History

Is the nation an 'imagined community' centered on culture or rather a biological community determined by heredity? "Modernism and Eugenics" examines 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 Eugenics" treats the history of eugenics not as a 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.

Ce livre s'intéresse à la nouvelle définition eugénique du corps de la nation proposée par divers scientifiques et hommes politiques européens entre 1870 et 1940. Il aborde les représentations de la communauté nationale dans les discours eugéniques qui cherchaient à lutter contre un prétendu processus de décadence culturelle et de dégénérescence biologique. L'ouvrage envisage l'histoire de l'eugénisme comme un élément à part entière de la modernité européenne.