Politicians and judges are bought, and natural resources worth trillions of dollars are sold to powerful corporations for a pittance.

A hundred oligarchs in India hold assets equivalent to 25 percent of the country's GDP, while 800 million of their compatriots survive on less than a dollar a day. Compared to Indian capitalism, capitalism's ethical failures elsewhere look especially benign. But challengers like China and India are in no position to preach.

To be sure, income inequality and social injustice are a concomitant of capitalist culture throughout the West. Moreover, even if China becomes the world's largest economy in, say, 2018, Americans would still be far richer than Chinese, with per capita GDP in the United States four times higher than in China. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pressed for an authoritarian 're-establishment of the state.' Such cases seem to point to the return of a European past in which democracy's failures gave way to more 'expedient' forms of government.Īnd yet, while Europe remains a question mark, economic growth and job creation, however fragile, are back in the United States. In Greece and Italy, technocratic governments have taken over from failing politicians. Worse, appalling income inequalities, a squeezed middle class and evidence of widespread ethical lapses and impunity are fueling a dangerous disenchantment with democracy and a growing loss of trust in a system that has betrayed the American dream of constant progress and improvement.Īs for Europe, the euro-zone crisis has exposed democracy's weaknesses in dealing with major economic emergencies, as well as the flaws in the European Union's design. In 2000, the United States' gross domestic product was eight times larger than China's. There can be no doubt that the West's military mastery and economic edge have been severely diminished recently. But its decline is not a linear, irreversible process. True, the West is no longer alone in dictating the global agenda, and its values are bound to be increasingly challenged by emerging powers. It also speaks to Spengler's dismissal of Western civilization as essentially being driven by a corrupting lust for money.īut determinism in history has always been defeated by the unpredictable forces of human will and, in this case, by the West's extraordinary capacity for renewal, even after cataclysmic defeats.

capitalism's inherent ethical failures and of Europe's dysfunction - might be seen as lending credibility to Spengler's view of democracy's inadequacy. The current crises in the United States and Europe - the result primarily of U.S.

Since the publication in 1918 of the first volume of Oswald Spengler's 'The Decline of the West,' prophecies about the inexorable doom of what he called the 'Faustian Civilization' have been a recurrent topic for intellectuals.

Spengler decline of the west