Modernism and Eugenics

Is the nation an 'imagined community' centered on culture or rather a biological community determined by heredity? Modernism and Eugenicsexamines this question from a bifocal perspective. On the one hand, it looks at technologies through which the individual body was re-defined eugenically by a diverse range of European scientists and politicians between 1870 and 1940; on the other, it illuminates how the national community was represented by eugenic discourses that strove to battle a perceived process of cultural decay and biological degeneration. In the wake of a renewed interest in the history of science and fascism, Modernism and Eugenicstreats the history of eugenics not as distorted version of crude social Darwinism that found its culmination in the Nazi policies of genocide but as an integral part of European modernity, one in which the state and the individual embarked on an unprecedented quest to renew an idealized national community.

MARIUS TURDA is the founder of the international Working Group on the History of Race and Eugenics based at Oxford Brookes University, UK, and the series editor of Studies in the History of Medicine with CEU Press in Budapest. He has published widely on the comparative history of eugenics and race.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Context and Methodology
The Pathos of Science, 1870-1914
War: The Worlds Only Hygiene, 1914-1918
Eugenic Technologies of National Improvement, 1918-1933
Eugenics and Biopolitics, 1933-1940
Conclusion: Towards an Epistemology of Eugenic Knowledge
Selected Bibliography
Index