Like other Progressive Era reformers, Thomas Nixon Carver promoted a form of biology-infused social science that included both eugenics and a strong version of hereditarianism. Carver was also a charismatic teacher who trained several generations of economists and sociologists at Harvard. In this paper we will focus on the contribution of three of them: James A. Field, Norman E. Himes, and Carl S. Joslyn. These authors differ in terms of style, method, and emphasis—with Field and Himes more interested in population and birth control issues, and Joslyn in the dynamics of social stratification. As it will be shown below, however, all of them reveal an explicit commitment to hereditarianism and eugenics, which can be directly traced back to Carver’s influence during their student days at Harvard.

Franklin H. Giddings can be considered one of the founding fathers of sociology in the United States. With many of his contemporaries, Giddings shared a firm commitment to eugenics, scientific racism, and race-conscious imperialism—a biologically rooted impetus that recent literature has placed at the core of the Progressive Era reform agenda, and which was particularly strong among the most sociologically inclined figures of the period. The aim of this article is to present a discussion of Giddings’s views on race, immigration, eugenics, and American imperialism, and how these views evolved over time. What follows adds to our general understanding of the extent to which racial and eugenic considerations permeated American social thought during the first decades of the last century and how, in the specific case of Giddings, this influence found expression in an inherently ambiguous and often contradictory fashion.

This note presents an unpublished 1939 address given by the American sociologist and population specialist Norman Edwin Himes on "Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action. Himes's discussion of eugenics and democracy has a two-fold relevance. First, it provides further evidence that among population studies specialists a generalized commitment to eugenics persisted well beyond the era of the so-called Progressive Era and continued throughout the 1930s. Second, Himes's approach reveals an attempt to reformulate a eugenic agenda along "liberal" lines, which was intended to distance him from the coercive and racialist approach of his progressive predecessors. Yet, it will be shown, even though Himes seemed to temper the extremism of the earlier movement with sociological and voluntaristic language, there was little actual change in the ultimate goals of his agenda regardless of the apparent switch to democratic eugenics.

The aim of this paper is to document Carver’s influence as a teacher and to shed further light on Harvard’s role as the “brain trust” of American eugenics (Fiorito 2019). On the same time, in more general terms, what follow adds to our general understanding of the extent to which biological considerations continued to permeate American social science well after the first two decades of the last century, the period which marked the "golden age" of eugenics (Leonard 2016).

Review of PAOLO SANTORI, Thomas Aquinas and the Civil Economy Tradition: The Mediterranean Spirit of Capitalism, Routledge, London, 2021.