He enumerates the traditional causes of insanity: grief, remorse, disappointed love, domestic cares and anxieties, jealousy, pride, and asks whether madness is associated with particular religious sects, with certain nations or occupations, with one sex rather than the other, only to conclude that such questions are ‘too vague and general, too wanting in precision, to admit of instructive answers’.

That madness has moral connotations is made quite clear: ‘… if insanity be on the increase among civilized peoples the increase is due more to their pleasures than their pains – to idleness, luxury, and self-indulgence more than to work, thrift, and self-denial.’ 6 On the other hand, Maudsley is influenced by the work of those who were showing that mental states had a physiological basis. 3 Following the lead of the psychologist, Henry Maudsley, Nordau characterises the extreme position as one of moral insanity, which shared with degeneracy the characteristics of ‘egoism’ and ‘impulsiveness’. Like his precursors, Nordau believes that degeneracy is recognised by physical ‘stigmata’: ‘Science, however, has found, together with these physical stigmata, others of a mental order, which betoken degeneracy quite as clearly as the former.’ 2 Such degenerates occupy a ‘borderland between reason and pronounced madness’, and like all degenerates ‘lack a sense of morality and of right and wrong’. Both are associated with the nervousness that is part of life in modern industrial society. For Nordau, inspired by the work of Lombroso and Morel, the period was one of degeneration, which he defines as a disease affiliated with hysteria. Nordau's journalistic flamboyance feeds off the very culture it attacks. He tapped into a rich vein of commentary in which cultural and moral criticism were intertwined, as the trial of Oscar Wilde so poignantly demonstrates. Max Nordau's evocation of the spirit of the age at the end of the nineteenth century caused a sensation when it was first published.

Purpose and Power by Donald Stoker