The Monist Century, 1845-1945

The thesis of this paper is that between the 1840s and the destruction of the fascist regimes in 1945 natural-scientific monism formed an essential epistemological framework for a number of movements in Western Europe and beyond that challenged dominant religious, philosophical and political assumptions. The paper will first introduce the narrow history of monism as a philosophical term and as a movement that self-consciously employed this term to describe its essential beliefs. It will focus on Germany, where the zoologist Ernst Haeckel called for an organized monism to serve as a “band between science and religion” in 1892 and subsequently founded the German Monist League. Monism peaked just prior to the First World War, but until 1933 a host of freethinking, Free Religious, feminist, Masonic and other cultural reform organizations continued to lay explicit claim to monism. The paper then proposes that monism can be used heuristically to better understand responses to a host of epistemological, social and religious problems that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century and provided a structuring framework to European public discourse until 1945. Comte's positivism, Büchner's materialism and Feuerbach's anthropology were all based on the conviction that a single scientific framework not only described nature and culture, but provided a blueprint for their revolutionary transformation. Despite the fact that such assumptions were widely criticized by the early twentieth century, they continued to unfold their effects in the wider field of politics and culture. Philosophical treatments of monism have tended to overlook its real historical impact, which was felt less in the realm of academic philosophy and more in the arenas of popular science, political ideology and religion.