It seems to me there is a pretty direct genealogy leading from Malthus to Eugenics - and back again!

1. Malthus rationalized England's stealing of Irish land and turning it over to "the Protestant Ascendancy". The Irish had big families. The world was running short of land.  The only way to stop them was to starve them by raising their rents.

2. European migrations to new worlds and lands, farm surpluses, low food and fiber prices, free trade, new technologies and the industrial revolution discredited Malthus. Labor was getting the vote, land reform was in the air - something new was needed to rationalize inequality and exploitation.

3. In 1858 along came Wallace and Darwin with natural selection, just in time. Wallace was innocent, but here is the subtitle of Darwin's work: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Under the aegis of T.H. Huxley, (aka "Darwin's Bulldog"), and Herbert Spencer, this became "Survival of the Fittest".  The poor were poor because they were unfit. Keep them poor to stop their breeding and thus improve the human race.

4. It didn't take long for Darwin's cousin Francis Galton to coin "eugenics" as the conscious effort to prevent the less fit from outbreeding the more fit, which they tended to do because of the maudlin sentimentality of social reformers who would tax the rich (considered the more fit) to help the poor (considered less fit). Galton clothed his ideas in the new "mystery" of statistics. "Regression towards the mean" was more impressively obscure, and intimidating to the unlettered, than Malthus' geometric progression. It had a genetic basis, justifying a class society based on birth. It fitted well with enclosure of the commons to keep inferior stock from mixing with superior. History is a rich tapestry of many threads: these came together in Eugenics.

5. Wallace, who anticipated Darwin and was more consistently anti-Lamarckian, did not go along with such elitist notions. He joined Mill in pushing for radical land reform. Wallace chose nurture over nature to improve the race. The intellectual world has taken its revenge by turning Wallace into a non-person, so the word for natural selection, Wallace's original idea, is now just "Darwinism". Spencer coined the new term, "Survival of the fittest", with overtones that richness is Nature's evidence of greater merit. To Spencer, richness and poverty were the very evidence of relative fitness - evocative of the Presbyterian idea of predestination.

6. With the anti-Progressive reaction after W.W. I, Karl Pearson (1919) carried elitist eugenicism to a peak, identifying it with the development of mathematical statistics. This may (or may not) have inspired Mark Twain's mot that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. It belies, I believe, the idea that Eugenics was a product and a tool of Progressivism.

7. We can fairly say, painting with the broad brush needed to simplify a complex history, that from Galton to Hitler, Eugenics filled the gap left by the decline of Malthusianism in a period of abundance and surpluses. It explained and justified Henry George's enigma of poverty in the midst of plenty. It gave comfort and support to the haves over the have-nots. 

8. Following Hitler, of course, Eugenics became intensely P.I.  Rather than exterminate the Kallikaks, Hitler focused on the Jews, probably above average in intelligence, culture, and wealth. The reaction to Hitler allowed for a period of progressive taxation, rising wages, the war on poverty, the second reconstruction of the south, reapportionment of legislatures, etc.  Soon, however, Malthusianism came roaring back to reprise its role of 1799, and once again social leaders are waging war on the young, on public education, on big families, on the property tax, on high wages, etc. "Progressivism" has been taken over by environmentalism, which has been coopted by Malthusians.  We have come full circle in just 200 years.

Mason Gaffney


-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alan G Isaac
Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2012 7:02 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] allusion to Pareto

On 7/20/2012 5:54 PM, Crmccann wrote:
> Filene objects to the notion of a Progressive "movement," not to the notion of ideological affinity.


And what "ideological affinity" does he suggest
provides the essence of progressivism?
Hint: none: not even the optimism and activism
taken as essential by Hofstadter. (I confess that
I think Hofstadter is basically right, nevertheless.)

Which dismantles your attempts to e.g. associate
progressivism with eugenics. Eugenics was a fad.
Some progressives were susceptible. Some weren't.
(As with conservatives. E.g., Popenoe.)

Alan Isaac