Natural theology and rejection of Darwinism

Danilevsky's Darwinism: Critical research, which brings together more than 1,200 pages of arguments against Darwin's theory, mostly assembled from the literature that already existed at the time, was published in 1885. It was meant to be the first volume of a longer work, the second volume containing Danilevsky's own theories, which he characterised as "natural theology", but it was unfinished at his death. When it was published posthumously, it contained only preliminary studies.

Danilevsky had been influenced by the work of von Baer, who had developed his own teleological theory of evolution and gone on to criticise Darwin's work in the 1870s. Danilevsky took from von Baer's theory the notion of Zielstrebigkeit. The German word means "singleness of purpose" but Danilevsky imbued it with a religious aspect and argued that evolution, as well as the original creation of the world, has a rational purpose and follows the will of a divine creator.

Theory of historical-cultural types

Danilevsky first published Russia and Europe: A Look at the Cultural and Political Relations of the Slavic World to the Romano-German World in the journal Zarya in 1869. Later republished as a monograph, it brought him international fame.

He pioneered the use of biological and morphological metaphors in the comparison of cultures. Danilevsky compared cultures and nations to biological species, denied their commonality and argued that each nation or civilisation is united by its language and culture, which it cannot pass on to any other nation. He thus characterised Peter the Great's reforms in Russia as doomed to failure, as they had attempted to impose alien values on the Slavic world.

Danilevsky distinguished four categories of historical-cultural activity:

1. religious
2. political
3. sociopolitical
4. cultural

They gave rise to ten historical-cultural types:^[2]

1. Chaldean
2. Hebrew
3. Arab
4. Indian
5. Persian
6. Greek
7. Roman or ancient Italian
8. Germanic
9. Hamitic or Egyptian
10. Chinese

Danilevsky applied his teleological theory of evolution by stating that each type went through various predetermined stages of youth, adulthood, and old age, the last being the end of that type. He characterised the Slavic type as being at the youth stage, and he developed a socio-political plan for its development, involving unification of the Slavic world, with its future capital at Constantinople (now Istanbul), ruled by an Orthodox emperor. While other cultures would degenerate in their blind struggle for existence, the Slavic world should be viewed as a Messiah among them. Danilevsky, however, believed that there is no genuine or absolute progress, as history is circular.

Aspects of Danilevsky's book prefigured some of the theories in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Arnold J. Toynbee mentions them in A Study of History. The Danilevsky hypothesis became the subject of much controversy and polarised its readers. On one hand, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy praised it, but on the other hand, Occidentalists, such as Nikolai Kareev, Pavel Milyukov (1859-1943) and Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842-1904), strongly opposed it, Tomáš Masaryk wrote his most famous book “Russia and Europe” (1913) exactly as the critique of Danilevsky’s book.