The German Race Hygiene Society was founded in 1905, followed by the Eugenics Education Society in England in 1907.34 An equivalent body was founded in the United States, in 1910 and in France in 1912.35 Arguments at times bordered on the fanatical. For example, F. H. Bradley, an Oxford professor, recommended that lunatics and persons with hereditary diseases should be killed, and their children.36 In America, in 1907, the state of Indiana passed a law that required a radically new punishment for inmates in state institutions who were ‘insane, idiotic, imbecilic, feebleminded or who were convicted rapists’: sterilisation.37
It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that the influence of social Darwinism was wholly crude and wholly bad. It was not.
A distinctive feature of Viennese journalism at the turn of the century was the feuilleton. This was a detachable part of the front page of a newspaper, below the fold, which contained not news but a chatty – and ideally speaking, witty – essay written on any topical subject. One of the best feuilletonistes was a member of the Café Griendsteidl set, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904). Herzl, the son of a Jewish merchant, was born in Budapest but studied law in Vienna, which soon became home. While at the university Herzl began sending squibs to the Neue Freie Presse, and he soon developed a witty prose style to match his dandified dress. He met Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Stefan Zweig. He did his best to ignore the growing anti-Semitism around him, identifying with the liberal aristocracy of the empire rather than with the ugly masses, the ‘rabble,’ as Freud called them. He believed that Jews should assimilate, as he was doing, or on rare occasions recover their honour after they had suffered discrimination through duels, then very common in Vienna. He thought that after a few duels (as fine a Darwinian device as one could imagine) Jewish honour would be reclaimed. But in October 1891 his life began to change. His journalism was rewarded with his appointment as Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse. His arrival in the French capital, however, coincided with a flood of anti-Semitism set loose by the Panama scandal, when corrupt officials of the company running the canal were put on trial. This was followed in 1894 by the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer convicted of treason. Herzl doubted the man’s guilt from the start, but he was very much in a minority. For Herzl, France had originally represented all that was progressive and noble in Europe – and yet in a matter of months he had discovered her to be hardly different from his own Vienna, where the vicious anti-Semite Karl Lueger was well on his way to becoming mayor.38
A change came over Herzl. At the end of May 1895, he attended a performance of Tannhäuser at the Opéra in Paris. Not normally passionate about opera, that evening he was, as he later said, ‘electrified’ by the performance, which illustrated the irrationalism of völkisch politics.39 He went home and, ‘trembling with excitement,’ sat down to work out a strategy by means of which the Jews could secede from Europe and establish an independent homeland.40 Thereafter he was a man transformed, a committed Zionist. Between his visit to Tannhäuser and his death in 1904, Herzl organised no fewer than six world congresses of Jewry, lobbying everyone for the cause, from the pope to the sultan.41 The sophisticated, educated, and aristocratic Jews wouldn’t listen to him at first. But he outthought them. There had been Zionist movements before, but usually they had appealed to personal self-interest and/or offered financial inducements. Instead, Herzl rejected a rational concept of history in favour of ‘sheer psychic energy as the motive force.’ The Jews must have their Mecca, their Lourdes, he said. ‘Great things need no firm foundation … the secret lies in movement. Hence I believe that somewhere a guidable aircraft will be discovered. Gravity overcome through movement.’42 Herzl did not specify that Zion had to be in Palestine; parts of Africa or Argentina would do just as well, and he saw no need for Hebrew to be the official language.43 Orthodox Jews condemned him as an heretic (because he plainly wasn’t the Messiah), but at his death, ten years and six congresses later, the Jewish Colonial Trust, the joint stock company he had helped initiate and which would be the backbone of any new state, had 135,000 shareholders, more than any other enterprise then existing. His funeral was attended by 10,000 Jews from all over Europe. A Jewish homeland had not yet been achieved, but the idea was no longer a heresy.44
Like Herzl, Max Weber was concerned with religion as a shared experience. Like Max Nordau and the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, he was troubled by the ‘degenerate’ nature of modern society. He differed from them in believing that what he saw around him was not wholly bad. No stranger to the ‘alienation’ that modern life could induce, he thought that group identity was a central factor in making life bearable in modern cities and that its importance had been overlooked. For several years around the turn of the century he had produced almost no serious academic work (he was on the faculty at the University of Freiburg), being afflicted by a severe depression that showed no signs of recovery until 1904. Once begun, however, few recoveries can have been so dramatic. The book he produced that year, quite different from anything he had done before, transformed his reputation.45
Prior to his illness, most of Weber’s works were dry, technical monographs on agrarian history, economics, and economic law, including studies of mediaeval trading law and the conditions of rural workers in the eastern part of Germany – hardly best-sellers. However, fellow academics were interested in his Germanic approach, which in marked contrast to British style focused on economic life within its cultural context, rather than separating out economics and politics as a dual entity, more or less self-limiting.46
A tall, stooping man, Weber had an iconic presence, like Brentano, and was full of contradictions.47 He rarely smiled – indeed his features were often clouded by worry. But it seems that his experience of depression, or simply the time it had allowed for reflection, was responsible for the change that came over him and helped produce his controversial but undoubtedly powerful idea. The study that Weber began on his return to health was on a much broader canvas than, say, the peasants of eastern Germany. It was entitled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Weber’s thesis in this book was hardly less contentious than Freud’s and, as Anthony Giddens has pointed out, it immediately provoked much the same sort of sharp critical debate. He himself saw it as a refutation of Marxism and materialism, and the themes of The Protestant Ethic cannot easily be understood without some knowledge of Weber’s intellectual background.48 He came from the same tradition as Brentano and Husserl, the tradition of Geisteswissenschaftler, which insisted on the differentiation of the sciences of nature from the study of man:49 ‘While we can “explain” natural occurrences in terms of the application of causal laws, human conduct is intrinsically meaningful, and has to be “interpreted” or “understood” in a way which has no counterpart in nature.’50 For Weber, this meant that social and psychological matters were much more relevant than purely economic or material issues. The very opening of The Protestant Ethic shows Weber’s characteristic way of thinking: B glance at the occupation statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light with remarkable frequency a situation which has several times provoked discussion in the Catholic press and literature, and in Catholic congresses in Germany, namely, the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labour, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant.’51