The Next Step From Nazi Ideology and Scientific Authority to the New Biopolitics of Health Security - Hardcover

The Architecture of Control Beneath Modern Science

Blending intellectual history, political theory, and critical philosophy, this interdisciplinary work forces a confrontation with what is called "progress." Beneath advances in modern medicine, data systems, and global security, it exposes enduring structures of authoritarianism, showing how tools designed to protect and improve human life can reproduce the very injustices they claim to overcome.

This book is best understood as a chronological account of the history of science and medicine, from Classical Greek Philosophy and the Enlightenment to modern medicine and contemporary global security. The Next Step traces a quiet but unsettling continuity: ideas once used to justify racial hierarchies and eugenics did not disappear, but adapted and resurfaced across anthropology, bacteriology, bioethics, and the governance of epidemics and infectious diseases.

The book examines continuities between Nazi-era biopolitics and contemporary public health governance, showing how ideologies of racial hygiene, segregation, and societal control persist in modern policy frameworks. Although scholarship has explored the ideological and bureaucratic mechanisms of Nazi racial science, no study has traced their legacies into today's health and governance systems. The Nazi regime targeted Jews, other ethnic groups, and individuals deemed socially or biologically "inferior," justifying persecution through narratives of contagion, eugenics, and racial purity. This monograph identifies emerging patterns in global public health interventions that reflect historical logics of governance, risk management, and social stratification. Drawing on intellectual history, political philosophy, and the history of science, The Next Step situates these continuities in an interdisciplinary context, analysing their ethical, political, and social implications. It is intended for scholars, graduate students, and interdisciplinary researchers in Holocaust studies, history of science, bioethics, political theory, and public health governance.

From speculative origins in Atlantis and the shadow of Nazi genocide to post-COVID technocracy, COVID lockdowns, and contemporary democracy, it shows how scientific authority and digital technologies shape systems of health governance and biometric surveillance, extending into vaccines policy and public health infrastructure.

Urgent and uncompromising, The Next Step asks not only where society is heading, but what and who are carried forward into that future.