The Decline of the West
In the "fin-de-siècle" period, Max Nordau scored an unexpected success with his bestselling "Degeneration" (1892). Sigmund Freud met Nordau in 1885 while he was studying in Paris and was notably unimpressed by him and hostile to the degeneration concept. Degeneration fell from popular and fashionable favor around the time of the First World War, although some of its preoccupations persisted in the writings of the eugenicists and social Darwinists (for example, R. Austin Freeman; Anthony Ludovici; Rolf Gardiner; and see also Dennis Wheatley's "Letter to posterity"). Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" (1919) captured something of the degenerationist spirit in the aftermath of the war.