William James’s Social Evolutionism in Focus

Introduction

It is well known that William James’s thinking was influenced by evolutionary theory and by Darwin’s theory of natural selection in particular. It is easy to misunderstand James’s evolutionary thinking, however, if one is tempted to read contemporary evolutionary views back into James. In this article I try to avoid such anachronism by carefully distinguishing James’s evolutionary views from some of their nearest conceptual neighbors. I focus in particular on James’s social evolutionism, especially as he expounds it in his 1880 essay “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment.”¹ By distinguishing James’s social evolutionism from sociobiology, from social Darwinism, and from the theory of memes, I underscore the distinctiveness of James’s socio-historical theory. I conclude by suggesting that James’s understanding of dynamic, evolving populations can still serve as a resource for evolutionary theory, especially as a corrective to a typically reductionistic neo-Darwinism.

In “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,” James advances an innovative theory of socio-historical change, and he does so by way of an explicit analogy with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The very first sentence of the essay reads:

A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.

(James, “Great Men” 602)

Specifically, the parallel that James claims to have noticed is that in both cases, change in a system over time is to be explained in terms of the differential treatment of varying elements within a population. In the parlance of contemporary philosophy of biology, James is claiming that both organic and societal change can be viewed as selectionist systems: in both cases, there is a population consisting of variants—elements that differ from one another—that can either be “selected” or not by the relevant features of the environment, thereby shaping the future characteristics of the population in question.² As James himself puts it,

I affirm that the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in the main exactly what it is to the “variation” in the Darwinian philosophy. It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short selects him.

(James, “Great Men” 625)

Although in this passage (as elsewhere) James focuses on what he calls “great men,” his point is meant to be perfectly general: there is something about how a person becomes accepted by society or gains social influence that parallels the selection for an organic trait in Darwin’s theory. How specifically are these two processes supposed to be the same?

What James Is Not Saying

Rather than directly explicating what I take to be the point of James’s analogy, I think it will be instructive to eliminate some erroneous interpretations at the outset. In particular, I would like to distinguish James’s position from several views that we might be tempted to project back on James based on our familiarity with contemporary discourses surrounding the relationships between biology and society. This methodology will serve to head off carelessly anachronistic interpretations of James, while also situating James’s thinking within a map of neighboring views, so that we can better see what James’s distinctive socio-historical theory might have to offer the contemporary scene. Here I differentiate James’s socio-historical theory from three views: sociobiology, (one particular type of) social Darwinism, and the theory of memes, in that order.

Given that James is avowedly applying some kind of insight from Darwin to social theory, one might be tempted to think of James’s position in the “Great Men” essay as somehow a precursor of twentieth-century sociobiology (or of offshoots like evolutionary psychology). Spearheaded in the 1970s by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, sociobiology is the interdisciplinary effort of various sciences to provide “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior” (Wilson 4). Because sociobiology views social behaviors as just one more type of trait that comprises an animal’s phenotype, it explains the existence and frequency...