Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In the German-speaking countries, a veritable galaxy of scientists and pseudo-scientists, philosophers and pseudo-philosophers, intellectuals and would-be intellectuals, competed to outdo each other in the struggle for public attention. Friedrich Ratzel, a zoologist and geographer, argued that all living organisms competed in a Kampf um Raum, a struggle for space, in which the winners expelled the losers. This struggle extended to humans, and the successful races had to extend their living space, Lebensraum, if they were to avoid decline.⁶³

Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), a zoologist from the University of Jena, took to social Darwinism as if it were second nature. He referred to ‘struggle’ as ‘a watchword of the day’.⁶⁴ However, Haeckel was a passionate advocate of the principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and, unlike Spencer, he favoured a strong state. It was this, allied to his bellicose racism and anti-Semitism, that led people to see him as a proto-Nazi.⁶⁵ For Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the renegade son of a British admiral, who went to Germany and married Wagner’s daughter, racial struggle was ‘fundamental to a “scientific” understanding of history and culture’.⁶⁶

Chamberlain portrayed the history of the West ‘as an incessant conflict between the spiritual and culture-creating Aryans and the mercenary and materialistic Jews’ (his first wife had been half-Jewish).⁶⁷ For Chamberlain, the Germanic peoples were the last remnants of the Aryans, but they had become enfeebled through interbreeding with other races.

Max Nordau (1849–1923), born in Budapest, was like Durkheim the son of a rabbi. His best-known book was the two-volume Entartung (Degeneration

) which, despite being six hundred pages long, became an international best-seller. Nordau became convinced there was ‘a severe mental epidemic; a sort of black death of degeneracy and hysteria’, which was affecting Europe, sapping its vitality, and was manifest in a whole range of symptoms, ‘squint eyes, imperfect ears, stunted growth . . . pessimism, apathy, impulsiveness, emotionalism, mysticism, and a complete absence of any sense of right and wrong’.⁶⁸ Everywhere he looked there was decline.⁶⁹ The impressionist painters were the result, he said, of a degenerate physiology, nystagmus, a trembling of the eyeball, causing them to paint in the fuzzy, indistinct way that they did. In the writings of Baudelaire, Wilde and Nietzsche, Nordau found ‘overwheening egomania’, while Zola had ‘an obsession with filth’. Nordau believed that degeneracy was caused by industrialised society – literally the wear-and-tear exerted on leaders by railways, steamships, telephones and factories. When Freud visited Nordau he found him ‘unbearably vain’ with a complete lack of a sense of humour.⁷⁰

In Austria, more than anywhere else in Europe, social Darwinism did not stop at theory. Two political leaders, Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, fashioned political platforms that stressed the twin aims of, first, power to the peasants (because they had remained ‘uncontaminated’ by contact with the corrupt cities) and, second, a virulent anti-Semitism, in which Jews were characterised as the very embodiment of degeneracy. It was this miasma of ideas that greeted the young Adolf Hitler when he first arrived in Vienna in 1907 to attend art school.

France, in contrast, was relatively slow to catch on to Darwinism, but when she did she had her own passionate social Darwinist. In her Origines de l’homme et des sociétés, Clémence Auguste Royer took a strong social Darwinist line, regarding ‘Aryans’ as superior to other races and warfare between them as inevitable in the interests of progress.⁷¹ In Russia, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) released Mutual Aid in 1902, where he took a different line, arguing that although competition was undoubtedly a fact of life, so too was co-operation, which was so prevalent in the animal kingdom as to constitute a natural law. Like Veblen, he presented an alternative model to the Spencerians in which violence was condemned as abnormal. Social Darwinism was, not unnaturally, compared with Marxism and not only in the minds of Russian intellectuals.⁷²