Social Darwinism

Although Charles Darwin himself never sought to apply his ideas of evolution through natural selection to the social world, numerous advocates of Darwinism selectively and erroneously applied this line of thought to the analysis of cultural relations. Thus, The Origin of Species, published in 1859, was enormously influential not only in the biological sciences but in the social sciences as well. The (mis)application of Darwin's ideas to social analysis is called social Darwinism, and its effects were enormous as well as uniformly reactionary. Some of its tenets preceded Darwinism itself, including, for example, the works of Thomas Malthus. By posing as a science, the pseudoscience of social Darwinism dismissed criticisms as unscientific. The heyday of social Darwinism occurred in late-Victorian Britain and in the United States during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

An important moment in the translation of Darwin's ideas to the social world was marked by the work of the French biologist Jean Baptiste La marck (1744–1829), who preceded and influenced Darwin. Lamarck's view of evolution centered on the inheritance of acquired characteristics—that is, organisms pass on characteristics that they adopt to survive in different environments. Neo-Larmarckism posited that culture is carried biologically as a “social mind”—thus discounting the notion of random chance, which played such a large role in Darwinian thought—and therefore that evolution occurred much more rapidly than via Darwinian natural selection. Social Darwinism effectively became a search for supposedly universal laws of people and their relations to nature, a view that, when coupled with place, led to notions of regions as an organic entity in which blood and territory were inseparably fused. Such a perspective was influential, for example, in late-19th- and early-20th-century cultural geography, as in the pays (a French word defining an area whose inhabitants share common geographical, economic, cultural, or social interests) of Vidal de la Blache.

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a conservative 19th-century British defender of Lamarck, who fanatically opposed all government programs to aid the poor, became the best-known advocate of social Darwinism. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the term survival of the fittest. His work found far more favor in the United States than in Britain, where it justified and naturalized the inequities of laissez-faire capitalism. Spencer was the foremost intellectual in the late 19th century to deploy social Darwinism to legitimize the excesses and inequalities of the Gilded Age. Numerous respected intellectuals and tycoons preached that competition in the market enshrined whoever emerged on top, naturalizing the status of the wealthy as inevitable and indeed fortunate for all: Millionaires are deserving of their wealth because they are simply stronger and work harder than do the lazy poor. Not [Page 2562]surprisingly, social Darwinism was often invoked to justify racial and ethnic inequalities as well, and its ultimate manifestation was in the 20th-century eugenics movement, which advocated the sterilization of ethnic minorities, the handicapped, and the socially disadvantaged to weed out “undesirable” genes.

Internationally, social Darwinism became a model of the global hierarchy of societies, with the white, Western world at the top, of course. Ostensible social evolution was posited to occur in stages, a view highly conducive to the dominant interests of 19th-century imperialism: Indeed, it is unlikely that social Darwinism would ever have enjoyed much popularity were it not for its role in legitimating the Western domination of the non-West. Because race and nation were typically held to be synonymous, with white countries seen as the more advanced and civilized compared with those in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, social Darwinism gave a scientific veneer to racist doctrines. Nineteenth-century textbook portrayals of the globe, for example, framed the Western geographical imagination around a series of continents, typically conflated with simplistic notions of race, that were hierarchically organized in terms of their alleged level of temporal progress and, thus, similarity to European and North American whites, a schema that gained respectability through appeal to various forms of social Darwinism and environmental determinism. Social Darwinism and the geopolitical view it sustained thus not only explained colonial rivalry and conquest but also legitimized it with an aura of scientific respectability.

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