Here’s an uncomfortable fact: public schooling, state social work, public hygiene, the welfare state, bureaucratic regulation arriving at the same time as the progressive era, prohibition, drug lAws, neoclassical econ & eugenics isn’t accidental.

All of these correspond to a new idea that the state has to be a guarantor of the population, to govern, to survey & to mold it to be workable for capital or to manage it and to modify the “human capital stock” so as to improve it over time

M Foucault, G D*leuze, F G*ttari, JF Lyotard, James Scott, Greg Kolko, Phil Mirowski, Bernard Harcourt, JQ Whitman, Charles s Maier, I Illich, L Mumford, have each written about aspects of these some more explicitly than others (like Foucault, Scott, Maier, Kolko, Illich)

Also m gaffneys history of neoclassical econ, and more loosely related theory or philosophy or social science or polemical work by Arendt, Heidegger, Schmitt, agamben, habermas, Frankfurt school, ferrer, Freire, Goodman, debord, Szazz, Tiqqun, crimethinc, endnotes etc

So we witnessed the transformation of schooling based around the agrarian or protoindustrial society to modern mass schooling in the progressive era where it completely changed.

The state with the guarantor of continual growth in human capital skills credentials education & R&D. Eugenics was the idea of improving the human capital stock phylogenetically & biologically. Hygiene & training ontogenetically & experientially.

Of course education, scholarship, libraries, archives, mass media, science, research, technology, the arts, infrastructure, upbringing & home ec combined the two—they evolve & accumulate over time while also & through modifying the present

Race science goes back prior to this era by about 100, 150 years, primarily to Germany, runner up the UK, followed, in no particular order, Italy, France, Switzerland, and the US, and later on in colonial powers like Japan. In this era it was primarily statist, & Protonationalist

Eugenics emerges later, primarily in the US, and secondarily in the UK, other Anglo settler colonies, Germany, Japan, Italy, etc.,—and it was always global in nature—but eugenics is different because it draws on Darwin, Spencer, Mendel, liberalism, Whig history, & progressivism

It was also distinctly capitalist in nature—albeit, many, and I mean *many* leftists and feminists advocated forms of eugenics (usually they imagined as positive, voluntary, achieved through education, & community led, but still believed in it).

But it was progressivist capitalism—the idea was to speed along education, hygiene, regulation, training, scholarship, media, entertainment, family, home ec, research, development, etc., in widening & leveling the playing field & improving society.

Thus, the idea was to educate, train, regulate, raise, and sanitize every generation to its maximum level possible, with equality of opportunity, while across generations improving the ‘human capital stock’, and its materials, through things like science & archives

While a pedantic distinction now, back then, people considered dysgenics & eugenics separate (since they amounted to much the same and many advocated both, we sensibly lump them together for convenience). Dysgenics was negative, eugenics meant to be progressive.

The Nazis racial hygiene drew on eugenics, but even more so dysgenics, plus animal husbandry, earlier race science (like physiognomy or phrenology), embryology, cultural history, nationalism, German bureaucracy & colonial technology

Germany was also the center of world science & universities, and had more doctors than most places. In part because of open acceptance, ideological agreement, & professional class interest, but also to eliminate competition, doctors joined the Nazi party early & quickly en masse.

In some places up to 50% of doctors were Jewish (Jews were excluded from high capital, the state, the military, high politics, and not liberal professions), and so doctors in part were trying to neutralize competition, but either way, the result is the same.

The mass support of doctors allowed race science to flourish in Nazi germany, and combined with Germany’s lethal nationalism, antisemitism, colonialism, corporatism, irredentism, militarism, personalism, & so on, it created a bureaucracy of medically sanctioned mass death.

Naziism is all about having the cake & eating it too—so they wish to have capitalism & socialism (more accurately corporatism, dirigism, welfarism, etc), w/o the contradictions within/between them, a war machine, state, nation & empire, w/o the contradictions within/between them

Thus Jews became the concrete embodiment of the negative contradictions within all of these. Like the Whig histories & teleologies they inverted elsewhere, so too their focus in race science was eliminative dysgenics, not ‘’’progressive’’’ eugenics

Some astute commentators at the time already noted that the negative/progressive distinction, here’s applied to eugenics, wasn’t really tenable, such as critics like the frankfurt school, or supporters like Heidegger & Schmitt—one leads to the other intrinsically

Liberalism recognized the contradictions implicitly, but thought they could be perpetually managed, and, if denied, avoided, but they used progressivism to mediate these contradictions, hence their belief in both public education & eugenics.

Socialism either cleft toward liberalism, or in more radical forms like anarchism rejected both eugenics & public schooling (altho there was the rare person who supported eugenics but not public schooling). State socialism accepted public schooling but not eugenics.

Hence weird oddities like the Lysenko affair, which tie into these issues, even if they seem distant. But, note, it’s possible to believe in eugenics even with inheritance of acquired characteristics (the Nazis & Darwin, not just Lamarck & Lysenko, believed in these).

Fascism was the other way around—rather than constantly change the system to adapt to contradictions that they deny, they wanted a static system to eliminate contradictions they affirmed, once and for all.

So, in the typical ‘Athens to Auschwitz’ style formulation, we can see the fundamental connection between the liberal ‘’’progressive’’’ capitalist belief in public schooling, social peace & eugenics, & the Nazi belief in public militarism, racial war, and dysgenics.