History as prophecy …

… Jacques Barzun's History of Darwin, Marx, and Wagner Endures | National Review.

Barzun’s targets were three thinkers whose works and perspectives had acquired in the period after 1859 an immense influence, leading at first to what Barzun’s teacher Carlton J. H. Hayes called, in a fine political and cultural history also published in 1941, “a generation of materialism” (referring to the period 1871–1900), and then to a deepening application of its materialistic and deterministic theories of “the struggle for survival” and “the survival of the fittest” of races, nations, and classes, transforming the theories into the ferocious modern totalitarian ideologies of the early and mid 20th century — Communism, Fascism, and Nazism.