The Biology of Stupidity: Genetics, Eugenics and Mental Deficiency in the Inter-War Years

Abstract

It may be thought that the title of this paper betrays a regrettable lack of sensitivity and good taste; it is as well, therefore, to explain its origin. Lewis Dexter was, I think, the first sociologist to apply a deviance perspective to the high-grade mentally retarded. ‘On the Politics and Sociology of Stupidity in Our Society’ argues that our discriminatory attitudes to the retarded have deep ideological roots; our social institutions tend ‘automatically’ to penalize stupidity; and repugnance often characterizes our face-to-face interactions with the stupid. The pejorative label ‘stupid’ was justified precisely because identifying the stupid is a ‘commonsense’ rather than a scientific process, although commonsense does not have long to wait before it is bolstered by science.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.