The article discusses the idea of the crisis of Western civilization. It is shown that it has a different meaning in the concept of O. Spengler and in Russian philosophy of the XIX - early XX centuries. For Spengler, the “decline of the Western world” is a completely natural process of extinction of one local civilization, in whose place others will be. According to the ideas of the most famous Russian thinkers (F. Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Vl. Solovyov and others), the divine essence of man and mankind is gradually revealed in history, therefore all nations and civilizations have one historical path, on which continuous spiritual and cultural perfection is possible. This model of civilization development was created by German romanticism and German philosophy of the beginning of the XIX century. The model was confronted in the history of the model of the Enlightenment (the liberal model), which rejects the infinite spiritual essence of a person and suggests that a person is completely subordinate to the laws of nature and does not have true freedom. Based on the ideas of H. von Keyserling, it is shown that the Enlightenment model was most fully implemented in the social life of the United States, and this led to the emergence of a special form of totalitarianism based on the suppression of the spiritual independence of individuals and the dominance of group consciousness. The transfer of this model to the entire Western world in the second half of the twentieth century led it to a radical spiritual crisis, which can be avoided only by returning to an alternative model created by German and Russian philosophers.