WHO SHALL SURVIVE? A NEW APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN INTERRELATIONS

Washington, D. C.: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1934. xvi,440 pp., including numerous in-text charts, many printed in red and black. Original publisher's cloth, stamped in gold. No dust jacket, as issued. Head of front board bumped, else fine.

First edition of the magnum opus of Romanian-American psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno (1889-1974), the pioneering work of sociometry that introduced the use of sociograms. The work, an answer to the dehumanizing promises of eugenics and technocracy, contains studies of voluntary interpersonal relationships formed at schools and other institutions, including the famous "Hudson study," conducted with Helen Jennings at the New York State Training School for Girls, a reformatory near Hudson, New York. Moreno dedicates the book to the school's superintendent, Fannie French Morse, "Educator and Liberator of Youth."

"Moreno founded psychodrama, and pioneered group psychotherapy. Apart from its psychiatric and sociological significance, this work contained some of the earliest graphic depictions of social networks - data visualization methods later applied to numerous other disciplines. These images were later called sociograms" - Garrison Morton Norman 7700.

"The weakest point in our present day universe is the incapacity of man to meet the machine, the cultural conserve, or the robot, otherwise than through submission, actual destruction, and social revolution. The eugenic doctrine, similarly to the technological process, is another promiser of extreme happiness to man. The eugenic dreamer sees in the distant future the human race so changed through breeding that all men will be born well, all accomplished by certain techniques through the elimination and combination of genes. The eugenic dreamer and the technological dreamer have one idea in common: to substitute and hasten the slow process of nature. In the face of the two vehicles of thought and power, eugenic rule and machine rule, man ought to call to mind their meaning: that they both aim to remove the center and the rule from within him, the one into a process before he is conceived, the other into a process which is conserved, both aiming to make him uncreative. Technology may be able to improve the comfort of mankind and eugenics may be able to improve the health of mankind, but neither is able to decide what type of man can and should survive. However, the acknowledgment of social attitudes and behavior, of the unity of mankind, and of the importance of social planning, may serve the survival of humanity" (p. 363).