I

Despite a wealth of existing literature, the history of race and eugenics continues to attract a diverse range of scholars, from historians to biologists and philosophers. This affluence and interdisciplinary convergence has not only furthered an increased awareness of diverse traditions of racial and eugenic thought, both defunct and active, but also prompted scholars carefully to examine established scholarly paradigms determining these traditions. This constant need for critical incisiveness is by no means an effortless exercise, as demonstrated by recent publications on race and eugenics.

Has race, as cultural, social, and biological symbol, survived decades of scientific and public denunciation, only to resurface surreptitiously in current attempts to fashion public alertness about our genetically obsessed societies? Moreover, is there a connection between phrenology and eugenics? Can phrenologists of the early nineteenth century be seen as pre-figuring eugenic ideas of social and biological improvement? Furthermore, what led so many scientists of the twentieth century to believe in eugenics? And, finally, does eugenics still have a place in twenty-first-century discussions on genetic engineering, cloning, and genomics? To answer these questions, one must consider two centuries of debates and speculations on the very nature of the human mind and body, modern societies, and states as well as their co-dependent, and often antagonistic, relationship. Indeed, it is during the Enlightenment that ideas of biological typology based on environmental conditions and psychological aptitudes were first formulated. Conceptions of physical and cultural difference might have existed in the ancient world and throughout the medieval period, but as George Fredrickson argues in his synthesis on racism, ‘no concept truly equivalent to that of “race” can be detected in the thought of the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians’ (p. 17). This perspective contends that the modern concept of race – namely, human types characterized by physical and psychological attributes like skin colour and intelligence – did not exist until the mid-nineteenth century. It was during this period of terminological and conceptual inventiveness that the Austrian Franz Joseph Gall began studying the development of brain contours in order to provide empirical evidence for how the brain functioned and, subsequently, human faculties and emotions. His theory of cranial bumps, or phrenology (from the Greek words ‘mind’ and ‘knowledge’) reduced psychological categories to physiological attributes, recommended that certain regions of the brain were correlated with certain physical aptitudes and moral behaviour. Violent propensities, like combativeness and destructiveness for instance, were located at the back of the brain; intellectual aptitudes, like memory and language, were situated in the front, while human affections, like veneration and benevolence, were located towards the top of the head. Gall and his followers in Europe and the USA believed that by examining skulls and brains, any given individual's psychological characteristics could be evaluated, thus enabling them to predict, and ultimately control, human improvement.

II

In his convincing discussion of Victorian naturalism, John van Whye observes ‘Gall's science was a charismatic and highly innovative technique for analysing and classifying individual aptitudes in ways specific to late eighteenth-century Viennese medical and philosophical contexts’ (p. 18). The origins of phrenology might have been Central European, but it was Britain and the USA where phrenological ideas gained sufficient consistency and adherence to serve as the foundation of a new science of morals and human nature. In Britain, Gall's assistant Johann Gaspar Spurzheim succeeded in not only overcoming negative attitudes towards phrenology, but also in convincing new audiences that he was co-creating a new scientific credo. But if Gall and Spurzheim's ideas overlapped, they were by no means identical: to the latter, phrenology implied, first and foremost, scientific authority and independence, as well as emancipation from the rule of other scientific canons in a hostile academic environment. To his credit, van Whye is not engrossed in merely narrating phrenological controversies in early nineteenth-century Britain; he also sheds light on how phrenology, especially the writings of George Combe, influenced ideas of culture and civilization in Victorian Britain. Comparing to other famous scientists of the nineteenth century like Charles Darwin or Herbert Spencer, Combe is almost forgotten by the annals of science. Van Whye disagrees with this view and substantiates his claim with an in-depth analysis of Combe's ideas as well as his significant role in establishing the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1820. In 1828, Combe published The constitution of man considered in relation to external objects, a book that van Whye describes as ‘the nineteenth-century bible of naturalism’ (p. 96). It was, in short, a philosophical theory of natural laws that, at its core, was based upon the idea of progress.

To be sure, by the late 1820s such ideas were scarcely original, but van Whye reads the popularity enjoyed by Combe's book as the symptom of a society searching for new moral foundations upon which to base individual improvement through self-help and physical discipline. It should, then, come as no surprise that The constitution of man was an editorial success, outselling classical works, like Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the natural history of creation (1844) and Charles Darwin's The origins of species (1859), as late as 1895. But this development could not prevent the mounting criticism from diverse segments of academia and the general public, and by the 1860s, phrenology fell in disrepute. The causes are varied, but arguably the emergence of competing theories of evolution articulated by a new generation of British naturalists, most prominently Charles Darwin, is one of them. Phrenological naturalism, on the other hand, survived this new wave of biological evolutionism, and – albeit transformed by subsequent appropriations – left an undeniable mark on political economy as well as medical, sanitary, and educational reforms introduced in Britain and the USA in the nineteenth century.

This scientific transfer and appropriation further preoccupies Stephen Tomlinson who, in his account of the emergence of British and American secular education, explains convincingly and in great detail the influence of phrenology on such esteemed American educators and social reformers as Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe. Proving that the historiography of race and eugenics is constantly changing, Tomlinson is concerned with the role science played in articulating racial conceptions of the body and mind. Much of the book's strength derives from Tomlinson's tendency to combine histories of scientific institutions with biographies of scientists, as well as to evaluate how the public engaged with science on an educational, cultural, and political level. The nineteenth century has proven to be an especially attractive ground for such investigations. It was then that science permeated the general public in most European countries and the USA, as scientists demanded a greater role in educational, economic, and social issues. Such an ambitious historiographic endeavour must be pursued comparatively and topically. Indeed, by focusing on the subtle connections between political ideologies and scientific theories in three countries (France, Britain, and the USA), Tomlinson demonstrates how beliefs about the human mind and body decisively influenced intellectual agendas as well as framed political debates by conferring legitimacy to social and cultural interaction.

Tomlison further describes the convoluted trajectory of nineteenth-century social thought, showing it to be infused with phrenological tropes of virtue, morality, and social philanthropy. Whether it is Combe describing the institutions of the New World as the most appropriate for the development of the mind's organs, Howe's phrenological miracle – the education of a deaf–blind girl, Laura Bridgman; or Mann's quest for biological and intellectual perfectibility for both men and women at the newly established Antioch College, Tomlinson devotes as much attention to the diachronic development of the academic and political career of these authors as he does to the epistemological synchronicity in their writings and social activities.

Four major assumptions keep Tomlinson's interwoven investigation of phrenology together. The first suggests that education ‘must incorporate some view of human nature and a conception of the social good’. Conceived in this way, education is, according to the second assumption, ‘the process of perfecting human nature’, that is an ambitious project which centres on the ‘psychological management of the population’. The third assumption indicates how French and British phrenologists combined psychology and utilitarian philosophy with pedagogy in order ‘to establish model secular schools that would demonstrate how the principle of political economy and physiology could be taught to the working classes’. It is perhaps surprising, given these very noble aspirations, that these phrenological principles ‘funded a classicist, racist, and sexist political agenda’. In fact, according to the fourth assumption, both Howe and Mann developed a eugenic phrenology which ‘provided the moral technology necessary for the control – and ultimately elimination – of the abnormal: the mad, the deaf, the blind, the mentally retarded, the deviant, the criminal, and the mulatto’ (pp. xiv–xv).

It bears emphasis that the phrenologists (like the eugenicists a century later) were a diverse group of varying political persuasions and religious affiliations. They did, however, agree that the fusion between science and politics should serve the harmonious development of the body politic of the nation. In the USA, unquestionably, it was the republican ideology and Christian values that each supporter of phrenology advocated. Harmonizing these ideals with the new political and social environment resulting from the Civil War (1861–5) was an essential test for national educators like Howe. Tomlinson nuances this point by contrasting ‘the reconstruction of the nation’ with ‘the historic problem of determining the social and political rights of people freed from slavery’ (p. 146).

After the 1860s, social reformers and progressive intellectuals addressed the enduring racial stereotyping and racism within the parameters of a legal framework, which was supposed to shape a new American nation. Above all, it was hoped that new foundations for race relations, as much as for the prevention of social and biological degeneracy and other topics of phrenological interest, could be implemented. Ultimately, Howe and his supporters might have succeeded in creating a modern system of pedagogy and social protectionism, but indebted, as they were, to their physiological philosophy, many of their ‘physiologically informed welfare policies’ – as Tomlinson clearly indicates – ‘helped create a field of prescientific professional knowledge and practices upon which the eugenic movement could build’ (p. 381).

III

Such a view is confirmed by the subsequent evolution of racial thought not only in the United States, but also in Europe. Although many episodes in the history of racial sciences are familiar (from the rise of Social Darwinism to the success of eugenics), they must be considered both in relation to each other, as well as juxtaposed to specific historical conditions. Yet again, as Fredrickson indicates, ‘[r]acism is always national specific. It invariably becomes enmeshed with searches for national identity and cohesion that vary with the historical experience of each country’ (p. 75). Critically, this principle of national specificity guides Angelique Richardson's discussion of late nineteenth-century feminist fiction in Britain. Most importantly, Richardson transcends the putative obsession of existing scholarship with the racial component of eugenics in order to focus on its social component: in Britain, she cogently argues, eugenics was a discourse on class, social status, and gender. To substantiate this claim, and its corollary – namely that eugenics was primarily concerned with rational reproduction – Richardson refers to a number of Victorian authors known as New Women writers, especially Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Mona Caird. These women professed progressive ideas about selective marriage and rational reproduction encouraging Richardson to suggest ‘the most sustained expressions of eugenic ideas were to be found in fiction’ (Prologue).

By focusing on fiction rather than sciences Richardson, therefore, provides an important qualification to common generalizations that eugenics evolved exclusively within the fields of medicine and biology. The common feature of the novels and short stories analysed by Richardson is the polemical strategy of using issues of national concern such as racial degeneration or marriage in order to address the relationship between eugenics and feminism and consequently undermine traditional ideas of sexual and social politics in the late Victorian period. The result is the conceptualization of ‘eugenic love’ or, in other words, ‘the politics of the state mapped onto bodies: the replacement of romance with the rational selection of a reproductive partner in order better to serve the state through breeding’ (pp. 8–9). In this way, then, careful investigations of marriage and motherhood, and, above all, the treatment of feminist narratives in their proper historical context prompt for a rather more subtle understanding of eugenic feminism and the ideas of rational reproduction it advocated.

The controversies surrounding the social and biological role of women are also significant in that they demonstrate the complexities of the eugenic discourse and its relationship to sexual identity. Acknowledging this should not, however, tempt us to assume that because the New Women writers placed hereditary determinism and women in direct relationship to rational reproduction, other eugenic concerns like ‘the proliferation of the unfit’ and the racial degeneration of the nation were marginalized. In fact, in the debates about women, heredity, and social emancipation all participants agreed on the need to ‘serve the race, the country, and their own interests through the rational selection of a reproductive partner’ (p. 215): they differed mainly over how that ‘rational selection’ could be achieved. Thus while many feminist writers championed the need for improving the role of women in society and marriage by outlining the seminal importance of eugenics, one author – Mona Caird – believed instead in social regeneration and improving social and cultural conditions. Although subscribing to the rhetoric of reproductive morality, Caird nonetheless questioned that motherhood was the natural function of all women. She thus insisted that motherhood and the racial symbolism associated with eugenics instead of liberating women were instruments of patriarchal authoritarianism. As the case-study concluding Richardson's book, Caird's example appropriately serves as a reminder of the necessity to understand how this generation of Victorian women articulated their visions of sexual emancipation and social liberties through their critical engagement with eugenics and biological determinism. Ultimately, Richardson succeeds in convincingly illustrating the role of class and social status in articulating eugenic agendas but it is clear, however, that eugenic feminism was as much about female empowerment as it was about accepting or rejecting its racial dimension. In a society pervaded by racial imagery this is not unexpected; nor was Victorian Britain singular in its fascination with race. Undoubtedly, few ideas in history have enjoyed a more trans-national career than the idea of race. In fact, affinities between different traditions of race and eugenics are otherwise difficult to grasp if one does not concentrate on the myriad of interfaces between scientific and political forces across national borders.

Andrés Horacio Reggiani additionally explores such hermeneutic strategies of interpretation in his study of Alexis Carrel, the French eugenicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912. Similar to the accounts of nineteenth-century phrenologists, this is ‘less a biography in the traditional sense than a discussion about science, popular culture, and politics’ (p. xii). These variations on the theme of science and politics are also good indicators of the historiographic transformation experienced by the scholarship on eugenics, especially of the tendency to introduce new methodologies grounded in a fusion between science, medicine, and history. Within this interdisciplinary field, Reggiani re-directs the discussion towards the historical documentation of eugenics, while simultaneously insisting on its ongoing relevance to contemporary debates on the role of science in society.

Central to Reggiani's interpretation of Carrel's scientific and political career in both the USA and France is the synergy between politics, anthropology, and biomedicine. The ultimate purpose of incorporating eugenics into this analysis is to encourage the development of more sensitive approaches to crucial events in recent French and European history; events which changed the life of millions of individuals and which were often implemented in the name of science and progress. This multidisciplinary approach to the diffusion of eugenic ideas also illuminates the relationship between the individual and the emergence of modern biopolitics. The reconfiguration of the traditional private sphere and of individual and religious rights was one important consequence of this transformation. Essentially, the boundary between private and public spheres was blurred by the idea of public responsibility for the nation, which came to dominate both. As a result, it became possible to connect notions of collective welfare with individual responsibility towards the nation.

Reggiani argues persuasively that Carrel is an eloquent example of a series of scientists who, in the 1930s and 1940s, envisioned programmes of human regeneration based on ideas of race and nation. The fact that Carrel – after a successful career in prestigious medical institutions in the USA, including the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research – welcomed the Vichy regime is, of course, central to Reggiani's arguments. The episode also reveals a more general point about the disillusionment of Carrel's generation with liberal democracy and its alleged ineffectual methods of controlling the biological degeneration of the nation. Social maladies like alcoholism and prostitution and economic problems like unemployment figured among the chief obstacles to the progress of society diagnosed by the eugenicists. Although Carrell did not go as far as other French eugenicists, or their German counterparts, in endorsing radical racial methods of segregation and elimination, he too believed that eugenics could greatly assist in society's biological rejuvenation.

Importantly, this argument percolates into more general themes characterizing twentieth-century history. Fusing medicine with biopolitical projects of social engineering required the use of historical, linguistic, anthropological, and semiotic tools as well as medical knowledge. Medicine, like history, is knowledge created not by reality but by the social and intellectual practices that inform it. Moreover, while medicine is guided by its internal principles, scientists are frequently enveloped by their social and political existence, and often adhere to dominant social and political practices. Scientific discoveries are thus not separated from the culture they inhabit, and the questions scientists ask about the world, as well as the interpretations they extract from their empirical data and experiments, are often shaped by cultural attitudes, social needs, and political possibilities. It is important to note that with the advent of eugenics notions of biological decline became entangled with new definitions of social pathology. The corollary to this development was a distinctly modern ethos that viewed the body and mind of individuals in decidedly more negative terms. Sterilization of the so-called ‘undesirable’ and even euthanasia hence became viable means in the quest to protect the nation's biological core.

Many of Carrel's concerns with population, sociobiological experimentation, and human engineering echoed, in fact, Combe, Howe, Mann, and other nineteenth-century phrenologists' preoccupation with the mind and body of the community. Yet, and during the 1940s in particular, the Christian morality invoked during the nineteenth century by the phrenologists succumbed to racial epistemology – in the same vein as the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment were replaced by an authoritarian form of technocratic modernism. A brutally instrumentalized rationality ideally served scientists like Carrel, who could not resist the temptation to engineer ‘human souls’ (p. 185). Eugenics, thus, became the repository of biological forms of knowledge, which in turn reinstated the supremacy of the laws of nature and of one racial group over others. After all, as Fredrickson remarks in his conclusion, ‘racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of difference that it believes are hereditary and unalterable’ (p. 170). Not all bioscientists would agree with this opinion, but this does not diminish the importance of Fredrickson's argument.

IV

Issues such as these were not abruptly abandoned after the Second World War. In fact, as Fredrickson suggests, this period established ‘patterns of thought and action concerning race and racism that would endure for the rest of the century’ (p. 127). Characteristically, the argument here is more about racial practices than the epistemology of race. As fervently as Fredrickson deplores the persistence of race as a central argument of post-1945 discussions about civil rights, gender roles, social difference, and genetic engineering, he decides, nevertheless, that a ‘categorisation of racism is justified’ (p. 169). But there is another side to this ‘categorisation’ that has little to do with methodology and more to do with scientific expertise and political power; especially the controversial, albeit increasingly conventional, attempt to resurrect eugenics within current discussions on genetic engineering and human cloning.

John Glad, for instance, believes that invoking the responsibility that present generations owe to future ones should serve as the foundation of contemporary science. In Future human evolution, he declares emphatically ‘we owe it to our children to begin the journey, to do our best to ensure that they will be born better people than we are, and that they inherit more of our good qualities and fewer of our flaws’ (p. 19). In this respect, his narrative takes us into the labyrinthine history of post-1945 controversies over eugenics and genetics in order ‘to pose certain broad philosophical questions about the values and goals of human civilization and the path which humankind will follow in consciously choosing either to pursue or to reject artificial selection’ (p. 31). Of late, Nicholas Agar's Liberal eugenics: in defence of human enhancement has put these claims forward most strongly.Footnote ¹ However, in contrast to the sophisticated ideological apparatus of Agar and other scientists agreeing with him, there is something redolently revisionist in Glad's account.Footnote ² Obviously, Glad realizes that a too enthusiastic justification of eugenics can all too easily become volatile, but he is oddly reluctant to pursue an unconditional criticism of the central tenets of eugenics. This is questionable considering that not only a large number of scientists forcefully criticized eugenic family planning after 1945, but so did scholars of eugenics.

To be fair, Glad recognizes the importance of integrating eugenics within its historical trajectory, but sees it less as a warning from the past than a reaffirmation of the dichotomy between ‘bad’ eugenics (namely racist) against ‘good’ eugenics (critical of Nazi racism and state interventionism). That said, some of Glad's suggestions are problematic to say the least, including the idea that the ‘radical egalitarianism’ promoted by contemporary societies will ‘devastate our species’, or that ‘[e]ugenic family planning services are the greatest gift that the advanced countries can offer the Third World’ (p. 97). Glad knows, of course, that the ultimate objective of eugenic policies, scientific as well as political, is the creation of a perfect biological organism, subject not to the unpredictability of the laws of Nature but to the rational design of genetic determinism. Yet, Glad insists that his form of eugenics is different from past eugenics, for instance, although ultimately all forms of eugenics share one fundamental ambition: to produce healthier babies. Whether ‘liberal’ or not, Glad's view that disability makes a life less worth living, and that it is therefore morally justified to prevent as many of those ‘genetically disabled’ from reproduction echoes particular, familiar, tropes of interwar negative eugenics.Footnote ³ One important remark is necessary: for Glad race is not the crux of twenty-first-century eugenics; he relocates this role to the concern for future generations. In this he unmistakably resembles Francis Galton's ideas of ‘positive eugenics’, namely that social engineering could enhance national community, quantitatively and qualitatively. Galton's conviction was that selective breeding and controlling reproduction could remedy social and biological pathologies. However, one cannot fail to ponder whether by excluding some individuals from reproduction, or eliminating personal features others find disagreeable or even catalogue as ‘diseases’, one does not act as insensitively and arbitrarily as proponents of racial eugenics did during the interwar period.

This question and other ethical issues connected to the development of new biotechnologies and genetics are suitably discussed by a handful of contributors to the special issue of the journal New Formations dedicated to eugenics and its relationship to genetics and biotechnology. Current controversies surrounding human reproduction, genetic diagnosis and therapies, stem-cell research, and germ engineering are knowledgeably interspersed with critical assessments of illustrative episodes in the history of eugenics. Véronique Mottier and Natalia Gerodetti, for instance, look at the social welfare and eugenic policies orchestrated by European Social Democracy in Scandinavian countries and Switzerland in order to document the growing importance after 1900 of ideas of state intervention and the subsequent ‘subordination of the individual to the collective interest of the national community’ (p. 49). Other contributors, like Gillian Swanson and Lucy Bland, investigate social psychiatry and eugenics and ‘race-crossing’ projects in interwar Britain, respectively. Both studies are illustrative of the historical importance one must devote to synchronic cultural repertoires of eugenics and race and their diachronic transformation in different social and historical contexts, if one expects to disentangle the ‘prehistory of our modern mentalities’ (p. 65) and engage with persistent forms of popular representation of race in public discourses and political action.

It is noteworthy that in the decisive debates over the validity and role of genetics in shaping the future of mankind, the problematic connotations of eugenics are ever so present. Hilary Rose's concern that eugenics and genetics are viewed by some more like ‘conjoined twins’ rather than distant relatives is also voiced by Alan Petersen, who denounces ‘crude portrayals of the new genetics’ as ‘analytically unhelpful’ as well as ‘historically and politically naïve’ (p. 88). And if this prompts us to be more careful when discussing the intellectual sources of contemporary technologies of human improvement, it is clear that such claims are not without complications. Thus, if Bill Armer forcefully paints a picture of eugenics silently motivating existing social policy in Britain and the USA, another contributor, Barbara Maria Stafford, does not hesitate to declare the commencing of ‘an age of self-eugenics’, whereby the ‘ecstasy of biologically-based enhancement’ (pp. 104, 111) ultimately contours and determines the moral values of the twenty-first century.

Yet, contrary to the central place occupied by the USA and Britain in the field of genetic research, some of the most interesting ethical and philosophical discussions of the relationship between new biotechnological techniques of human improvement and the re-emerging of eugenics take place in France, the country which established the first national bioethics committee and where, as John Marks discusses in his article, biologists like Jacques Testart and others, initiated ‘a humanist critique of the hegemony of a molecular genetic framework, and associate[d] this molecular eugenics with the more general development of technoscience’ (p. 125).

This humanist perspective also finds an elaborate expression in those biological and philosophical reflections that evaluate the impact of recent developments in molecular biology on human body and mind, and question the contentious affiliation between ‘liberal eugenics’ and biotechnology. In the concluding article to this brilliantly planned collection, Lenny Moss engages with Habermas's confutation of ‘liberal eugenics’, demonstrating how by accentuating the neo-Kantian tradition of ‘abstention that swallows and regurgitates the media-hyped jargon of genetic programming holus-bolus’ (p. 139) while neglecting the anthropological dimension in which ethical critiques of human nature are embedded, the German philosopher has, in fact, assembled a distorted interpretation of moral autonomy, which makes it difficult to evaluate the genetic revolution in its own contextual and normative environment.Footnote ⁴ Interestingly, Moss's appeal to the legacy of philosophical anthropology evokes, subtly, the main tenets of early nineteenth-century phrenology; particularly the phrenologists' insistence on a symbiotic relationship between body, mind, and nature.

Moss's evaluation of critical views on biotechnology, like that of other contributors, is more than a mere exercise in historical memory. Contrary to Glad's superficial analysis of the impact of new bio-technological practices on society, this volume provides a solid and refreshing approach to controversial and unsettling dilemmas facing both scientists involved in genetic research and the general public. Understanding human nature continues to be as much a form of moral introspection as a quest for scientific knowledge.

V

Phrenologists of the early twentieth century were aware of human imperfection but – true to their Enlightenment credentials – assumed that training and education could transform any individual, irrespective of gender and ethnic origin. Contemporary genetics complements this assumption by insisting that it can prevent the occurrence of imperfect or detrimental genetic traits and diseases. That biotechnology can yield incalculable benefits, even its staunchest detractors will not deny. However, its repeated abuses ever since the Enlightenment in the name of human improvement ought to alert us to the normalization of genetic engineering. We might, as individuals, be ‘as ephemeral as the chaff in the wind’ (Glad, p. 105), but why some should prevent others from enjoying those ephemeral moments constituting life remains to be answered. The claim that the new ‘liberal eugenics’ avoids the coercions of authoritarian forms of biological selection to elevate the rights of the individual instead should thus be contemplated critically and in its historical dimension. Ultimately, this is what the new scholarship on race and eugenics is endeavouring to do.Footnote ⁵ It is difficult to predict our genetic future; it is certain, however, that the lessons from the past are not easily forgotten.