[Tamim]

A very dense read, but somewhat understandable to someone who hasnt read the Decline, such as myself. It seems to build more on the distinctions of various European nations instead of the broader Culture-Civilizations, as well as discussing practical economics in light of the end of WW1 and the Bolshevik Revolution. The summary at the end was also quite helpful.

[Justin Barger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decent read about the essential "German" character of socialism, the body 'corpus' in contrast to English liberalism and French 'anarchism' would recommend, A very passionate tract of what it means to be "Socialist' and the token digs at Marxist "English" style socialism. Read it.

[Oolalaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

19/20

[Jaiden Builes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book. Accurate critique of Marx and analysis of Western cultures. I found the last paragraph very inspiring:

"My fervent hope is that no one will remain hidden who was born with the ability to
command, and that no one is given the responsibility for commanding who lacks the
inborn talent for doing so. Socialism means ability, not desire. Not the quality of
intentions but the quality of accomplishments is decisive. I turn to our youth. I call upon
all who have marrow in their bones and blood in their veins. Train yourselves! Become
men! We need no more ideologists, no more chatter about Bildung and cosmopolitanism
and Germany’s intellectual mission. We need hardness, we need a courageous
skepticism, we need a class of socialistic mastertypes. Once again: Socialism means
power, power, and more power. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power. The
path to power has already been mapped: the valuable elements of German labor in union
with the best representatives of the Old Prussian state idea, both groups determined to
build a strictly socialist state to democratize our nation in the Prussian manner; both
forged into a unit by the same sense of duty, by the awareness of a great obligation, by
the will to obey in order to rule, to die in order to win, by the strength to make immense
sacrifices in order to accomplish what we were born for, what we are, what could not be
without us.
We are socialists. Let us hope that it will not have been in vain"

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oswald Spengler's "Prussianism and Socialism" offers a thought-provoking analysis of the interaction between Prussian values and socialist ideologies in early 20th-century Germany. Spengler explores the historical, cultural, and political dimensions of Prussianism and its influence on the rise of socialism in the country. This review aims to provide an academic evaluation of Spengler's arguments, discussing the book's strengths, weaknesses, and its significance within the fields of political philosophy and German history.


“Prussianism and Socialism" by Oswald Spengler examines the relationship between the Prussian ethos and the emergence of socialist movements in Germany. Spengler argues that Prussianism, characterized by its emphasis on discipline, hierarchy, and authoritarianism, created a fertile ground for the growth of socialist ideas. He explores the historical development of Prussian society, the influence of Prussian values on German political institutions, and the subsequent response of socialist movements.

Spengler's work stands out for its interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon historical, sociological, and philosophical perspectives. He traces the evolution of Prussianism from its military origins to its permeation of German society, providing readers with a nuanced understanding of the cultural and political underpinnings of Prussianism and its interactions with socialist ideologies. Spengler's thought-provoking analysis invites readers to critically examine the complexities of these intertwined phenomena.


One of the notable strengths of "Prussianism and Socialism" lies in Spengler's ability to synthesize historical research and philosophical inquiry. He weaves together historical narratives, biographical sketches, and philosophical reflections, enriching the analysis with diverse sources of evidence. This multidimensional approach enhances the depth and breadth of the book, contributing to a nuanced understanding of the interplay between Prussianism and socialism.

Moreover, Spengler's examination of the ideological tensions and contradictions between Prussianism and socialism prompts readers to question prevailing assumptions about political ideologies. He challenges simplistic dichotomies and explores the complex dynamics between seemingly opposing forces, shedding light on the intricate relationship between authoritarianism and egalitarianism.


While "Prussianism and Socialism" offers a thought-provoking analysis, it is not without its limitations. Some critics argue that Spengler's work reflects a particular ideological bias, potentially overlooking or downplaying alternative interpretations or counterarguments. A more comprehensive exploration of opposing perspectives and a greater engagement with opposing scholarly views would strengthen the book's analytical rigor.

Additionally, Spengler's writing style can be dense and complex, making it challenging for some readers to fully grasp the nuances of his arguments. A more accessible presentation of ideas could enhance the book's reach and appeal to a broader readership.


"Prussianism and Socialism" holds significant importance within the fields of political philosophy and German history as a seminal work that explores the interplay between cultural values, political ideologies, and social transformations. Spengler's analysis invites readers to reconsider traditional interpretations of Prussianism and socialism, encouraging critical reflections on the complexities of political and cultural developments.

The book's contribution lies in its ability to stimulate broader discussions on the impact of cultural values on political ideologies, the tensions between authoritarianism and egalitarianism, and the historical context in which political movements emerge and evolve.

GPT

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Socialism is cool