William H. Sheldon and the culture of the somatotype

The burden of this dissertation is to show that William Sheldon’s somatotype project should be seen as an integral aspect of modernist culture. Sheldon engaged the same problems with modernity and the "Second Industrial Revolution" (urbanization, overpopulation, industrialization, alienation) that confronted modernist poets, novelists, and philosophers. In this I am elaborating Dorothy Ross’s recent metaphor, "modernist impulses in the human sciences" (1994). Both scientists and artists were responding to the social chaos and fragmentation engendered by WWI, by capitalism, and by a science and technology that was often felt to have run amok. Advocacy of eugenics for Anthony Ludovici, William Sheldon, and Aldous Huxley (polemics against "promiscuous breeding", overpopulation, medical and psychological holism, "aristocracy", nobility) was another means of defending conservative values against the onslaught of modernism. The German romantic, holistic, tradition (the "Goethean vision") in the physical and biological sciences that has been treated recently by Ann Harrington (1996) carried reactionary assumptions and priorities that duly influenced British and American constitutionalists. Sheldon’s quest of the somatotype, his attempt to map the human physique scientifically, was, at least in his case, a means of salvaging personality, character, and soul ina way that was consonant with the aims of German holism and hence, to a Significant degree, with the aims of the nazis, who appropriated the tradition for political purposes and propagandized it in their art. Sheldon’s studies in human constitution possessed the same "value-base" (Weingart) as much of German medicine and psychology during the first four decades of this century. Sheldon’s anti-Freudian position was intended to reinculcate a place for moral character and eugenic breeding in psychology. Sheldon insisted that character was a seasoned and hard-won proposition, as opposed to a cheap jettisoning of sexual inhibitions. Sheldon opposed the sexual origin of neurosis and replaced it with a highly disciplined character-building that was consistent with a nineteenth-century masculine ethos.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Science and Technology Studies

Department dc:contributor.department

Science and Technology Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

1997

Author dc:creator

• Gatlin, Stephen H.

Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair

• Barker, Peter
• La Berge, Ann F.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Burian, Richard M.
• Moyer, Albert E.
• Hardcastle, Gary L.

• social problems
• modern society
• Technology

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

etd-05222007-091439

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/37907