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Discuss the relationship between ethnicity and naturalism. 'Naturalism', the attempt to explain social phenomena by reference to 'natural' causes, themselves seen as empirically self-evident, is a trend which assumes a wider significance in proportion to the prevailing level of pessimism in society about the human potential to transcend and dominate nature. 'Naturalism' underwent a qualitative transformation with Social Darwinism, a monist trend which appropriated the positivist rationality of nineteenth century scientific progress and gave it a political content in the service of anti-democratic reaction. To do this it had increasingly to abandon any 'scientific' logic to its advocacy of elitism, and instead promote a mystical assertion of the historical inevitability of inequality. This abandonment of any hard faith in the scientifically calculable basis for denying democratic rights to one portion of humanity came at a fairly early stage. Lukacs shows the parallel logic which on the one hand sought to...

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