Does History Repeat Itself?

The Caesar of the 21st century...

Our culture is uneasy with the idea of decline. It teaches us instead to see history as a steady ascent from ignorance to knowledge, from poverty to abundance, and from tyranny to freedom.

It’s a comforting story — but what if it's wrong?

In 1918, a German historian named Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, a sweeping, ambitious theory of history. In it, he rejected the Enlightenment notion of never-ending linear “progress”. Civilizations, Spengler argued, are not constantly marching toward utopia. They are instead living organisms that grow, age, and die.

Spengler believed that Western culture — which he called the "Faustian" civilization — was already in its twilight. The signs were there for anyone who dared to look: declining faith, exhausted art, shallow materialism, and bloated cities. A century later, his ideas feel eerily prescient.

Today, we explore Spengler’s work The Decline of the West to see what it reveals about the world we live in today — and what it predicts about the chaos and upheavals you will live through in the first half of the 21st century…