Menschenzucht

This is an entertaining, important, and at times shocking book. Its subject is the prehistory of attempts to improve the quality of the human population by breeding better people. ‘Every race-horse, every straight-backed bull, every premium pig tells us what we can do and what we must do for man’ (p. 269). So wrote John Humphrey Noyes, who founded the free-loving Oneida utopian community in 1848 in upstate New York. Noyes came near the end of a long pre-modern tradition of thought experiments on ‘human optimization’ that began with Plato’s Republic, which Lorenz pithily casts as a proto-eugenic project. He stood near the beginning of a campaign to implement actual eugenics projects in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Menschenzucht focuses on a long span of time leading up to that pivot point, from 1500 to 1870, tracing how Renaissance literary utopias became Enlightenment-era medical manuals, economic analyses and policy proposals, all of which in turn entered nineteenth-century popular culture—and thus prepared the ground for the real-life population improvement interventions that were to follow, ultimately with murderous results.

Art history · Enlightenment · Environmental ethics · Eugenics · Library science · Political science · Population · Sociology · Subject (documents) · The Renaissance · Theology · Classics · Demography · German Literature and Culture Studies · German Social Sciences and History · History · Law · Medical History and Research · Philosophy