Degeneration

Abstract

Complex and in many ways enlightening, the history of this concept presents the succession of an eighteenth-century phase in which the descriptive and structural meaning prevails, and of an nineteenth-twentieth-century phase in which, vice versa, the concept is charged with highly negative evaluative meanings, to the point of becoming salient in Nazi ideology as the indicator of an anti-model to be annihilated in the name of a totalitarian program connoted at the same time and alternatively in a biological-racial and artistic-stylistic sense.