Summary
The fin-de-siècle discourse of decay, popular among educated classes as a means of rejecting progress, liberalism and cosmopolitanism, against which Franz Oppenheimer argued in his early medical writings in Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine: he held there was no statistical evidence that the modern age was more afflicted by degeneration and hysteria than any before (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.49-50).
Details
- Oppenheimer did not reject the concept of a contemporary Jewish racial degeneration, but positioned himself with those claiming social causes had a greater influence on race than biological ones (PDF p.25).
- He disagreed with Max Nordau’s diagnosis of society as degenerate, while sharing Nordau’s Organicism and the wish to protect liberalism and rationalism (PDF p.50).
- The theory of the hereditary origin of neurasthenia and degeneration relieved physicians of performance pressures over groups collectively labeled as degenerates, among them the insane, the criminal and the alcoholic, as the work presents Weiss’s account (PDF p.54).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Franz Oppenheimer, Max Nordau, Rassenhygiene