In Chapter 2, the human is defined for the purpose of legally advocating for the needs of humanity. Biological considerations are made, including the history of Social Darwinism and the misuse of selective traits to legally discriminate.

In Chapter 6, the history of the rule and role of law over time demonstrates a longstanding but eroding dedication to human well-being, particularly in natural law and constitutional principles derived from natural law. A strict adherence to traditional natural law is criticized for its selective support of certain traits as universal.

This chapter outlines distinctions between national and nationalist uses of folk music as a frame for discussing its slipperiness as a concept and the political and identitarian implications of its performance, its collection and publication, its use in education and in religion, and its adoption into works of art music. Consideration of folk practices in Britain, France, Spain, and the USA from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries is combined with special attention to expressions of Celtic otherness within nation states. The chapter also addresses the manner in which sub-national musical nationalisms (or ethnic nationalisms), operate as positive symbols of subaltern resistance and celebration when folk or folk-like material is imported into the art music of late nineteenth-century concert halls. At the same time, the chapter addresses the ‘primitivism’ of folk music and the connections nineteenth-century thinkers made between national folk musics and the precepts of social Darwinism.

This chapter describes and analyzes the role that medicine has historically played in relation to broader cultural attachments to the idea of progress. It offers a historical overview of how the interest – or disinterest – in progress is entangled with contemporary understandings of what it means to be healthy or ill and the medical priorities of the time. Improved medical care had very different meanings depending on the respective value ascribed to individual and societal well-being, attitudes toward death, and the role of physicians. While contemporary ideas about medical progress rest on very different understandings of the human from other cultural and historical contexts, their emergence from a combination of scientific knowledge and ethical preoccupations recurs throughout history. Even as the capacity and desire to intervene in the human body with technological means has increased, both utopian and modest visions of progress in medicine have historical antecedents. The historical overview that follows is crucial for understanding how answers to the question “What is progress in medicine?” have always been contested and historically contingent.

This chapter explores fascist urban imaginary – the ways in which European fascists responded to, and sought to reorder, the modern city – and how these visions informed projects in Italy, Germany and Spain. Drawing on Social Darwinist and social hygienic discourses, fascists regarded cities antagonistically, as epicentres of cosmopolitanism, degenerate modernism, racial corruption and sterility. The city, like the nation as whole, was a space to be conquered, purged and regenerated. Yet at the same time, they also embraced the urban environment as a showcase for national greatness, a site of political ritual and a vehicle for the totalitarian transformation of society.

This tension shaped the policies of fascist regimes, especially as directed towards the capitals of Rome, Berlin and Madrid. Through demolition, excavation and construction, they used urban space to invoke past golden ages, attempted to leave an enduring imprint on the built environment, and formulated utopian plans for cities of the future. The chapter also considers the afterlives of fascist urban interventions and their significance for contemporary memory politics.

Constitutionalism and communist totalitarianism are both foreign ideologies and institutions that were imported into China. The failure of China’s attempts at constitutionalism cleared the path for the rise of communist totalitarianism. This chapter examines the shortcomings of the constitutional reforms and the Republican Revolution, as dictated by China’s institutional genes of the time. It reviews the ineffective Hundred Days’ Reform and the impact of Social Darwinism, which found deep roots in China’s institutional genes and profoundly influenced the later Chinese reception of communist totalitarianism. The text also discusses the unsuccessful constitutional reforms that lacked popular support and chronicles the collapse of the Qing Empire following the Xinhai Revolution. Additionally, the chapter analyzes the failures of the Republican Revolution, attributing them to the absence of those institutional genes necessary for establishing constitutionalism as well as to the enduring institutional gene of “secret societies,” which deeply influenced the revolutionary parties.

This chapter explores the evolution of racial ideas before and after the First World War, comparing German-speaking central Europe with the rest of Europe, the USA, or Japan. It analyzes nuances and tensions in German racial discourse between conceptions of Volk and Rasse, both of which might connote “race” in the broader English sense of the term; between Germandom, which privileged the idea of a pure Nordic race native to northern Europe, and Aryanism, which emphasized the racial superiority of multiple “Aryan” nations and peoples; and competing notions of eugenics, including concepts such as “Systemrasse” and “Vitalrasse,” with the former highlighting the differential quality of nations and races and the latter focused on improving the quality of a given population. Finally, it highlights the porous boundaries between conceptions derived from science and eugenics and those emerging from humanist, religio-mythological, and esoteric conceptions of blood and soil. Nazism drew equally on “scientific” eugenic and more “humanist” traditions, which were not unique to Germany but together created the syncretic apotheosis of race-thinking that undergirded the Holocaust.

The third chapter traces the linkages between evolutionary science and aestheticism through the work of popular science writer Grant Allen and the arch aesthete Oscar Wilde, who shared a penchant for socialist politics as well as a firm belief in the truth of both Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories. More importantly, Allen and Wilde were similarly repulsed by the cultural implications of social Darwinism, and for that reason looked to sexual selection – and, by extension, aesthetics – for a life-affirming alternative to the pressures of Darwinian competition. In their fiction and critical prose from the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, both Allen and Wilde eventually arrived at a markedly utopian aesthetics that posited individual self-culture, through the emancipated pursuit of pleasure, as the key to radical social change. This chapter thus sheds light on aestheticism’s late-century polemical turn, which made it a lightning rod in the sexual controversies of the fin de siècle.

Several versions of ‘social Darwinism’ flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, along with ideologies derived from non-Darwinian evolution theories. They exploited discoveries of fossil hominids including Neanderthals and the Piltdown fraud to construct rival explanations of the emergence of human characteristics that might shape social development. The linear hierarchy of races erected in the nineteenth century remained the basis of many popular accounts, even though professional anthropologists began to turn their backs on it. Ideologies based on national or racial competition were advocated even by writers who did not accept the Darwinian theory of competition within populations. Fear of racial degeneration fuelled the eugenics movement’s calls for the elimination of ‘harmful’ characters, although the input from genetics encouraged an analogy with artificial rather than natural selection.

This chapter traces the concept of an “Irish race” as it appeared and developed in historical writing. It opens with a brief survey of the legacy of medieval and early-modern tropes of otherness in English descriptions of the Irish population, as well as in vernacular Gaelic poetry that responded to colonization, and in antiquarian writings about national origins. It then charts the influences of enlightenment discourse on racial differences and the formulation of nineteenth century anthropological concepts of race. Distinctions between Anglo-Saxons and Celts, championed by eminent English historians, were inverted in popular Irish histories, in which ahistorical notions of a distinct “Irish race” were a marker for innate national uniqueness. Whereas racial prejudice was prevalent in Victorian political writing, Irish nationalist histories showed a fluid approach to race, which was used to forward claims for a distinguished ancient pedigree worthy of sovereignty and to foster a transnational bond with diaspora communities worldwide. Having played a prominent role in the Irish Revival through to the early years of independence, the language of race was practically expunged from Irish historiography in the mid-twentieth century, and yet the appeal of racial distinctiveness has not entirely vanished.

Chapter 9 traces worker repression in and around the 1877 worker protests. The crucible of low-road capitalism delivered the Great Strikes of 1877, but the layers of enforcement - from citizens and local police to militia and national troops - reveal the exclusive nature of the new industrial order. Since the Panic of 1873, railroad corporations had maintained profitability by lowering the wages of their workers. By 1877, workers’ wages moved from unequal to unsustainable as many now earned half their 1872 pay. While social and political leaders spoke sympathetically of laborers and their low earnings at the start of the Great Strikes, soon, in response to violent acts of working-class resistance (usually against corporate property), such rhetoric disappeared. Instead, these leaders framed workers as vagabonds and criminals - persons in need of surveillance and control. The workers’ violence was used as a reason to attack workingmen’s bodies and labor mutualism. When mixed with the hostile differences of liberal society, differences intended to keep wages low and the working class divided, the laborers on the bottom endured the greatest physical and economic harm.

John Gould’s father was a gardener. A very, very good one – good enough to be head of the Royal Gardens at Windsor. John apprenticed, too, becoming a gardener in his own right at Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, in 1825. As good as he was at flowers and trees, birds became young John Gould’s true passion early in life. Like John Edmonstone, John Gould (1804–1881) adopted Charles Waterton’s preservation techniques that kept taxidermied bird feathers crisp and vibrant for decades (some still exist in museums today), and he began to employ the technique to make extra cash. He sold preserved birds and their eggs to fancy Eton schoolboys near his father’s work. His collecting side-hustle soon landed him a professional post: curator and preserver of the new Zoological Society of London. They paid him £100 a year, a respectable sum for an uneducated son of a gardener, though not enough to make him Charles Darwin’s social equal (Darwin initially received a £400 annual allowance from his father plus £10,000 as a wedding present).

Darwin claimed that On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was only an “abstract” of that much longer book he had begun to write in 1856, after his irreverent meeting with J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, and T. V. Wollaston, and Lyell’s exasperated encouragement in May. But he never completed that larger book. Instead, he worked on plants and pigeons and collected information through surveys from other naturalists and professional specimen hunters like Alfred Russel Wallace for the better part of a decade.

For all their scientific prowess and public renown, there is no comparable Lyell-ism, Faraday-ism, Einstein-ism, Curie-ism, Hawking-ism, or deGrasse-Tyson-ism. So, there must be something even more powerful than scientific ideas alone caught in the net of this ism attached to Darwin. And whatever the term meant, it’s fair to say that Darwinism frightened Bryan.