From Darwin to Hitler Now in Paperback

Richard Weikert's very helpful and illuminating book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany has been released in paperback. Dr. Weikert wrote  "Eugenocide: Darwinism and the Rise of German Eugenics" for the Darwin's Last Stand? issue we published last summer.

You can read some of the reviews of his book here. The short review I wrote for our Book Notice section went:

FROM DARWIN TO HITLER:

EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY

by Richard Weikart

Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

(312 pages, $59.95, hardback)

Beginning with Darwin himself, Darwinism has never been a merely scientific theory, but a way of understanding the world that radically challenged the traditional Western mind — and in the hands of some very prominent scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, challenged it in ways that appall even secular people today. From Darwin to Hitler traces perhaps the most notable example of this: the use of Darwinism as the basis for ethics in Germany from Darwin’s time to the first world war, and the resulting ethics’ effect in devaluing human life and justifying the elimination of the “inferior.”

As the title suggests, Weikart finds “significant historical connections between Darwinism and Hitler’s ideology,” though he carefully qualifies his development of this point and insists that it is wrong to call the German Darwinists “proto-Nazi, as though Nazism inevitably flowed from their views.” He notes, however, that even when they “were poles apart politically,” these Darwinists often held nearly the same views on ethics, the value of human life, and racial ideology, and his book carefully examines the inhuman views — which were perfectly logical developments from Darwin’s theories — held by men who were among Germany’s intellectual leaders.

The reason, Weikart shows, is that while many Darwinians thought “Darwinism delivered a death-blow to the prevailing Judeo-Christian ethics, as well as Kantian ethics and any other fixed moral code,” they would not accept “complete moral relativism.” They believed in “one fixed point of reference — the process of evolution itself. Since morality arose through evolution, they argued that the purpose of morality is to advance the evolutionary process.”

An assertion, readers will note, that Darwinism itself does not in fact justify and that authorized any action thought to bring evolutionary “progress.” It is this Weikart exposes in a carefully developed and heavily evidenced argument.

Besides being an important contribution to intellectual history, From Darwin to Hitler usefully upsets the sanitized version of Darwinism presented in the schools and the media, which are ever eager to use the sins of Christians as an argument against Christianity. The book reflects impressive research (the endnotes alone take up 44 pages of small print and the bibliography another 23) and includes many German works never before translated into English. Weikart, whose Eugenicide” appears in this issue, is a professor of modern European history at the University of California, Stanislaus, and a fellow of the Discovery Institute.

You can also find three of Dr. Weikert's articles and one of his lectures here on this page of his website.