Degeneration and Its Discontents: Rereading Nordau in Context

This article examines Max Nordau’s Entartung (Degeneration) (1892/93) at the intersection of fin-de-siècle cultural critique and contemporary psychopathology. It argues that Nordau did not simply denounce modern art, but transferred an established psychiatric vocabulary—centred on degeneration, hysteria, and neurasthenia—into the sphere of aesthetic judgement. Interpreting a range of literary and cultural phenomena as symptoms of pathological degeneration, Nordau sought to diagnose the psychological condition of modern culture through the works of contemporary writers and intellectuals. Situating Entartung within the broader nineteenth-century degeneration paradigm and within contemporary evolutionary debates, the article analyses how scientific discourse was mobilised to authorise cultural evaluation. Rather than assessing the validity of Nordau’s diagnoses, it reconstructs the epistemic logic through which psychiatric categories were transformed into instruments of cultural criticism. In doing so, it repositions Nordau within the history of the human sciences, highlighting his role in the consolidation of expert authority in late nineteenth-century cultural debates. By foregrounding the structural migration of psychiatric categories into cultural criticism, the article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the alliance between scientific knowledge and normativity at the fin de siècle.