Sidney Webb Wrote that No Consistent Eugenist Can Be a Laisser Faire Individualist Unless He Throws Up the Game in Despair. He Must Interfere, Interfere, Interfere!

Social Darwinism, after all, was associated at least in Britain with a commitment to unrestricted laissez-faire and emphasis on individual choice while eugenics implied, at a minimum, the development of a social, and often a state, concern with reproduction. As Sidney Webb wrote: "No consistent eugenist can be a 'Laisser Faire' individualist unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!" The involvement of society or the state in the intimate sphere of family life was not naturally appealing to those whose first principle was that the individual should think of his own interest first and who wished to keep the functions of the state to an absolute minimum. That some social Darwinists were inconsistent--individualists only where it suited their interests--need not be denied. The eugenics movement was largely composed of people who combined a rhetorical commitment to philosophic individualism with advocacy of restrictive immigration laws, compulsory sterilization laws, and an imperialist foreign policy. But it is important to note that advocacy of such policies did involve them in inconsistency; the acceptance of "social consciousness and responsibility in regards to the production of children" and, even more, state action to enforce that responsibility, ran counter to the philosophic temper of social Darwinism.

--Diane Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 4 (October-December 1984): 570.