Politický mýtus, Thomas Robert Malthus a vznik árijské rasové imaginace

Abstract

The emergence of Nazi ideology and the rise of Nazism represented one of the most dramatic and tragic events of modern times, the consequences of which humanity is still dealing with today. The doctrine of the superiority of the Aryan race was an integral part of Nazi doctrine and served as a “scientific” justification for German expansionism and the policy of ethnic genocide. The Nazi conception of the German nation as the chosen Aryan racial community was identified as an example of a modern political myth by Henry Tudor in the early 1970s [Tudor 1972: 16]. We will attempt to explain the rise of Aryan ideology using the concept of political myth and Blumenberg’s notion of “work on myth” as the result of the long development of Western genealogical speculation, which underwent a process of secularization during the Enlightenment and once combined with stimuli coming from contemporary natural sciences, was used under the conditions of modern industrial society to “rationally” legitimize inequalities between people. A parallel development, consisting in the attempt to deny by scientific arguments the equality of human beings, despite the spread of liberal ideas inspired, among others, by the American and French Revolutions, took place in the economic sciences, where the doctrine of the British political economist Thomas Robert Malthus gained prominence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Malthusianism, Aryan race ideology, Social Darwinism, or the eugenics movement thus had a common denominator, which Friedrich August von Hayek called the “counter-revolution of science” or Zeev Sternhell “counter-Enlightenment”.