Hot on the heels of Joe Keysor’s book “Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible” California State University Associate Professor Richard Weikart has recently published a new book.True Freethinker reviewed “Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible” in two posts:
The new book is entitled “Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress” and is described thusly at Amazon:
In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler’s evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler’s immorality flowed from a coherent ethic.Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race.
This ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.
We touched upon this theme in the post From Zeitgeist to Poltergeist, Part 12 of 13
From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany
From Darwin to Hitler elucidates the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality throughout history.
This book is a provocative yet balanced work that addresses a wide range of topics, from the value of human life to sexual mortality, to racial extermination.
Pervious works by Richard Weikart include the following:
From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany
From Darwin to Hitler elucidates the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality throughout history.
This book is a provocative yet balanced work that addresses a wide range of topics, from the value of human life to sexual mortality, to racial extermination.
This important new study is an intellectual history exploring the reception of Darwinism by prominent German socialist theoriests: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engles, Friedrich Albert Lange, Ludwig BŸchner, August Bebel, Karl Katusky, and Eduard Bernstein.
It relies not only on published books, articles, and speeches by these men, but also on some unpublished correspondence. In addition, one chapter covers the anti-socialist stance of prominent Darwinian biologists, including Charles Darwin and the foremost champion of Darwinism in Germany, Ernst Haeckel. Darwinism’s effect on German socialism’s view of eugenics, race and religion are also discussed.