Oswald Spengler in the context of "Caesarism"

World history or global history as a field of historical study examines history from a global perspective. It emerged centuries ago; some leading practitioners have included Voltaire (1694–1778), Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975). The field became much more active (in terms of university teaching, textbooks, scholarly journals, and academic associations) in the late 20th century.

It is not to be confused with comparative history, which, like world history, deals with the history of multiple cultures and nations, but does not do so on a global scale. World historians use a thematic approach, with two major focal points: integration (how processes of world history have drawn people of the world together) and difference (how patterns of world history reveal the diversity of the human experience).

The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes; more literally, The Downfall of the Occident or even more literally, "The Going-Under of the Evening Lands") is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler. The first volume, subtitled Form and Actuality, was published in the summer of 1918. The second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History, was published in 1922. The definitive edition of both volumes was published in 1923.

Spengler introduced his book as a "Copernican overturning"—a specific metaphor of societal collapse—involving the rejection of the Eurocentric view of history, especially the division of history into the linear "ancient-medieval-modern" rubric. According to Spengler, the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. In his framework, the terms "culture" and "civilization" were given non-standard definitions, and cultures are described as having lifespans of about a thousand years of flourishing, and a thousand years of decline.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (US: /ˈvɪŋkəlmɑːn/ VINK-əl-mahn; German: [ˈjoːhan ˈjoːaxɪm ˈvɪŋkl̩man]; 9 December 1717 – 8 June 1768) was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the differences between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology", Winckelmann was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art. Many consider him the father of the discipline of art history. He was one of the first to separate Greek Art into periods, and time classifications.

He had a decisive influence on the rise of the Neoclassical movement during the late 18th century. His writings influenced not only a new science of archaeology and art history but Western painting, sculpture, literature and even philosophy. Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (1764) was one of the first books written in German to become a classic of European literature. His subsequent influence on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan George and Oswald Spengler has been provocatively called "the Tyranny of Greece over Germany".

Family resemblance (German: Familienähnlichkeit) is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein, with the best known exposition given in his posthumously published book Philosophical Investigations (1953). It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things. Games, which Wittgenstein used as an example to explain the notion, have become the paradigmatic example of a group that is related by family resemblances. It has been suggested that Wittgenstein picked up the idea and the term from Friedrich Nietzsche, who had been using it, as did many nineteenth century philologists, when discussing language families.

The first occurrence of the term family resemblance is found in Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860; The World As Will and Representation §§17, 27, 28) who attributed the term to the school developed by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854). As demonstrated, Schopenhauer's polemical target is Henrik Steffens (1773–1845), a student of Schelling. The next occurrence appeared in a note from 1930, commenting on Oswald Spengler's ideas. The notion itself features widely in Wittgenstein's later work, and in the Investigations it is introduced in response to questions about the general form of propositions and the essence of language – questions which were central to Wittgenstein throughout his philosophical career. This suggests that family resemblance was of prime importance for Wittgenstein's later philosophy; however, like many of his ideas, it is hard to find precise agreement within the secondary literature on either its place within Wittgenstein's later thought or on its wider philosophical significance.

Declinism is the belief that a society or institution is tending towards decline. Particularly, it is the predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy retrospection, to view the past more favourably and the future more negatively.

"The great summit of declinism" according to Adam Gopnik, "was established in 1918, in the book that gave decline its good name in publishing: the German historian Oswald Spengler's best-selling, thousand-page work The Decline of the West."