Social Hygiene and the Holocaust

The twentieth century must be seen as the era of the political efficiency of biology, that is to say, of politics as bio-cybernetics. This provides the context in which a definition of social hygiene makes sense as bio-politics or as the practice of biologism through the power of politics. But the point is that social hygiene provided legitimacy to the Holocaust, insofar as it constituted an ethical framework that made sense, in some way, to a significant part of the ruling elites of Germany. The Holocaust as a sanitary operation represented the ultimate consequence of social hygiene. In other words, there would have been no Holocaust without the theory and practice of social hygiene as a commonly accepted social and political phenomenon, and its “barbarity” had little to do with that of foreign cultures or ancient times. The Holocaust happened as the consequence of the unchecked development of social hygiene as political common sense in twentieth-century European culture

Environmental ethics · Hygiene · Legitimacy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · The Holocaust · History · Law · Medical History and Research · Medicine · Philosophy