Interests
Decline of the West
Oswald Spengler
Year read: approximately 1961 to 65, my age, approximately 20 to 24
I was first exposed to Spengler in a political science course in my sophomore year of college. Then again in a history of city planning course in architecture school. I had always been hungry for sweeping, syncretic views of the human condition, and Spengler provides the best such view, with his notion that each great culture has an inner symbolic structure, and each goes through stages of development from birth to death.Spengler was very influential on my Masters thesis, and on my approach to history and culture, and it influences my teaching to this day. Spengler is out of fashion, but I think he is as relevant today as ever, and his ideas keep popping up.
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