Abstract
This book has focused on how eugenics emerged and interacted with European national cultures between 1870 and 1940. During this period, eugenics became part of larger social, political and national agendas that included social hygiene, population policies, public health and family planning, as well as racial research on social and ethnic minorities. As I have argued, eugenics widely served as a vehicle for transmitting a social and political message that transcended political differences and opposing ideological camps. Moreover, eugenics was as diverse ideologically as it was spread geographically, and adhered to by professional and political elites across Europe, from West to East, irrespective of their political and cultural contexts.
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Notes
Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with Modernity: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 230.
Peter Bowler, The Mendelian Revolution: The Emergences of Hereditarian Concepts in Modern Science and Society (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), 17. Bowler expands here on the “strong programme in the sociology of knowledge” proposed by David Boor in his Knowledge and Social Imagery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991) [first edition 1976].
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” American Historical Review 114, 1 (2009): 2.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (London: Polity Press, 1991); Michael Schwartz, “Biopolitik in der Moderne”, Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 31 (1995); Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (London: Routledge, 2009).
See, from a long list of studies, Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (London: Polity Press, 2003); Nicholas Agar, Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Jean Gayon, Daniel Jacobi, eds., L’éternal retour de l’eugénisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006); and John Harris, Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
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© 2010 Marius Turda
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Turda, M. (2010). Conclusion: Towards an Epistemology of Eugenic Knowledge. In: Modernism and Eugenics. Modernism and …. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281332_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281332_6
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