Evolutionist doctrines translated middle-class ambition into biological race hierarchy

Evidence

But before Nazism, in the course of its totalitarian policy, attempted to change man into a beast, there were numerous efforts to develop him on a strictly hereditary basis into a god. Not only Herbert Spencer, but all the early evolutionists and Darwinists “had as strong a faith in humanity’s angelic future as in man’s simian origin.” Selected inheritance was believed to result in “hereditary genius,” and again aristocracy was held to be the natural outcome, not of politics, but of natural selection, of pure breeding. To transform the whole nation into a natural aristocracy from which choice exemplars would develop into geniuses and supermen, was one of the many “ideas” produced by frustrated liberal intellectuals in their dreams of replacing the old governing classes by a new “elite” through nonpolitical means. At the end of the century, writers treated political topics in terms of biology and zoology as a matter of course, and zoologists wrote “Biological Views of our Foreign Policy” as though they had detected an infallible guide for statesmen. All of them put forward new ways to control and regulate the “survival of the fittest” in accordance with the national interests of the English people. … The most dangerous aspect of these evolutionist doctrines is that they combined the inheritance concept with the insistence on personal achievement and individual character which had been so important for the self-respect of the nineteenth-century middle class. This middle class wanted scientists who could prove that the great men, not the aristocrats, were the true representatives of the nation, in whom the “genius of the race” was personified. These scientists provided an ideal escape from political responsibility when they “proved” the early statement of Benjamin Disraeli that the great man is “the personification of race, its choice exemplar.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 475

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Defines how ‘hereditary genius’ and ‘choice exemplar’ recast aristocracy as natural selection rather than politics.
• XREF: Extends the Darwin/evolutionist thread and connects to later totalitarian attempt to ‘change man into a beast’ that Arendt develops in the Nazi chapters.

Related

• Evolutionist doctrines fused heredity with individual merit to excuse political elites from responsibility (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Doctrines of civilizational decay are intimately connected with race-thinking #complicates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 457
• Biological race theory predates Darwin and supported colonialism #complicates (0.78) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 77