Marius Turda’s Modernism and Eugenics is a significant addition to an ever-expanding and evolving eugenics historiography. Turda, who is Deputy Director of the Centre for Health, Medicine and Society at Oxford Brookes University, seeks to enrich our understanding of eugenics by exploring its relationship to modernism in various European countries between 1870 and 1940. Modernism and Eugenics is the first volume of the series Modernism and…, edited by Roger Griffin, and an insightful contribution to Turda’s extensive body of work on nationalism, race and eugenics in central and southeastern Europe.
Turda significantly enhances and complicates the history of eugenics by advancing several compelling claims that engage with central historiographical themes. First, he argues that eugenics needs to be conceptualised ‘not only as a scientistic narrative of biological, social and cultural renewal, but also as the emblematic expression of programmatic modernism’ (p. 2). Second, Turda suggests that eugenics was not simply a sideline to European cultures or a momentary extremist episode, but rather a central component of European modernity. He elaborates these arguments by carefully analysing the ways in which eugenics and modernist ideologies dovetailed in visions of national regeneration, and how European citizens became both perpetrators and targets of scientific regulation that blurred distinctions between the individual and collective body, and the private and public sphere. Third, he demonstrates the value of studying national eugenics within a comparative, international framework by emphasising the interplay between universal philosophies and local applications of eugenics. His multidisciplinary study, which draws on conceptual intellectual history, works to redress the historiographical neglect of eugenics in southeastern and central Europe. It also contributes to the history of science by challenging the ‘mythology of the autonomy of science’ through an exploration of modernism and eugenics that stresses the interconnectedness of science, politics, and social practices (p. 119).
Modernism and Eugenics is comprised of four thematicallyorganised chapters that chart the convergence of eugenics and programmatic modernism, from the development of the scientific ethos of eugenics, to the establishment of the bio-political state. Eugenics emerged in the latenineteenth century as both a critique of, and solution to, the ‘anomie of modernity’ by refiguring the individual and national body within a biological discourse (p. 7). Turda emphasises that although eugenics was taken up by European countries in various ways (in France through puericulture, in Germany as racial hygiene), all eugenic programmes were based on the ‘politicisation of science’, a belief in the importance of heredity to one’s physical state, and the overlapping of medicine, biology and national health (p. 7). Turda chronicles how eugenics became increasingly integral to modernist re-imaginings of the nation, particularly after WWI through what he calls ‘the biologisation of national belonging’ whereby the individual and the nation were conceptualised as biological entities whose regulation would create social cohesion and bring about national palingenesis (pp. 6–7). He sees eugenics and modernist visions culminating in the bio-political states that emerged in the 1930s and 40s in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, but also in Romania, Hungary and many other European countries.
Turda’s comparative analysis, which is based on such sources as national and international conference proceedings and specialised journals, is quite impressive as he illuminates points of convergence and divergence in the eugenics movements of countries as diverse as France, Romania, Britain, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Greece. However, since Turda touches briefly on eugenics in many different national contexts without sketching a rich outline of the movement in any one country, some prior knowledge of the history of eugenics is advised in order to fully appreciate the intricacy and sophistication of his arguments. As Turda notes in his introduction, this study is a contribution to a eugenics historiography that is mature enough to embrace a trans-disciplinary, comparative approach that engages with the topic of modernism. Modernism and Eugenics would therefore be best appreciated by historians of eugenics, science and medicine, with a working historical knowledge of European eugenics.
