HISTORICAL NOTES

Rationalism

The Rationalists were established in 1889 in the United Kingdom and spread to the United States and throughout the English-speaking world. They stated their position as the adoption of ‘those mental attitudes which unreservedly accept the supremacy of reason and aim at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority’. It had no doctrinal tests for membership and included as members Julian Huxley, Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Arnold Bennett, Georges Clemenceau, Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, J. B. S. Haldane, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Professor L. Susan Stebbing, Havelock Ellis, and Professor V. Gordon Childe. They saw religion as their main opponent. The movement declined after the Second World War.

Eugenics

The study and advocacy of eugenics, or population engineering, was internationally active from the late nineteenth century, originating in the genetic research and ideas of Sir Francis Galton and, to some degree, from the thinking of Florence Nightingale.

It combined an interest in genetics and demographics to formulate social policy aimed at eliminating hereditary suffering. Firstly, it set out to measure and describe the population, looking especially at crime, poverty and hereditary disease. It was interested in whether criminal behaviour and poverty were ‘genetic.’

The Eugenics Society of Britain in the 1920s described itself this way: ‘Eugenics is the study of those agencies which are under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.’ Many prominent members of the scientific community and progressive intellectuals of the times belonged to the international movement until the ’thirties, when it fell into disarray and became intellectually disreputable mostly because of the German Nazi party’s misuse of the science of genetics to justify its policies.

Union for Democratic Control

A British society which campaigned to have foreign policy treated as a matter of public debate. It was opposed to all ‘secret diplomacy’.

The World Population Conference

As a point of historical accuracy, this conference took place in Geneva slightly earlier than when it occurs in the book.

Under Secretaries-General

In practice, the Secretary-General, Deputy Secretary-General and the Under Secretary-Generals of the League together reflected the nationalities of the permanent members of the Council. Consequently there was never a Swiss Under Secretary-General.