Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts
Rosenberg was inspired by the theories of Arthur de Gobineau, in his 1853–1855 book "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races", and by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Rosenberg's "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" was conceived as a sequel to Chamberlain's 1899 book "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century". Rosenberg believed that God created mankind as separate, differentiated races in a cascading hierarchy of nobility of virtue, not as separate individuals or as entities with "blank slate" natures. Rosenberg harshly rejected the idea of a "globular" mankind of homogeneity of nature as counter-factual, and asserted each biological race possesses a discrete, unique soul, claiming the Caucasoid Aryan race, with Germanic Nordics supposedly composing its vanguard elite, as qualitatively superior, in a vaguely "ontological" way, in comparison to all other ethnic and racial groupings: the Germanic Nordic Aryan as Platonic ideal of humankind.