Anthony Mario Ludovici MBE (8 January 1882 – 3 April 1971) was a British philosopher, sociologist, social critic and polyglot. He is known as a proponent of aristocracy and anti-egalitarianism, and in the early 20th century was a leading British conservative author. He wrote on subjects including art,[1] metaphysics, politics, economics, religion, the differences between the sexes and races, health, and eugenics.
Ludovici's writing was varied, and took traditional conservative stances on social issues. Liberalism, socialism,
In his A Defence of Aristocracy (1915), Ludovici defends aristocracy against government in popular control. In The False Assumptions of "Democracy" (1921), he attacked the democratic idea and the liberal attitude in general, as being unnatural.[citation needed] A Defence of Conservatism (1927) defends tradition as being tied to survival.[24]
For Ludovici, egalitarianism was a denial of the innate biological differences between individuals, the sexes and races. He criticized what he saw as the sentimental coddling of the mediocre and botched. His articles were a regular feature of the New Pioneer, a far-right journal controlled by Viscount Lymington and closely linked to the British People's Party.[25] Ludovici repeatedly warned of the dangers of miscegenation and defended incest as an appropriate response to racial mixing, arguing that society should act 'to break down the barriers now preventing the mating of close relatives' as it was the only way to cause 'a purification of our stock.'.[26]
Views
Ludovici was a nationalist, traditionalist
Later life
He was on the Selection Committee of the Right Book Club,[29] with Norman Thwaites, Trevor Blakemore, Collinson Owen and W. A. Foyle.[30]
After the Second World War, Ludovici fell into obscurity. In 1936, he had written enthusiastically about Adolf Hitler, whom he had met personally that year, along with many other high-ranking Nazi leaders.[31] He was critical of the effect of Jews on the history of England, writing a work under the pseudonym Cobbett, The Jews, and the Jews in England (1938).[citation needed]
Ludovici was dismissed from his intelligence work on 14 August 1940 and his house was subsequently raided allegedly due to his membership of the political group The Right Club. On Friday 8 October 1940, Ludovici was interviewed at Scotland Yard, and then released.[citation needed]
From 1955 until 1969 Ludovici wrote a series of articles in the monthly journal The South African Observer.[32] Topics under his analysis included The Essentials of Good Government[33] in a series of 20 monthly parts, and Public Opinion in England[34] in a similar series.
The January Club was a discussion group founded in 1934 by Oswald Mosley to attract Establishment support for the movement known as the British Union of Fascists.
n May 1936 the Left Book Club had been established, and towards the end of 1936 a group of “neo-Tories” mooted the idea of a right-wing book club. Christina Foyle and her father William Foyle undertook to organize it, and the Club was launched at a luncheon at the Grosvenor House Hotel in April 1937, with John Baird, 1st Viscount Stonehaven, the recently-retired Chairman of the Conservative Party, presiding.
The English Mistery ("Mistery" being an old word for a guild) was a political and esoteric group active in the United Kingdom of the 1930s. A "Conservative fringe group" in favour of bringing back the feudal system,[1] its views have been characterised as "reactionary ultra-royalist, anti-democratic".[2] The organisation was opposed to social welfare, the London School of Economics, and the United States
EARL GERARD WALLOP OF PORTSMOUTH
Gerard Vernon Wallop, 9th Earl of Portsmouth (16 May 1898 – 28 September 1984), styled Viscount Lymington from 1925 until 1943, was a British landowner, writer on agricultural topics, and politician involved in right-wing groups.
Before World War I there existed an intellectual turmoil in Britain as great as any in Germany, France, or Russia, as the debates over Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and eugenics in the context of early modernism reveal. With the rise of fascism after 1918, these debates became more ideologically driven, with science and vitalist philosophy being hailed in some quarters as saviours from bourgeois decadence, vituperated in others as heralding the onset of barbarism. This book looks at several of the leading Nietzscheans and eugenicists, and challenges the long-cherished belief that British intellectuals were fundamentally uninterested in race. The result is a study of radical ideas that are conventionally written out of histories of the politics and culture of the period.
DAN STONE, Breeding Superman :-Furthermore, the peculiar mélange of ideas which went into making Ludovici’s ideology cannot easily be labelled with any familiar term. I argue that we should not forget the ‘extremes of Englishness’ just because its ideas, here represented by Ludovici, did not ultimately inform policy.4 While it would be overstating the case to claim that Ludovici’s writings were widely influential, he was well known as a public figure, whose ideas, particularly early on in his career, acquired some intellectual currency. But the Whiggish view of history which still dominates interpretations of British fascism – that its failure was a result of the inherent strength of British parliamentary institutions – means that he has long been ignored. Ludovici’s idiosyncratic blend of Förster-Nietzscheanism, Lamarckianism, social Darwinism, antisemitism, anti-feminism, monarchism and aristocratic conservatism was, however, not as ridiculous to Edwardian minds as it is to ours today; it is easy to dismiss Ludovici as a crank, and therefore miss the fact that many of his ideas chimed in with those being espoused by people on the left as well as on the right certainly before 1914, and even until 1939. I argue that reminding ourselves of the existence of men such as Ludovici – who was not as marginal as might at first appear – can help in dispelling the complacency which still surrounds the historiography of British fascism.
To Sir Francis Galton belongs the honour of founding the Science of Eugenics. To Friedrich Nietzsche belongs the honour of founding the Religion of Eugenics . . . Both aim at a Superman, not a Napoleonic individual, but an ideal of a race of supermen, as superior to the present mankind – many of whom, alas! have not even completed the stage of transition from animal to man – as man is superior to the worm. Maximilian Mügge, ‘Eugenics and the Superman’, Eugenics Review, 1.3, 1909, p. 191.
Nietzsche is the spiritual father and forerunner of the Eugenists. Charles Sarolea, German Problems and Personalities, 1917, p. 92
Dan Stone:-
For example, Pauline Mazumdar, in a book about the Eugenics Society in Britain, points out the similarities between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the theories of eugenics that were often detected by British commentators. Beginning with a reference by R. A. Fisher to Zarathustra in a talk delivered to the Cambridge Society on 12 October 1913, Mazumdar goes on to note the interest of people such as Havelock Ellis, Maximilian Mügge and George Chatterton-Hill in both strands of thought. She also notes that the Eugenics Society’s official line on Nietzsche, if such can be said to exist, was one of caution.6
Dan Stone:-
Eugenics in Britain is a much-explored field. Since the pioneering studies of
George Mosse, Daniel Kevles and others, the opinions of Francis Galton and
Karl Pearson, Caleb Saleeby and Leonard Darwin, R. A. Fisher and J. B. S.
Haldane have become widely known. With the exception of the USA, which
is often examined along with Britain, the impact of eugenics in other European
countries and on other continents is only now becoming clear, as a recent
reviewer points out.1 That fact does not, however, mean that only an international
approach, desirable as that undoubtedly is, remains the sole task for
scholars.2 There is as yet confusion about eugenics in Britain
Dan Stone:-
Particularly interesting are Ludovici’s dealings with the Eugenics Society.
In correspondence with C. P. Blacker, one of the society’s leading lights, he
argued that as well as the pre-natal selection which Blacker advocated, there
had to be, as in animal husbandry, some form of post-natal selection, ‘either
by total elimination when the aberration is too pronounced, or by the selection
of a particular member of a brood or the particular product of a cross for
further breeding’.17 The society was not put off; indeed, it wrote to Ludovici
asking him to join them, but he refused on account of their co-operation with
religious groups and their promotion of contraception. The secretary wrote
back, accepting the validity of the criticism, but arguing that the society was
trying ‘to convert Christianity to Eugenics’, adding that ‘I greatly hope that we
shall not hereby be debarred from occasionally getting your help in debates
and discussions.’18 Nor was Blacker, the same man who after 1945 decried the
extremism of pre-war eugenics, personally affronted, and he and Ludovici
Breeding Superman
remained friends. In 1932 Ludovici invited Blacker to stay with him in his
holiday home in Lewes, and the following year Blacker sent Ludovici a pedigree
schedule he had drawn up, saying that it ‘may be of interest to the English
mistery [sic],’ the proto-fascist group with which Ludovici was involved.19
Although these were extremists, there were too many of them, and their
views were not so far removed from those of the mainstream ideas on race, to
dismiss them as having little or no bearing on the eugenics movement.
Dan Stone:-
"Like the Tory revivalists, but from a different political tradition, Karl
Pearson, the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London
and director of the Eugenics Laboratory, an institution devoted to Pearson’s
new science of biometrics, who held the Eugenics Society’s ‘unscientific’
popularising in contempt, was quick to draw broader conclusions from his
research than his statistics merited. MacKenzie has shown the extent to which
Pearson’s eugenics was an expression of the habitus of the professional middle
class. Yet that does not mean that the science of eugenics was solely focused
on class-related efforts at producing healthier children, nor that the scientists’
claim to objectivity was a whitewash. Pearson, who can be seen as a sort of
national socialist (in the literal sense), believed that he was working not just for
the benefit of the middle classes but for the health of the nation, the race."
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