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Social Darwinism: The Two Sources

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Michael Ruse
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“Social Darwinism” means almost as many things as there are people who have written on it; but this paper takes it to be a generic term for theories of human social development and maintenance which are in some way inspired by biological evolutionary theories—this “inspiration” could take the form of seeing human sociality as a straight extension of the animal (and perhaps plant) domain, or it could involve some sort of analogy. In discussion of the roots of social Darwinism two names invariably appear—that of Charles Darwin himself, obviously, and that of Herbert Spencer. Here, however is the end of agreement. Who was the more important and influential, divides scholars right down the middle; as also do the questions of who really came first and whether their doctrines were essentially the same.

Because there is so much disagreement, no one has yet adequately argued to precisely the right conclusion. To anticipate, this paper argues that both Darwin and Spencer represent fundamental advances (or, less normatively, shifts beyond) their common major source, Thomas Robert Malthus; and that although there was overlap (and undoubted mutual borrowing) their positions were fundamentally dissimilar. Consequently, a search for the roots of Social Darwinism yields two sources, Darwin and Spencer respectively, and that what came from these sources was different. This essay begins with a brief discussion of Malthus's views, paying special attention to his relevance to social Darwinian lines of thought, considers the views of Spencer and Darwin on human social structures, and concludes by comparing the two thinkers, noting their similarities, but arguing that these are far outweighed by their differences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Spring 1980 , pp. 23 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1980

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References

1 See, for example, Himmelfarb, Gertrude, “Varieties of Social Darwinism,” in Victorian Minds (London, 1968)Google Scholar; Halliday, R. J., “Social Darwinism: A definition,” Victorian Studies, 14 (1971): 389–409Google Scholar; and Rogers, James A., “Darwinism and Social Darwinism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 33 (1973): 265–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 To forestall criticism of seemingly anachronistic uses of the term “Social Darwinism,” I emphasize that it is in this generic sense only that I intend the term in this paper.

3 See, for example, Harris, Marvin, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Peel, John D.Y., Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Freeman, Derek, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” Current Anthropology, 15 (1974): 221CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Greene, John, “Darwin as a Social Evolutionist,” Journal of the History of Biology, 10(1977): 1–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

4 Malthus, Thomas Robert, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2 vols. (6th ed., 1826; Repr. 1914, London).Google Scholar

5 Inglis, Brian, Poverty and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1971).Google Scholar

6 Malthus, , Essay, I: 5–6.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 14.

8 Ibid., II:9.

9 For two excellent discussions of Malthus see Young, Robert M., “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory,” Past and Present, 43 (1969): 109–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bowler, Peter, “Malthus, Darwin, and the Concept of Struggle,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976): 631–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

10 There is some justification for considering Darwin before Spencer: he discovered his key mechanism of evolutionary change (natural selection) in 1838, and by 1844 he had written up his ideas into a 230 page essay; moreover, from the start Darwin included man in his evolutionary scheme of things (Ruse, Michael, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw [Chicago, 1979])Google Scholar. Nevertheless, since Darwin did not publish the Origin of Species until 1859, and his work on humans, the Descent of Man, did not appear until 1871, whereas Spencer started publishing on evolution (including humans) right through the 1850s, I shall consider Spencer before Darwin.

It might be added parenthetically that Spencer was not the first major public evolutionist of the Victorian era. In 1844 Robert Chambers had published his widely-read (and widely-condemned!) evolutionary tract, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. However, while Chambers was certainly not above suggesting that humans have evolved from lower forms— indeed, Chambers thought we are going to go on evolving into something better—and whilst indeed Chamber's ideas were taken up by the most prestigious of authorities—by no less a person than Alfred Tennyson who became Poet Laureate on the strength of his In Memoriam, published in 1850, in which it is suggested that Arthur Hallam was a forerunner of that breed of super-humans into which we are all evolving (see Killham, John, Tennyson and “The Princess”: Reflections of an Age [London, 1958]Google Scholar)—Chambers does not really appear as a Social Darwinian in any real sense. He does not have much at all to say about society and its possible evolution. It is rather to Spencer and Darwin that we must look.

11 Spencer, Herbert, “Progress: its Law and Cause,” Westminster Review (1857)Google Scholar, reprinted in Spencer, Herbert, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, 3 vols. (London, 1868), I:3.Google Scholar

12 “Progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity.” Ibid., p. 58.

13 Ibid., p. 17.

14 Lamarck's own theory of evolution encompassed far more than the inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, I use the term “Lamarckian” in its modern sense, as something re¬ferring to that mechanism.

15 Spencer, Herbert, “A Theory of Population, Deduced From the General Law of Animal Fertility,” Westminster Review, n.s.1. (1852): 266.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., p. 251.

17 Ibid., p. 263.

18 For full details, see Ruse, Darwinian Revolution.

19 Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species (London, 1859), pp. 63–4.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., pp. 80-1.

21 Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, 2 vols. (London, 1871), I: 159.Google Scholar

22 Wallace, Alfred Russel, “Sir Charles Lyell on geological climates and the origin of species,” Quarterly Review, 126 (1869): 359–94.Google Scholar

23 Darwin, , Descent, II: 346.Google Scholar

24 See Ruse, Darwinian Revolution.

25 Darwin, , Descent, I: 163.Google Scholar

26 Ibid. For more details on sociobiology, see Ruse, Michael, Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? (Dordrecht, 1979).Google Scholar

27 Darwin, Francis, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, 3 vols. (London, 1887), I: 316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Darwin, , Descent, I: 168.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., pp. 60-1.

30 Greene, , “Darwin,” p. 24.Google Scholar

31 Darwin was not a crude recapitulationist, believing simply that ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny. See Ospovat, Dov, “The Influence of Karl Ernst von Baer's Embryology. 1828-1859: A Reappraisal in Light of Richard Owen's and William B. Carpenter's Paleontologies! application of ‘von Baer's law,’” Journal of the History of Biology, 9 (1976): 1–28.Google Scholar

32 Darwin, , Descent, I: 1974.Google Scholar

33 Peel, , Spencer, p. 125.Google Scholar

34 Darwin, , Descent, II: 316, 326.Google Scholar

35 Spencer, , “Theory,” p. 267.Google Scholar

36 Darwin, , Descent, I: 117.Google Scholar

37 Peel, Spencer.

38 Of course, this does not imply that others would not have drawn stronger links between laissez-faire ideology and their Social Darwinism, even thinking that they were thereby following Spencer. See Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism in American nought, (rev. ed.: New York, 1959).Google Scholar

39 Darwin, , Descent, I: 121.Google Scholar

40 Ibid.

41 See Greene, “Darwin,” for a full (although I believe on-sided) discussion of this aspect of Darwin's thinking.

42 In fact, the present-day successors of Spencer and Darwin are poles apart. The neo-Spen-cerians such as the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service (Evolution and Culture [Ann Arbor, 1960]), bitterly oppose such neo-Darwinians, as the sociobiologist Wilson, Edward W., Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975)Google Scholar. See also, Sahlins, Marshall, The Use and Abuse of Biology (Ann Arbor, 1976).Google Scholar