The subtitle of Spengler's monumental work, "The Morphology of World History," is the central idea of "The Decline of the West," which can be traced back to Goethe and Nietzsche. World history is the history of its carriers, the great civilizations, which are considered as great organisms that are born, mature, flourish, and die. Independent from each other, they are nevertheless governed by a common characteristic, a necessary, somewhat organic lawfulness, which constitutes their destiny. The similarity between the late Roman era and the present, which has been noted by several historians and other intellectuals, is a special case of this general lawfulness of living becoming. Such great civilizations or mega-organisms of world history, which are examined morphologically in their organic phases of genesis, flourishing, and decline, are the Egyptian (which includes the Minoan), the Babylonian, the Indian, the Chinese, the ancient Greco-Roman, the Arab (part of which is the early Christian-Byzantine), the Western, and the Mexican civilization. [...] Spengler, a polyhistor and intensely "Faustian," tames enormous masses of cultural material, seeking with his "physiognomic" gaze similarities and proportions between the morphologically related phases of the eight civilizations he deals with, which are revealed as morphologically "synchronous," as all great creations, all individual forms of religion, art, politics, society, economy, and science are born, complete their development, and fade away "simultaneously," independently of the chronological time. Such "synchronous" phenomena are, among others, Buddhism, Stoicism, and socialism, three ways of psychic decline of three different civilizations. This cyclical-morphological view of history has been criticized more than any other aspect of "The Decline of the West," while countless factual observations and judgments-discoveries of his physiognomic-morphological philosophy have been applauded, and the history of the 20th century has overwhelmingly confirmed his central predictions.
The theoretical framework can simply be the Ithaca that offers the great journey of rich and constantly tense reading. Similarly, the reader is not called to believe, but above all to experience this adventure himself through civilizations, to think for himself, and to judge through his own experience of the world.