Social Darwinism

“Social Darwinism” is best defined as a term in an ongoing debate over human nature and society rather than as a fixed doctrine or “school” of social Darwinists. A pejorative phrase coined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it continues to serve as a cultural marker stigmatizing neo-Hobbesian individualism, racism, militarism, and coercive social controls.

Although the term social Darwinism first appeared in the writings of European socialists about 1880, it was not widely adopted by historians until the publication of Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944). Hofstadter defined social Darwinism as the application to human affairs of the concepts “struggle for existence,” “natural selection,” and “survival of the fittest,” terms derived from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). The misuse of Darwin began with free market individualists in the 1870s and 1880s, Hofstadter wrote, but soon extended to others who argued (or appeared to argue) that human beings are subject to the same laws as animals and plants. Historians subsequently described social Darwinism as developing in two stages: “conservative” and “reform,” individualist and collectivist, pre-and post-1890s.

Although revisionist historians soon questioned Hofstadter's account, discoveries in genetics, the emergence of sociobiology, and the ascendancy of free market economics in the 1980s put social Darwinism [Page 1303]again on center stage. Countering the claim that Darwin himself was not a social Darwinist, British scholar Robert Young argued that since Darwin's scientific theory was saturated with the capitalistic, racist, and imperialist assumptions of his day, he was ipso facto a social Darwinist.

Expanding the meaning of social Darwinism still further, British historian Mike Hawkins in 1997 argued that it should be defined, not in terms of specific phrases such as natural selection, but as a worldview consisting of assumptions regarding the role of biological factors in creating and eliminating species and in determining social and psychological attributes among humans. Because questions concerning the mechanism of selection and the rate and direction of change allowed different answers, social theorists drew diverse ideological conclusions, resulting in a protean social Darwinism.

Meanwhile, however, revisionist historians made their case against the Hofstadter interpretation. Some questioned whether prominent social Darwinists were really Darwinists at all. Others distinguished social Spencerianism from social Darwinism, the latter referring only to post-1890s varieties (imperialism, racism, eugenics). Others suggested that the term be limited to eugenics or eliminated altogether. The most thorough-going revisionists argued that the term social Darwinism was socially constructed by critics seeking to discredit their opponents.

Although these conflicting interpretations differ on the question of whether social Darwinism is a coherent, if ideologically diverse, worldview or a slogan invented to discredit opponents, they converge in the view that Darwinism symbolized what Hawkins has termed a “Janus-faced” view of nature and science: nature as threat and promise, science as undermining traditional values versus science as embodying human reason. In this dual role, it continues to shape debate over society and politics.