2 - Degénérescence and revolution

Summary

DEGENERATION WITHIN

It would be possible to argue that degeneration must primarily be understood as one intellectual current within a far-wider language of nineteenth-century racist imperialism. Admittedly, sectors of the population of the imperial metropolis were eventually bracketed off with the races of the empire but, so this argument might proceed, the real ‘hegemonic task’ lay in the ideological construction of ‘inferiority’, ‘savagery’, ‘atavism’, ‘moral pathology’, in the ‘far-flung’ countries which came increasingly under Western political control. At moments of particular ideological crisis over the terms of government and mastery in the Empire, for instance in England after the Indian Mutiny in 1857 or during the Governor Eyre controversy between 1865 and 1868, the notion of physical, mental and technological backwardness was used to justify the formidable use of military force in the suppression of rebellions just as elsewhere it was used to condone the philanthropic paternalism of the missionary.

Work by Fabian and Said, two examples briefly discussed below, emphasises nineteenth-century European projections of inferiority and degeneracy on to the non-European world. My main concern here, however, will be with the ‘internal’ crises, the ‘domestic’ worlds at issue in the language of degeneration which have received far less scrutiny in the recent critical historiography of racism and the human sciences.