Decline and Fall contraction of Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The title alludes also to the German philosopher Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" (1918–1922), which first appeared in an English translation in 1926 and which argued, among other things, that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse. Waugh read both Gibbon and Spengler while writing his first novel. Waugh's satire is unambiguously hostile to much that was in vogue in the late 1920s, and "themes of cultural confusion, moral disorientation and social bedlam...both drive the novel forward and
Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire by , and the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum's "The Foundations of Psychoanalysis" (1984). He accepts Elizabeth Thornton's argument, made in "Freud and Cocaine" (1983), also published as "The Freudian Fallacy", that Breuer's patient Anna O. suffered from tuberculous meningitis. "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire" was first published by Viking Press in 1985. The book was published by Pelican Books in 1986. In 2004, a revised edition with a preface by Hans Eysenck's widow, Sybil Eysenck, was published by Transaction Publishers. "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire" received a positive review from Paul Stuewe in "Quill & Quire", and