Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I History as Critique: Debating the McKeown Thesis and the Postwar Policy Consensus
- PART II Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities
- 7 Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: on the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development
- 8 The G.R.O. and the Public Health Movement in Britain, 1837–1914
- 9 The Silent Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Government: The Rise of Local Government Expertise
- PART III History and Policy: From the Past to the Future
- Consolidated Bibliography
- Index
9 - The Silent Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Government: The Rise of Local Government Expertise
from PART II - Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I History as Critique: Debating the McKeown Thesis and the Postwar Policy Consensus
- PART II Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities
- 7 Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: on the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development
- 8 The G.R.O. and the Public Health Movement in Britain, 1837–1914
- 9 The Silent Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Government: The Rise of Local Government Expertise
- PART III History and Policy: From the Past to the Future
- Consolidated Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The National Efficiency Crisis
By the beginning of the twentieth century Fabian socialists had been advocating collectivist social legislation for well over a decade, on grounds of functional efficiency, national defense and, increasingly, congruence with the lessons of evolutionary science. In this respect their analysis and aims coincided to a considerable extent with those of the eugenicist and biometrician Karl Pearson. Both shared a nationalist interpretation of evolutionary theory: “social Darwinism” as it has come to be termed. The specific form of social Darwinism espoused by the Fabians and by the biometricians would be more accurately termed “nationalist Darwinism,” since there were so many other social Darwinisms.
Sidney Webb and Karl Pearson had both come to the conclusion quite separately that, among humans, national populations were the fundamental unit of evolution, to whom the unavoidable laws of survival of the fittest applied in all their rigor. The collective protection—or even positive enhancement—of the health of the domestic, national population was therefore deemed to be an appropriate task for the state to take upon itself. Evolutionary logic dictated that the goal of national physical efficiency was the prerequisite for national survival against the competition represented by other nations. Such responsibilities required the state to undertake a prudential policy of rational and scientific regulation of the economic system's motor force of capitalism in order to prevent its individualistic, internally competitive forces from outrunning their overall national, social utility.
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- Information
- Health and WealthStudies in History and Policy, pp. 281 - 342Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005