Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism was published by Howard Fertig in 1978, and it provides the intellectual genealogy of the racist ideology that culminated in the Holocaust. Mosse traces racism from its origins in the Enlightenment — when the classification of human beings by physical type began as a scientific project — through its development in the nineteenth century into a comprehensive worldview that claimed to explain history, society, and human nature through racial categories.
Mosse’s approach is cultural rather than political: he is interested not in the laws and policies that expressed racism but in the ideas, images, and aesthetic preferences that made racism seem natural and inevitable. He traces how physical ideals (the Greek aesthetic of bodily beauty, adapted into racial typology), scientific theories (craniology, physiognomy, eugenics), and popular culture (novels, caricatures, exhibitions) together created a visual and intellectual framework within which racial hierarchy seemed self-evident.
The book argues that racism was not a German aberration but a European phenomenon — that France, Britain, and the United States all contributed to the development of racist thought, and that the Holocaust was the logical conclusion of ideas that were shared across European civilization rather than confined to Germany alone.
Collecting Toward the Final Solution
First edition (Howard Fertig, New York, 1978): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Without jacket: $8–$15