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Social Darwinism in American Thought

by Richard Hofstadter, Eric Foner (Introduction)

3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 · rating details · 104 ratings · 5 reviews

Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory & the notable battle waged among thinkers over the implications of evolutionary theory for social thought & political action. Theorists such as Herbert Spencer & Wm Graham Sumner adopted the idea of the struggle for existence as justification for the evils as...more

Paperback, 278 pages

Published September 1st 1992 by Beacon Press (Boston) (first published April 28th 1959)

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Jan 16, 2012 Megan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, non-fiction

As a basic documentation of the way evolutionary thought is absorbed and adapted into American thought, it's a nice treatment. Definitely an intellectual history in the style of the time, though, focusing mostly on key, university-based figures rather than on broader publics or communities. Nor does it move towards any greater theorizing about the reasons evolutionary thinking transformed so quickly into social darwinism in the U.S.

The chapter I liked most is the exploration of the way evolution...more

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Jul 02, 2010 John rated it 3 of 5 stars

The original, 1944, edition of this book essentially brought the term "Social Darwinism" into the language; it had appeared in occasional journal papers, etc., ever since the basic philosophy had been put forward by UK philosopher Herbert Spencer in the years starting fractionally before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), but Hofstadter's usage popularized it. Not surprisingly, his usage differs in meaning somewhat from our current one, since he's concerned with all the theori...more The original, 1944, edition of this book essentially brought the term "Social Darwinism" into the language; it had appeared in occasional journal papers, etc., ever since the basic philosophy had been put forward by UK philosopher Herbert Spencer in the years starting fractionally before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), but Hofstadter's usage popularized it. Not surprisingly, his usage differs in meaning somewhat from our current one, since he's concerned with all the theories of society that modelled themselves on or were inspired by (or simply sought to justify themselves using) the idea of evolution by natural selection -- the attempts of sociologists (another term not used until long after the events described in the earlier parts of this book) to harness to their generally ideological purposes the latest findings (or at least their understanding of these) of evolutionary and behavioural biology, whatever these might be. Thus, as well as the fairly abhorrent and socially destructive Social Darwinism (modern meaning of term) of people like Spencer and the man whom we might very loosely label his US bulldog, William Graham Sumner, and the even more repulsive ideas produced by eugenicists, racists, theorists of the "evolutionary warmonger" stripe (including Theodore Roosevelt), and those who believed the white man's duty was to exterminate the coloured races, we find the far more beneficent ideas of those like Lester Ward and Thorstein Veblen, both of whom eschewed socialistic notions but at the same time advanced theories which seem to accommodate fairly well with what today we'd call social democracy; in other words, they weren't leftists (though naturally enough they were accused of such by the FOX News equivalents of their day) but good, solid, decent-hearted liberals.

I made a note to try to track down some books by Ward and Veblen through the library system after things calm down a bit for me workwise (before reading Hofstadter's book, while I'd vaguely heard the two names, I couldn't have told you if they were sociologists or baseball players); I must also try to read a little more William James than I have, since he has a way of pithily capturing what should be, but too often aren't, self-evident truths. When Roosevelt was prancing around preaching his horrible gospel that men needed wars with defenceless brown-skinned people in order to prove or enhance their manliness, James pierced the pretension of the man with the observation that Roosevelt was "still mentally in the Sturm und Drang period of early adolescence" (p195), and his rebuttal of the Social Darwinists (modern use of term) made me punch the air with delight:

The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to another. (p201)

Although there was a lot to interest me in this book, at the same time I found the text somewhat boring; it was an effort to read, and I had to keep reminding myself of the good bits there had been already and the likelihood that I could be amid more of their like just as soon as I turned the next page. I don't regard this as Hofstadter's fault: first of all, he was writing for a readership other than me (i.e., for social scientists and social historians rather than just lay readers); secondly, he was writing for people conditioned by the attitudes and knowledge-state of the 1950s, not the 2010s -- for example, the text frequently made offhand illusions to people I'd never heard of but whose ideas Hofstadter assumed were familiar to his readers and needed no further explanation: there's little more tedious than the realization that, through ignorance, you're comprehensively missing the author's point. The half-century's social difference works both ways, though; here's a Hofstadter sentence that made me sigh: "Lacking an influential military caste, the United States never developed a strong military cult audacious enough to glorify war for its own sake" (p184).

I was led to read this book by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason, which Jacoby obviously considers indebted to it (and about which I shall ramble very shortly). I found Jacoby's book a wonderful read -- witty, hilarious and profound by turn, with prose that rattled along like a stream over pebbles -- and so I came to Hofstadter's expecting more of the same. That I was disappointed is, again, both not Hofstadter's fault and likely a product of the half-century that has passed since he wrote the book.(less)

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May 21, 2013 Sean Chick rated it 4 of 5 stars

A true classic. The conclusion is heartbreaking, since circa 2013 social Darwinism has been resurrected and prettied up as libertarianism.

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Mar 24, 2011 Thom Dunn is currently reading it · review of another edition

Shelves: a-own-hardcover, america-1-american, culture, right-wing, zeitgeist, evolution

NOT A REVIEW

Reese has it shelved as reference; Book Pig as to-read.

Decent library h/c arrived 3/24/2011

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Feb 23, 2008 Paul rated it 2 of 5 stars

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About Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter (6 August 1916 – 24 October 1970) was an American public intellectual, historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays continue to illumin...more Richard Hofstadter (6 August 1916 – 24 October 1970) was an American public intellectual, historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays continue to illuminate contemporary history.

His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history, Anti-intellectualism in American Life.

Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when he was ten. He attended the City Honors School, then studied philosophy and history at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that eventually may have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the institutional antisemitism of the 1940s.

As a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “I join without enthusiasm, but with a sense of obligation.... My fundamental reason for joining is that I don’t like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking.... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now.” In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Soviet–Nazi alliance. He remained anti-capitalist: “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it.”

In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late 19th century American capitalism and those who espoused its ruthless “dog-eat-dog” economic competition and justified themselves by invoking the doctrine of as Social Darwinism, identified with William Graham Sumner. Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, however, disagree with this interpretation.(less)

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