Concepts of culture and technology in Germany, 1916-1933: Ernst Cassirer and Oswald Spengler

While recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in works by Cassirer, Spengler’s works have generated considerably less academic attention, to the extent that they are left out of accounts of Cassirer’s political thought. A detailed comparison between their concepts of culture (and technological progress) has not been undertaken before. Cassirer saw in Spengler an important intellectual opponent, and undertook a detailed reversal of Spengler’s propositions. As this essay shows, the tensions between the two thinkers, set in the context of the contemporary political climate, invite a reconsideration of the common characterization of Cassirer as a predominantly apolitical scholar, and emphasize that Spengler’s work ought to be taken far more seriously as a contribution to a philosophical and political debate in late Weimar Germany.