The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man - Paperback

by Lothrop Stoddard (Author)

The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man by Lothrop Stoddard is a 1922 examination of the forces that have repeatedly brought high civilizations to ruin. Stoddard identifies three fatal tendencies: the structural overloading of complex societies beyond the capacity of their populations to sustain them; biological regression through the differential fertility of the superior and the inferior; and the atavistic revolt of what he terms the Under-Man—those who fall short of the intellectual and adaptive standards demanded by advanced civilization and who therefore nurse an instinctive hatred of the social order itself. Drawing on contemporary intelligence testing, historical patterns of revolution, and biological principles, he argues that the modern world faces an accelerating crisis of racial and cognitive impoverishment.

The book treats the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and especially Bolshevism not as isolated political events but as eruptions of this deeper biological revolt. Stoddard contends that egalitarian doctrines and revolutionary ideologies serve as the organized expression of the Under-Man’s resentment, offering him the promise of leveling the very hierarchy he cannot ascend. Against this threat he proposes a program of eugenic selection, widespread birth control among the less capable, and the deliberate cultivation of a neo-aristocracy founded on ability rather than birth or wealth. First published in the unsettled aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the work remains a stark statement of early-twentieth-century concerns about heredity, hierarchy, and the survival of civilization.