Eugenicism

Conceptual Framework

Eugenicist notions emerged during the pre-Christian era. The earliest documented articulation of eugenicism was possibly that laid out by Plato in The Republic, written in 390 BCE, in which he called for the best of either sex to be united with the best as often as possible and the inferior with the inferior as seldom as possible and that the offspring of the first should be maintained in optimal conditions. Plato also understood that this work [Page 265]should be carried out in secret by the rulers to avoid the danger that the herd would rebel.

Eugenicism matured during the Enlightenment period, structured by interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks that were responsive to the nature versus nurture debate of human development. Gregor Mendel's mid-19th-century research on genetics and heredity was recovered in the early 20th century and became the basis for eugenicist thought. Prior to Mendel, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck posited that through the process of adaptation, an organism can pass on to its offspring characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime. Lamarckian evolution grounds the theory of behavioral genetics. The racialist thinking of Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, a French aristocrat considered to be the father of racial demography and author of An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, established the superiority of an Aryan master race. A few years later, in 1859, Charles Darwin introduced a theory, in his On the Origin of Species, that suggested an evolutionary process for humans based on natural selection that Galton later theorized could be aided by scientific intervention. Herbert Spencer, influenced by Darwin, coined the term the survival of the fittest in his text, Principles of Biology, which rationalized individualism and competitiveness based on a scarcity of resources articulated in the dystopian vision of Thomas Robert Malthus. Between 1798 and 1826, Malthus published six editions of his famous treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population, which provided the rationale for population control. The intertextual readings of these theoretical frameworks inform notions of the desirability and viability of certain bodies and genes.

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