Dan Stone
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853239871
- eISBN:
- 9781846312694
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846312694
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
Before World War I there existed an intellectual turmoil in Britain as great as any in Germany, France, or Russia, as the debates over Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and eugenics in the context of early ...
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Before World War I there existed an intellectual turmoil in Britain as great as any in Germany, France, or Russia, as the debates over Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and eugenics in the context of early modernism reveal. With the rise of fascism after 1918, these debates became more ideologically driven, with science and vitalist philosophy being hailed in some quarters as saviours from bourgeois decadence, vituperated in others as heralding the onset of barbarism. This book looks at several of the leading Nietzscheans and eugenicists, and challenges the long-cherished belief that British intellectuals were fundamentally uninterested in race. The result is a study of radical ideas that are conventionally written out of histories of the politics and culture of the period.Less
Before World War I there existed an intellectual turmoil in Britain as great as any in Germany, France, or Russia, as the debates over Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and eugenics in the context of early modernism reveal. With the rise of fascism after 1918, these debates became more ideologically driven, with science and vitalist philosophy being hailed in some quarters as saviours from bourgeois decadence, vituperated in others as heralding the onset of barbarism. This book looks at several of the leading Nietzscheans and eugenicists, and challenges the long-cherished belief that British intellectuals were fundamentally uninterested in race. The result is a study of radical ideas that are conventionally written out of histories of the politics and culture of the period.