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The Pure Society, From Darwin to Hitler PDF

422 Pages·2009·4.233 MB·English
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1 THE PURE SOCIETY 2 3 THE PURE SOCIETY From Darwin to Hitler ANDRÉ PICHOT Translated by David Fernbach 4 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 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 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 5 Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Maple Vail 6 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 7 Notes Bibliography Index 8 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 9

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