Though written by a critic, Rodger Sandall, whose politics clearly stand opposite mine, this essay on Oswald Spengler entertained me for three reasons.

One, it has an extract from The Decline of the West (Spengler’s most famous book—1922) that, despite its bad motives, paints a fairly accurate vision of the future, the world we are in now:

An age of violent conflict is opening, and with the First World War of 1914-1918 it is obvious an era of perpetual warfare has begun.
New Caesars with armies of fanatical devotees struggle for mastery. Meanwhile the mass of mankind looks on with growing bewilderment, apathy, or resignation, prepared to accept the fate that determined soldiers, terrorist movements, fearful police and militarised states impose.
But long before this comes about, political ideologies and parties will have lost their meaning. Life in a globalised world falls to a level of uniformity where local and national differences virtually cease to exist. The only places that matter will be a handful of gigantic “world citiesâ€�—New York, Berlin, Tokyo or Beijing. These will be what Hellenistic Alexandria and Imperial Rome were to the ancient world—vast assemblages of people all living on top of one another, a mob following anyone who keeps them amused.
The lives of the masses will be an empty rehearsal of dull tasks and brutal diversions—arenas and gladiators, gross spectacles of sensuality and sadism watched by drunken roaring crowds.

Two, from Spengler’s book The Hour of Decision (1933), the essay extracts this inspiring (at least for me) passage:

…the arrogance of the urban intellect, which, detached from its roots and no longer guided by strong instinct, looks down with contempt on the full-blooded thinking of the past and the wisdom of ancient peasant stock… Rationalism is at bottom nothing but criticism, and the critic is the reverse of a creator: he dissects and he reassembles; conception and birth are alien to him. Accordingly his work is artificial and lifeless, and when brought into contact with real life, it kills.

(The figure Spengler and the Nazis loathed, the “urban intellect,” is precisely the figure I most admire.)

Lastly, I had no idea that the lefty and anti-war Lewis Mumford, whose book The City in History(1961) I’m reading at the moment, was inspired by the conservative, pro-war Spengler. How did one give birth to the other? Their connection was made here: What I love about Mumford’s book is that the vastness of its project (the history of every city to ever appear on this planet) is managed by what he calls a “mighty theme,” which is exactly what Spengler used, a mighty theme (“The history of mankind as a form of moral prophecy”), to manage the vastness of The Decline of the West, a book which I have yet to complete. But the materials in each of my favorite books (Das Capital, Arcades Project, Little Dorrit, In Search of Lost Time) are organized by a mighty theme—one muscular concept that shapes the chaos of the world into something readable. As with all tools, the mighty concept (or theme) has its good users and its bad ones.