Politics of Eugenics

Productionism, Population, and National Welfare

Alberto Spektorowski, Liza Ireni-Saban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415814317
• eBook ISBN: 9781135008840
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book analyzes whether the "new debate on genetics" owes a debt to eugenic practices by welfare democracies of 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, the question is whether precisely the same "eugenic rationale" used in the 1930s is philosophical akin to a new rationality unfolding in some Western European welfare societies that find themselves trapped in the modern dilemma of choosing between increasing immigration and population growth that leads to economic prosperity on the one hand, or halting immigration, protecting national identity, and suffering economic stagnation on the other.

By analyzing, policies of integration and assisted reproduction technology (ART) in Northern European nation states such as Sweden, Finland, Denmark as well as in Israel, we find a historical continuity between "old eugenics" and current reproductive and family planning subsides and integration policies. By focusing on the concept of welfare productionism, we trace a continuing rationale between the eugenic policies of the past and current investments of ART. These programs, are rationalized as universal programs for the whole of the population. However, in this book the authors suggest that they served the goal of reproducing a productivist, national middle class which are enticed to reproduce.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of racism, extremism, European politics, population politics, and the social impact of science and technology.

1 Eugenics and productive socialism

New genetics and eugenics—old wine in new bottles?

We believe that the history of eugenics is instructive for those concerned with the bioethics of the new genetics. We do not pretend to provide here a comprehensive bioethical theory that would connect ethical virtues to uses of new genetic technologies. Instead, our aim is to uncover an ethical dimension to decisions about the application of scientific knowledge and technology in welfarist systems. In particular, this book provides some essential materials for constructing a eugenic productivist framework for discourse about the ethical deliberations of the use of reproductive technology. Based on the twofold nature of eugenics as science and politics, two discourses conflated in examining the nature of eugenics: the scholarly discourse situating eugenics in the history of science and aiming at understanding the intellectual development in scientific and ideological contexts, and the political discourse that we set out in this book to compare the historical and the current conjunctures between eugenics and new genetics in population policies in welfare states.¹

Thus, this chapter seeks to address how eugenics was being incorporated into population-based analysis and became politically prominent in various political settings.

In this book we claim that population policies are designed in a context where citizens and government agencies share a commitment to welfare-state policy choices, thereby limiting the range of other possible trajectories. Within the context of national welfarist productivism, the eugenic ideas take a particular form concerning subsidizing population and fertility.

Several historical studies of eugenics have emphasized that the discursive diffusion between science and politics has significance in explaining the rise and fall of eugenics. Eugenics as an applied science sought in its beginning to live by the doctrine of unity of theory and practice for improving society and to impose certain obligations for political action on its adherents. Most of the historical studies of the eugenics movement have proved in more ways than one that in its early beginnings, eugenics’ ambitions were not much different from totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism, fascism, and Leninism in various national and cultural settings (Adams 1990).

However, the interesting thing, as Porter suggests, is that Galtonian ideals adapted not only to totalitarian ideologies but to new practices of welfare planning (Porter 1996). According to Kevles, since its beginnings in the 1860s, eugenics has undergone two major transitions: the first was the shift from “mainline” to “reform” eugenics and the second from reform eugenics to contemporary medical genetics (Kevles 1985). Mainline eugenics is defined as the product of the first meeting of Darwinism and medicine: the understanding that evolution is ongoing, and the emerging concern that the human evolutionary process be rationalized and guided by the ideal of progress, and the human stock protected from harm (Gems 1999). At times Lamarckian (assuming the inheritance of acquired characteristics), mainline eugenics, however, failed to distinguish between cultural and biological heredity. It emphasized the determinant character of the latter.

Advocates of mainline eugenics acted against the proliferation of degenerate families and to effect countermeasures against reproduction of inferior stocks, which could be defined as lower classes or foreigners.

From the 1920s, however, scientists began to understand that Darwin’s theory of evolution was insufficient and was surpassed by a more rigorous understanding of human genetics. As a result of this new consensus, a new type of reform eugenics based in human genetics emerged, the prevention of specific genetic diseases becoming its central focus (Gems 1999). Still, as we shall try to show, there is a direct connection between mainline and reformist eugenics. The latter is connected to the idea of productivist socialism, which represented not only a middle road between Marxist socialism and liberalism, but also between racist nationalism and liberalism. As we shall see, fascist as well as labor and social democratic movements were productivist socialists who used eugenics to create a scientific society relying on the society’s strongest sectors.

While fascist productivist socialism was authoritarian, social democratic and labor movements promoted an organized democratic society, equipped to meet the demands of the modern world. Despite differences, social democrats and fascists supported the idea of a national community. Differently from the Nazi concept of a closed exclusionist and racially superior community, however, social democrats endorse the idea of a democratic republic unified in productivist values. Inclusion is conditioned to productivity, and eugenics became a central tool in order to set the basis of a modern productive national welfare society. Eugenics, thus, was a tool of modernization.

Several books and essays written since the 1970s have thoroughly proven that eugenics flourished in Edwardian Britain as a modernizing ideology for the scientific management of health care problems by the middle class (MacKenzie 1976; Paul 1998; Searle 1976). Moreover, in Great Britain, mainline eugenics evaluated class differences rather than racial differences (Zweiniger-Bargielowska 2007). In Scandinavian countries and Germany, race dominated institutionalized scientific discourse and influenced nation building and social democratic politics (Broberg and Roll-Hansen 1996; Proctor 1988; Weingart 1999). In the United States, biological knowledge about inheritance served as a discriminating tool for social goals during progressive eras. The existence of racial and gender differences entered at the point where historical events and circumstances intersected with personal and familial experience (Dowbiggin 2002). Afro-Americans and women became a potential focus of interest for eugenic management, as these groups were at high risk of experiencing poverty and welfare dependence.² Moreover, as shown by Hansen and King (2001: 243), eugenic ideas were also translated in the United States into policies by political actors who possessed powerful institutional positions. Indeed, the United States saw a particular synergy between eugenic ideas and strategic interests: motivated by political opportunism and (in some measure) racism.

In short, historians have shown that eugenics thinking, as an avenue for the application of science to social problems, became compatible with varied political views, namely a “scientific ideology” (Spektorowski and Mizrachi 2004). Consequently, popular eugenics movements succeeded in rapidly introducing eugenics ideas into public discourse prior to World War II.

In proceeding from our working hypothesis that contemporary genetic practices are embedded in eugenics, we need to explain how its core ideas and practices are still with us today and not confined to the Nazi era.

Thus, in the following we will attempt to portray and highlight eugenics’ “cluster of ideas and activities that aimed at improving the quality of human race through the manipulation of its biological heredity” (Kevles 1992: 4).

We shall set the theoretical frame enabling understanding of why these eugenic ideas that fit the productive interests of socialists are reproduced in the logic of genetics in present times. In synthesis we will trace the links between eugenics and socialist productivism, and in order to do so we should start by introducing a brief historical analysis of social science disciplines through three forms of discourse that together span much of the disciplinary spectrum of eugenics.

Since eugenics was not so much a clear set of scientific principles as a “modern” way of formulating social problems in biological terms, and also as a political spurious set of beliefs between the two world wars, we should employ two models for the purpose of eugenics analysis: scientific and ideological.

As an applied science, which could be used to guide social policy and practice over a wide range of problems in health care and welfare, eugenics fit the strategic research site for the study of science-ideology interactions. Because these two types of disciplines are apparently quite different from one another, it seems risky to conflate them haphazardly. The apparent incompatibility of science and ideology helps to provide a disciplinary account of the survival of eugenics’ ideological core in social democratic movements.

Eugenics in accordance with a scientific model may not necessarily rely on solid rigorous research to back it up, because research in modern genetics and anthropology rendered eugenics’ scientific authority senseless. A scientific approach often fails to take into account that the goals of eugenics are intimately tied up with the values of nation or community and that these values are often driven by ideology. Therefore, an eclectic model that connects the scientific research to a larger ideological context would be a proper way to investigate the continuity or discontinuity with historical disciplinary analysis.

In this chapter we argue that, in time, eugenics’ ambition to reconstruct society was suppressed by social science’s twentieth century core disciplines. Therefore, the history of eugenics should be connected not only to political history but also to the history of social science. Despite the evident variety of eugenic ideas, three attributes of eugenics have been alleged to be inherent in the core eugenic doctrine of improving the stock of humankind by application of the science of human heredity: race, artificial selection, and degeneration. These attributes were constitutive discourses of scientific disciplines, namely anthropology, human genetics, and degeneration. These three discourses will be used to trace the disciplinary status of eugenics to account for paradigmatic shifts in anthropology, human genetics, and ideology prior to World War II.

First, we note the failure of eugenics to account for paradigmatic shifts in anthropology through the conceptualization of race. The category of race will allow us to determine the paradigmatic status of anthropology as a discipline. Within the scientific model, eugenics succeeded or failed to account for theoretical shifts in the racial category within anthropology. Of course, anthropology succeeded in becoming a reputable discipline and eugenics did not.

Second, we examine how eugenics had been interwoven by the discourse of artificial selection into the discipline of human genetics. It is suggested that eugenics refused to regard the model of variability in large populations as compatible with new human genetic heredity. When the modern synthesis established itself as a permanent feature of the genetics landscape, eugenics could no longer provide a conceptual territory within the biological sciences in which the discipline could operate. Finally, during the 1930s there was considerable agreement among geneticists about what constituted the paradigmatic core of a genetic discipline, namely a revived Darwinism as the dominant theory of evolution. Consequently, the synthesis form of Darwinism led to an interpretation of evolution in terms of the genetics of populations, new factors being created by mutation and established in the population by natural selection when they conferred adaptive benefit (Mayr 1991). A modern synthesis was established as a permanent feature of the genetic scientific landscape.

Third, we will shift into the ideological political realm and explore the ideological construction of degeneration over time in both right and left political wings while adapting to changing political realities. Within the ideological discourse, we examine the idea of degeneration as a core concept in several ideologies, including eugenics, with attention to the interplay of its respective (peripheral) loosening and tightening ideological forces, namely, class, youth, heredity, and race. We will show how the interaction of these features found a point of inconsistency in the eugenic ideology of degeneration.

When analyzing eugenics within the framework of these models, we can locate just how eugenics represents a major overhaul of the nation’s welfare system. It is suggested that eugenics’ absence of clearly and coherently defined scientific and ideological objectives make it possible for eugenics to play a role in the nation’s welfare system. Rather than being well constructed, eugenics’ core objectives were arrived at through broader political and social consensus following World War II. To do this, eugenics shifted its emphasis from what was referred to as “race hygiene” to the more consensual form of “national productivist (social) hygiene” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This shift is grounded in the scientifically disciplinary history of eugenics in which eugenics was recognized as a significant interlocutor in various areas of thought and social life, especially in the first third of the twentieth century.³ Welfare policies were formulated on the basis of the values of the community and what measures, based on rational knowledge, will bring those values to fruition. Efficacy rather than well-constructed ideology was more relevant to the narrow question of whether a stated policy achieved a predicted set of objectives.

Finally, the continuity of eugenics in contemporary human genetic practices should be based on rigorous scientific research, while also factoring in the values of the broader society, that is, ideology. This would imply that despite the fact that eugenics lost its scientific authority or its scientific reliability to measure whether the policy is achieving the stated goals, its survival derived from the relevance of its scientific vocabulary to social fears and social political panic. Its old prestige of science allowed social reformers to embrace its main tenets. Thus, in this chapter we present why eugenics became so important for socialism.

This purpose branches into a broader theoretical debate that comprises the succeeding three chapters: the present chapter defines the nature of eugenics, the succeeding chapters compare how eugenic ideas were translated into population policies and which form of eugenics accompanied population politics before World War II up to today in welfare states (Marshall and Rose 1989). It is suggested that the ideational features of eugenics thus securing a place for path dependency have been delineated as factors influencing welfarist policy and politics.

Eugenics between science and ideology—identifying the eugenic disciplinary core concepts: race, artificial selection, and degeneration

Introducing eugenics

Historically, the term eugenics has been defined as a science that investigates ways to improve the genetic conditions of the human race. In general terms, eugenics synthesizes science and policy, and as a discipline and social movement lies at the interface of biological science and society. Its most important and first characteristic is the conviction that human traits of character are genetically transmitted. This so-called science, therefore, aspires to regulate human procreation by encouraging the fecundity of allegedly genetically superior groups in society, while discouraging “defectives” from producing children, since they would replicate their deficiencies.

Although the term eugenics was coined by Francis Galton (1822–1911), the intellectual history of eugenics could be traced back to the philosophies of ancient Greece. In The Republic, Plato’s thoughts on eugenics and the breeding of philosopher kings and guardians were stated: “Defective off-spring … will be quietly and secretly disposed of” and that medicine provided by the state “will provide treatment for those … citizens whose physical and psychological constitution is good; as for others, it will leave the unhealthy to die” (1974: 174). Eugenic thought was also discussed in Roman times; its practice was employed by the Spartans who used to cast out babies who were considered unfit, including female babies, in order to protect their “pure” stock.

In modern times, as noted, the term eugenics was popularized by Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, the founder of the biometric movement in England. It enjoyed its greatest influence from approximately 1905 to 1930, but the movement fell into disrepute because its scientific structure was faulty.

In 1883, Galton’s elaboration of eugenics referred to one “good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities” (1883: 24–25). Galton’s American disciple Charles B. Davenport (1866–1944) defined eugenics as “the improvement of the human race by better breeding” (1910). In 1904, Galton founded the National Eugenics Laboratory, followed by the Eugenics Education Society in 1907, whose stated aim was to educate the British public about eugenics.

As an applied science, thus, the practice of eugenics referred to everything from prenatal care for mothers to forced sterilization and euthanasia. Galton divided the practice of eu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge studies in extremism and democracy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Eugenics and productive socialism
• 2 From "race hygiene" to "national-productivist hygiene"
• 3 The bioethical turn to biopolitics: the emergence of bio-nationalism
• 4 The bio-regulation return of eugenics for a new century of massive immigration and multiculturalism
• 5 European countries and eugenic productivism gospel—potential convergence trends in eugenic productivist population policy
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index