Search results for "eugenic"

Economists and Eugenics: Progressive Era Racism and its (Jewish) Discontents

2017

This chapter analyzes the contribution to the debates on labor and immigration of a group of Jewish academicians and reformers who, during the second half of the Progressive Era, explicitly took a stance against the racialist and eugenic rhetoric of the period. This group includes first-rank economists like Edwin R. A. Seligman, Jacob H. Hollander, and Emanuel A. Goldenweiser; influential field specialists such as Isaac A. Hourwich and Isaac M. Rubinow; and relatively less known figures like Max J. Kohler and Samuel K. Joseph. By focusing on the voices of these dissenters, this chapter enriches the emerging picture of Progressive Era eugenic and racial thought.

A prenatal case of inverted duplication with terminal deletion of 5p not including the cat-like cry critical region

2010

Wesley Clair Mitchell and the “Illiberal Reformers”: A Documentary Note

2021

In this note we inquire whether Mitchell as a reformer ever expressed concern over the biological quality of individuals and whether he did somehow share the Progressive Era faith in eugenics as an instrument for improving American society’s health, welfare, and morals. This is an aspect of Mitchell’s thought that has received scant attention in the literature and that projects him into the current debate on progressivism.

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION, HEREDITARIANISM, AND EUGENICS. A HARVARD TALE

2019

This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders…

Sexualidad, reproducción y cultura obrera revolucionaria en España: la revista <em>Orto</em> (1932-1934)

2014

Orto. Revista de Documentacion Social, published in Valencia from 1932 to 1934, is a good example of cultural magazines in the Spanish labour movement, particularly in the world of anarcho-syndicalism. Marin Civera, its editor, sought to make Orto (which had a large and diverse range of contributors) a forum for convergence between the different working-class ideologies, united by the ideas of “Syndicalism”. In keeping with its aim to be “social documentation for the proletariat “, the journal took a strong interest in the spread of theory and practice, and debates on, sexual reform, linking these efforts to the international movement for that cause. In addition to the struggle for a new se…

Norman Edwin Himes's "Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action" (1939). The Eugenic Manifesto of a Devote Carverian

2022

This note presents an unpublished 1939 address given by the American sociologist and population specialist Norman Edwin Himes on "Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action. Himes's discussion of eugenics and democracy has a two-fold relevance. First, it provides further evidence that among population studies specialists a generalized commitment to eugenics persisted well beyond the era of the so-called Progressive Era and continued throughout the 1930s. Second, Himes's approach reveals an attempt to reformulate a eugenic agenda along "liberal" lines, which was intended to distance him from the coercive and racialist approach of his progressive predecessors. Yet, it will be shown, even though…

EUGENICS AND SOCIALIST THOUGHT IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA: THE CASE OF JAMES MEDBERY MACKAYE

2018

The aim of this essay is to assess James Medbery MacKaye’s contribution to socialist thought during the Progressive Era. Largely forgotten today, MacKaye proposed a special version of socialism, which he called “Pantocracy,” based on a peculiar blend of utilitarian and eugenic assumptions. Specifically, MacKaye held that biological fitness mapped to the capacity for happiness—biologically superior individuals possess a greater capacity for happiness—and saw the eugenic breeding of “a being or race of beings capable in the first place of happiness” as a possibility open by the advent of Pantocracy. Incidentally, this essay provides further evidence that the influence of eugenic and racialist…

Frank W. Taussig and Carl S. Joslyn on the Social Origins of American Business Leaders: A Chapter in the History of Social Science at Harvard

2019

In their 1932 volume "American Business Leaders: A Study in Social Origins and Social Stratification," Frank W. Taussig and Carl S Joslyn, then a young Harvard graduate, argued that success in business depended more on innate superiority than on other environmental factors such as financial aid, influential connections, and formal education. The aim of this paper is to analyze the main contentions of Taussig and Joslyn, as well the intellectual genesis of, and the general reactions to, this controversial volume. Although our main focus is on Taussig and Joslyn, other figures, all directly affiliated with Harvard, will play a decisive role in our narrative—the economist Thomas Nixon Carver, …

Modificazioni germinali del patrimonio genetico e biodiritto. I paradossi della de-differenziazione tra bioetica e biodiritto

2021

Il presente lavoro, incominciato nel novembre del 2017, è partito con l'ambizione di ricostruire la risposta che il sistema giuridico fornisce innanzi alle nuove tecniche di ingegneria genetica che, a fronte della loro applicabilità sugli esseri umani, hanno prodotto, negli ultimi anni, il sorgere di nuovi stakeholders e, ancor prima, di nuovi interessi meritevoli di tutela. Se fino a qualche anno fa pareva impensabile modificare il genoma umano e, men che meno, farlo in maniera precisa, efficiente ed economica, oggi grazie al sistema di modificazione genetica CRISPR/Cas9 è possibile, intervenendo sulla linea germinale degli embrioni umani, prevenire la contrazione di odiose malattie geneti…

Jürgen Habermas and the risk of liberal eugenics for the ethical self-understanding of species

2016

El artículo analiza el problema de la naturaleza humana que presenta Jürgen Habermas en su obra El futuro de la naturaleza humana, ¿Hacia una eugenesia liberal? Los vertiginosos avances biotecnológicos reclaman una rigurosa reflexión bioética que el filósofo alemán afronta superponiendo a su ética del discurso una ética de la especie. Habermas esboza un modelo de naturaleza humana construido sobre preceptos como la dignidad humana y de la vida humana, la simetría de las relaciones intersubjetivas y, a resultas de estas, la autocomprensión ética de la especie. Respecto a la eugenesia liberal, el autor se posiciona criticando la eugenesia positiva y amparando la negativa, para lo que basa su …