INHERIT THE WINDBAGS:

Barzun's case against both Darwin and Marx is that both are writers of evasive, convoluted, confused prose that obscures not only truth itself but their own scientistic, mechanistic premises about the meaninglessness of mind, free will, and purpose in human affairs. He himself had started out his own academic career by writing a strongly anti-racialist book in 1937, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, at a time when Darwinian "racial science" was riding high not only in Germany but throughout the West, leading to eugenic laws in several American states even before the Nazi national policy of eliminating "lives unworthy of life." Four years later, in Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Barzun went on to write: "No doubt the 'favoured races' mentioned on the title page of Darwin's Origin of Species referred to pigeons, but the extension of the term to man was easy to make; indeed it seemed to receive Darwin's own approval on many a page of [his] Descent of Man, where the struggle of races was a part of evolutionary advance." In 1999, Terence Kealey, lecturer in clinical biochemistry at Cambridge University, noted that "the only professional group in Germany to register a greater than 50 percent membership of the Nazi Party before 1933, when the careerists joined, was that of academic biologists. Hitler believed in the state planning of society and in eugenics, and so did they." The English man of letters A. N. Wilson, author of a recent book on Darwin, wrote in 2006: "Darwin, the product of British imperialism, was surely the father, among other things, of European fascism." And the American historian Richard Weikart has made this argument clearly and in documented detail in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004; see my review, "Murderous Science," in NR, March 28, 2005).

In the aftermath of Barzun's own groundbreaking 1941 critique of mechanistic Darwinism and its sociopolitical uses and effects, and clearly influenced by it, two other powerful books were published that lucidly covered the relevant and related issues -- Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) and Gertrude Himmelfarb's exhaustive, detailed Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959). Like Barzun himself, Hofstadter and Himmelfarb are among the great American historians of the last 75 years, both recipients of the highest honors and commendations; yet the books are oddly neglected in our time, when renewed conceptions of "sociobiology" and "evolutionary psychology" are again widely promoted and uncritically taught.

Following on the efforts of historians such as Hofstadter, Himmelfarb, and Weikart, philosophical and scientific accounts of the deficiencies of Darwinism have been made by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, 2012; see my review, "Rationality vs. Darwinism," NR, November 12, 2012) and by scientists such as the award-winning English science writer and physician James LeFanu (Why Us?, 2009; see my review, "Science Illuminated," Modern Age, fall 2011) and the geophysicist and historian of science Stephen C. Meyer in three major books that have attracted great attention: Signature in the Cell (2009), Darwin's Doubt (2013), and, most recently, Return of the God Hypothesis (2021).

Regarding Marx and Marxism, in 1980, before the fall of Western Communism, the émigré Hungarian-American physicist and historian and philosopher of science Stanley L. Jaki wrote that "the enthusiasm for Darwinism of the advocates of the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . is all too understandable. Marx was quick to notice the usefulness of Darwinist theory for promoting class struggle." The discrediting of Marxism has mainly been done by the course of large-scale human history since the fall of Western Communism in 1990, including firsthand, first-rate Russian documentary literature by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and by exhaustive historical surveys such as the French Black Book on Communism (1997) by Stéphane Courtois and his associates. In the same vein, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their biography Mao (2005) have examined the crimes of Communism in China, and the theoretical pretensions of the political philosophy have been decisively analyzed and debunked by the great émigré Polish ex-Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski in his three-volume Main Currents of Marxism (1976).

But Barzun's short anatomy of Marx and Marxism, quietly devastating, is permanently worth reading for its clear understanding and lucid explanation of the self-contradictory and damaging character of Marxism and all forms of reductionism. He insists on the perennial need for an at least minimally accurate description of human personality, the reality of the human mind, and the scope of human free will.

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