VVSpektorowski and Saban point out two quite different motivations for the broad base of support still quietly enjoyed by eugenics: ‘productivism’ and national identity. Modern states tend to give precedence to the former, while Hitler stressed the latter. Social Democrats in Sweden and Denmark, and Laborists in Israel and Finland believed that a welfare society was sustainable only by increasing the number of productive individuals while reducing the number of people with limited work capacity. On the whole, the concepts of race and ‘productivism’ are presented in this book as working partly in opposition to each other, and partly in tandem. The authors derive the theoretical basis of their view of biopolitics from the French social theorist Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. Politics of Eugenics presents an underlying eugenic strategy reemerging in ‘liberal,’ ‘democratic’ states seeking to preserve their ethnic identities while remaining competitive in the globalized economy: “What began as racial eugenics and shifted into productive eugenics akin to national welfare societies, reappears nowadays guised under genetic progress, the base of biopolitics which slams bioethical discourse.”
VVThe two authors touch briefly on the disagreements between the Mendelians and the biometricians during the early twentieth century – a tempest in a teapot from our point of view nowadays – but the discussion led this reader to muse as to whether the late Stephen Jay Gould’s insistence on ‘punctuated equilibrium’ was not simply rehashed Mendelianism.
VVThe turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was marked by a fear of ‘degeneration’ and ‘decline.’ This was the recurrent theme of such disparate writers as Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse. Spektorowski and Saban are entirely correct in pointing out that this concern was not a parochial conceit of early eugenicists, but that the topic retains its centrality in the Twenty-First Century. When all is said and done, the ultimate goal of modern medicine is to eliminate the mechanism that has created all life forms and ensures their continuing viability – natural selection.
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