The Specter of Inferiority: Devaluing the Disabled and “Unproductive”

Abstract

When the French social Darwinist Georges Vacher de Lapouge wrote the introduction to the 1897 French edition of Haeckel’s Monism as Connecting Religion and Science, he rang the death knell for the three main ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. To replace these allegedly outmoded and unscientific liberal dogmas, he argued that the Darwinian revolution had introduced a new, improved triad: determinism, inequality, and selection.¹ Lapouge agreed with Clemence Royer, who wrote in her 1862 preface to her French translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species, “What is the result of this exclusive and unintelligent protection accorded to the weak, the infirm, the incurable, the wicked, to all those who are ill-favored by nature? It is that the ills which have afflicted them tend to be perpetuated and multiplied indefinitely; that evil is increased instead of diminishing, and tends to grow at the expense of good.”² Lapouge’s views found more resonance in Germany than in his native France, probably due in part to the stress on biological inequality in the writings of other German social Darwinists and eugenicists, who prepared the soil in Germany for the spread of Lapouge’s ideas.