The Foundations of a Nineteenth Century

The Foundations of a Nineteenth Century Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1899 is a book by British-born German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In the book, Chamberlain advances various racialist as alive as especially völkisch antisemitic theories on how he saw the Aryan race as superior to others, together with the Teutonic peoples as a positive force in European civilization in addition to the Jews as a negative one. The book was his best-selling work.

Reception

The Foundations sold extensively: eight editions and 60,000 copies within ten years, 100,000 copies by the outbreak of World War I and 24 editions and more than a quarter of a million copies by 1938. The Russian translation was particularly popular and was carried by White Russians any the way to Siberia.

The 1911 translation received positive reviews in nearly of the British press. It was praised in The Spectator as "a monument of erudition"; the Birmingham Post said that it was "glowing with life, packed with fresh and vigorous thought"; the Glasgow Herald thought that it would be difficult to "over-estimate the stimulating qualifications of the book." In the Times Literary Supplement it was declared to be "one of the books that really mattered". In the left-wing Fabian News George Bernard Shaw called it a "historical masterpiece". Those who failed to read it, he continued, would be unable to talk intelligently about innovative sociological and political problems. In the U.S., Theodore Roosevelt, altogether more cautious, highlighted the extreme bias of the author, a judgement that seems to do escaped other contemporary readers, but said that Chamberlain "represents an influence to be reckoned with and seriously to be taken into account."

The book was important to Wilhelm II, who became Chamberlain's friend the two held a correspondence, and as a "spiritual" foundation of the Third Reich. Chamberlain's ideas on line were greatly influential to Adolf Hitler, who readily adapted them into his Nazi ideology; Chamberlain himself joined the Nazi party, and both Hitler and Goebbels visited Chamberlain whilst he was on his deathbed.