ABSTRACT
While eighteenth-century investigations into hereditary racial identity struggled with purifying impulses to categorize and regulate hybrid lines, more practical investigations into heredity and what might be done with genealogical transmission produced a discourse of judicious improvement of the human kind, with various ideals of “purity,” both moral and physiological, posited as goals. During the second half of the eighteenth century, heritability was subjected to the microscope and dissected by science to expose its real, material content. A range of essayistic engagements with the problem of hereditary transmission raised concerns that extended to its consequences for urbanism, hygiene, and moral philosophy. As even the science writing of the era attests, knowledge of a blood-bond between people was assumed to be a guarantor of a higher affi nity, with claims-for better or worse-upon the emotions, spirit, and reason. This chapter identifi es a struggle by eighteenth-century writers to represent a socially organized, ethically inclined human kind based upon “natural” principles of affi liation and transmission, relying upon the blood-bond’s presumed function as a mediator between the real, physical world and a metaphysical realm of beholdenness and mutual care. When hereditary lines are presumed to transmit characteristics (physical, emotional, and intellectual) with some reliability, then the consequential logic easily becomes-to use a term anachronistically but precisely-eugenic: in theory, at least, family lines, and then ever increasing population groups including villages, nations, and ultimately the entire species, can be improved by controlling breeding.
