A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Cultural Ferment 807

industrial world suffered “alienation” (anomie in French). Yet he optimisti­
cally believed that social problems could be solved by studying them in a
systematic, scientific manner.
Durkheim was hardly alone in thinking that urban growth, spurred on
by the arrival of rural migrants, generated social pathology of which crimi­
nality was but one manifestation. In 1895, Gustave Le Bon (1841—1931)
published The Crowd, in which he worried that modern life submerged the
individual in the “crowd.” Riots and strikes, he warned, were becoming
part of the political process. He described crowds as lurching erratically,
and sometimes dangerously, like drunks, at a time of a growing awareness
of the ravages of alcoholism. Some nationalists now worried that their peo­
ples were being undermined by “racial degeneration,” which might com­
promise the natural process of evolution by hereditary debasement.
Certain scientists claimed that significant racial differences could be iden­
tified within specific peoples, and that they accounted for soaring rates of
crime, alcoholism, insanity, syphilis, and even popular political action. An
Italian anthropologist believed that criminals showed inferior physical and
mental development and contended that they could be identified by mea­
suring their skulls.

Nietzsches Embrace of the Irrational

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

emerged in this period as the most

strident philosophical critic of

Enlightenment rationalism. The son

of a strict Protestant German minis­

ter who died when Nietzsche was

young, he was raised by his domi­

neering mother. He became a profes­

sor of classics in Basel, Switzerland.

The tormented Nietzsche, forced by

illness to leave the university, moved

to the Swiss Alps and thereafter lived

by his pen, but with little success. He

suffered a mental collapse at the age

of forty-five, after sending off tele­

grams to some of his friends signed

“The Crucified.” Nietzsche was

briefly confined in an asylum toward

the end of his life, leading one wag to

comment, “At last, the right man in

the right place.”

Nietzsche hated all religions Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher of the

equally, believing that they had irrational.