"Degeneration theory" redirects here. For other uses, see Degeneracy (disambiguation).
Social degeneration was a widely influential concept at the interface of the social and biological sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries.[1][2][3][4] During the 18th century, scientific thinkers including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Immanuel Kant argued that humans shared a common origin but had degenerated over time due to differences in climate.[5][6][7] This theory provided an explanation of where humans came from and why some people appeared differently from others. In contrast, degenerationists in the 19th century feared that civilization might be in decline and that the causes of decline lay in biological change. These ideas derived from pre-scientific concepts of heredity ("hereditary taint") with Lamarckian emphasis on biological development through purpose and habit. Degeneration concepts were often associated with authoritarian political attitudes, including militarism and scientific racism, and a preoccupation with eugenics. The theory originated in racial concepts of ethnicity, recorded in the writings of such medical scientists as Johann Blumenbach and Robert Knox. From the 1850s, it became influential in psychiatry through the writings of Bénédict Morel, and in criminology with Cesare Lombroso.[8] By the 1890s, in the work of Max Nordau and others, degeneration became a more general concept in social criticism. It also fed into the ideology of ethnic nationalism, attracting, among others, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras and the Action Française. Alexis Carrel, a French Nobel Laureate in Medicine, cited national degeneration as a rationale for a eugenics programme in collaborationist Vichy France.
The meaning of degeneration was poorly defined, but can be described as an organism's change from a more complex to a simpler, less differentiated form, and is associated with 19th-century conceptions of biological devolution. In scientific usage, the term was reserved for changes occurring at a histological level – i.e. in body tissues. Although rejected by Charles Darwin, the theory's application to the social sciences was supported by some evolutionary biologists, most notably Ernst Haeckel and Ray Lankester. As the 19th century wore on, the increasing emphasis on degeneration reflected an anxious pessimism about the resilience of European civilization and its possible decline and collapse.[9]
^Herman, Arthur (1997). The Idea of Decline in Western History. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 9780684827919.[page needed]
^Pick, Daniel (1989). Faces of Degeneration. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511558573. ISBN 978-0-521-36021-0.[page needed]
^Dowbiggin, Ian (1985). "Degeneration and hereditarianism in French mental medicine 1840–90: psychiatric theory as ideological adaptation". In Bynum, W. F.; Shepherd, Michael; Porter, Roy (eds.). Anatomy Of Madness: essays in the history of psychiatry. Volume III, The asylum and its psychiatry. London: Tavistock Publications. pp. 188–232. OCLC 564383203.
^Oppenheim, Janet (1991). "Nervous Degeneration". "Shattered Nerves": Doctors, patients, and depression in Victorian England. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 265–292. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195057812.003.0009. ISBN 9780195057812.
^Lenoir, Timothy (1980). "Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology". Isis. 71 (1): 77–108. doi:10.1086/352408. ISSN 0021-1753. JSTOR 230314. S2CID 145106436.
^Leclerc, Georges-Louis, Comte de Buffon (1821). Hutton, W. (ed.). Buffon's natural history: abridged. London: Thomas Tegg. doi:10.5962/bhl.title.120026. OCLC 34659411.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)[page needed]
^Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich (1865). The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Anthropological Society of London. Publications. Longwood Press. doi:10.1037/13883-000. hdl:2027/mdp.39015010297656. ISBN 9780893415112.[page needed]
^Horn, David G. (2003). The criminal body: Lombroso and the anatomy of deviance. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415947299.[page needed]
^"Degeneration the Dark Side of Progress", Degeneration the Dark Side of Progress, Columbia University Press, 6 May 2019, doi:10.7312/cham90822/html, ISBN 978-0-231-88066-4, retrieved 15 May 2024
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