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Nietzsche, however, was only one of the thinkers and artists in the intellectual revolution of the fin de siècle who attacked the shared assumption of mainstream politics – the liberal conception of society as an aggregate of formally equal, self-seeking individuals – with their exhortations to world-historical tasks and hardness. Henri Bergson captivated many artists in France and Italy, including Proust, with his theories of intuition, involuntary memory and élan vital, which also influenced many prevalent political notions such as collective consciousness of a class or race, the esprit of the nation and the sovereignty of the individual.
The most popular among these thinkers was Herbert Spencer with his notion of a self-made man who overcomes all obstacles, biological and social, in his appointment with destiny. Spencer believed, among many things, that a race of Supermen would rise after industrial society had accomplished its task of weeding out the unfit. His medley of ideas, variously interpreted, consumed and appropriated, found an awestruck global audience. Spencer himself, towards the end of his long life, confessed that ‘I detest that conception of social progress which presents as its aim, increase of population, growth of wealth, spread of commerce.’ However, for budding Egyptian, Indian and Chinese nationalists as much as for Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Spencer had defined nothing less than the laws of social evolution and progress. (Exasperated by the adoration of Spencer by fellow Indians, Gandhi in Hind Swaraj (1909) quoted G. K. Chesterton’s sarcastic remark, ‘What is the good of Indian national spirit if they cannot protect themselves from Herbert Spencer?’)
Many others in the same cluster of thought as Spencer spoke of unconscious impulses and heroic striving, heredity and environment, the rediscovery of the uncivilized within human souls, national greatness and regeneration, and the struggle for existence. A common urge among them was the surrender of the effete rational self to irrational forces that were the true fount of creativity and energy. War in particular came to be widely celebrated, especially among educated classes.
In even relatively affluent England, there appeared, as J. A. Hobson wrote in The Psychology of Jingoism (1901) a ‘coarse patriotism, fed by the wildest rumours and the most violent appeals to hate and the animal lust of blood’. Hobson deplored these pathologies. So did the poet Edward Carpenter, who sought with the Fellowship of the New Life (founded in 1883, with the sexologist Havelock Ellis, the feminist Edith Lees and the animal-rights activist Henry Stephens) ‘a universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour’.
How to Be a New Man
Spencer was appalled during the Boer War by bellicose poets and journalists, and the general militarization of public life. England had become, he wrote, ‘a fit habitat for hooligans’. Many more writers and thinkers were eager to intensify racial, class and national passions. ‘It is war,’ Treitschke argued, ‘which turns a people into a nation.’ The German historian clarified that the ‘virile’ features of history are ‘unsuited’ to ‘feminine natures’. Even Max Weber, a sensitive and troubled figure, sneered at the unmanly and immature bourgeoisie and the ‘Anglo-Saxon conventions of society’. Agonizing over Germany’s unfitness for international competition, he warned in 1895 that Germans ‘do not have peace and happiness to hand down to our descendants, but rather the eternal struggle to preserve and raise the quality of our national species’. Weber would later welcome a ‘great’ and ‘wonderful’ war in 1914, greeting guests at his home in his reserve officer’s uniform.
‘Societies perish because they are degenerate,’ asserted the French writer Arthur de Gobineau (a friend of both Tocqueville and Wagner). His screed Essay on the Inequality of Races (1853–5), justly neglected on publication, was rediscovered after France’s humiliating defeat to Germany in 1871 sparked a desperate search for recipes of regeneration. For racial theorists, it became an intellectual resource along with The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century (1899), an extended hymn to the Teutonic spirit by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s notoriously anti-Semitic English son-in-law.
Hitler attended Chamberlain’s funeral in 1927. Some startlingly diverse figures at the turn of the century enacted in their writings the dialectic of decadence and rebirth fully worked out later in Mein Kampf. In Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau, the co-founder with Theodor Herzl of the World Zionist Organization, identified a range of culprits, from Wilde to Zola, for widespread emasculation. ‘Things as they are,’ he wrote, ‘totter and plunge. They are allowed to reel and fall because man is weary.’ Nordau soon became obsessed, along with other Jewish readers of Herbert Spencer, with creating a new generation of Muskeljudentum, literally muscular, virile, warrior-like Jews.
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The fixation with manliness cut across apparent ideological barriers. Maxim Gorky, one of the many Bolshevik adepts of Nietzsche, hoped for a Russian Superman to lead the masses to liberation. Undaunted by Lenin’s denunciation of ‘literary supermen’, he would later hail Soviet man as the ‘New Man’, who was pitting his human will against intransigent nature. Likewise, Mussolini hoped to fabricate a ‘New Italian’, who would talk and gesticulate less (and also eat less pasta) while being driven by a ‘single will’. The novelist and Catholic monarchist Maurice Barrès was one of the French aesthetes of the time who moved from hating decadent bourgeois to exalting a national self, which, defined by heredity, tested its will against such treacherous ‘others’ as cosmopolitans, socialists and Jews.