Man and Technics

Oswald Spengler – Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life
New and revised edition

In this revised edition of Spengler’s prophetic classic Man and Technics, the German historian and philosopher presents a chilling analysis of modern industrial society—one that feels eerily prescient more than eighty years after its original publication.

Spengler foresaw the environmental crises caused by unchecked industrialisation and mass extinction. He predicted the offshoring of Western industry, undercut by cheap labour from Asia, Latin America, and beyond. But beyond economics, his most striking insight is philosophical: that mankind’s mastery over nature through technology would eventually turn against him. What once empowered man now enslaves him. “The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team,” Spengler writes.

He warns of a future where the artificial supersedes the organic, where Western man, alienated from both nature and himself, comes to loathe the civilisation he built. This process, he argues, is irreversible—our high-tech culture is destined to collapse under its own weight, leaving behind ruins as forgotten as those of Memphis and Babylon.

Spengler was among the 20th century’s most influential thinkers. Best known for The Decline of the West, where he presented his cyclical theory of civilisation, Spengler viewed cultures as living organisms—rising, blooming, and inevitably decaying. His ideas resonated deeply in post-Imperial Germany and shaped the Conservative Revolution, although he later fell out of favour with the Nazi regime, which banned his final major work The Hour of Decision.

Man and Technics remains one of his most accessible and urgent texts—a philosophical warning from a past century that speaks uncomfortably clearly to the present one.