Tagged "Political-Philosophy"

Chapter five from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain by Dan Stone.

As we have seen, before the First World War, and in some circles until well into the interwar period, eugenics — literally, ‘well born’ or ‘good stocks’— was the height of sophisticated, ‘progressive’ thought.¹ Across Europe, the novels and plays of the period, such as H. G. Wells’s The New Machiavelli (1911) and George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1905), are suffused with the language of race-regeneration and fears of physical deterioration. In Arthur Schnitzler’s novel, The Road to the Open (1908), Berthold Stauber, a young and enthusiastic Viennese Jewish physician, tells his father, the humane Dr Stauber, that ‘You need only consider, father, that the most honest and consistent social hygiene would have the direct result of annihilating diseased people, or at any rate excluding them from all enjoyment of life, and I don’t deny that I have all kinds of ideas tending in that way which may seem cruel at the first glance.’ He went on to say that ‘You needn’t be afraid, father, that I shall begin straight away to preach the murder of the unhealthy and superfluous. But theoretically that’s certainly what my programme leads to.’² Although primarily a conservative ideology, both left and right were attracted to eugenic proposals. These ranged from ‘positive’ measures such as the encouragement of ‘hygienic marriage’, that is, marriage between two people of good stock, to ‘negative’ measures such as sterilisation or segregation in order to ensure that the unfit, feeble-minded and morally degenerate did not have children. In this chapter I will consider eugenics in general, before concentrating on one aspect of its rhetoric which to a post-Second World War audience is perhaps even more shocking than it was to an Edwardian one.

A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it per- ceives capitalism dialectically, as a social total- ity that includes modes of production, relations of production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most important contri- bution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A histori- cal materialist perspective should stress that “race”—which includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a par- ticular system of production.

The text here is an extract from Adolph Reed Jr’s 2000 work “Class Notes”. This publication is the founding inspiration for the theme and title of this site here – long live Reed.

This book is built on commentary about current issues and events in american politics over most of the 1990s. as such, it expresses an on-going attempt to make sense of contemporary american political life from a critical perspective. most of the essays published here appeared originally in substantially the same form in my regular columns in the progressive and the village voice, or in similar venues. writing in those venues presents a special challenge— to convey complex, perhaps unconventional ideas clearly and concisely to a general audience. i’ve found this challenge very useful partly because i work out my own views on many issues by writing about them; to that extent, these essays are much less a set of didactic pronoucements than a sustained attempt to think things through, and the obligation to communicate those views effectively to others encourages preciseness and clarity. having to ask constantly, “what would this formulation mean to someone outside my own head or outside a narrowly specialized community of discourse?” imposes a requirement to bring abstractions down to the ground, to imagine how— if at all— they appear in, explain or bear upon the daily world we inhabit and reproduce. the challenge is more important, though, as a corrective to the flight from concreteness that has increasingly beset left theorizing and social criticism, and as a result political practice, in the u.s. in recent decades.