Was Hitler a Darwinian?

“These essays display the impressive range of Robert J. Richards’s abilities as an intellectual historian and historian of science, as they explore the disparate sources of Darwinian thought in romanticism, theology, ethics, aesthetics, and linguistics. They dispel the notion that Darwin saw the world as purposeless, amoral, and red in tooth and claw, and they bring out the complexity and nuance of Darwin’s accounts of the origins of mind, morals, language, emotions, and humanity. It becomes clear, even before we get to the title essay, that Darwin was an unlikely fountainhead for Nazi ideology, and, for that matter, a poor figurehead for other -isms sometimes connected to him, from social Darwinism, to neo-Darwinism, to atheism and materialism. Richards also gives us an unusually sympathetic treatment of Ernst Haeckel, defends him against oft-repeated accusations of fraud, and reveals a strong affinity between his Darwinism and Darwin’s own.”

“This collection of essays by Robert J. Richards, today’s preeminent historian of evolutionary theory, shows the scholarship and intellectual daring we have come to expect from this author. Knowledgeable and sympathetic toward Charles Darwin, Richards also shows great empathy for Darwin’s contemporaries, from supporters like Ernst Haeckel to rivals like Richard Owen and Herbert Spencer. Witty and engaging on the surface, Richards’s authoritative dismissal of the hypothesis that the roots of Nazi thinking are to be found in the fertile soil of the Origin of Species proves that the volume is held together by a deep moral seriousness and the conviction that the past really matters to the present.”