The Faces of Eugenics: Local Mirrors and Global Reflections

This positions the present study in the voluminous literature on the history of eugenics, outlining its particular methodology and its major arguments. By tracing the life story of Florinskii’s treatise over the course of nearly one hundred fifty years of Russian history and by comparing and contrasting this punctuated biography with the life trajectory of Galton’s eugenics, this book offers a novel interpretation of eugenics as a time- and place-specific amalgam of ideas, values, concerns, and actions regarding human reproduction, heredity, diversity, development, and evolution, which purports to address some perceived social problems and to shape the future of a particular society and humanity as a whole.