The spirit of history seemed to falter in its march, or at any rate require a massive push from human beings. One proposed answer, calamitous in its consequences but emerging from the experience of liberalism and democracy and meant to overcome their failure, was to have gigantic state projects, in which non-bourgeois elites would harness the strength of the masses – what we now call ‘totalitarianism’.
An intellectual revolution prepared the way for it, starting with Darwin’s idea that evolutionary progress was contingent on a violent struggle for existence. Social Darwinism, as it rapidly developed, applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection – of the progress of species by adaptation to changing local environments, preserving the ‘favourable variations’ and rejecting the ‘injurious variations’ – to society at large. Progress still looked as inevitable as when Adam Smith first linked it to mimetic desire and aggressive mutual competition, but after Darwin and the rise of the masses the workings of the invisible hand no longer seemed adequate.
*
Drastic measures were needed; and eugenic thinking, as it became respectable in the wake of popular Darwinism, fed on a widely felt need for a systematic alternative to an old model that looked unsuitable for a struggle that only the fittest would survive. So did the vogue for looking at the world as a struggle between races. Bogus notions of the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Jewish’ races had swiftly gone mainstream in the second half of the nineteenth century along with anxieties about birthrates, immigration and mass politics. E. A. Freeman, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, was no outlier in his claim in the early 1880s that the United States ‘would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it’.
Imperialists in Britain and America considered it their manifest destiny as members of superior races to rule over their dark-skinned inferiors – their ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half-child’, as Kipling put it. For other Europeans envying Anglo-America’s territories and resources, racial categories began to seem an ethical as well as a scientific way to classify and organize a nation (and to exclude inferior and undesirable people). Anything that promotes, in Hitler’s later words, ‘the health and vitality of the human species was morally good’. Thus, race in the late nineteenth century appeared, in France as well as Germany, an attractive collective subject, a replacement for the selfish liberal individualist.
Social disorder and economic crisis also helped the rise of Marxist parties, and made class, the working class, and specifically trade unions, appear as another likely collective agent of history and spearhead of social renewal. As the nineteenth century ended, a range of haughty doctrines of progress through willed human intervention exerted a broad emotional appeal among educated men. And there were highbrow intellectuals at hand to offer textual encouragement, and even specific guidelines to agitators like D’Annunzio. Soon after he went insane in 1888, Nietzsche’s ideas of the self-overcoming superman, the will to power, and the morality of war started to explode across the world.
Obscure for much of his life, a spate of translations made Nietzsche the prophet of restless young men everywhere. Nehru noted the rage for him at Cambridge University in the first decade of the twentieth century. But young Jews in Russia, Chinese exiles in Japan, Muslims in Lahore and many other men acutely conscious of their vulnerability were fortifying themselves through Nietzschean resolves to ‘resist all sentimental weakness’ and to acknowledge that ‘Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overwhelming of the alien and the weaker, oppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own form, incorporation, and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.’
*
Artists like Flaubert and Baudelaire had long been railing against the bourgeois cults of humanitarian progress, and spinning dreams of virility. Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil (1857) saw descent into the abyss as the only antidote to the tedium and soullessness of life with the conventionally enlightened bourgeois. In between painstakingly mocking the latter, and its cults of progress, Flaubert indulged in elaborate fantasies of violence and sex in his historical fictions, Salammb? (1862) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). J. K. Huysmans in à Rebours (1884) detailed his attempts to overcome his disgust at ‘everything that surrounds me’. Zola in his late nineteenth-century novels deplored at length the sterility, vanity and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie. Max Nordau’s best-selling broadside Degeneration (1892) fixed the characteristic features – bleak pessimism, ennui, enervation – of the fin de siècle sensibility.
But Nietzsche seemed to answer most thrillingly, as the century ended, a general feeling of malaise: he seemed best able to discern, as Lu Xun, China’s iconic modern writer, claimed, ‘the falsity and the imbalances’ of nineteenth-century civilization. He confirmed the sense that old practices and institutions were failing to respond to the imperatives of development and progress, but he also seemed to amplify a widely felt need for a New Man and New Order.
Nietzsche’s writings provided a kind of pivot into a new set of questions and range of possibilities, which had not been present a century earlier when Rousseau first offered his political cure – a coherent and united community of patriotic citizens – to the discontents of modernity. He seemed to be turning away from sterile reason to life-sustaining myth, from moral notions of good and evil, truth and falsehood, to aesthetic values of creativity, vitality and heroism. As a detractor of both liberal capitalism and its socialist alternative, Nietzsche seemed to be offering, with his will to power, an unprecedented scope for human beings to reshape the world: to create, in effect, one’s own objects of desire, values, ideology and myths.
To his youthful followers across the world, he provided the intellectual framework for several quintessentially modern and pressing projects: the radical trans-valuation of inherited values, the revolt against authority and its shibboleths, the creation of new forms of superabundant life, and politics in the grand mode. This is why Zarathustra’s promise of a great leap from the debased present into a healthier culture, even a superior mode of being, recommended Nietzsche to many Bolsheviks (much to Lenin’s displeasure), the left-wing Lu Xun, and fascists as much as to anarchists, feminists and aesthetes. Iconoclasts of all kinds could interpret Nietzschean self-overcoming as a call to grandiose political action as well as an apolitical exhortation to individual reinvention. The German writer Lily Braun wasn’t the sole fin de siècle feminist to claim to ‘need the flashing weapons from his armoury’.