Nietzsche’s antipathy toward England expresses a general sentiment in 19th-century Europe, Germany in particular, as rising nations felt constrained by the cultural, military, and economic power of the British Empire. Nietzsche draws on a number of examples to support his distaste for England, arguing that English empiricists and utilitarian thinkers are the most direct source of modern degeneration in Europe, as they have both given materialism a philosophical foundation and upheld empty, wrongheaded ideas of morality. To Nietzsche the leading English thinkers of the 19th century all offer prototypical examples of the “scientific man” discussed in “We Scholars.”