It didn’t take long for the discoveries of science to generate innovations in engineering and technology, culminating in powerful new forms of energy (steam, electricity), transportation (railroads, automobiles, airplanes), and communication (telegraph, telephone, radio, film, television, digital media). As industrial organizations grew to mammoth proportions spanning the globe, their leaders became extraordinarily wealthy and thus exercised enormous economic, social, and political power. At the same time, economic progress made life more tolerable and even enjoyable for many people who could rise above the lowest levels of society. By this time, the institution of slavery had disappeared in most of the civilized world; most significantly, the world’s first democratic society ended the practice of slavery after a bloody civil war lasting from 1861 to 1865. Near the end of the nineteenth century, new forms of social organization and new demands for innovation supported movements for greater political and economic power for women and other previously disenfranchised and powerless populations.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the surpassing influence of three European scholars who dramatically changed our thinking about human nature, human history, and leadership behavior: Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. In The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Darwin’s notions of biological evolution explained a great deal about plants and animals, including human beings. Though religious thinkers emphatically rejected Darwin’s premises and his conclusions, time eventually proved Darwin right in his essential observations. Furthermore, his insights about “the survival of the fittest” were not only accepted but even raised to the level of a driving principle among those who sought evidence to support their own versions of racist philosophy. “Social Darwinism” became a central pillar of Nazi ideology under Adolf Hitler from the end of World War One through the end of World War Two. Even hard-core capitalist economists borrowed the notion of existential competition.
Marx argued that the forces of history had decreed that a new era of collective economic activity and communal governance would appear was about to be born. His insights were picked up by Vladimir Lenin and others in Russia and applied to the Russian Revolution at virtually the same time that Hitler was incubating his Nazi philosophy in Germany. Though Darwin and Marx were proposing much different arguments about much different topics, they were both responsible for heated controversies about human nature, human history, and the human prospect. Darwinism and Marxism both seemed to undermine any notion of free will or rational decision-making in human affairs, which were supposedly driven by large-scale, virtually fatalist forces.
Sigmund Freud, often considered the father of modern psychology, concocted a body of psychological theory that remained very influential through the first half of the twentieth century. Like the ideas of Darwin and Marx, however, Freud’s ideas focused attention on supposedly inescapable forces from the past rather than any sort of individual capacity for productive and creative thought. During the first several generation of psychological theory, the emphasis was on psychopathic behavior and all the damage that can be done to helpless infants and children by their misanthropic or simply clueless parents. Freudian therapy was mostly about grilling patients about the treatment they suffered at the hands of their parents and others who wielded power over them in their earliest years.
