Thread by @cvmonakow

In fin de siècle France, there was a retreat to metaphysics by leftists in the face of the ruthless empiricism of Vacher de Lapouge

Ferdinand Brunetière was the precursor to modern postliberals, retreating to religion out of a fear of Nature

Lapougue criticized the “freethinkers” who used Darwinism to attack the church, but who dodged challenges by science on their precious egalitarianism

Lapouge: “The barbarians are coming, the besiegers have come to be besieged, and their last hope of resistance is to lock themselves up in the citadel which they were attacking.”

Lapougue (cont): “The near future will show our sons a curious spectacle: the theoreticians of the false modern democracy constrained to shut themselves back up in the citadel of clericalism.”

One opponent worried that objective science could prove inequality, which led him to the position that “natural science cannot touch human values.”

The most effective critic of Lapouge, Jean Finot, disputed his science, arguing that “races as irreducible categories exist only as fictions of our brains.”

Summarizing the leftist thinkers who rejected empiricism: “these theorists argued that intuitive moral wisdom must be held above science. They gave themselves license simply to ‘know’ what is right…despite indexes, bell curves, Latin names, and calibrated tools.”