Acknowledgments; Preface: Relativity and Ideology; Introduction: The Conspiracy against Truth; Chapter 1: Difference, Unity, Proliferation; Chapter 2: Relativity and Authority; Chapter 3: The Relativity of Logic; Chapter 4: Karl Pearson and the Human Form Divine; Chapter 5: Frazer and Einstein; Afterword: Protagoras and History-Writing; Notes; Works Cited; Index.

One of the articles of faith of twentieth-century intellectual history is that the theory of relativity in physics sprang in its essentials from the unaided genius of Albert Einstein; another is that scientific relativity is unconnected to ethical, cultural, or epistemological relativisms. Victorian Relativity challenges these assumptions, unearthing a forgotten tradition of avant-garde speculation that took as its guiding principle "the negation of the absolute" and set itself under the militant banner of "relativity."Christopher Herbert shows that the idea of relativity page