Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Defining Social Darwinism
- Part II Pioneers
- Part III Case studies
- 7 Reform Darwinism
- 8 Races, nations and the struggle for existence
- 9 The eugenic conscience
- 10 Social Darwinism, nature and sexual difference
- 11 Nazism, Fascism and Social Darwinism
- Postscript: Social Darwinism old and new: the case of sociobiology
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - The eugenic conscience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Defining Social Darwinism
- Part II Pioneers
- Part III Case studies
- 7 Reform Darwinism
- 8 Races, nations and the struggle for existence
- 9 The eugenic conscience
- 10 Social Darwinism, nature and sexual difference
- 11 Nazism, Fascism and Social Darwinism
- Postscript: Social Darwinism old and new: the case of sociobiology
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The story of the various national eugenics and racial hygiene movements has been told many times, and it is not my intention to reproduce these histories here. My interest is in the relationship between these movements and Social Darwinism. As I argued in the introduction, eugenics and Social Darwinism should not be conflated for it was possible to endorse one and not the other. Nevertheless, Darwin himself prefigured the concerns of the eugenics movements. In his Descent Darwin signalled his anxiety about the possibility of biological decline caused by social practices that cushioned the unfit from the impact of natural selection. Whereas among ‘savages’ mentally and physically defective individuals were quickly eliminated, in civilised societies such persons were sustained by various medical and charitable practices:
Thus the weak members of civilised society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed (205–6).
In the closing pages of the book Darwin returned to this topic to suggest that ‘all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children’, pointing out that ‘if the prudent avoid marriage whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the better members of society’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945Nature as Model and Nature as Threat, pp. 216 - 248Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997