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It was an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise, but few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom.
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To Sumner and his followers, life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive – and through this struggle societies became stronger over time. A correlate of this principle was that government should do little or nothing to help those in need because that would interfere with natural selection.
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JSTOR: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1978), pp. 317-328
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To put this into context, since Hofstadter published his book in 1944 the term social Darwinism has appeared 4,258 times. This history gives every indication that social Darwinism as a theory was invented by Hofstadter and that it had only negligible influence prior to his book.
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Previous social planners have come from the assumption that humans were different from all other creatures in the natural world. When they constructed our modern civilizations, what I often refer to as the human zoo, they assumed that understanding how humans interact in their "natural habitat" wasn't important. They made decisions based on economics and utility, not smart science. Some theorists in the past may have borrowed terms from the hottest science of the day to justify their own malevolent goals. That should be a warning for us, but it shouldn't discourage us from using the best information available to construct a world that we all want to live in.
In this series it is my goal to raise some questions about the usefulness of social Darwinism and the way it has been applied. This is a history that is full of contradictions (as history often is) and I encourage people to both challenge and offer suggestions as I develop these ideas. : The Primate Diaries
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There is a widespread myth that Darwin wrote a letter to Karl Marx thanking him for sending a copy of Das Kapital. The reality is that a letter from Darwin to Edward Aveling (a biology lecturer who was in a long term relationship with Marx's daughter Eleanor) was accidentally mixed in with a box of Marx's correspondence that was in Eleanor's care.
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In his 1851 bestseller Social Statics, Spencer developed most of the ideas attributed to social Darwinism when he argued that the poor should not be helped through government programs, but should be allowed to die for the betterment of society:
It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence--the same beneficence that brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic. . .
Blind to the fact that, under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation--absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident by heightening the prospective difficulty of maintaining a family. And thus, in their eagerness to prevent the really salutary sufferings that surround us, these sigh-wise and groan-foolish people bequeath to posterity a continually increasing curse.
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Libertarians need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human evolution supports classical liberalism.
In my lead essay, I have argued that Darwinian science supports classical liberalism. The responses to my essay from P. Z. Myers, Herbert Gintis, and Lionel Tiger show a wide range of reactions — the general disagreement of Myers, the partial agreement of Gintis, and the general agreement of Tiger.
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A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the theory a coherent set of principles. A political theory only possesses utility if its general principles exist independent of the thing to be explained. Without this the theory is a mere amalgamation of tenuously related ideas that do not form a unified structure.
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while scholars universally acknowledge Spencer as central to any definition of social Darwinism and have filled multiple volumes of critical analysis based on his views, every word Sumner ever wrote on the subject was cited in Hofstadter's book, and his single chapter on him is less than sixteen pages.
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scholars have begun to seriously challenge the usefulness of the term as a political theory.
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- central concepts of what came to be called social Darwinism were already in place prior to the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species.
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When Francis Galton first coined the term "eugenics" in his 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development, he intended it to describe his theories concerning the importance of "good breeding" in shaping human development. A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton drew upon evolutionary theory and
speeches and writing defending succession and the Confederacy. Notice reference to racial differences as natural or essential or designed
Stemming from an unwieldy synthesis of fin-de-siecle Social Darwinism and (until recently) trendy Chicago School economics, this ethos claims that ferocious, mercilessly competitive conditions weed out the weak while preserving and enhancing the strongest members of an institution, a market, or a civilization as a whole. Such roughness and ruthlessness render us more competitive, thicker-skinned, and simply better than the rest of the pack. Such maxims are applied to communities and societies as much as to the people who comprise them: The more cutthroat an organization's culture, the more hardened it is to adversity and tougher the people who emerge from its hallowed halls. Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
Morality is the final domain that theists cling to in order to justify the existence of God. They argue that, without a supernatural deity (or deities), there would be no reason for people to be kind with one another and we would be constantly at each other's throats. The view of Darwinian evolution as "nature, red in tooth and claw" is pervasive and theists perceive that the absence of God is the absence of moral sense. However, this façade is cracking around its very foundation as a steady flow of observational evidence reveals it to be one more bit of fallacious reasoning.
In this review Simon Underdown disagrees with the premise that racism is part of evolution, rather than a crime
Janet Browne: Darwin's Origin of Species, A Biography\nNew York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006.\n[excerpt]
in list: Evolution
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a struggle for existence among nations and races
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the notorious doctrine of 'social Darwinism' took the idea of success to justify social and economic policies in which struggle was the driving force
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