During the Edwardian era in England a new intellectual mood was reaching its peak. The new mood manifested itself in many ways: as a new feeling of nationalist exclusiveness, as economic protectionism, as jingoistic imperialism, as social imperialism, and in appeals to "efficiency." Some have seen it as an intellectual reaction against humanitarianism and sentimentality, and indeed "might" and "necessity" were to some extent replacing the old concept of "right" in public policy.1
There was a number of factors behind the new mood, including a general increase in literacy that had resulted in a new, more popular, journalism, the decline in fundamental religious beliefs, and a Hegelian authoritarian trend in philosophy. But perhaps the primary factor was the impact of a new sociobiological school of thought, Social Darwinism.2
Social Darwinism3 can by no means be considered a monolithic system of thought. It began as a liberal and individualistic construct, concerned largely with man’s relationship to his own society in evolutionary terms, but soon developed into a collectivist doctrine, concerned with each society as a unit, and its relationship to other societies in evolutionary terms. Currents of Social Darwinism that focused on the latter can be characterized somewhat by the term "external," since they considered extranational forces the most important in evolutionary development. The earlier individualistic school can be called "internal" Social Darwinist, since its special interest was in intranational forces.4
The various schools of Social Darwinism were the product of the revolution which began in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin’s monumental work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The idea of physical evolution had been prevalent for many years, but it had generally taken a directly environmental form, such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and had been largely rejected for various scientific and religious reasons. Darwin’s great contribution was that he combined long and detailed observations with careful and cautious scientific reasoning, producing a theory that, disregarding teleological considerations, tended to explain how life had evolved and to do it much more satisfactorily than any previous theory had done. Nevertheless, this theory did not always win acceptance from the members of the old guard in biology, and certainly not in religion. In fact, the opposition that orthodox Christianity supplied was in many ways both beneficial to the eventual acceptance of the theory and harmful to the religious structures. The Darwinian theory was developed at a time when Western religion was undergoing a severe crisis, and it was quickly drawn into this crisis. Darwinism emerged triumphant and religion was perhaps irreparably damaged.
As a new theory, evolution had a great appeal to the new guard in biology. In fact, as far as biologists themselves were concerned, it can be argued that basically only the new guard accepted Darwinism; the rest gradually (and literally) died away, thus ending major opposition.
The two major ideas which Darwin expressed were the "struggle for existence," dealing with the eternal validity of competition of all forms, both intraspecific and interspecific, and "natural selection," the by-product of this competition or struggle, by which evolutionary advancement had occurred.5 Since the "new biology" considered man a part of nature, not above or apart from it, these ideas and their many subsequent corollaries rapidly became part of contemporary discussions of man and the social, religious, economic, ethical, and political facets of his existence. Thus the intellectual framework was created for the development of Social Darwinism.
The first major figure considered to be a Social Darwinist was Herbert Spencer.6 Spencer was the classic Social Darwinist: individualistic, liberal to the core, and an enthusiastic proponent of laissez faire economics. Easily the best known of all Social Darwinists and the founder of its most prominent school, he nevertheless played no direct role in that collectivistic Social Darwinism which chiefly concerns this essay. Still, he exerted a great influence on his contemporaries as well as on those later schools of Social Darwinism that rejected him for his defense of individualism and democracy.
Spencer espoused two major points that entered into the considerations of the later Social Darwinists. The first of these has been touched on previously, that man is physically an animal, and therefore the natural laws of the new biology applied as much to him as to the alligator or songbird. As an animal, man was subject to heredity, so Spencer felt that he could prove that the empiricists were wrong in maintaining that the mind was a tabula rasa.7 Spencer’s second point was that groups, or societies, had also evolved, and thus society itself was an organism.8 He took this idea, which had been popular with Edmund Burke and the Romantics, and attempted to reinforce it with the prestige of the new evolutionary science. The physical organism, man, could be related scientifically and biologically to the social organism, society. Spencer felt that the many facets of man’s development, e.g., his culture in the broad sense, were the products of evolution. Man’s physical, mental, and sociocultural evolution formed a system, a unified whole, which could be used to provide the proper explanations for all major questions concerning man and his problems. As a result, Spencer was able to make a systematic application of his Social Darwinism to many fields, and he wrote ponderous works on psychology, sociology, and ethics.
Where does this leave us? Had our second great fratricidal war been averted, or even if—as that ardent believer in eugenics, Charles Lindbergh, urged—a negotiated peace had been achieved, perhaps the egalitarian leftist conquest of the social and political institutions of the West might not have occurred. In which case it seems likely that the development of contemporary sociobiology might have occurred earlier, influenced by, if not an outgrowth, of Social Darwinism. Since history took a different path, Social Darwinism remains a past and a prologue, but the contemporary sociobiology grew from a different branch on the Darwinian tree.
1. L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), 59-60.
2. Ibid., 75-84.
3. Although Social Darwinism is sometimes defined simply as the equating of business competition with natural selection leading to evolutionary progress, here it is more broadly used as any system or approach to the study of man and society that utilizes evolutionary theory on the biological level.
4. I have borrowed these terms from Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895-1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin , 1960.), 30.
5. Although a little dated, Garrett Hardin provides an excellent review of the development of evolutionary theory and its implications for man in Nature and Man’s Fate (New York: Rinehart, 1959).
6. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Liberal philosopher, published works on almost all major phases of knowledge including philosophy, ethnology, biology, sociology, psychology, political science, history, and mathematics. He was a member of both the ‘X’ and Athenaeum clubs. Dictionary of National Biography (1901-1911) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 360-369.
7. For a brief discussion of Spencer’s theories and their relation to the development of authoritarian thought, see William M. McGovern, From Luther to Hitler (London: George G. Harrap, 1946), 457-463.
8. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, vol. 1, part II (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897), 449 ff.
9. Cited in Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 11.
10. Ibid.
11. Walter Bagehot (1826-1877). Educated at the University of London. Journalist and economist. Editor of the Economist. Dictionary of National Biography (From the Earliest Times to 1900) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 865-868.
12. Cited in McGovern, 464.
13. Ibid.
14. Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895), chapters 3 & 4.
15. Ibid., 43.
16. Ibid., 156 ff.
17. Alfred Milner, Viscount (1854-1925). Educated at Tübingen; King’s College, London; awarded first scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. Liberal journalist; Director General of Accounts (Egypt), 1889; Undersecretary to the Khedive, 1890; Board of Internal Revenue (Eng.), 1892; C.B., 1894; K.C.B., 1895; High Commissioner to South Africa, 1897-1905; War Cabinet, 1916; Secretary of the Colonial Office, 1918-1921. Dictionary of National Biography (1922-1930), 588-602.
18. Alfred Milner, England in Egypt (London: Edward Arnold, 1904), 356.
19. Benjamin Kidd (1858-1916). Civil servant, sociologist. Western Civilization, 1902; The Science of Power, 1918. Dictionary of National Biography (1912-1918), 305-306.
20. William L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, vol. 1, 87. See also Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 282-292.
21. Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1894), 227.
22. Ibid., Chapters 1 and 7 generally.
23. Ibid., 78.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 277-287.
26. Ibid., 103. For a criticism of Kidd’s religious theories, see Pitirim A. Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1928), 672 ff.
27. Langer, 87.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. W. F. Wyatt, "The Ethics of Empire," Nineteenth Century, April 1897, 524.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 525-529.
33. Ibid., 530.
34. W. F. Wyatt, "War As the Test of National Value," Nineteenth Century, February 1899, 218.
35. Ibid., 220.
36. Ibid., 224-225.
37. Sidney Lowe, "The Hypocrisies of the Peace Conference," Nineteenth Century, May 1899, 692.
38. H. H. Almond, "The Breed of Man," Nineteenth Century, October 1900, 667.
39. Eugenics is concerned with the genetic or hereditary improvement of man. In its beginnings it was largely concerned with the possibility of the improvement of innate intelligence or "talent." Perhaps its major "theorem" is that "Man’s political actions have genetic consequences." Hardin, 214.
40. Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). Founder of the school of Eugenics; creator of fingerprint analysis. Conducted studies in evolution, experimental psychology, and heredity. Numerous awards and honors from scientific societies in England and France. Dictionary of National Biography (1901-1911), 70-73. Hardin, 214 ff.
41. Macmillan’s Magazine 11 (November 1864-April 1865), 157-166. This as well as his second essay, a continuation of the first, were reprinted in The Occidental Quarterly, 2 (3), (Fall 2002) pp. 45-68.
42. For a discussion and criticism of these letters, see James W. Barclay, "The Race Suicide Scare," Nineteenth Century, December 1906, 895-899.
43. Karl Pearson (1857-1936). Statistician and biologist; educated at University College School; King’s College, Cambridge; University of Heidelberg; University of Berlin; from 1884, at University College, London; FRS, 1896; Darwin Medal, 1899; founded journal Biometrika, 1901; 1911 first Galton Professor of Eugenics; numerous scientific papers and books. Dictionary of National Biography (1931-1940), 681-684.
44. Karl Pearson, "Women and Labor," Fortnightly Review, January-June 1894, 562.
45. Cited in Hobhouse, 114-115.
46. Semmel, 37.
47. Ibid., 39.
48. Karl Pearson, "Socialism and Natural Selection," Fortnightly Review, July-December 1894, 2-5.
49. Ibid., 18.
50. Ibid., 5.
51. Ibid., 6.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 11.
54. Ibid., 14.
55. Ibid., 16.
56. Pearson, "Women and Labor," 569.
57. Ibid., 576.
58. McGovern, 499.
59. Semmel, 49.
60. Ibid., 50.
61. Hayes, 340.
62. A. M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics: A Study of Lord Milner in Opposition and in Power (London: Anthony Blond, 1964), 123.
63. Ibid., 127.
64. The Times, July 27, 1925.
65. Ibid.
66. Gollin, 130-131.
67. Edward Crankshaw, The Forsaken Idea: A Study of Viscount Milner (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), 162.
68. Cited in Semmel, 181.
69. Gollin, 156.
70. Gollin, 115.
71. Semmel, 181-182.
72. In the balance of this essay, sociobiology refers to both sociobiology and its offspring, evolutionary psychology and biosociology.
73. For example, see William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
74. For example, see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking Press, 2002), reviewed in this issue of The Occidental Quarterly.
75. Group evolution, the socialization of the state, and the British Empire and its race-based paternalism.
76. Louis Andrews, "Science for Tomorrow," The Occidental Quarterly 2 (1), (Spring 2002), 73-79.
77. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994) and Malcom Brown, "What Is Intelligence, and Who Has It?" The New York Times, October 16, 1994.