The Pure Society, From Darwin to Hitler

422 Pages·2009·4.233 MB·English

by  André Pichot

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THE PURE SOCIETY
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THE PURE SOCIETY
From Darwin to Hitler
ANDRÉ PICHOT
Translated by David Fernbach
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This work was published with the help of the French Ministry of
Culture – Centre National du Livre
This work is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign
Affairs, as part of the Burgess programme headed for the French
Embassy in London by the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni.
First published as La Société pure de Darwin à Hitler
© Flammarion 2001
This edition published by Verso 2009
Translation © David Fernbach
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-244-8
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress
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Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Maple Vail
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CONTENTS
Introduction: A Hard Subject to Tackle
Part One: Sociology and Biology
1. The Naturalization of Society
2. The Critique of Social Darwinism
3. Evolutionary Altruism
4. Sociobiology Today
5. Darwinism, Society and Morality
6. Methodological Issues
Part Two: Genetics and Eugenics
7. The Origins of Eugenics
8. The Extension of Heredity to Disorderly Behaviour
9. Eugenics in the United States and Europe
10. German Eugenics Before and Under Nazism
11. The Extermination of the Mentally Ill
12. The Resurgence of Eugenics
Part Three: Taxonomy, Evolution and Racism
13. The Classification of Races
14. Gumplowicz and Racial Struggle
15. Racism, Anti-Semitism and Biology
16. The Present Perspective
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Notes
Bibliography
Index
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INTRODUCTION:
A Hard Subject to Tackle
This book takes me somewhat away from my areas of specialization
– epistemology and the conceptual history of biology – and tackles
questions that I have not always been very familiar with, though I did
make a previous incursion into the sociology of science with a small
book on eugenics.1 An exercise of this kind is not without risk, and
my reason for embarking on it is that there is a definite gap between
the constantly proclaimed necessity to study the relationship
between biology and society, and a certain inability of sociologists
and specialists in social and political history to take into account
things that are well known to epistemologists and historians of
science – an inability shared by lawyers and politicians (not to speak
of the media). I see evidence of this in the difficulty they have in
taking a position in relation to recent advances in biology and the
declarations of certain biologists.
It is not that the subject matter is particularly arduous, but rather
that it amounts to walking through a minefield. On the one hand, that
is because of the constant need to interweave data deriving from
heterogeneous disciplines, and to distinguish between genuinely
scientific approaches and more or less crude analogies. On the other
hand, it is because the question inevitably refers to the doctrines of
Nazism, and because the relationship between those doctrines and
contemporaneous biology is a taboo subject that historians avoid
tackling, while the media only caricature it (with the approval of
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