The Nature of the Period

Aside from the current economic crisis, the most significant development of the period we are now in is the qualitative decrease in the global influence of the United States and western Europe. We might call this “The Decline of the West.” This was the title of an influential book published in two volumes, in 1918 and 1922, respectively, by Oswald Spengler. As we can now see, the treatise was prescient but also, as it turned out, about a century premature.