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simply born without the ability to feel or act morally, just as an imbecile—what we would now call a developmentally disabled person—was born without the ability to think or reason normally. Eugenicists saw both kinds of imbeciles as examples of evolutionary error, and of undesirable clutter in the gene pool.
    At the same time as Darwin’s theories were enthusiastically seized upon by eugenicists, “social Darwinists,” and other champions of the hierarchy of life encapsulated in the Great Chain of Being, they also helped to facilitate a wholesale questioning of the whole notion of a fixed human hierarchy. Egalitarianism and universal human rights were relatively new concepts at the turn of the nineteenth century, brought to the attention of most as a result of the French and American revolutions of the late eighteenth century. At the time of the rise of the monster cities of the West, these progressive ideas by no means dominated the scene. The idea that birth was worth, and that one’s place in the Great Chain was not really something one could change, was still common even as people began to simultaneously entertain the notions that perhaps this should not matter and that a civil society might have an interest in behaving as if it mattered less, or perhaps not at all.
    As the cities grew, the pragmatic value of civil egalitarianism became increasingly evident. Whether a country was headed by a king or a president, whether it maintained a formal aristocracy or insisted upon equality of citizenship, the intense population pressure of the cities made it increasingly apparent that the masses required some sort of management. Merely asserting old hierarchies of class was notgoing to get the job done either, because in the new industrial economy hierarchies of class were changing, too. What was required were systematic, reproducible, universally applicable systems for social management that could be implemented on a large scale.
    It is no coincidence that we first see this happening with regard to sex in early Napoleonic France. Beginning as early as 1802, when the French government began regulating and registering Parisian prostitutes via the Bureau des Moeurs (Bureau of Morals) and Bureau Sanitaire (Bureau of Health), the policing of the sexual activity of the general public increasingly became a problem for the state. Many efforts focused on specific problem behaviors like prostitution, or health problems like venereal diseases. In England, the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts (enacted in 1864) attempted to stem the tide of the latter by rigidly controlling the former, complete with compulsory gynecological exams. Other early attempts at managing the sexuality of the masses were more philosophical in nature, such as the campaign to raise the age of consent that became such a hot-button issue in the English 1870s.[ 2 ]
    The law was integral to this effort to impose greater control over the sexual behavior of citizens. Central to this legal effort, in turn, was the process of creating a body of work that helped to support the law and aid it in doing its managerial work. The new secular state required secular justification for its laws, and professionals in many fields began to apply themselves to the task of providing it. Physicians like Richard von Krafft-Ebing would do this in a particular and distinctive way. Drawing on an Enlightenment legacy of scientific naming, a variety of sexual behaviors and characteristics were suddenly made both “new” and “known” thanks to Krafft-Ebing’s classification and assignment of scholarly names. Krafft-Ebing’s book
Psychopathia Sexualis
(1886) was a pioneering, and highly problematic, index to disorders of the “sexual instinct” and the human types subject to them.
    As with the ornate sleeper ray that became
Electrolux addisoni
in 2007, none of the actual behaviors Krafft-Ebing catalogued were new to the annals of human