Exhibit 2 - The Minotaur and Other Hybrids in Ancient Greece

Summary

These concluding reflections proceed by way of three broad, though selective themes. First, we consider the defining frameworks, reviewing the genesis and career of the old ‘generation’—the active making of humans and beasts, plants and even minerals—and of the modern ‘reproduction’—the more abstract process of perpetuating living organisms. The emphasis is on the different functions of these frameworks and how the stakes changed while the questions stayed much the same. Next we place the eighteenth-century emergence of population as an object of knowledge in relation to a longer history of multitudes and states and explore the uneven playing out of the modern logic of commensurability within supposedly closed groups. Then we reconstruct ideals and realities of control in the history of contraception and abortion, pregnancy and childbirth, asking how the politics changed as uncertainty gave way to risk. We conclude that the major changes add up to a long revolution that endorses the notion of a shift ‘from generation to reproduction’ and that exploring other themes, from the family and sexuality to inheritance and the law, would likely confirm as well as complicate this generalization. We end by pondering some general challenges and opportunities of long views.