During the 19th century, social organisation was increasingly conceived in biopolitical terms: the social problems of urban, industrial society should be addressed by managing a population of bodies, thus expanding the domain of medical expertise and enhancing the political authority of the medical profession.
In Britain, the Vaccination Acts greatly strengthened the powers of the medical profession to compel the adoption of medical treatments. Significantly, in the late 19th century, critics of the attempts to alter such legislation argued that it would lead to the ‘de-Jenner-ration’ of the nation .These critics were playing on the fears of national degeneration.
From the 1870s onward, on the basis of an increasingly darwinian understanding of society, the middle class was fearful that the physically and morally degenerate working classes were reproducing faster than themselves, the better part of society: social degeneration. In other words, social difference was explained in biological terms, and now the biological differences between the normal and the pathological or deviant were increasingly assumed to be heritable. It is in this context that Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s nephew, coined the word eugenics to capture the importance of good breeding to the welfare of the nation.
| 
|
It is perhaps needless to say that self-regarding thinking, such as that espoused by Galton and many of his contemporaries, was also shaped by the increasing justification of imperial rule in terms of rule over biologically inferior people (racialisation of imperialism). Increasingly, however, these were not idle boasts, but arguments supported by scientific evidence collected by medically trained experts (anthropology, anthropometry and criminology).
The increasingly scientifically grounded fears of degeneration were heightened in the 1890s, as Britain seemed to lose its international pre-eminence. International competition was increasingly understood in terms of a darwinian struggle for existence, which Britain was losing because its population was degenerating: national degeneration. Such insecurity was brought to a head by British defeat in the Boer War (1899-1902). Those who had been advocating greater state intervention in society and the economy, to improve national efficiency, pointed out that 80% of the volunteers from the working class were unfit for recruitment, both mentally and physically.
Liberal Imperialists argued that, if Britain was to survive in the struggle for international pre-eminence, it had to look to Germany for answers to the problem of national efficiency. In Germany, Otto Bismarck had introduced a national insurance scheme as a way to pacify the working classes and reduce the appeal of socialism. Furthermore, Bismarck’s political opponents such as Rudolf Virchow were won over by the linked expansion of public health to improve the health of the German working class (see ideology of practical interest). To Liberal Imperialists, this seemed a very attractive solution to the problem confronting Britain, and it was equally attractive to the reformist Fabian Society and, for quite different reasons, to the more moderate, parliamentary wing of the British socialist movement, the Independent Labour Party (National Insurance Act, 1909).
Eugenics and public health
There can be little doubt that it was very difficult to tease apart whether the socially disruptive behaviour of the working classes, which so worried the middle classes, was inherited or a product of their environment (little education, poor housing and health). The principal issue, on which almost everyone agreed, was instead how to change the norm, to produce a more efficient nation.
The norm could be shifted in one of two ways: either by increasing the reproduction of better classes of people (positive eugenics) or by stopping the reproduction of the inferior classes of people (negative eugenics).
Positive eugenics
Initially, greater emphasis was placed on positive eugenics and the role of children in producing the fitter nation of the future. Much legislation was enacted to promote better childrearing and schooling among both the working classes and middle classes, such as the establishment of Schools Medical Service as well as the introduction of school meals and physical education, all on the assumption that physically healthy and better educated children and youths would improve the nation and empire.
School Medical Officer (examining child’s eyes): Now, little girl, can you see my finger?
Child (coyly): I shan’t tell you.
Does the girl need glasses or not?
The emerging science of genetics, whose origins are intimately tied to eugenics, suggested however that this approach was unlikely to work as long as the lower classes continued to reproduce and mix with their betters, especially as the extension of access to medical care meant that many more of their unfit children would survive into adulthood.
This shift was tied to a hardening of views on the inherited nature of abnormality, against which environmental modification could do preciously little (Mental Deficiency Act, 1913: symbolic role of mental deficiency, and sterilisation to segregation of sexes in mental asylums).
Negative eugenics
If environmental improvement seemed to fail, the problem could be tackled in a number of ways. In the United States, eugenics was championed by Charles Davenport. As Director of the Department of Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, and author of The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding (1910), he established the Eugenics Records Office, where his collaborators assembled 750,000 pedigrees of American families and promoted the concept of eugenics with ‘Fitter Families’ contests across the nation.
In the United States, eugenic ideas were so powerful, however, that, as confidence in positive approaches waned, they shaped legislation to compulsorily sterilise so-called mental defectives and, in a society that was much more overtly and aggressively racist than Britain, it also became possible to legally prohibit miscegenation, the reproductive mixing of races through intermarriage.
It is then not surprising that the notorious German eugenic policies under National Socialism, which culminated in the extermination of over six million people and largely discredited eugenics, owed much to earlier developments in the United States.
This said, while German and American eugenic policies increasingly evoked much criticism, throughout the 1930s, even progressive critics such as Mary Stopes denied that childbearing was an inalienable right and argued that society, if not the state, should intervene in childbearing choices.
By this time, the efforts of the British state to produce healthier and better educated children and youths focussed increasingly on mothers, transforming childbirth and rearing into a medical problem.
Stopes was actively involved in this programme, and was particularly concerned to expand its remit by promoting birth control.
It is important to bear in mind that the efforts to promote birth control, like most negative eugenic policies, focussed particularly on the working classes and the burden of large families (cf. Thomas Malthus and the reform of the Poor Law).
The welfare state as the eugenic state?
That many of the medical experts involved in these efforts became actively involved in the establishment of the National Health Service (1948), suggests that we should think about such provision as a form of eugenic policy.
On the other hand, the arguably less coercive approach developed in Britain, which emphasised both the provision of health care facilities for mothers and children, and education into making the right reproductive choices, suggests that it might be more productive to think in more general biopolitical terms. The emphasis here lies on the positive deployment of biological potential to promote the self-production of new political subjects (internalisation of biopolitical norm).
| 
|
- - - - - - - - - -
Giacomo Savini (2006)
|
Blog 
