By Robert Bannister
"The so much systematic and accomplished attempt but made to evaluate the function performed by way of Darwinian rules within the writings of English-speaking social theorists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries." --Isis "In looking to set the list directly, Bannister cuts during the amalgam with an highbrow shredder, exposing the illogic and incompatibility serious about fusing Charles Darwin's at the starting place of Species with Herbert Spencer's Social Statics... Bannister's familiarity with suitable texts and their reception by means of modern social theorists, students, and critics on each side of the Atlantic is impressive." --Journal of Interdisciplinary historical past "A positive contribution to Anglo-American highbrow history." --Journal of yankee historical past
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Extra resources for Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought
Example text
Pre-Darwinian evolutionists, cherishing the Enlightenment faith in beneficent laws of nature, continued to argue that society ought best be left to develop without central direction or controls. But to those who saw nature through Darwinian lenses, this option seemed intolerable. 18 More specifically, the argument of this study consists of a series of interrelated propositions: (1) The Origin of Species, from the start, fatally undermined social speculation based on the assumptions of harmonious, mechanical, self-regulating laws of nature, which in one form or another have dominated AngloAmerican thought since Newton.
Interpreting natural selection within the general framework of the redistribution oj matter and motion, the Spencerians (as will appear in the next chapter) obscured the difference between this doctrine and the Lamarckian mechanism of change through direct action of the environment. The Cosmic Theists, led by the scientist Asa Gray (1810-1888), similarly interpreted the Origin within a framework of spiritual mechanism, whereby God stood behind and ultimately determined the evolutionary process.
Future historians, Wyllie predicted, "will distinguish between representative and unrepresentative views, between the ideas of an intellectually unsophisticated majority and those of an educated bookish minori ty. "11 Other historians replaced wholesale condemnation with retail pardon. One by one such figures as Andrew Carnegie, John Fiske, and Josiah Strong were excused from the social Darwinist ranks. 12 By the late 19608 the suspicion grew that very few Americans were actually social Darwinists.
