Suchergebnisse

The relative importance of heredity or environmental influence remains an enduring, hotly debated issue, while the legacy of scientific racism and sexism still tarnishes the twenty-first century. This unique study analyzes how theories of inherited difference - including race and gender - affected French social scientists in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

While previous studies have contrasted the relative optimism of middle-class social scientists before 1848 with a later period of concern for national decline and racial degeneration, Staum demonstrates that the earlier learned societies were also fearful of turmoil at home and interested in adventure abroad. Both geographers and ethnologists created concepts of fundamental "racial" inequality that prefigured the imperialist "associationist" discourse of the Third Republic, believing that European tutelage would guide "civilizable" peoples, and providing an open invitation to dominate and exploit the "uncivilizable.".

Deals with the dilemmas of early French social scientists inclined to stress either heredity or environment, but forced to concede the influence of both.