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 produced revolutionary changes in one field after another in the nineteenth century. Surveying a long line of thinkers including Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, W. K. Clifford, W. S. Jevons, Karl Pearson, James Frazer, and Einstein himself, Victorian Relativity argues that the early relativity movement was bound closely to motives of political and cultural reform and, in particular, to radical critiques of the ideology of authoritarianism. Recuperating relativity from those who treat it as synonymous with nihilism, Herbert portrays it as the basis of some of our crucial intellectual and ethical traditions. One of the articles of faith of twentieth-century intellectual history is that the theory of relativity in physics sprang from the unaided genius of Albert Einstein in 1905; another is that scientific relativity has no significant connection with ethical, cultural, or epistemological relativism. Victorian Relativity challenges these truisms, unearthing a forgotten tradition of avant-garde speculation that took as its guiding principle "the negation of the absolute" and set itself under the banner of "relativity." Christopher Herbert shows that the principle that nothing exists but relations formed the basis of nineteenth-century speculation across a wide range of fields; he argues that this defining idea of intellectual modernism was linked from the moment of its emergence to political and cultural radicalism. One of the articles of faith of twentieth-century intellectual history is that the theory of relativity in physics sprang from the unaided genius of Albert Einstein in 1905; another is that scientific relativity has no significant connection with ethical, cultural, or epistemological relativism. Victorian Relativity challenges these truisms, unearthing a forgotten tradition of avant-garde speculation that took as its guiding principle "the negation of the absolute" and set itself under the banner of "relativity." Christopher Herbert shows that the principle that nothing exists but relations formed the basis of nineteenth-century speculation across a wide range of fields; he argues that this defining idea of intellectual modernism was linked from the moment of its emergence to political and cultural radicalism. Christopher Herbert is a professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Trollope and Comic Pleasure and Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century .