Houston Stewart Chamberlain (; 9 September 1855 – 9 January 1927) was a British-German-French philosopher. His writings on political philosophy and natural science influenced Adolf Hitler, among many others, attributing all world accomplishments to the Germanic race. Chamberlain promoted German ethnonationalism, antisemitism, scientific racism, and Nordicism; he has been described as a "racialist writer". His best-known book, the two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), published in 1899, became highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements of the early 20th century, and later influenced the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy. In the early 1920s, Chamberlain met and encouraged Hitler.
Born in Hampshire, he immigrated to Dresden in adulthood out of an adoration for composer Richard Wagner. He married Eva von Bülow, Wagner's biological daughter, in December 1908, twenty-five years after Wagner's death. As a long admirer of French culture, he settled in Paris in 1884. He was later naturalised as a French citizen in 1914. During World War I, Chamberlain sided with Germany against his country of birth. He took German citizenship in 1916.
Though they share the same surname, he is not related to contemporary British politician Neville Chamberlain.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born in Southsea, Hampshire, England, the son of Rear Admiral William Charles Chamberlain. His mother, Eliza Jane, daughter of Captain Basil Hall, died before he was a year old, leading to his being brought up by his grandmother in France. His elder brother was Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain. Chamberlain's poor health frequently led him to being sent to the warmer climates of Spain and Italy for the winter. This constant moving about made it hard for Chamberlain to form lasting friendships.
Chamberlain's education began at a lycée in Versailles and continued mostly in continental Europe, but his father had planned a military career for his son. At the age of eleven he was sent to Cheltenham College, an English boarding school that produced many Army and Navy officers. Chamberlain deeply disliked Cheltenham College, and felt lonely and out of place there. The young Chamberlain was "a compulsive dreamer", more interested in the arts than in the military, and he developed a fondness for nature and a near-mystical sense of self.
Chamberlain grew up in a self-confident, optimistic, Victorian atmosphere that celebrated the nineteenth century as the "Age of Progress", a world that many Victorians expected to get progressively better with Britain leading the way for the rest of the world. He was supportive of the Liberal Party, and shared the general values of 19th-century British liberalism such as a faith in progress, of a world that could only get better, of the greatness of Britain as a liberal democratic and capitalist society.
Chamberlain's major interests in his studies at Cheltenham were the natural sciences, especially astronomy. Chamberlain later recalled: "The stars seemed closer to me, more gentle, more worthy of trust, and more sympathetic – for that is the only word which describes my feelings – than any of the people around me in school. For the stars, I experienced true friendship".
During his youth, Chamberlain – while not entirely rejecting at this point his liberalism – became influenced by the romantic conservative critique of the Industrial Revolution. Bemoaning the loss of "Merry Old England", this view argued for a return to a highly romanticized period of English history, with the people living happily in harmony with nature on the land overseen by a benevolent, cultured elite. In this critique, the Industrial Revolution was seen as a disaster which forced people to live in dirty, overcrowded cities, doing dehumanizing work in factories while society was dominated by a philistine, greedy middle class.
The prospect of serving as an officer in India or elsewhere in the British Empire held no attraction for him. In addition, he was a delicate child with poor health. At the age of fourteen he had to be withdrawn from school. After Cheltenham, Chamberlain always felt out of place in Britain, a society whose values Chamberlain felt were not his values, writing in 1876: "The fact may be regrettable but it remains a fact; I have become so completely un-English that the mere thought of England and the English makes me unhappy". Chamberlain travelled to various spas around Europe, accompanied by a Prussian tutor, Mr Otto Kuntze, who taught him German and interested him in German culture and history. Fascinated by Renaissance art and architecture, Chamberlain learned Italian and planned to settle in Florence for a time.
University of Geneva and racial theory
Chamberlain attended the University of Geneva, in French-speaking Switzerland. There he studied under Carl Vogt, who was a supporter of racial typology, as well as under chemist Carl Gräbe, botanist Johannes Müller Argoviensis, physicist and parapsychologist Marc Thury, astronomer Emile Plantamour, and other professors. Chamberlain's main interests as a student revolved around systematic botany, geology, astronomy, and later the anatomy and physiology of the human body. In 1881, he earned a baccalaureate in physical and natural sciences.
During his time in Geneva, Chamberlain, who always despised Benjamin Disraeli, came to hate his country more and more, accusing the Prime Minister of taking British life down to what Chamberlain considered to be his extremely low level. During the early 1880s, Chamberlain was still a Liberal, "a man who approached issues from a firmly Gladstonian perspective and showed a marked antipathy to the philosophy and policies of British Conservatism". Chamberlain often expressed his disgust with Disraeli, "the man whom he blamed in large measure for the injection of selfish class interest and jingoism into British public life in the next decades".
An early sign of his antisemitism came in 1881 when he described the landlords in Ireland affected by the Land Bill as "blood-sucking Jews". The main landowning classes in Ireland then were gentiles. At this stage of his life his antisemitic remarks were few and far between.
Botany dissertation: theory of vital force
In Geneva, Chamberlain continued working towards a doctorate in botany, but he later abandoned that project due to ill health. The text of what would have been Chamberlain's doctoral dissertation was published in 1897 as Recherches sur la sève ascendante ("Studies on rising sap"), but this publication did not culminate in any further academic qualifications.
Chamberlain's book was based on his own experimental observations of water transport in various vascular plants. Against the conclusions of Eduard Strasburger, Julius von Sachs, and other leading botanists, he argued that his observations could not be explained by the application of the fluid mechanical theories of the day to the motion of water in the plants' xylem conduits. Instead, he claimed that his results evidenced other processes, associated with the action of living matter and which he placed under the heading of a force vitale ("vital force").
Chamberlain summarised his thesis in the book's introduction:
Without the participation of these vital functions it is quite simply impossible for water to rise to heights of 150 feet, 200 feet and beyond, and all the efforts that one makes to hide the difficulties of the problem by relying on confused notions drawn from physics are little more reasonable than the search for the philosopher's stone.