The 'Lethal Chamber' in Eugenic Thought: an excerpt from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 01:51:19 +0000

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.

Marx, Race and Neoliberalism

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 02:47:39 +0000

A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it perceives capitalism dialectically, as a social totality 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 contribution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A historical 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 particular system of production.

Race-Theory on Class Letters

The 'Lethal Chamber' in Eugenic Thought: an excerpt from *Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain*

Marx, Race and Neoliberalism

The 'Lethal Chamber' in Eugenic Thought: an excerpt from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain