The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition
Social Darwinism refers loosely to various late nineteenth-century applications (mostly misapplications) to human societies of ideas of biological evolution associated (often erroneously) with Darwin. Though often associated with conservatism, laissez-faire capitalism, fascism and racism, Social Darwinism was, in fact, a pervasive doctrine of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Britain and North America, and its influence covered the entire political spectrum, including, for example, British Fabian socialism.
Its two leading intellectual proponents were the British philosopher Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’) and William Graham Sumner, a professor of anthropology at Yale University. To Spencer (1864; 1873–85), we owe the misleading analogy that a society is like an organism (hence, the term ‘organicism’ sometimes used to describe his theories). Just as an organism is composed of interdependent organs and cells, a human society is made up of specialized and complementary institutions and individuals, all belonging to an organic whole.
Spencer himself was never very clear about his analogy: he claimed that society was both ‘like an organism’ and that it was a ‘super-organism’. His central notion, however, was that the whole (organism-society) was made up of functionally specialized, complementary and interdependent parts. Thus, he is also considered to be one of the main fathers of sociological functionalism.
Sumner’s concept of ‘mores’ (his term, by the way) and his turgid disquisitions on morality are his most lasting contributions. What his writings have to do with Darwinism is questionable. ‘Bad mores are those which are not well fitted to the conditions and needs of the society at the time…. The taboos constitute morality or a moral system which, in higher civilization restrains passion and appetite, and curbs the will’ (Sumner 1906). Sumner uses terms such as ‘evolution’ and ‘fitness’ to be sure, but his moralistic pronouncements and his repeated emphasis on the ‘needs of the society’ are the very antithesis of Darwin’s thinking. Spencer was also prone to inject ethics into evolution, seeing an ‘inherent tendency of things towards good’. Darwin saw evolution as a random process devoid of ethical goals or trends, and natural selection as a blind mechanism discriminating between individual organisms on the basis of their differential reproductive success.
Another central theme in Sumner is that ‘stateways cannot change folkways’, meaning that state action is powerless to change the underlying mores. This certainly made him an apostle of laissez-faire. Indeed, he went so far as to contradict himself and suggest that state intervention is worse than useless: it is noxious. These propositions probably form the core of the doctrine associated with Social Darwinism, namely, that the existing social order with its inequalities reflects a natural process of evolution in which the ‘fitter’ rise to the top and the ‘unfit’ sink to the bottom. Any attempt, through social welfare, for example, to reduce inequalities is seen as noxious because it allows the unfit to ‘breed like rabbits’. Indeed Spencer, as a good Victorian puritan, believed that intelligence and reproduction were inversely related. Overproduction of sperm, he thought, leads first to headaches, then to stupidity, then to imbecility, ‘ending occasionally in insanity’ (Spencer 1852).
Again, these ideas are quite antithetical to those of Darwinian evolutionary theory. If the lower classes reproduce faster than the upper classes, it means they are fitter, since, in evolutionary theory, the ultimate measure of fitness is reproductive success. To say that the unfit breed like rabbits is a contradiction in terms.
Social Darwinism, in short, is a discredited moral philosophy that bears only a superficial terminological resemblance to the Darwinian theory of evolution, and is only of historical interest.
Pierre van den Berghe
University of Washington
References
Spencer, H. (1852) ‘A theory of population deduced from the general law of animal fertility’, Westminster Review 1.
—(1864) Principles of Biology, London.
——(1873–85) Descriptive Sociology, London.
Sumner, W.G. (1906) Folkways, Boston, MA.
Further reading
Hofstadter, R. (1959) Social Darwinism in American Thought, New York.
Ruse, M. (1982) Darwinism Defended, Reading, MA.
See also: evolutionism and progress; race.
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