IN 1918 A GERMAN scholar named Oswald Spengler produced a weighty tome titled“Decline of the West,” which had quite a vogue in the first half of the 20th century and probably still sits unread in American homes. Spenglerian prose — “Like the cosmic cycle of the blood, the differentiating activity of sense is originally a unity.” — did not prove to be the stuff of bestsellers, but as other authors have discovered to their profit, the idea of decline and fall continues to have considerable commercial appeal in this country, which despite its habitual optimism also contains a streak of doubt about its good fortune and how long it can last.
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