Book Review

Methods/Theory

Just when it seemed that every possible source for the origins of fascist ideology had been examined, Daniel Gasman proposes a new candidate for the role of fascist intellectual godfather in the person of Ernst Haeckel, the late nineteenth-century biologist and zoologist. According to Gasman, who, if nothing else, is not afraid to take sweeping positions, Haeckel is not just the key thinker in the development of fascism. He is the crucial inspiration of much of modern art, including symbolist poetry, the works of Paul Gaugin, Henri Matisse, and Edvard Munch, and Art Nouveau. As one might expect, positivist and Social Darwinist thinkers are also indebted to Haeckel, but Gasman argues that even antipositivists like Georges Sorel and the Italian modernists Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini based their thinking on Haeckel's theories.

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Haeckel argued that one single evolutionary force guided all nature including man and that it would provide the basis for all social laws. He resolutely rejected Enlightenment rationalism and any kind of transcendental dualism, especially Judeo-Christian theology, in favor of a strict monism that bound human history to the laws of nature and individuals to the larger racial or ethnic group. He stressed that instinctual and primitive impulses, not individual rational choice and intelligence, guided human history. He fused this with an almost mystical vision of monism as a kind of secular religion that negated human progress and called for man's acceptance of the primitive and subordination to powerful natural forces.

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