SOCIAL DARWINISM

SOCIAL DARWINISM

‘Social Darwinism’ is the much-contested, loose and in some respects inaccurate term widely used to describe the application of evolutionary theory, and of biological or other models drawn from the natural sciences, to social issues, and especially to attitudes towards the poor and towards non-European peoples, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The term implies that the discovery of the theory of natural selection by the British naturalist CHARLES DARWIN (1809–82), as announced in Origin of Species (1859), produced a new set of attitudes, focused on the notion of the ‘survival of the fittest’. Darwin’s account of the survival of ‘favourable’ over ‘unfavourable’ variants in species, and of the inheritance of favourable characteristics and their role in sexual selection and the attainment of subsistence, and his argument that species were mutable, was indeed a breakthrough in evolutionary thought. But while contemporaries were quick to apply evolutionism to humanity, many recognized that the social model often associated with the phrase, ‘the survival of the fittest’ in fact preceded the work of Darwin and ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE (1823–1913) (the co-discoverer of the theory). Most agreed that it had been first popularized by T.R.MALTHUS, whose Essay

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on Population (1798) had argued that population growth tended naturally to outstrip the provision of the means of subsistence, and that ‘positive’ checks, such as disease, warfare and poverty, were a natural means of limiting the growth of numbers. As HENRY MAINE put it:

The central seat in all Political Economy was from the first occupied by the theory of Population. This theory has now been generalised by Mr. Darwin and his followers, and, stated as the principle of the survival of the fittest, it has become the central truth of all biological science

(Popular Government, 1886:37) These assumptions, integrated by 1820 into the work of the leading liberal political

economists, notably DAVID RICARDO (Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817), had given political economy the reputation of ‘the dismal science’ for the presumption that wages would not naturally rise above the subsistence level. The model of an intensely competitive society in which individual virtues such as thrift and abstinence might be the sole means of guaranteeing ‘survival’ was cemented by the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, or ‘New Poor Law’, which made the receipt of poor relief much more difficult and punitive, with the aim of reducing the costs of relief. Here a distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor is evident, which facilitates the later development of the language of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’.

If ‘Social Darwinism’ is thus often a variation on Malthusianism, it remains to be seen more precisely what contribution Darwin made to these strands of thought through Origin of Species and Descent of Man (1871), and how the ensuing debate developed ideas not previously conceived or thought through.

To complicate matters, it is also widely conceded that HERBERT SPENCER (1820– 1903) had applied evolutionary theory drawn from natural science, rather than, for example, a stadial or ‘conjectural’ notion of historical progress, well before Origin of Species, and had indeed begun the construction of a complex philosophic system based on these assumptions. Not only did Spencer coin the term ‘survival of the fittest’ (in 1852), he described a ‘law of progress’ carrying society forward to greater perfection in terms of the advancement towards differentiation, individuation and complexity, and asserted that the struggle for existence produced an improvement in ‘type’. Spencer’s starting-point was thus, like Darwin’s and Wallace’s, Malthusian: the pressure of population was the chief cause of human progress. Biological evolution was thus from lower organisms to the more complex, and human social evolution moved from tribal society to an industrial, liberal, individualistic state. Any threat to freedom potentially interfered with the evolutionary process, and Spencer came adamantly to oppose ‘the coming slavery’ of the state, including factory legislation, sanitary inspection by Government officials and public management of the Post Office. Because these views became extremely influential in Europe and the USA in particular, ‘Social Darwinism’ is often associated with the promotion of extreme laissez-faire ideas of the sort that Spencer popularized in The Man versus the State (1881) and other works. As we will see, this is also highly contentious. But Spencer was widely influential, and was a key source for the ideas of the leading US Social Darwinist, WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER (1840–1910),

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among others. A similarly individualist conclusion was drawn from Darwinist premises in France by Clémence-Auguste Royer (1830–1902).

A recent study of the subject (Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism and European and American Thought 1860–1945, 1997) argues that four main assumptions compose the Social Darwinist world-view: (1) biological laws govern the whole of organic nature, including humans; (2) the pressure of population growth on resources generates a struggle for existence among organisms; (3) physical and mental traits confer an advantage on their possessors in this struggle, or in sexual competition; which advantages can, through inheritance, spread through the population; (4) the cumulative effects of selection and inheritance over time account for the emergence of new species and the elimination of others. In order to ascertain how distinctive lines of Social Darwinism thought emerge after 1859, we need to see how these notions developed after Origin of Species .

The most important single development lay in the consequences of Darwin’s own focus upon mankind in Descent of Man. Origin of Species had not contended that the ‘best’ types survived as a result of evolutionary struggle, only that members of species who left the largest number of offspring would promote the characteristics of that group in the species as a whole. Between 1859 and 1871, and while Descent of Man was being composed, Darwin responded to a variety of proposed applications of natural selection to human society. The most influential on his own thinking appear to have been A.R.Wallace’s 1864 research on the tendency of natural selection to promote human intelligence, Darwin’s cousin, FRANCIS GALTON’s (1822–1911) pioneering 1865 article on ‘Hereditary Talent and Character’, which lamented that ‘we are living in a sort of intellectual anarchy, for the want of master minds’, and an article by W.R.Greg ‘On the Failure of “Natural Selection” in the Case of Man’ (1868). Collectively these arguments presented the case for seeing ‘intelligence’ as the quality most suitable for defining what ‘fitness’ was in the human species, and this view Darwin conceded in Descent of Man . Darwin was willing to give environmental factors an important role to play in moral and intellectual evolution, and was thus less insistent on hereditary factors than Lamarck or Spencer. But increasingly after 1871 he came to argue that the optimal outcome of human natural selection would be the triumph of ‘the intellectual and moral’ races over the ‘lower and more degraded ones’, even writing in 1881 that ‘at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races of the world’.

While assumptions about the inevitable displacement of native peoples by colonizing and imperial Europeans are common in this period (e.g. in Charles Dilke’s Greater Britain, 1869), and become increasingly widespread during the great imperial scramble of the 1880s and 1890s, the idea of race thus plays a crucial role in the creation of Social Darwinism in the early 1870s. It is not merely the introduction of the language of race as such, however, but a particular approach to racial categorization and classification, which was crucial to making Social Darwinism essentially racist or racialist. Darwin himself had used the notion of ‘race’ very loosely in Origin of Species to denote species generally, but by Descent of Man he argued that ‘civilised races’ ‘encroach on and replace’ the savage, with the ‘lower races’ being displaced through the accumulation of capital and growth of the arts. This is, as such, a discourse on civilization rather than an assessment of the necessarily different developments of lighter-and darker-skinned

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peoples. But the two concepts are, of course, virtually coterminous: the brahman priest, master of a 3,000-year-old civilization, is placed on the same level as the most primitive jungle tribesman. Social theorists from the 1870s onwards placed increasing stress on utilizing anthropology, philology and history to establish a common origin and lineage for lighterskinned European peoples, and especially their derivation from a common ‘Aryan’ stock. Writers like Dilke developed the idea of the civilizing racial destiny of ‘saxondom’, while the nascent study of comparative Government commenced, in Edward Freeman’s famous exposition (Comparative Politics, 1873) with the assumption of an essential affinity between Greeks, Romans and Teutons. Where the preceding century had explained differences in levels of civilization chiefly in terms of climate (in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, 1748, notably), such differences were now increasingly ascribed to ontological variations in outlook and potential defined by race as skin pigmentation. A variety of sciences and pseudo-sciences, such as anthropometry (the measurement of skull size), promoted a much more rigid, ontological and determinist notion of racial hierarchy, and of Saxon, Teutonic or Caucasian superiority. The idea that race was a central explanatory category in human life, and that some races, and specifically the ‘Aryan’ or ‘Teutonic’, would naturally dominate over others, contended for, for instance, in Robert Knox’s The Races of Men (1850), and in JOSEPH GOBINEAU’s Inequality of the Human Races (1854), predates Darwin. What evolutionism did was to add a supposedly scientific account of racial differentiation, and to define human destiny generally in terms of an inevitable struggle of contending groups, which now were often primarily construed in racial terms. Such trends were developed in Germany by Ernst Haeckel in particular. In the USA racial inequality was justified on Darwinian grounds by Joseph Le Conte (1823–1901), among others (see The Race Problem in the South, 1892). Nor was this solely from a ‘conservative’ or reactionary viewpoint; Darwin’s radical disciple T.H.HUXLEY published an essay entitled ‘On the Natural Inequality of Men’ (1865), which argued that blacks were inferior, while the socialist H.G.WELLS assumed in his Anticipations (1902) that if:

those swarms of black, & brown, and dirtywhite, and yellow people…do not come into the new needs of efficiency…they will have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.

A.R.Wallace, too, apparently believed that racial differences were ineradicable, though crucially he did not view primitive peoples as intellectually inferior to those more advanced. The Italian criminologist Enrico Ferri also attempted an ambitious synthesis of Darwin, Spencer and Marx in Socialism and Positive Science (1894).

Racialism was the chief external application of Social Darwinism precepts in the imperial age. Internal to European nations, there were two main areas in which such ideas were applied: to ideas of the poor; and to theories of the state and moral philosophy. Respecting the poor, the notion of a ‘domestic race’ (as Darwin termed it) also developed in the 1870s, usually in conjunction with a perceived threat of the degeneration of the species through the greater fecundity of its poorest members. This led to frequent debates about whether sterilization in particular was an appropriate method for dealing with mental incapacity, and a range of other diseases that might qualify one as ‘unfit’.

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