Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought

Contents

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pp. vii-

Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-xxxi

The idea for this study developed initially during a year of reading on British Intellectual History from 1880 to 1920 at the British Library in London, supported by a Study Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. During 1970-71 and 1974-75 I was able to work intermittently on the project in connection with a more general study of the...

Introduction: The Idea of Social Darwinism

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pp. 3-13

Social Darwinism, as almost everyone knows, is a Bad Thing. On a national American history examination, a high school senior asked "how could a democratic society ... profess to be the land of opportunity [in the 188Os] when poverty, disease, and social Darwinism were rampant?" Also speaking of the Gilded Age, another student added,...

1. The Scientific Background

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pp. 14-33

"I have received in a Manchester newspaper, rather a good squib," Charles Darwin wrote to the geologist Charles Lyell, shortly after the appearance of the Origin of Species, "showing that I have proved 'might is right' and therefore that Napoleon is right, and every cheating tradesman is also right." Although Darwin ridiculed the charge, it would...

2. Hushing Up Death

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pp. 34-56

Soon after the appearance of The Descent of Man, Herbert Spencer began to discover that public identification with Darwinism had some distinct disadvantages. In 1875 the economist John Elliott Cairnes charged that Spencer "transferred laws of physiology (including the 'survival of the fittest') to the domain of social science." James Martineau, a...

3. Philanthropic Energy and Philosophic Calm

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pp. 57-78

In August 1882, Herbert Spencer sailed for New York. During his three-months' stay in America, he toured Niagara Falls and as far west as Pittsburgh, where he visited Andrew Carnegie. The highlight of the trip was a public banquet at Delmonico's restaurant in New York in November, arranged hastily but successfully by Edward L. Youmans,...

4. Amending the Faith

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pp. 79-96

During the final decades of the century, a dwindling band of American Spencerians kept the faith against considerable odds. Although the economic upswing and relative calm in the early 1880s gave temporary relief from the troubles of the previous decade, the promise proved illusory. The rise of the trusts, renewed labor militancy, and persistant poverty...

5. William Graham Sumner

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pp. 97-113

William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) made enemies easily. An Episcopalian minister in the late 1860s, he accepted the chair of Political Economy at Yale in 1872 and was soon embroiled in hassles over curriculum reform. In 1880 his battle with Yale President Noah Porter over the use of Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology, one of the earliest academic...

6. The Survival of the Fittest Is Our Doctrine

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pp. 114-136

American reformers of the late nineteenth century were understandably less interested in their opponents' intellectual difficulties than in capitalizing on apparent gaps in logic. New Liberals and socialists asserted in almost a single voice that opponents of state activity wedded Darwinism to classical economics and thus traded illicitly on the prestige...

7. Neo-Darwinism and the Crisis of the 1890s

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pp. 137-163

During the 1890s labor violence, agrarian protest, and disturbing new evidence of urban poverty convinced many Americans that "the wolfish struggle for existence," as one contributor to the Arena called it, was growing worse. At Andrew Carnegie's Homestead steel mill near Pittsburgh seven men died in a single clash in 1892. Two years later...

8. A Pigeon Fanciers' Polity

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pp. 164-179

In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross published Social Control, a study of the foundations of order in modern society. Although he never defined the term precisely, Ross traced formal and informal means of social control through history and predicted the gradual substitution of the force of enlightened public opinion for the mystical and authoritarian

9. The Scaffolding of Progress

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pp. 180-200

Although ideas of racial inferiority antedated the Origin of Species, modern racism like eugenics appeared on the surface to be a direct legacy of Darwin's work. Darwin, after all, subtitled his masterpiece "The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." In The Descent of Man he predicted, "At some future period, not very distant...

10. The Nietzsche Vogue

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pp. 201-211

While most Americans in the 18908 sought escape from the chilling logic of neo-Darwinism, a scattered few seemed deliberately to dramatize their contemporaries' worst nightmares. A decadent and sterile America required "the kind of courage that aids by active cooperation the survival of the fittest," wrote the author of Might is Right, a paperback...

11. Beyond the Battle: The Literary Naturalists

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pp. 212-225

During the 1890s American novelists also pondered the lessons of biology. In Caesars Column (1892) Ignatius Donnelly treated readers to an unabashedly Darwinian "Sermon of the Twentieth Century." "If Nature, with her interminable fecundity, pours forth millions of human beings for whom there is no place on earth, and no...

12. Imperialism and the Warriar Critique

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pp. 226-242

"The rule of the survival of the fittest applies to nations as well as to the animal kingdom," wrote a prominent Asia watcher in the wake of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Urging annexation of the territories acquired in the conflict, another expansionist argued that "the law of self preservation as well as that of survival of the fittest" demanded...

Epilogue: From Histrionics to History

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pp. 243-251

Unlike many slogans of World War I, social Darwinism continued to flourish in the interwar years. At the Scopes trial in Tennessee no less than in the work of leading sociologists and even literary critics, the suspicion lingered that someone, somewhere was twisting Darwinism for evil purposes. During the 1930s, renewed debate between individualists...

Notes

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pp. 253-289

Index

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pp. 291-298