The concept of degeneration arose during the European
enlightenment and the
industrial revolution – a period of profound
social change and a rapidly shifting sense of
personal identity. Several influences were involved. The first related to the extreme demographic upheavals, including
urbanization, in the early years of the 19th century. The disturbing experience of
social change and urban
crowds, largely unknown in the agrarian 18th century, was recorded in the journalism of
William Cobbett, the novels of
Charles Dickens and in the paintings of
J. M. W. Turner. These changes were also explored by early writers on social psychology, including
Gustav Le Bon and
Georg Simmel. The psychological impact of industrialisation is comprehensively described in
Humphrey Jennings' masterly anthology
Pandaemonium 1660 – 1886. Victorian social reformers including
Edwin Chadwick,
Henry Mayhew and
Charles Booth voiced concerns about the "
decline" of
public health in the urban life of the British
working class, arguing for improved housing and sanitation, access to parks and recreational facilities, an improved diet and a reduction in alcohol intake. These contributions from the public health perspective were discussed by the Scottish physician Sir
James Cantlie in his influential 1885 lecture
Degeneration Amongst Londoners. The novel experience of everyday contact with the urban working classes gave rise to a kind of horrified fascination with their perceived reproductive energies which appeared to threaten
middle-class culture. Secondly, the
proto-evolutionary biology and transformatist speculations of
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and other natural historians—taken together with the
Baron von Cuvier's theory of extinctions—played an important part in establishing a sense of the unsettled aspects of the natural world. The
polygenic theories of multiple human origins, supported by
Robert Knox in his book
The Races of Men, were firmly rejected by
Charles Darwin who, following
James Cowles Prichard, generally agreed on a single African origin for the entire human species. Thirdly, the development of world trade and
colonialism, the early European experience of
globalization, resulted in an awareness of the varieties of cultural expression and the vulnerabilities of Western civilization. Finally, the growth of historical scholarship in the 18th century, exemplified by
Edward Gibbon's
The History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire (1776–1789), excited a renewed interest in the narratives of historical decline. This resonated uncomfortably with the difficulties of French political life in the post-revolutionary 19th century. Degeneration theory achieved a detailed articulation in
Bénédict Morel's
Treatise on Degeneration of the Human Species (1857), a complicated work of clinical commentary from an asylum in Normandy (Saint Yon in
Rouen) which, in the popular imagination at least, coalesced with de
Gobineau's
Essay on The Inequality of the Human Races (1855). Morel's concept of
mental degeneration – in which he believed that intoxication and addiction in one generation of a family would lead to hysteria, epilepsy, sexual perversions, insanity, learning disability and sterility in subsequent generations – is an example of Lamarckian biological thinking, and Morel's medical discussions are reminiscent of the clinical literature surrounding
syphilitic infection (
syphilography). Morel's psychiatric theories were taken up and advocated by his friend
Philippe Buchez, and through his political influence became an official doctrine in French legal and administrative medicine.
Arthur de Gobineau came from an impoverished family (with a domineering and adulterous mother) which claimed an aristocratic ancestry; he was a failed author of historical romances, and his wife was widely rumored to be a Créole from
Martinique. De Gobineau nevertheless argued that the course of history and civilization was largely determined by ethnic factors, and that
interracial marriage ("
miscegenation") resulted in social chaos. De Gobineau built a successful career in the French diplomatic service, living for extended periods in Iran and Brazil, and spent his later years travelling through Europe, lamenting his mistreatment at the hands of his wife and daughters. He died of a heart attack in 1882 while boarding a train in Turin. His work was well received in German translation—not least by the composer
Richard Wagner—and the leading German psychiatrist
Emil Kraepelin later wrote extensively on the dangers posed by degeneration to the German people. De Gobineau's writings exerted an enormous influence on the thinkers antecedent to the
Third Reich – although they are curiously free of anti-Semitic prejudice. Quite different historical factors inspired the Italian
Cesare Lombroso in his work on criminal anthropology with the notion of
atavistic retrogression, probably shaped by his experiences as a young army doctor in
Calabria during the
risorgimento. In Britain, degeneration received a scientific formulation from
Ray Lankester whose detailed discussions of the biology of
parasitism were hugely influential; the poor physical condition of many
British Army recruits for the
Second Boer War (1899–1902) led to alarm in government circles. Psychiatrist
Henry Maudsley initially argued that degenerate family lines would die out with little social consequence, but later became more pessimistic about the effects of degeneration on the general population; Maudsley also warned against the use of the term "degeneration" in a vague and indiscriminate way. Anxieties in Britain about the perils of degeneration found legislative expression in the
Mental Deficiency Act 1913 which gained strong support from
Winston Churchill, then a senior member of the Liberal government. In the
fin-de-siècle period,
Max Nordau scored an unexpected success with his bestselling
Degeneration (1892).
Sigmund Freud met Nordau in 1885 while he was studying in Paris and was notably unimpressed by him and hostile to the degeneration concept. Degeneration fell from popular and fashionable favor around the time of the First World War, although some of its preoccupations persisted in the writings of the
eugenicists and
social Darwinists (for example,
R. Austin Freeman;
Anthony Ludovici;
Rolf Gardiner; and see also
Dennis Wheatley's
Letter to posterity).
Oswald Spengler's
The Decline of the West (1919) captured something of the degenerationist spirit in the aftermath of the war. == Psychology and Emil Kraepelin ==