Nietzsche, the eloquent and menacing prophet of an impending catastrophe whose exact nature he did not quite define, expressed this crisis of expectations better than anyone else. His very mode of literary exposition, by means of a succession of poetic and prophetic aphorisms containing visionary intuitions or unargued truths, seemed a contradiction of the rationalist system-building discourse of philosophy which he claimed to practise. His enthusiastic admirers multiplied among middle-class (male) youth from 1890.For Nietzsche, the avant garde decadence, pessimism and nihilism of the 1880s was more than a fashion. They were 'the logical end-product of our great values and ideals'. Natural science, he argued, produced its own internal disintegration, its own enemies, an anti-science. The consequences of the modes of thought accepted by nineteenth-century politics and economics were nihilist. The culture of the age was threatened by its own cultural products. Democracy produced socialism, the fatal swamping of genius by mediocrity, strength by weakness - a note also struck, in a more pedestrian and positivistic key, by the eugenists. In that case was it not essential to reconsider all these values and ideals and the system of ideas of which they formed a part, for in any case the 'revaluation of all values' was taking place? Such reflections multiplied as the old century drew to its end. The only ideology of serious calibre which remained firmly committed to the nineteenth-century belief in science, reason and progress was Marxism, which was unaffected by disillusion about the present because it looked forward to the future triumph of precisely those 'masses' whose rise created so much uneasiness among middle-class thinkers.