Eugenics in the national and international context

The articles collected in this special section of «Popolazione e Storia» take stock of the results of previous inquiries in order to explore more in depth new research directions. The first two articles focus on the main promoters of the establishment of the Italian Committee for Eugenic Studies in 1913, an event reconstructed in detail by Luca Tedesco in this volume. Both Giuseppe Sergi (1841-1936) and Alfredo Niceforo (1876-1960), here studied by Angelo Caglioti, were influenced by Cesare Lombroso and his views concerning the necessity to prevent degeneration by monitoring and managing the population. The practice of the statistical measurement of the characteristics attributed to heredity was also crucial to a large part of Italian eugenics. Manfredi Alberti proposes here an analysis on the surveys realised and published under fascism on asylum patients as a way to assess the role of quantification practices in the construction of a scientific argument in favour of eugenic measures, focusing on psychiatry as one of the disciplines that most resorted to hereditary explanations in that period. As Roser Cussò (2012) has demonstrated in a previous study, quantification was crucial since the interwar period as a tool for the legitimation not only of scientific enterprise, but also of international organisations. In the article here published, she questions the presumed “silent abstinence” of the League of Nations from any involvement in eugenic programs. This last article shifts the focus from Italy to the transnational level. Yet unexpected similarities emerge, in particular concerning the problem of the “disguised” nature of eugenics both in Italy and inside the League of Nations. The articulation of eugenics, as shown in the introductory article by Giovanni Favero, results much more complex than expected.