Oswald Spengler’s Geopolitical System and National Socialism

Johann von Leers’ Oswald Spengler’s Geopolitical System and National Socialism (1934) is a sharp polemical critique of Oswald Spengler’s philosophy of history and politics, written from the standpoint of a committed National Socialist. Leers sets out Spengler’s major ideas (historical determinism, the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations, the inevitability of decline, and his concept of “Caesarism”) and contrasts them sharply with the National Socialist worldview. Leers repeatedly emphasizes that Spengler’s determinism ignores the realities of race and biology, which for National Socialists were central to history. He argues that Spengler’s pessimism, elitism, liberalism, and hostility to the German working class amount to a disguised form of bourgeois counterrevolution, favoring individualistic capitalism and imperialist Caesarism. Oswald Spengler thus cannot be regarded as a thinker aligned with National Socialism but as a subversive rival philosopher within the liberal-conservative camp.