Darwin to Hitler Richard Weikart Explores the Impact of Social Darwinism in Germany

About the Book

From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany by Richard Weikart was released in 2004 (paperback edition in 2006) with Palgrave Macmillan in New York, a major publisher of historical scholarship. In this compelling and painstakingly researched work of intellectual history, Richard Weikart explains the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality. He demonstrates that many leading Darwinian biologists and social thinkers in Germany believed that Darwinism overturned traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics, especially those pertaining to the sacredness of human life. Many of these thinkers supported moral relativism, yet simultaneously exalted evolutionary “fitness” (especially in terms of intelligence and health) as the highest arbiter of morality. Weikart concludes that Darwinism played a key role not only in the rise of eugenics, but also in euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination, all ultimately embraced by the Nazis. He convincingly makes the disturbing argument that Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian principles rather than nihilistic ones. From Darwin to Hitler is a provocative yet balanced work that should encourage a rethinking of the historical impact that Darwinism had on the course of events in the twentieth century.

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About the Author

Richard Weikart is Emeritus Professor of History at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to HitlerHitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary ProgressHitler’s Religion: The Twisted Ideas that Drove the Third Reich, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, and Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. His most recent book is Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing (2024). He completed his Ph.D. in modern European history at the University of Iowa in 1994, receiving the biennial prize of the Forum for History of Human Sciences for the best dissertation in that field. His revised dissertation, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein, was published in 1999.

Learn more about Richard Weikart