Social Darwinism
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Created: November 9, 2001
Latest Update: November 9, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Olivier Urbain, Soka University

This essay is based on a new book, The Metaphorical Society: An Invitation to Social Theory, by Daniel Rigney. Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Oxford. 2001. Chapter One.

Rigley gives an interesting summary of Social Darwinism on pp. 26:

"While Charles Darwin himself did not propose the concept of social evolution (Nubert 1969: 161; Degler 1991: 5-6), his theory of natural selection, published in On the Origin of the Species in 1859, did inspire the rise of evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century social thought. (Hofstadter 1944; R.J. Wison 1989). Spencer ([1876] 1906) and sumner (1883) were particularly influential as popularizers of Darwin's theory. Going well beyon Darwin's original intent, they attempted to apply the principles of natural selection to the study of human societies in a manner that has since been widely discredited. Their ill-fated venture has come to be called "social Darwinism."

Note that most of the information we have in the dominant discourse comes through popularizers who often extrapolate the findings of scientists like Darwin. Darwin never subscribed to social Darwinism. Darwin was much more precise and disciplined with his findings. Such discipline is characteristic of scrupulous scholarship.

One of the ways in which we expand theory is to try extrapolating it to other fields, to other situations. See Stealing Theory But in the process of borrowing what works in other fields we can't afford to deny the bits that don't transfer, don't fit. When Rigley speaks of social Darwinism as being "widely discredited," what he means is that other scientists have found that the lack of fit of the theory in the social context was denied by the popularizers, and so discredited the theory. Did the scientists do wrong to deny the lack of fit? Of course. One becomes complicit by such denial, complicit in constraining others to believe in what one now knows to be fraudulent.

Relevant References:

• John Godfrey Saxe, A Hindu Fable