ABSTRACT
The outcome was to destroy our belief in the right of experts – whether they are scientists, social engineers or managerial politicians – to think for us unquestioned. It was suddenly no longer possible to take the notion of modernist civilisation for granted or to accept an unilinear image of social progress in human affairs. The biological variant of the predestined actor model had led to the plausibility of ideas such as sterilisation, genetic selection and even death for the biologically untreatable. Such work was now unpalatable for many in the context of the mid-twentieth century experience of mass systematic extermination in death camps of outsider groups whether based on their ethnicity (in the case of the Jews, Slavs and Gypsies), their sexuality (in the case of homosexuals), their health (in the case of the disabled and seriously ill) or their behaviour (in the case of whole categories of criminals).
