Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism is the application of the theory of natural selection to human society. Alfred Wallace, the theory's codiscoverer, once asked Charles Darwin whether he would follow up his Origin of Species with a book on human beings. Darwin replied:

Darwin was understandably cautious. But others have felt less constrained, with the result that massive theoretical and political issues have arisen.

Most living creatures, Darwin and Wallace argued, produce many more offspring than are needed to reproduce their numbers. Such multiplication, if left unhindered, meant that “the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair.” However, the numbers of each species remained much the same from one generation to the next. What was taking place?

A struggle for survival and reproduction must be occurring, one between individuals and the rest of nature. No two individuals are alike, each possessing variations that confer advantages and disadvantages in the struggle. Those individuals with particular advantages will be those that develop and reproduce future generations. All this, Darwin and Wallace believed, occurs in the context of inevitable resource shortages. As Malthus had argued in the late eighteenth century, populations grow at a geometric rate while food supplies grow arithmetically. The environment was therefore active in eliminating those individuals without the characteristics necessary to survive and reproduce.

Turning now to social Darwinism, human characteristics can also be seen as resulting from struggle to survive. Herbert Spencer, for example, looked forward to a society in which individuals are free to realize their full potential. A long evolutionary process would take place, leading to a race in which people found fulfilment in aesthetic and spiritual matters rather than in the materialism of Spencer's own day. Those individuals not adapting and developing in this way would slowly die out. Note, however, a divergence between Spencer's views and those of Darwin. Spencer had no Malthusian fear of overpopulation, believing that humans have the capacity to adapt to environmental and social change. There are also differences between social Darwinists. Spencer believed that state intervention would delay the improvement of the human species, while William Sumner, the influential Yale Social Darwinist, increasingly saw a need for social reform.

The transfer of evolutionary ideas to human beings is an intellectual and political minefield. There are five themes here; the politics of knowledge, the question of “struggle,” the notion of “progress,” the assumption of direction, and an “end” to which evolution is developing.

As regards knowledge, the theory of natural selection can easily be seen as a product of its era and knowledge recruited to distinctive political ends. “The struggle for survival,” for example, can be seen as a transposal of the social struggle (all too apparent in Darwin's Britain) to the nonhuman world. Similarly, the “successful” variations are no less than the human success stories of middle-class Victorian society again transposed to the natural world. Similarly, Malthus's theory of necessary resource shortages is by no means the objective and scientific theory as he claimed. Wallace, though clearly influenced by Malthus, was also sympathetic to Owen's socialism. Such a politics argues that “resource shortages” are not inevitable. They are a product of social and property relations.

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