BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

extermination of weak races and the inevitability of mass suffering, however, not only provided
ammunition for virulent racists and militant imperialists, but in the process also stigmatized
social Darwinism itself as an anti-Enlightenment, anti-Utopian, and “un-Christian” excuse for
social and imperial exploitation. 65 Neo-Darwinist geneticism of the 1890s disturbed the dream of
evolutionary progress through environmental means. It also provoked a moralistic reaction from
neo-Lamarckian social reformers who targeted the influence of German biologists August
Weissmann and Ernst Haeckel and the so-called “tough” school of Darwinistic Nietzscheans. 66
The equation of Nietzsche with barbarism, Machtpolitik and Prussian militarism constituted an
important facet of the negative Social Darwinian (originally anti-Spencerian) stereotype. 67
Despite the fact that Nietzsche ridiculed Darwin’s theory, and despite the existence of a contrary
or “tender” view of Nietzsche, the common attitude prevailed that Nietzsche, as H. L. Mencken
the work of Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest” ten years before the
publication of Darwin’s famous work, but also mentions John Lubbock, who applied Darwin’s
idea of natural selection to Eurocentric racial theory.
65 Bannister, Social Darwinism, 3, 9-11, 53-54, cites quotations from Spencer’s Social
Statics, originally published in 1850, and Social Statics, Abridged and Revised (1891) to show
that he strongly reaffirmed his original conception of ruthless natural selection despite reform
efforts motivated by his theories.
66 Bannister, Social Darwinism, 132, 138. The new interest in genetics was spurred by
Weismann’s theories on heredity (germ plasm) and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s
experimental work. Haeckel synthesized folkish and racist romanticism with social Darwinist
ideology into a monistic view of man as totally subject to natural forces, a view that spurned the
scientific validity of historical and theological values. Although some British and American
writers rivaled the extremity of Haeckel’s ideas, the weaker political tradition of liberal
individualism in Germany probably allowed for greater propagation of the “collective
Darwinism” that was to become the core of Nazi ideology. See George J. Stein, “Biological
Science and the Roots of Nazism,” American Scientist, 76 (January-February 1988): 55-56.
67 Bannister, Social Darwinism, 202, 208-9.
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