Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea

The Unfit, by Elof Carlson, explores the sources of a movement—negative eugenics—that was used to justify the Holocaust, which claimed millions of innocent lives in World War II. The title reflects the nearly three centuries of belief that some people are socially unfit by virtue of a defective biology, and echoes an earlier theory of degeneracy, dating to biblical antiquity, in which some people were deemed unfit because of some transgression against religious law. The author presents the fi…