Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Extremes of Englishness
- 1 Oscar Levy: A Nietzschean Vision
- 2 Anthony Mario Ludovici: A ‘Light-Weight Superman’
- 3 Nietzsche and Eugenics
- 4 Race and Eugenics
- 5 The ‘Lethal Chamber’ in Eugenic Thought
- Conclusion: From ‘Underman’ to ‘Underclass’
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Nietzsche and Eugenics
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Extremes of Englishness
- 1 Oscar Levy: A Nietzschean Vision
- 2 Anthony Mario Ludovici: A ‘Light-Weight Superman’
- 3 Nietzsche and Eugenics
- 4 Race and Eugenics
- 5 The ‘Lethal Chamber’ in Eugenic Thought
- Conclusion: From ‘Underman’ to ‘Underclass’
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
To Sir Francis Galton belongs the honour of founding the Science of Eugenics. To Friedrich Nietzsche belongs the honour of founding the Religion of Eugenics … Both aim at a Superman, not a Napoleonic individual, but an ideal of a race of supermen, as superior to the present mankind – many of whom, alas! have not even completed the stage of transition from animal to man – as man is superior to the worm.
Maximilian Mügge, ‘Eugenics and the Superman’, Eugenics Review, 1.3, 1909, p. 191.Nietzsche is the spiritual father and forerunner of the Eugenists.
Charles Sarolea, German Problems and Personalities, 1917, p. 92.‘The old tablets of morality are broken, and the new ones are only half-written.’ With these words Alexander Tille ended his book, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche (1895), ushering in a process, which still continues, of making use of Nietzsche both to diagnose a modern condition of godlessness, and to find something to fill the gap left by God's death. It would probably be true to say that the new tablets of the law are still only half written, if they are even that much written (and perhaps postmodernism means accepting, even celebrating that fact), but in the first decades of the twentieth century interpretations of Nietzsche combined with the new science of eugenics to form a potent attempt to formulate a new code of morals. Why this combination came about, how it was articulated, and what were its results, are the subjects of this chapter.
In his book on Nietzsche, for the second edition of which Oscar Levy wrote a glowing preface, George Chatterton-Hill, the Geneva-based sociologist, wrote of Nietzsche's masters and slaves as constituting two separate races. Chatterton-Hill tried hard to clarify this claim:
By this division, Nietzsche does not mean arbitrarily to divide the human species into two anthropological races. His meaning is that, given an infinite number of races, or of ‘ethnies’, which is the term preferred by the anthroposociological school, those races may, alike from the physical and mental point of view, be roughly divided into a superior and inferior race.
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- Breeding SupermanNietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, pp. 62 - 93Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2002