Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Prophet of Teutonism
Michael D. Biddiss profiles a British theorists's claims that all the greatest triumphs of civilization and culture were the products of race—and of a single race at that.
In the history of European racism, the year 1855 is particularly notable for two events. In Paris there appeared the final two volumes of Count Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, the work that, more than any other, represents the culmination of the first half-century in the history of the great delusion of Aryan supremacy.1
In the same year, in humbler Southsea, there was born Houston Stewart Chamberlain who, nearly fifty years later, was to publish The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, the study that not only summarized the work of racist philosophy in the intervening period, but also provided one of the most famous bases for its regrettable twentieth-century career.
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