The Human by Design - Population Policy and Proto-Eugenics in the Early Modern Period. The desire for an optimally capable human being has existed long before modern times. Utopias of human breeding may be as old as human civilization itself. During the Renaissance and especially during the Enlightenment, questions of population policy gained relevance in Europe and the young USA. Not only economists, politicians, and medical professionals devised scenarios and sought ways to produce perfect "subjects." Writers, journalists, philosophers, sexual reformers, theologians, religious utopians, and early feminists also called for state regulation and control over human reproduction. This previously religiously determined topic was now to be oriented solely towards the common good and not the rights of the individual. Maren Lorenz examines utopias and concepts.