Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Political thought after the French Revolution
- II Modern liberty and its defenders
- III Modern liberty and its critics
- IV Secularity, reform and modernity
- 18 Church and state: the problem of authority
- 19 The politics of nature
- 20 Conservative political thought from the revolutions of 1848 until the fin de siècle
- 21 Modern liberty redefined
- 22 Political economy
- 23 German socialism and social democracy 1860 –1900
- 24 Russian political thought of the nineteenth century
- 25 European political thought and the wider world during the nineteenth century
- 26 Empire and imperialism
- Epilogue
- Biographies
- Bibliography
- Index
19 - The politics of nature
Science and religion in the age of Darwin
from IV - Secularity, reform and modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Political thought after the French Revolution
- II Modern liberty and its defenders
- III Modern liberty and its critics
- IV Secularity, reform and modernity
- 18 Church and state: the problem of authority
- 19 The politics of nature
- 20 Conservative political thought from the revolutions of 1848 until the fin de siècle
- 21 Modern liberty redefined
- 22 Political economy
- 23 German socialism and social democracy 1860 –1900
- 24 Russian political thought of the nineteenth century
- 25 European political thought and the wider world during the nineteenth century
- 26 Empire and imperialism
- Epilogue
- Biographies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Perhaps no Victorian was more startled by the implications of evolution than Charles Darwin (1809–82). Transformations of nature through natural selection were considered in his private and, eventually, very public writings; but even as they flowed from his pen, these ideas disturbed him. He was perennially torn about their moral and ethical consequences. The imagery of struggle, selection and extinction in nature that Darwin did so much to fashion was also ready-made to describe the rough passage of arguments and beliefs through history, including the struggle for survival of the evolutionary idea itself. Darwin and his followers identified themselves with a cause, but they were not always so sanguine about the social and political repercussions of their intellectual battles. This chapter situates Darwin's struggle – and his concept of struggle – in a wider context of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and explores political and religious consequences of the claim that species (human included) are not definitively fixed in form, but undergo change over time.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought , pp. 649 - 690Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011