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This paper focuses on the “sociology of struggle” between groups, sometimes called social Darwinism, in the Anglo-Saxon world, and the development of eugenic thought and measures.Eugenics developed in the last quarter of the 20th century as a reaction against what was called the “survival of the unfit” in modern urban life conditions. Its founder, Francis Galton, considered eugenics as a religious ideal, a science, and a practical technique, which aimed at increasing the number of the “well born” and limiting the number of the unfit. In The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Madison Grant extended the idea of “unfit” to entire races.The feeling of racial superiority of the advocators of the “Nordic race” became so strong at the turn of the century in the United States that measures of sterilization of the “unfit” were taken in thirty states. Between 1910 and 1940, some 30.000 or 40.000 people were sterilized, many of them in California. Many American supporters of eugenics welcomed the first measures taken by the Nazi government in the early 30s. Though overtly racist, and very often anti-Semitic, they never advocated the sterilization of entire groups or “races”.