Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (1880-1936) was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West in which he puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilisations.

In 1931, he published Man and Technics, as a short and accessible supplement to his magnum opus, The Decline of the West, which warned against the dangers of technology and industrialism to culture.

Technics involves the use of the reasoning faculties of the Mind in accordance with the physical use and manipulations of objects by the Hand to make whatever that is outside of man's being in Nature subject to man's will. This provides obvious advantages and also extremely serious disadvantages as well.

In Man and Technics Spengler examines man's way on earth from the perspective of a philosophical anthropology. In agreement with the other exponents of reactionary modernism in Weimar Germany, Spengler focuses on technology as the critical feature of the Faustian Western Civilisation and uses the Goethian hero in order to disclose to the reader the likely outcome of man's blind worship of instrumental technological reason. At the same time he scorns the West for its imperialism and violation of the life-style of other cultures.

In the last pages of Man and Technics, Spengler concludes that there is nothing that can be done to abort the fall of Faustian Civilisation, which is ruined by internal decadence, economic competition from without, and the militancy of non-Western peoples who will use Western technology against Europe and America. Spengler regards any notion of optimism about the outcome of human affairs to be cowardly and any hope of utopian salvation to be a flighty dream. The best thing that any man can do in the face of eventual destruction is an honorable end following the choice of Achilles: 'Better a short life full of deeds and glory than a long life without content.'