Nietzsche was suffering from the tertiary phase of syphilis. To begin with, he was wildly deluded. He insisted he was the Kaiser and became convinced his incarceration had been ordered by Bismarck. These delusions alternated with uncontrollable rages. Gradually, however, his condition quietened and he was released, to be looked after first by his mother and then by his sister. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took an active interest in her brother’s philosophy. A member of Wagner’s circle of intellectuals, she had married another acolyte, Bernard Förster, who in 1887 had conceived a bizarre plan to set up a colony of Aryan German settlers in Paraguay, whose aim was to recolonise the New World with ‘racially pure Nordic pioneers.’ This Utopian scheme failed disastrously, and Elisabeth returned to Germany. (Bernard committed suicide.) Not at all humbled by the experience, she began promoting her brother’s philosophy. She forced her mother to sign over sole legal control in his affairs, and she set up a Nietzsche archive. She then wrote a two-volume adulatory biography of Friedrich and organised his home so that it became a shrine to his work.3 In doing this, she vastly simplified and coarsened her brother’s ideas, leaving out anything that was politically sensitive or too controversial. What remained, however, was controversial enough. Nietzsche’s main idea (not that he was particularly systematic) was that all of history was a metaphysical struggle between two groups, those who express the ‘will to power,’ the vital life force necessary for the creation of values, on which civilisation is based, and those who do not, primarily the masses produced by democracy.4 ‘Those poor in life, the weak,’ he said, ‘impoverish culture,’ whereas ‘those rich in life, the strong, enrich it.’5 All civilisation owes its existence to ‘men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, [who] hurled themselves on weaker, more civilised, more peaceful races … upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption.’6 These men of prey he called ‘Aryans,’ who become the ruling class or caste. Furthermore, this ‘noble caste was always the barbarian caste.’ Simply because they had more life, more energy, they were, he said, ‘more complete human beings’ than the ‘jaded sophisticates’ they put down.7 These energetic nobles, he said, ‘spontaneously create values’ for themselves and the society around them. This strong ‘aristocratic class’ creates its own definitions of right and wrong, honour and duty, truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, and the conquerors impose their views on the conquered – this is only natural, says Nietzsche. Morality, on the other hand, ‘is the creation of the underclass.’8 It springs from resentment and nourishes the virtues of the herd animal. For Nietzsche, ‘morality negates life.’9 Conventional, sophisticated civilisation – ‘Western man’ – he thought, would inevitably result in the end of humanity. This was his famous description of ‘the last man.’10
The acceptance of Nietzsche’s views was hardly helped by the fact that many of them were written when he was already ill with the early stages of syphilis. But there is no denying that his philosophy – mad or not – has been extremely influential, not least for the way in which, for many people, it accords neatly with what Charles Darwin had said in his theory of evolution, published in 1859. Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘superman,’ the Übermensch, lording it over the underclass certainly sounds like evolution, the law of the jungle, with natural selection in operation as ‘the survival of the fittest’ for the overall good of humanity, whatever its effects on certain individuals. But of course the ability to lead, to create values, to impose one’s will on others, is not in and of itself what evolutionary theory meant by ‘the fittest.’ The fittest were those who reproduced most, propagating their own kind. Social Darwinists, into which class Nietzsche essentially fell, have often made this mistake.
After publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species it did not take long for his ideas about biology to be extended to the operation of human societies. Darwinism first caught on in the United States of America. (Darwin was made an honorary member of the American Philosophical Society in 1869, ten years before his own university, Cambridge, conferred on him an honorary degree.)11 American social scientists William Graham Sumner and Thorsten Veblen of Yale, Lester Ward of Brown, John Dewey at the University of Chicago, and William James, John Fiske and others at Harvard, debated politics, war, and the layering of human communities into different classes against the background of a Darwinian ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘survival of the fittest.’ Sumner believed that Darwin’s new way of looking at mankind had provided the ultimate explanation – and rationalisation – for the world as it was. It explained laissez-faire economics, the free, unfettered competition popular among businessmen. Others believed that it explained the prevailing imperial structure of the world in which the ‘fit’ white races were placed ‘naturally’ above the ‘degenerate’ races of other colours. On a slightly different note, the slow pace of change implied by evolution, occurring across geological aeons, also offered to people like Sumner a natural metaphor for political advancement: rapid, revolutionary change was ‘unnatural’; the world was essentially the way it was as a result of natural laws that brought about change only gradually.12
Fiske and Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899, flatly contradicted Sumner’s belief that the well-to-do could be equated with the biologically fittest. Veblen in fact turned such reasoning on its head, arguing that the type of characters ‘selected for dominance’ in the business world were little more than barbarians, a ‘throw-back’ to a more primitive form of society.13
Britain had probably the most influential social Darwinist in Herbert Spencer. Born in 1820 into a lower-middle-class Nonconformist English family in Derby, Spencer had a lifelong hatred of state power. In his early years he was on the staff of the Economist, a weekly periodical that was fanatically pro-laissez-faire. He was also influenced by the positivist scientists, in particular Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology, published in the 1830s, went into great detail about fossils that were millions of years old. Spencer was thus primed for Darwin’s theory, which at a stroke appeared to connect earlier forms of life to later forms in one continuous thread. It was Spencer, and not Darwin, who actually coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ and Spencer quickly saw how Darwinism might be applied to human societies. His views on this were uncompromising. Regarding the poor, for example, he was against all state aid. They were unfit, he said, and should be eliminated: ‘The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.’14 He explained his theories in his seminal work The Study of Sociology (1872–3), which had a notable impact on the rise of sociology as a discipline (a biological base made it seem so much more like science). Spencer was almost certainly the most widely read social Darwinist, as famous in the United States as in Britain.
Germany had its own Spencer-type figure in Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). A zoologist from the University of Jena, Haeckel took to social Darwinism as if it were second nature. He referred to ‘struggle’ as ‘a watchword of the day.’15 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.16 France, in contrast, was relatively slow to catch on to Darwinism, but when she did, she had her own passionate advocate. In her Origines de l’homme et des sociétés, Clemence August 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.’17 In Russia, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) released Mutual Aid in 1902, in which he took a different line, arguing that although competition was undoubtedly a fact of life, so too was cooperation, 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.18 Neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels saw any conflict between the two systems. At Marx’s graveside, Engels said, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’19 But others did see a conflict. Darwinism was based on perpetual struggle; Marxism looked forward to a time when a new harmony would be established.