Abstract
At a time when biological theories of human nature were at their zenith and endorsed by some of the most powerful political regimes in Europe, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset unhesitatingly declared that “[m]an has no nature. What he has is history.”1 This was a powerful critique of the biologisation of national identity his contemporaries seemed to accept so eagerly. Indeed, by the late 1930s, most cultural commentators and philosophers — not to mention scientists — were building a consensus that human destiny was determined by evolution and heredity. The French biologist Alexis Carrel helped to popularise this conception of life by describing the scientific achievements of the twentieth century in terms of the ultimate transformation of man: “Science, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself. It has unveiled some of the secret mechanisms of his life. It has shown him how to alter their motion, how to mould his body and his soul on patterns born of his wishes. For the first time in history, humanity, helped by science, has become master of its destiny.”2 This widespread biological understanding of culture was an essential prerequisite for the emergence of a modernist version of eugenics, set to embark upon ambitious policies of human improvement. However, in order to understand the conceptual transformation within this scientific knowledge about human nature, we must first attempt to grasp how eugenics was formulated and disseminated during the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century.
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Notes
José Ortega y Gasset, “History as a System,” in Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton, eds., Philosophy and History (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 313.
Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1935), 257.
F. A. von Hayek, “Scientism and the Study of Society,” Economica 9, 35 (1942): 269.
Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Scientism,” Social Research 15, 4 (1948): 489.
See Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 23.
Richard G. Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Champaign, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 1.
Havelock Ellis, The Problem of Race-Regeneration (London: Cassell, 1911), 51.
E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1880), 62.
It is Durkeim’s theory of religion that promoters of the concept of political religion had found useful for their explorations of modern secular ideologies. See Stanley G. Payne, “On the Heuristic Value of the Concept of Political Religion and its Application,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, 2 (2005): 163–74; and Roger Griffin, Robert Mallett, John Tortorice, eds., The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Peter J. Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 7.
Michael Burleigh, “Eugenic Utopias and the Genetic Present,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, 1 (2000): 64.
Aaron Gillette, Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture Debated in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Francis Galton, “Hereditary Character and Talent,” MacMillan’s Magazine 12, 70 (1865): 319.
Ibid., 322.
Francis Galton, “Heredity Improvement,” Fraser’s Magazine 7, 37 (1873): 116.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 129–30.
Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century. Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 81.
L. Hirschfeld and H. Hirschfeld, “Serological Differences between the Blood of Different Races,” The Lancet 197, 2 (1919): 675–9. See also William H. Schneider, “Chance and Social Setting in the Application of the Discovery of Blood Groups,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57 (1983): 545–62; and Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, “Blood and Soil: The Serology of the Aryan Racial State,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (1990): 187–19.
P. C. Mitchell, “Preface” to Elie Metchnikoff, The Nature of Man. Studies in Optimistic Philosophy (London: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1903), ix.
The description belongs to Daniel J. Kevles. See his highly influential In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Francis Galton, Memories of My Life, 2nd edn. (London: Methuen, 1908), 290.
Francis Galton, Inquiry into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), 17.
Ibid.
Alfred Ploetz, Grundlinien einer Rassen-Hygiene. Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1895), 13.
Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims,” The American Journal of Sociology 10, 1 (1904): 5.
Ibid.
Francis Galton, “Studies in Eugenics,” The American Journal of Sociology 11, 1 (1905): 11.
Ibid., 25.
Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Modernism from Baudelaire to Becket and Beyond (London: William Heinemann, 2007), 28.
John M. Coulter, the chair of the Botany Department of the University of Chicago, hoped to convince Christian organisations to “add the practical suggestions of biology to their own great motive, and to transform eugenics so that it may really be another effective form of religion.” John M. Coulter, “What Biology Has Contributed to Religion,” The Biblical World 41, 4 (1913): 223.
Maximilian A. Mügge, Eugenics and the Superman. A Racial Science and a Racial Religion (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909), 10. Dan Stone has convincingly described the influence Nietzsche had on the British eugenicists. See his Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002).
Caleb Williams Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics (London: Cassell, 1909), ix.
Ibid., 304.
Edgar Schuster, Eugenics (London: Collins, 1912), 255.
Internationalen Gesellschaft für Rassen-Hygiene (Naumburg: Lippert, 1910), 4–6.
Francis Galton, “A valószínűuség, mint az eugenetika alapja,” Huszadik Század 8, 12 (1907): 1013–29. An earlier example is Galton’s 1904 text on the definition of eugenics which was translated in the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie in 1905 and then commented upon in the Hungarian journal Huszadik Század in 1906.
Francis Galton, “Probability, The Foundation of Eugenics,” in Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909), 98–9.
Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), v. [first edition 1892]
Ibid., 2.
Roger Griffin, “Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism. A ‘Mazeway Resynthesis’,” Modernism/Modernity 15, 1 (2008): 21, n. 5.
Giuseppe Sergi, Le Degenerazioni Umane (Milan: Fratelli Dumolard, 1889), 25.
Sheila Faith Weiss, Racial Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3.
Wilhelm Schallmayer, Über die drohende körperliche Entartung der Kulturmenschheit und die Verstaatlichung des ärztlichen Standes (Berlin: Heuser, 1891). The second edition was republished as Über die drohende physische Entartung der Culturvölker (Berlin: Heuser, 1895).
See Alfred Ploetz, Ernst Rüdin, “Der Alkohol im Lebensprozeß der Rasse,” in Bericht über den IX. Internationalen Kongress gegen den Alkoholismus (Bremen 14–19.IV.1903) (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1904), 70–107.
Karl Pearson, The Problem of Practical Eugenics (London: Dulau, 1909), 34 [emphasis in the original]
Ibid.
Dr Madrazo, Cultivo de la especie humana. Herencia y educación — Ideal de la vida (Santander: Blanchard y Arce, 1904), 5 and 137. Both quotes are from Richard Cleminson, Anarchism, Science and Sex. Eugenics in Eastern Spain, 1900–1937 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 81–2.
See the discussion in Lesley A. Hall, “Malthusian Mutations: The Changing Politics and Moral Meanings of Birth Control in Britain,” in Brian Dolan, ed., Malthus, Medicine, and Morality: ‘Malthusianism’ after 17798 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 1–63.
Sidney Webb, The Decline in the Birth-Rate (London: Fabian Society, 1907) and Ethel Elderton, Report on the English Birth Rate. Part 1. England North of the Humber (London: Dulau, 1914).
See Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 2. See also J. Edward Chamberlain, Sander L. Gilman, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
David G. Horn, The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (London: Routledge, 2003).
See, for example, Emil Mattauschek, “Einiges über die Degeneration des bosnisch-herzegowinischen Volkes,” Jahrbücher für Psychiatrie und Neurologie 29 (1908): 134–48.
Robert Reid Rentoul, Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? A Plea for the Unborn (London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1906), xii.
G. Sergi, La Decadenza della Nazione Latine (Milano: Fratelli Bocca, 1900).
See Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Quoted in Angus McLaren, “Reproduction and Revolution: Paul Robin and Neo-Malthusianism in France,” Dolan, ed., Malthus, Medicine, and Morality, 170. See also Elinor A. Accampo, “The Gendered Nature of Contraception in France: Neo-Malthusianism, 1900–1920,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34, 2 (2003): 235–62; and Richard Sonn, “ ‘Your Body is Yours’: Anarchism, Birth Control, and Eugenics in Interwar France,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, 4 (2005): 415–32.
Luis Bulffi, “Dos palabras,” Salud y Fuerza 1 (1904): 1–2. Quoted in Cleminson, Anarchism, Science and Sex, 134
S. [Alexandru Sutzu], “Evoluţiunea şi hereditatea,” Gazeta medico-chirurgicalǎ a spitalelor 5, 12 (1874): 182–7.
Mihail Petrini-Galatzi, Filosofia medicalǎ: Despre ameliorațiunea rasei umane (Bucharest: Tipografia D. A. Laurian, 1876).
Mladen Jojkić, Pokusaj fiziološko-patološke studije o srpskom narodu (Subotica: Štamparija Vinka Blesića, 1895).
Bretislav Foustka, Slabí v lidské společnosti. Ideály humanitní a degenerace národu (Prague: Jana Laichtera, 1904).
Bretislav Foustka, Die Abstinenz als Kulturproblem mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der österreichischen Völkerstämme (Vienna: Verlag von Brüder Suschitzky, 1908), 6.
C. W. Saleeby, The Methods of Race-Regeneration (London: Cassell, 1911), 45.
The persistence of the Lamarckian tradition in French biology, for instance, prompted scholars to argue for different version of eugenics in France, characterised mostly by the improvement of environmental influences on mothers and infants. See William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
As illustrated by Auguste Forel, Malthusianism oder Eugenik? (Munich: Verlag von Ernst Reinhardt, 1911).
Heinrich Siegmund, Zur sächsischen Rassenhygiene (Hermannstadt: Peter Drotleff, 1901).
The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. IIIa, ed. by Karl Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 222.
Alfred Ploetz, “Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft und die davon abgeleiteten Disciplinen,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 1, 1 (1904): 1–27. A decade later, Fritz Lenz was still troubled by claims that racial hygiene and eugenics were merely subdivisions of social hygiene. He argued that racial hygiene includes both individual and social hygiene, and brings together the qualitative and quantitative demography. See Fritz Lenz, “Zum Begriff der Rassenhygiene und seiner Benennung,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 11, 4 (1915): 445–8.
Alfred Grotjahn, Soziale Pathologie: Versuch einer Lehre von den sozialen Beziehungen der menschlichen Krankheiten als Grudlage der soziale Medizin und der sozialen Hygiene (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1912).
Reproduced in C. B. S. Hodson, “Eugenics in Norway,” The Eugenics Review 27, 1 (1935): 42.
“Eugenic Research in Bohemia,” The Journal of Heredity 7, 2 (1916): 157; and “Eugenics in Austria,” The Eugenics Review 5, 4 (1914): 387.
Géza von Hoffmann, “Ausschüsse für Rassenhygiene in Ungarn,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschafsbiologie 10, 6 (1914): 830–1.
“An Italian Eugenics Committee,” The Eugenics Review 5, 4 (1914): 387.
Max von Gruber, Ernst Rüdin, Fortpflanzung, Vererbung, Rassenhygiene (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns, 1911).
Ibid., 122. For a discussion between Ploetz’s concept of racial hygiene and Galton’s eugenics see Marius Turda, “Race, Science and Eugenics in the Twentieth Century,” in Alison Bashford, Phillipa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 98–127.
See Marius Turda, “Eugenics, Race and Nation in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940: A Historiographic Overview,” in Marius Turda, Paul J. Weindling, eds., ‘Blood and Homeland’: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 1–22; and idem, “ ‘A New Religion’: Eugenics and Racial Scientism in Pre-World War I Hungary,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7, 3 (2006), 303–25.
József Madzsar, “Gyakorlati eugenika,” Huszadik Század 21, 2 (1910): 115–17.
Ibid., 116.
Ibid.
Ladislav Haškovec, “Moderne eugenische Bewegung,” Wiener Klinische Rundschau 26, 39 (1912): 609–11; 26, 40 (1912): 625–7 (part III); 26, 40 (1912): 643–5 (part IV) and 26, 42 (1912): 659–61 (final part).
Karl Pearson, The Academic Aspect of the Science of National Eugenics (London: Dulan, 1911), 4.
Ibid., 27.
Major Leonard Darwin, “Presidential Address,” Problems in Eugenics, vol. 1. Papers Communicated to the First International Eugenics Congress held at the University of London, July 24th to 30th, 1912, vol. 1 (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1912), 6.
Agnes Bluhm, “Eugenics and Obstretics,” in ibid. 387–95 and Alfred Ploetz, “Neo-Malthusianism and Race Hygiene,” in Problems in Eugenics. Papers Communicated to the First International Eugenics Congress held at the University of London, July 24th to 30th, 1912, vol. 2 (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1913), 183–9.
Bleeker van Wagenen, “Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders’ Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population,” in Problems in Eugenics, vol. 1, 460–79.
See, for example, Kurt Goldstein, Über Rassenhygiene (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1913).
For an analysis of some of the most important complexities of this relationship see, in particular, Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995); and idem, The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998).
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Turda, M. (2010). The Pathos of Science, 1870–1914. In: Modernism and Eugenics. Modernism and …. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281332_2
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