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Book Review: Darwin’s Legacy?André Pichot, The Pure Society: From Darwin
to Hitler, trans. David Fernbach. London: Verso, 2009. 360 pp. £19.99. ISBN13:
978 1 84467 244 8

Article  in  History of the Human Sciences · April 2010

DOI: 10.1177/0952695110362303

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H I S T O RY O F T H E H U M A N S C I E N C E S Vol. 23 No. 2
© The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and Permissions: pp. 132–134
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[23:2; 132–134; DOI: 10.1177/0952695110362303]
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Darwin’s Legacy?

André Pichot, The Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler, trans. David
Fernbach. London: Verso, 2009. 360 pp. £19.99. ISBN-13: 978 1
84467 244 8

To put it succinctly, this book is an attempt at popularizing the arguments that

Darwin was a racist and that Hitler’s National Socialist ideas derived from
Darwinism. There is nothing original about this line of reasoning. From Darwin
to Hitler has by now become a common expression among certain historians of
science; a few years ago, Richard Weikart penned his admonition of Darwinism’s
impact on Nazism’s worldview under the same title. Admittedly, André Pichot
had already published his book in French in 2001, being, in fact, one of the most
consistent advocates of the current re-evaluation of Darwin’s historical legacy.
There are general categories of literature on the relationship between Nazism,
Darwinism and racial sciences: an extensive scholarly literature including a few
books of broader synopsis, like Paul Weindling’s Health, Race and German
Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (1989); works
designed for the general public but making a serious effort to incorporate academic
debates, like Robert Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (1988);
and a body of controversial scholarship, like Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to
Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004).
Compared to the above-mentioned books, Pichot’s fails to make an impression.
Using an aggregated bibliographic arrangement, Pichot has no difficulty in fitting
into one teleological scheme social Darwinism, eugenics, racism, genetics, socio-
biology and Nazism. These subjects are condensed into three parts, and the author
navigates effortlessly between Ludwig Gumplowicz’s sociology of conflict,
Galton’s eugenics, Vacher de Lapouge’s racial sociology, Nazi euthanasia, racial
anti-Semitism and current disputes about biotechnology. These developments in
the history of culture, science and politics over the past two centuries, Pichot

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 BOOK REVIEWS 133

argues, are all part of the same modern quest for a ‘pure society’. It was under
the Nazi regime in Germany, Pichot rightly points out, that this biological utopia
became reality, albeit in the most tragic and condemnable way. Although Pichot’s
argument is often encyclopaedic in its presentation and scope, his coverage is
more descriptive than analytical, accompanied by long quotes from various
authors. It is this blend of journalism and textbook approach that unfortunately
overshadows those parts of the book which are conceptually demanding.
Throughout the book, we are constantly reminded that the gallery of European
racism is missing one important character: Charles Darwin. Undoubtedly, no one
would deny that the idea of a biologically ‘pure society’ is rooted as much in the
Enlightenment myth of human perfectibility, as in the hereditarian concepts
associated with the Darwinian and Mendelian revolutions in science. But in
desperately trying to substantiate the claim made in the title of the book, the
author himself remains locked into a tortuous labyrinth of arguments and ideas
whose only quality is that they have something in common with either Darwin
or Hitler.
Moreover, and surprisingly for these are abundantly documented topics, Pichot
has overlooked some secondary works of importance. Mike Hawkins’s Social
Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (1997), for instance,
covers convincingly most of the topics pertaining to the growth of social Darwin-
ism in western societies, while Paul Crook’s Darwinism, War and History (1994)
unveiled the ramifications of theories of human pugnacity and racial supremacy
derived from Darwin, Spencer, Bagehot, Pearson’s biological and sociological
theories, proving in fact that Darwin’s theory did equally inspire pacifist theories.
Pichot seems unaware of either book.
Ultimately, Pichot’s attempt to weld together this plethora of ideas results in
a disjointed product offering little on either eugenics or racism. For scholars of
both fields, there is nothing new in Pichot’s book, nor is the interpretation
particularly useful. While no one would deny that a healthy re-evaluation of
Darwinism, carefully grounded in the historical sources, is always needed, one
ought to avoid the trivial form of historical debunking. It would be, however,
unfortunate if Pichot’s book were to be judged solely on its treatment of Darwin-
ism. The key weakness of the book is professional not polemical. The author tends
to overlook instead of refuting. He also discounts the evidence that, however
peppered with references to Darwin, Gobineau and Chamberlain Nazi racial
ideology may have been, concrete decisions implementing the Final Solution
were taken by Hitler and his Nazi elite during a world war.
For the past two decades, attempts have been made by scholars of various intel-
lectual traditions, most prominently by Zygmunt Bauman, Tzvetan Todorov,
Edward Ross Dickinson, Roger Griffin and, most recently, by Dan Stone (2008)
and Aristotle Kallis (2009), to integrate eugenics into debates about modernity,
genocide and the Holocaust. The new scholarship on eugenics, therefore, must
take into account these new developments in the history of science, medicine and
political ideologies. Only then will we be able to convincingly and precisely re-
construct how the relationship between Darwinism and Nazism became possible

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134 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 23(2)

in the first place, so that we can move further and contextualize those instances
when this relationship was obstructed and ultimately rejected.

Marius Turda

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crook. P. (1994) Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War
from the ‘Origins of Species’ to the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hawkins, M. (1997) Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–
1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Kallis, A. (2009) Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe.
London: Routledge.
Proctor R. (1988) Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Stone, D., ed. (2008) The Historiography of Genocide. Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave.
Weikart, R. (2004) From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism
in Germany. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Weindling, P. (1989) Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification
and Nazism, 1870–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

MARIUS TURDA is RCUK Academic Fellow in Central and Eastern European

Biomedicine at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of The Idea of
National Superiority in Central Europe, 1880–1918 and the editor with Paul
Weindling of Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in
Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940. His new book Modernism and
Eugenics will be published by Palgrave in 2010. He is now completing a
monograph on the history of eugenics in Hungary between 1904 and 1944.

Address: School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Head-

ington Campus, Gipsy Lane, Oxford OX3 0BP, UK. Tel.: 01865 741111.
[email: mturda@brookes.ac.uk]

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