Eugenics without the state: anarchism in Catalonia, 1900–1937

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Abstract

Current historiography has considered eugenics to be an emanation from state structures or a movement which sought to appeal to the state in order to implement eugenic reform. This paper examines the limitations of that view and argues that it is necessary to expand our horizons to consider particularly working-class eugenics movements that were based on the dissemination of knowledge about sex and which did not aspire to positions of political power. The paper argues that anarchism, with its contradictory practice afforded by the convulsive social situation of the Civil War in Spain, allows us to assess critically the parameters of the social action of eugenics, its many alliances, and its struggle for existence in changing political circumstances not of its own making.

Introduction

Recent studies have rejected stable or essential characteristics for ‘eugenics’, acknowledging the diversity of driving motivations and theoretical underpinnings from which its varied expressions were established (Adams, 1990).1 Two authors have recently urged a comparative transnational analysis of the reception of eugenic ideas (Barrett and Kurzman, 2004). The shift away from considering national movements alone and the broadening of histories of eugenics outside of its ‘mainline’ expression (Kevles, 1985) has allowed attention to focus on eugenics movements formerly thought to be on the geographical and scientific periphery (Stepan, 1991). Such a shift has also enabled the discussion of a much wider range of ideas and practices to be subsumed under the title of ‘eugenics’.

Despite these developments, however, certain assumptions as to what inspired eugenics or what eugenics was ‘really’ about still prevail. Barrett and Kurzman (2004, p. 497) regard eugenics as a movement that attempted to change policies ‘in a context of broad ideological support and little organized opposition, through non-confrontational mobilization that bordered, at times, on public relations or lobbying’. The same authors also note that, by and large, proponents of eugenics were confined to an emerging group of professional scientists and the ‘educated’ classes. Indeed, ‘The privileged social position of eugenicists and their consensus-mobilization approach no doubt helped them to capitalize on international political opportunities and to speak the elite and often elitist discourse of global culture’ (ibid.). In order to assess the success of this transnational movement, Barrett and Kurzman use two indicators: one representing the nature and characteristics of the activity of eugenics movement in terms of propaganda, publications and general activity and the second representing ‘eugenic-inspired state policy’ (ibid., p. 498).

From the perspective of the history of eugenics in Spain, however, such comments by Barrett and Kurzman need to be questioned. In the Spanish case, it is also not possible to assert that eugenicists of different stripes enjoyed ‘broad ideological support and little organized opposition’ (ibid., p. 497), or that most of those who advocated eugenics came from the professional or scientific class, or even that eugenics in all its different expressions appealed to the state for the implementation of policy. In contrast, some eugenicists in Spain suffered from a ban on their activities in 1928 and, given their lack of durable institutionalization, were confronted with a difficult and uphill struggle to make their voices heard. Other advocates of eugenics, particularly those involved in the working-class movement of anarchism in Spain, and particularly in the eastern region of Catalonia, did not look initially to the state to implement eugenic policies. Given these realities, which may recur in other national spaces, we have to ask: what happens to our understanding of eugenics when some of its expressions were not dedicated to working within the institutions of the state? How do we consider the reception and implementation of eugenic ideas in working-class movements which attempted to operate outside of and even against the state?

After Mark Adams’s work (Adams, 1990), Nancy Stepan’s (1991) analysis of eugenics in Latin America further decentred ‘mainline’ eugenics and illustrated the variety of notions of heredity entertained and the nature of the issues broached by eugenics movements in that continent. These movements considered sex education, improvements in hygiene, health care and child pedagogy, to name some areas, to be integral to their eugenics.2 Other more recent work on Cuba (García González & Álvarez Peláez, 1999) and Australia (Wyndham, 2003), to name two examples, has reinforced a similar perspective.

I would like to add two further dimensions to these authors’ reconsideration of the boundaries of eugenics. Firstly, rather than trying to delimit what eugenics ‘really’ was, I take eugenics to be what movements, groups or individuals, acting ‘in the name of eugenics’ (Kevles, 1985) actually took eugenics to be. Secondly, I follow Ian Hacking’s notion of ‘dynamic nominalism’ (Hacking, 1990) as a key to understanding the development of eugenics movements and language. Hacking (1990, p. 78 ) discusses the creation of certain sexual identities in the late nineteenth century. These sexual identities do not describe anything real or factual about the world, he argues; they are ways of understanding and categorizing human activities. In the same way, there is nothing in eugenics that corresponds to anything ‘real’ or pre-defined about itself. Eugenics can be understood as coming into being at the same time as the science itself was being invented—from a dynamic nominalist perspective it generated its own realities as it developed. While on the one hand eugenics does not have to perform to a checklist of contents, on the other hand, we should not consider related campaigns, such as anti-tuberculosis or social hygiene measures, as ‘really about’ eugenics unless they were integrated into the concerns of eugenics movements.

Section snippets

Eugenics in Spain: the ‘official’ eugenics movement

Eugenics in Spain, as already stated, corresponded to variety of tendencies with low levels of institutionalization, a characteristic that makes it difficult to talk of a ‘eugenics movement’ at all. Rather than a unified movement, there were several regional centres with very different ideological and institutional realities from which eugenics was advocated, a characteristic that may well have reflected the fragmented scientific community of the period. On the one hand, there was what we might

Social movements and communities without the State

Pierre Clastres (1989, p. 189) has argued that in anthropology the conception that certain ‘primitive’ societies are without a state entails an ethnocentric view that sees those social formations as suffering ‘the painful experience of a lack—the lack of the State—which, try as they may, they will never make up’. These communities are depicted as primitive, lacking in progressive social development, uncivilized and bound eventually to succumb to ‘modern’ techniques of government. But in

The limits of the anarchist project: eugenics within the state

This paper argues finally that anarchism, with its contradictory practice provoked by the convulsive social situation of the Civil War in Spain, allows us to assess critically the parameters of the social action of eugenics, its many alliances and its struggle for existence and implementation in changing political circumstances.

The failed army coup d’état of July 1936, which attempted to destroy the republican government, resulted in a three-year civil war. The republican state collapsed in

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank participants in the conference ‘Eugenics, Sex and the State’, held at the University of Cambridge in January 2007 and colleagues present at the University of Bradford History Seminar in February 2007, where a version of this text was presented, for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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