Explores the political forces underlying shifts in thinking about the respective influence of heredity and environment in shaping human behavior, and the feasibility and morality of eugenics.

By the 1950s, eugenics had lost its scientific status; it now belonged to the context rather than to the content of science. Interest in the subject was also at low ebb. But that situation would soon change dramatically. Indeed, in an essay-review published in 1993, Philip Pauly commented that a “eugenics industry” had come to rival the “Darwin industry” in importance, although the former seemed less integrated than the latter. Since then, the pace of publication on eugenics, including American eugenics, (...) has only accelerated, while the field has become even more fractured, moving in multiple and even contradictory directions. This essay explores the trajectory of work on the history of American eugenics since interest in the subject revived in the 1960s, noting trends and also fractures. The latter are seen to result partly from the fact that professional historians no longer own the subject, which has attracted the interest of scholars in several other disciplines as well as scientists, political activists, and journalists, and also from the fact that the history of eugenics has almost always been policy-oriented. Historians’ desire to be policy-relevant and at the same time attentive to context, complexity, and contingency has generated tensions at several levels: within individuals, among historians, and between professional historians and others who also engage with the history of eugenics. That these tensions are resolved differently by different authors and even by the same authors at different times helps explain why the fragmentation that Pauly noted is not likely to be overcome anytime soon. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that the question of the relative importance of innate characteristics and institutional arrangements in explaining human difference was vehemently contested in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus Sir Francis Galton’s work of the 1860s should be seen as an intervention in a pre-existing controversy. The central figure in these earlier debates—as well as many later ones—was the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. In Mill’s view, human nature was fundamentally shaped by (...) history and culture, factors that accounted for most mental and behavioral differences between men and women and among people of different classes, nationalities, and races. Indeed, Mill’s whole program of social reform depended on the assumption that human differences were not fixed by nature. To identify the leading figures in these disputes about difference and the concrete context in which they occurred, we explore three debates in which Mill played a key role: over the capacities and rights of women, the viability of peasant proprietorship in India and Ireland, and the status of black labor in Jamaica. The last two draw our attention to the important colonial context of the nature–nurture debate. We also show that ideas that for us seem of a piece were not always linked for these earlier thinkers, nor did views on innateness necessarily have the political correlates that we now take for granted. (shrink)