Was Hitler a Darwinian? Robert J. Richards The University of Chicago
The Darwinian underpinnings of Nazi racial ideology are patently obvious. Hitler's chapter on "Nation and Race" in Mein Kampf discusses the racial struggle for existence in clear Darwinian terms. Richard Weikart, Historian, Cal. State, 1 Stanislaus Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, 2.
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The Issues regarding a Supposed Conceptually Causal Connection . 3. Darwinian Theory and Racial Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. The Racial Ideology of Gobineau and Chamberlain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Chamberlain and Hitler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Mein Kampf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. Struggle for Existence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8. The Political Sources of Hitler’s Anti-Semitism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9. Ethics and Social Darwinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10. Was the Biological Community under Hitler Darwinian? . . . . . . . . . . . . 11. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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1. Introduction Several scholars and many religiously conservative thinkers have recently charged that Hitler’s ideas about race and racial struggle derived from the theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), either directly or through intermediate sources. So, for example, the historian Richard Weikart, in his book From Darwin to Hitler (2004), maintains: “No matter how crooked the road was from Darwin to Hitler, clearly Darwinism and eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially for the Nazi
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Richard Weikart, “Was It Immoral for "Expelled" to Connect Darwinism and Nazi Racism?” (http://www.discovery.org/a/5069.)
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