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In the wake of earlier works by the prime architects of degeneration theory, Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) and Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809-1873), the Jewish eugenicist and degenerationist Max Nordau (1849-1923)1 voiced in his much acclaimed Degeneration his deep concerns about the future of humankind and the challenge posed by the phenomenon of human degeneration. Highly popular among European physicians in the late Victorian age, degeneration theory stemmed from the widespread belief that lower classes were naturally more prone to experience and inherit mental pathologies. As Edward Shorter (1997) highlights, at the turn of the century, almost all psychiatrists were convinced that mental diseases were directly transmissible from parents to offspring (p. 94). It was thought that this phenomenon fueled an unrestrained social decline that, for the sake of the upper classes, had to be curbed via the prompt implementation of a cordon sanitaire.
According to Nordau, degenerate subjects were relegated to their state of degradation due to an innate inability to adapt, to cope with reality, to change, and to keep up with the speed of modernity. Foregrounding the cruciality of adaptability for the survival of the subject, Nordau (1920) emphasized that “the degenerate subject cannot adapt himself, because he has no clear idea of the circumstances to which he ought to adapt himself” (p. 263). He underscored that
the organism makes efforts actively or passively to adapt itself, by seeking to modify injurious conditions, or by adjusting itself in some way so that conditions impossible to modify should be as little noxious as possible. Degenerates
Page 349… are not capable of adaptation. Therefore, they are fated to disappear. That which inexorably destroys them is that they do not know how to come to terms with reality. (Nordau, 1920, p. 540)
Besides offering the gist of Nordau's thought, these lines from Degeneration bring up the two issues that this article sets out to explore in En