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Social Darwinism in American Thought
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 well as the benefits of laissez-faire modern industrial society. Others such as Wm James & John Dewey argued that human planning was needed to direct social development & improve upon the natural order. Hofstadter's study of the ramifications of Darwinism is a major analysis of the social philosophies that animated intellectual movements of the Gilded Age & the Progressive Era.
Introduction
Author's Note
Author's Introduction
The Coming of Darwinism
The Vogue of Spencer
William Graham Sumner: Social Darwinist
Lester Ward: Critic
Evolution, Ethics & Society
The Dissenters
The Current of Pragmatism
Trends in Social Theory, 1890-1915
Racism & Imperialism
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Introduction
Author's Note
Author's Introduction
The Coming of Darwinism
The Vogue of Spencer
William Graham Sumner: Social Darwinist
Lester Ward: Critic
Evolution, Ethics & Society
The Dissenters
The Current of Pragmatism
Trends in Social Theory, 1890-1915
Racism & Imperialism
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Index
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
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1279 people want to read
About the author
Richard Hofstadter
81 books295 followersRichard Hofstadter 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
November 25, 2025
Expecting this to be rather grim, I was heartened to read that it took most American philosophers, scientists and sociologists less than a decade to see Herbert Spencer for what he was: a makeshift guru, a publicist of the illusions of robber barons, and a counselor to their uneasy consciences. (We don't need Hofstadter to tell us that the realism of serious thinkers is one thing, and the "political folklore" of the masses quite another, as witness America's decades-long imprisonment by "trickle-down" economics and its inevitable companion the fascistic scapegoating of minorities.) In Spencer’s pseudoscience, the “militant” phase of society guarantees the “industrial” - which will, once its biologically necessary course has run, without the meddling of statist reformers or even private charities, itself evolve an “altruistic” phase. This “remote social Nirvana,” Hofstadter calls it, fortified for instance Andrew Carnegie, who after discovering Spencer wrote: “ ‘All is well since all grows better,’ became my motto, my true source of comfort.”
Spencer’s “absolutist social rationalization,” part Providence, part biology, was a perfect product of the Capitalism of the 1870s and 80s. It strikes me as something related to Robert E. Lee’s purely Christian conviction, voiced in a previous era, that though slavery was an evil, it was up to God, not men, to decide when it would end in the United States; and it points forward to the coming, kindred Communist delusion voiced by Eric Hobsbawm, to pick just one apologist, who in 1994 (!) told an interviewer that “the prices in human lives and suffering under Stalin would have been worth paying” if the workers’ utopia had been achieved in Russia. Ah yes, the insane idea that you can traumatize people into happiness, that a generation decimated and terrorized by its rulers will raise hopeful, trusting, joyous children. I have read post-Soviet interviews with Russians, orphaned during Stalin’s purges, terrors, and famines, who maintained that the times demanded such things. I think it was Pessoa who said that we write propaganda for what life has made us - or, in the cases of Lee and Spencer and Hobsbawm, we write propaganda for what life has made of others, the inferior, “unfit,” disposable others.
Spencer’s “absolutist social rationalization,” part Providence, part biology, was a perfect product of the Capitalism of the 1870s and 80s. It strikes me as something related to Robert E. Lee’s purely Christian conviction, voiced in a previous era, that though slavery was an evil, it was up to God, not men, to decide when it would end in the United States; and it points forward to the coming, kindred Communist delusion voiced by Eric Hobsbawm, to pick just one apologist, who in 1994 (!) told an interviewer that “the prices in human lives and suffering under Stalin would have been worth paying” if the workers’ utopia had been achieved in Russia. Ah yes, the insane idea that you can traumatize people into happiness, that a generation decimated and terrorized by its rulers will raise hopeful, trusting, joyous children. I have read post-Soviet interviews with Russians, orphaned during Stalin’s purges, terrors, and famines, who maintained that the times demanded such things. I think it was Pessoa who said that we write propaganda for what life has made us - or, in the cases of Lee and Spencer and Hobsbawm, we write propaganda for what life has made of others, the inferior, “unfit,” disposable others.
March 2, 2017
If you've ever wondered why we're such unthinking assholes, this, along with some lay histories of the period 1865-1920, can help you find the answer.
Reel at the conclusions that philosophical assholes like Sumner and Spencer reached in the wake of Darwin's revolution. Recoil in horror from the development, pre-Ayn "Shitbeak" Rand, of acquisitive individualism, the natural order of greed, and the idea that poor people just suck by nature. Be astonished at the growth of ideas of inherency and racism that led right smack into neo-imperialism and the doe-eyed, innocent racism of the alt-right and higher assholery.
There is that. There is also a healthy look at those who rejected such idiocy, the ones who saw in Darwin a kind of cooperation and mutualism and who weren't afraid to appeal to that one part of nature that sets us apart: feelings.
Oh, wait. We're not supposed to talk about those. No--we're supposed to talk about them TOO much. Wait--I am so confused.
Anyway, folks like William James and Kropotkin, who thought block-universe determinism was psychotic and weird feature prominently here, showing up the stupidity of social Darwinism at its finest.
A nice primer to the America of today.
Reel at the conclusions that philosophical assholes like Sumner and Spencer reached in the wake of Darwin's revolution. Recoil in horror from the development, pre-Ayn "Shitbeak" Rand, of acquisitive individualism, the natural order of greed, and the idea that poor people just suck by nature. Be astonished at the growth of ideas of inherency and racism that led right smack into neo-imperialism and the doe-eyed, innocent racism of the alt-right and higher assholery.
There is that. There is also a healthy look at those who rejected such idiocy, the ones who saw in Darwin a kind of cooperation and mutualism and who weren't afraid to appeal to that one part of nature that sets us apart: feelings.
Oh, wait. We're not supposed to talk about those. No--we're supposed to talk about them TOO much. Wait--I am so confused.
Anyway, folks like William James and Kropotkin, who thought block-universe determinism was psychotic and weird feature prominently here, showing up the stupidity of social Darwinism at its finest.
A nice primer to the America of today.
May 21, 2013
A true classic. The conclusion is heartbreaking, since circa 2013 social Darwinism has been resurrected and prettied up as libertarianism.
March 31, 2018
This is an excellent intellectual history of Darwinian thought as applied to U.S. sociological theory in the late 19th century. Though the focus is here, the book’s title misleads somewhat. Social Darwinism was pulled in to bolster the already existing current of “Anglo-Saxonism” that, Hofstadter writes, “was a product of modern nationalism and the romantic movement rather than an outgrowth of biological science.” Anglo-Saxonism was an amalgam of white racial superiority and imperialism on the one hand and the more benign belief in the “righteousness” of the white, Western way of life on the other. (1)
“Manifest Destiny” captured these twin tendencies and these were fed and augmented as it turns out by Darwin’s own writing. (2) After Darwin, such “progress” manifested itself in two strains of thought. Spencer saw a dialectical progression in evolutionary history, driven by conflict and force until the modern age when, aided by a taught benevolence passed on through Lamarckian inheritance, “militancy” would give way to an “industrialism” characterized by cooperation for the benefit of all. (3) In contrast to Spencer’s “ideal evolutionary pacifism,” “the philosophy of force” was seen in Darwin’s theory as a justification for the strong to prevail over the weak. It was a philosophy that was best exemplified in the German militancy that culminated in World War I.
Hofstadter writes that by the late 1890s, unrestrained business competition started to turn the public against social Darwinism. Humanitarianism laid out an intellectual groundwork to divorce meaningful human activity from biology, and this soon became the prevailing view in American thought. “Of critical importance in everything Lester Ward wrote in the late 19th century,” Hofstadter observes, “was a sharp distinction between physical, or animal, purposeless evolution and mental, human evolution decisively modified by purposive action. By thus bifurcating of the Spencerian system, Ward sundered social principles from simple and direct biological analogies….In his sphere, he served a function similar to that of instrumentalists in philosophy: he replaced an older passive determinism with a positive body of social theory adaptable to the uses of reform.” Ward was followed by philosophical pragmatism that was highly critical of Spencer-like cosmic-scale monism and a biological determinism that had humans as passive, dependent and determined. “Pragmatism,” Hofstadter writes, “was an application of evolutionary biology to human ideas, in the sense that it emphasized the study of ideas as instruments of the organism….the pragmatists stood for freedom and control of the environment by man.” New Psychology’s most prominent voices, Veblen and James, saw the human organism “as a structure of propensities, interests, and habits, not as a mere machine for the reception and registering of pleasure-pain stimuli.” Veblen’s thought countered “hedonistic man…passive under the buffetings of pain and pleasure stimuli.” And, though totally enamored by First Principles at one time, James turned against Spencer, arguing instead that mind’s “commanding intelligence” played a central role in directing our activities and human motivation was more than survival. (4)
Much of the criticism of social Darwinism was accurate. Darwin and Spencer worked within a Malthusian paradigm that anchored the struggle for existence in group-versus-group competition, whereas the real struggle was with more general environmental challenges. Commenting on one critic, Hofstadter writes that “The primary biological error of social Darwinism is its habit of ignoring the physical universe, of assuming that the cause of progress is not the struggle of man with his environment but rather the struggle of man with man.” People helping each other is integral to human adaption, a point that was emphasized by Darwin and, to a degree, by Spencer. (5)
But the humanistic separation from biology also went too far. Spencer’s biological emphasis was anything but passive. The “persistence of force” concept pervades life. Life is driven by what is needed to survive. It is Schopenhauer’s Will. Human life is no different, but it adds intelligence to meet adaptive needs. Yes, of course, humans are free to make their choices, but on what basis does one choose one course of action over another? It’s a question Schopenhauer famously asked. Pragmatism is wrongly stuck on pure, biological determinism. Humans are moved by dispositions, desires, etc., that can be traced back to both our species and individual needs and in-born character. Pain and pleasure are dismissed as “hedonistic” stimulus-response behaviors, but this too mischaracterizes who we are. Pain is Schopenhauer’s need. It’s what prompts the organism and humans to engage the world – going outward to seek objects that satisfy need and defending against incoming threats. When successful in both active and reactive endeavors, there is satisfaction, a state of equilibrium, an adaptive, “pleasure” state. Even Veblen’s many examples of conspicuous consumption are thoroughly prompted by biological impulses. Where does the need for status and rank come from? If it permeates our primate cousin world, why would humans be immune?
Why does it matter if our motivation source is ultimately cultural influences and free choice on the one hand or biologically based on the other? Now we bump into Freud and Jung and others who are well aware of our deep-seated, animal-based motivations. If we think we are guided by mind, free of biology, we are more than likely in key respects to be controlled by these deep-seated motivations. Awareness -- bringing such to the consciousness -- is necessary if we are to control and direct our actions. Spencer took the Lamarckian side of his biology too seriously. He presumed we too could eliminate our brutish, animal nature to achieve that harmonious end he envisioned for the future of humankind. Yet if there’s no motivation to be other-regarding and respecting, that envisioned future fails. The corrective is not what Spencer saw at all. It is to understand that two prongs of Darwinian biology are, and will always be, present. Schopenhauer’s Will to survive is bifurcated – some pursue self-interest regardless of the interests of others, and others pursue their self-interest by respecting the interests of others. Both approaches work as survival strategies. The philosophy of force contends with the philosophy of mutual aid and vice versa and this has always been the case.
Hofstadter’s writing is such that the reader can easily feel the climate of thought at the time and how it would have been difficult to think and operate outside of the Social Darwinian paradigm. It’s interesting that a strong undercurrent of similar thinking applies to the U.S. today. Hofstadter's insights are good and his writing is excellent.
(1) “Darwinism was put in the service of the imperial urge. Although Darwinism was not the primary source of the belligerent ideology and dogmatic racism of the late nineteenth century, it did become a new instrument in the hands of the theorists of race and struggle….In the United States, however, such frank and brutal militarism was far less common than a benevolent conception of Anglo-Saxon world domination in the interests of peace and freedom.” Although the U.S. “lacked an influential military caste” that glorified “war for its own sake,” Hofstadter states that it still was pervaded with the notion of racial superiority, a sense of the country’s “divine mission” and “rugged individualism.” This romantic, idealistic and self-absorbed vein of thought was promoted by thinkers such as John Fiske who, Hofstadter writes, saw that the “rustic democracy of America’s Aryan forefathers…would make possible an effective union of many diverse states. Democracy, diversity and peace would be brought into harmony. The dispersion of this magnificent Aryan political system over the world, and the complete elimination of warfare, was the next step in world history.”
(2) Hofstadter asks, “Had not Darwin himself written complacently in The Descent of Man of the likelihood that backward races would disappear before the advance of higher civilizations?”
(3) Spencer called for “an ethical standard” that was “the right of every man to do as he pleases, subject only to the condition that he does not infringe upon the equal rights of others. In such a scheme, the sole function of the state is negative – to insure that such freedom is not curbed….While the moral constitution of the human race is still ridden with vestiges of man’s original predatory life which demanded brutal self-assertion, adaptation assures that he will ultimately develop a new moral constitution fitted to the needs of civilized life. Human perfection is not only possible but inevitable.”
(4) Hofstadter describes James’s switch as prompted by his discomfort with the implications of Darwinian thought as applied to biology. James may have been, in other words, driven more by his own philosophical need than a truer picture of humankind that Darwin was laying out for all to see. Writing of James, Hofstadter notes that “without some possibility that the individual may in a measure alter the course of history, there is no chance for betterment of any kind.”
(5) “Darwin devoted many pages of The Descent of Man to the sociality of man and the origins of his moral sense….‘Selfish and contentious people will not cohere,’ he wrote, ‘and without coherence nothing can be effected.’”
“Manifest Destiny” captured these twin tendencies and these were fed and augmented as it turns out by Darwin’s own writing. (2) After Darwin, such “progress” manifested itself in two strains of thought. Spencer saw a dialectical progression in evolutionary history, driven by conflict and force until the modern age when, aided by a taught benevolence passed on through Lamarckian inheritance, “militancy” would give way to an “industrialism” characterized by cooperation for the benefit of all. (3) In contrast to Spencer’s “ideal evolutionary pacifism,” “the philosophy of force” was seen in Darwin’s theory as a justification for the strong to prevail over the weak. It was a philosophy that was best exemplified in the German militancy that culminated in World War I.
Hofstadter writes that by the late 1890s, unrestrained business competition started to turn the public against social Darwinism. Humanitarianism laid out an intellectual groundwork to divorce meaningful human activity from biology, and this soon became the prevailing view in American thought. “Of critical importance in everything Lester Ward wrote in the late 19th century,” Hofstadter observes, “was a sharp distinction between physical, or animal, purposeless evolution and mental, human evolution decisively modified by purposive action. By thus bifurcating of the Spencerian system, Ward sundered social principles from simple and direct biological analogies….In his sphere, he served a function similar to that of instrumentalists in philosophy: he replaced an older passive determinism with a positive body of social theory adaptable to the uses of reform.” Ward was followed by philosophical pragmatism that was highly critical of Spencer-like cosmic-scale monism and a biological determinism that had humans as passive, dependent and determined. “Pragmatism,” Hofstadter writes, “was an application of evolutionary biology to human ideas, in the sense that it emphasized the study of ideas as instruments of the organism….the pragmatists stood for freedom and control of the environment by man.” New Psychology’s most prominent voices, Veblen and James, saw the human organism “as a structure of propensities, interests, and habits, not as a mere machine for the reception and registering of pleasure-pain stimuli.” Veblen’s thought countered “hedonistic man…passive under the buffetings of pain and pleasure stimuli.” And, though totally enamored by First Principles at one time, James turned against Spencer, arguing instead that mind’s “commanding intelligence” played a central role in directing our activities and human motivation was more than survival. (4)
Much of the criticism of social Darwinism was accurate. Darwin and Spencer worked within a Malthusian paradigm that anchored the struggle for existence in group-versus-group competition, whereas the real struggle was with more general environmental challenges. Commenting on one critic, Hofstadter writes that “The primary biological error of social Darwinism is its habit of ignoring the physical universe, of assuming that the cause of progress is not the struggle of man with his environment but rather the struggle of man with man.” People helping each other is integral to human adaption, a point that was emphasized by Darwin and, to a degree, by Spencer. (5)
But the humanistic separation from biology also went too far. Spencer’s biological emphasis was anything but passive. The “persistence of force” concept pervades life. Life is driven by what is needed to survive. It is Schopenhauer’s Will. Human life is no different, but it adds intelligence to meet adaptive needs. Yes, of course, humans are free to make their choices, but on what basis does one choose one course of action over another? It’s a question Schopenhauer famously asked. Pragmatism is wrongly stuck on pure, biological determinism. Humans are moved by dispositions, desires, etc., that can be traced back to both our species and individual needs and in-born character. Pain and pleasure are dismissed as “hedonistic” stimulus-response behaviors, but this too mischaracterizes who we are. Pain is Schopenhauer’s need. It’s what prompts the organism and humans to engage the world – going outward to seek objects that satisfy need and defending against incoming threats. When successful in both active and reactive endeavors, there is satisfaction, a state of equilibrium, an adaptive, “pleasure” state. Even Veblen’s many examples of conspicuous consumption are thoroughly prompted by biological impulses. Where does the need for status and rank come from? If it permeates our primate cousin world, why would humans be immune?
Why does it matter if our motivation source is ultimately cultural influences and free choice on the one hand or biologically based on the other? Now we bump into Freud and Jung and others who are well aware of our deep-seated, animal-based motivations. If we think we are guided by mind, free of biology, we are more than likely in key respects to be controlled by these deep-seated motivations. Awareness -- bringing such to the consciousness -- is necessary if we are to control and direct our actions. Spencer took the Lamarckian side of his biology too seriously. He presumed we too could eliminate our brutish, animal nature to achieve that harmonious end he envisioned for the future of humankind. Yet if there’s no motivation to be other-regarding and respecting, that envisioned future fails. The corrective is not what Spencer saw at all. It is to understand that two prongs of Darwinian biology are, and will always be, present. Schopenhauer’s Will to survive is bifurcated – some pursue self-interest regardless of the interests of others, and others pursue their self-interest by respecting the interests of others. Both approaches work as survival strategies. The philosophy of force contends with the philosophy of mutual aid and vice versa and this has always been the case.
Hofstadter’s writing is such that the reader can easily feel the climate of thought at the time and how it would have been difficult to think and operate outside of the Social Darwinian paradigm. It’s interesting that a strong undercurrent of similar thinking applies to the U.S. today. Hofstadter's insights are good and his writing is excellent.
(1) “Darwinism was put in the service of the imperial urge. Although Darwinism was not the primary source of the belligerent ideology and dogmatic racism of the late nineteenth century, it did become a new instrument in the hands of the theorists of race and struggle….In the United States, however, such frank and brutal militarism was far less common than a benevolent conception of Anglo-Saxon world domination in the interests of peace and freedom.” Although the U.S. “lacked an influential military caste” that glorified “war for its own sake,” Hofstadter states that it still was pervaded with the notion of racial superiority, a sense of the country’s “divine mission” and “rugged individualism.” This romantic, idealistic and self-absorbed vein of thought was promoted by thinkers such as John Fiske who, Hofstadter writes, saw that the “rustic democracy of America’s Aryan forefathers…would make possible an effective union of many diverse states. Democracy, diversity and peace would be brought into harmony. The dispersion of this magnificent Aryan political system over the world, and the complete elimination of warfare, was the next step in world history.”
(2) Hofstadter asks, “Had not Darwin himself written complacently in The Descent of Man of the likelihood that backward races would disappear before the advance of higher civilizations?”
(3) Spencer called for “an ethical standard” that was “the right of every man to do as he pleases, subject only to the condition that he does not infringe upon the equal rights of others. In such a scheme, the sole function of the state is negative – to insure that such freedom is not curbed….While the moral constitution of the human race is still ridden with vestiges of man’s original predatory life which demanded brutal self-assertion, adaptation assures that he will ultimately develop a new moral constitution fitted to the needs of civilized life. Human perfection is not only possible but inevitable.”
(4) Hofstadter describes James’s switch as prompted by his discomfort with the implications of Darwinian thought as applied to biology. James may have been, in other words, driven more by his own philosophical need than a truer picture of humankind that Darwin was laying out for all to see. Writing of James, Hofstadter notes that “without some possibility that the individual may in a measure alter the course of history, there is no chance for betterment of any kind.”
(5) “Darwin devoted many pages of The Descent of Man to the sociality of man and the origins of his moral sense….‘Selfish and contentious people will not cohere,’ he wrote, ‘and without coherence nothing can be effected.’”
January 8, 2023
“We may wonder whether, in the entire history of thought, there was ever a conservatism so utterly progressive as this.” (p.8)
Before 1900, practitioners of the human sciences often found it difficult to distinguish between evolution and progress. By conflating these two terms, social scientists and historians hoped to gain some prestige from a solidly defensible paradigm of biology, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet while claiming to apply the laws of biological evolution to questions of social progress, Social Darwinism did little more than buttress ugly ideologies. Some of Social Darwinism’s vicious effects on the collective psyche are with us still. These ideologies naturalized social hierarchy while positing a universal human destiny. This metaphorical way of seeing cultural progress as part of an inevitable human evolution fertilized both academic debate and popular thinking during the Victorian era. Hofstadter’s historical critique of Social Darwinism traces how this errant approach to evolution spread like a plague through a range of academic discourses. And beyond the university, this theory of human progress was so simple yet so potent that it fired the imaginations of politicians and reformers on both the left and the right. But for the most part, Social Darwinism supported a quietism in politics, an extreme laissez faire passivity in economics, and above all a racist-imperialist bourgeois individualism, whose battle cry was the oft repeated but seldom understood “survival of the fittest.”
Compared to Social Darwinism, evolutionary biology had a much better grasp of what “survival of the fittest” actually means when applied to humans. On the one hand, “survival of the fittest” among humans usually refers to survival of populations working together in social solidarity. On the other hand, “survival of the fittest” among humans is not dependent on predetermined adaptations to a specific natural environment but rather depends on humans “becoming plastic to the environment,” whatever that environment might be. Darwin also noted how the long maturation period for the human child leaves plenty of time for local learning and complex socialization. All people--rich and poor, primitive and modern--rely on this time of play and learning. As a result, we humans do not rely on our instincts to the extent that other animals do. Instead, we all adapt through our education and experience, learning to navigate in an environment that is as much man-made as it is a product of nature.
Herbert Spencer was the most famous proponent of Social Darwinism. It should be pointed out that Spencer’s Social Darwinism was neither social nor Darwinist. It was not social, since no amount of cooperation or solidarity was considered valid in Spencer’s dog-eat-dog system. Nor was it especially Darwinist, for Spencer focused exclusively on the struggle of man against man whereas Darwinism comprehended man’s struggle for survival in the context of his holistic environment (physical, social, and aesthetic). Spencer didn’t understand the complexities of Darwin’s arguments about the uniquely human aspects of evolution. Or he just didn’t care. Ideas of absolute human progress could be derived elsewhere, from political economy (‘unseen hand’ of Smith, communist utopia in Marx), or else from anthropologists (either E. B. Tylor or L. H. Morgan would do nicely). In his own writings, Spencer insisted on a mechanistic fatalism for humanity’s development. For Spencer, there is no reason ever to interfere with the ‘natural course of events’ by helping out our fellow humans. If people are poor, they are poor because they are weak and should be eliminated from the population, according to Spencer. Spencer also believed that since progress always unfolds mechanically and slowly, nothing can be gained through an attempted quick social transformation.
Despite Spencer’s political-economic complacency, or maybe because of it, Social Darwinism had a wide impact on the human sciences, especially anthropology, sociology, history, and political economy. Both academia and the wider public showed enthusiasm for the new paradigm. Some approved of how the tenets of Social Darwinism justified both proto-fascist movements like the Anglo-American alliance for the Saxon race as well as terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Some were happy to invoke spurious biological laws to justify eugenics as the path to social progress. And of course, Social Darwinism pandered to the self-interested rich by declaring the wealthiest and most successful to be the most ‘fit’ in biological terms; the poor meanwhile are less ‘fit’ and so deserve whatever fate they get. (This I suppose is the sort of thing that happens when only the wealthy formulate social theory.) Spencer was telling the self-appointed guardians of human society exactly what they wanted to hear. Even though competition was waning under a trust-infested, near-monopoly capitalism, the Social Darwinists continued to advocate for non-interference in economic affairs on the part of governments or unions. As Hofstadter put it (p. 57), “The competitive order was now supplied with a cosmic rationale. Competition was glorious. Just as survival was the result of strength, success was the reward of virtue.” Similar Social Darwinist arguments provided justification for two of America’s most unnatural ideologemes: Manifest Destiny and Rugged Individualism.
There were of course prominent academics who argued vociferously against the fallacies of Social Darwinism. The pragmatist philosopher John Dewey for one attacked Spencer’s idea of a deterministic system dictating the fate of human populations. A big part of what makes humans human, according to the pragmatists, is our knack for functioning well in conditions of uncertainty. Humans do not live in a haphazard world, nor in a predetermined one. We live in a world that offers plenty of choices, including whether to be cruel and compete, or else be kind and cooperate. Anthropologists, too, rejected Social Darwinism. In the twentieth century, Anthropology’s preferred paradigm for interpreting how human groups change over time was neither grand-theoretical nor reductive. Rather, ethnological understanding emerged through historical particularism and cultural relativism. Hofstadter gives in his conclusion (p. 204) a fantastic synopsis of modern anthropology’s orthodox views on social evolution:
‘Whatever the course of social philosophy in the future, however, a few conclusions are now accepted by most humanists: that such biological ideas as the “ survival of the fittest,” whatever their doubtful value in natural science, are utterly useless in attempting to understand society; that the life of man in society, while it is incidentally a biological fact, has characteristics that are not reducible to biology and must be explained in the distinctive terms of a cultural analysis; that the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa; that social improvement is a product of advances in technology and social organization, not of breeding or selective elimination; that judgments as to the value of competition between men or enterprises or nations must be based upon social and not allegedly biological consequences; and, finally, that there is nothing in nature or a naturalistic philosophy of life to make impossible the acceptance of moral sanctions that can be employed for the common good.’
The times they were a-changing. In the first decades of the twentieth century (dubbed by American historians as the ‘Progressive Era’), the human sciences were no longer impressed with fatalist apologies for capitalism or imperialism. Social Darwinism went out of favor with nearly everyone in part because it promoted violence, war, and even genocide as a means for sorting out who is most ‘fit.’ In the Progressive Era, what was called for was human action in pursuit of a better world. Rather than wait for progress passively and at the mercy of natural selection, people may, through education and democracy, self-select their way to the progress of their choosing. Progressives strove to attain the best society possible, not through a dismal passiveness but rather by their choices made and actions taken.
If Hofstadter intended to pen the obituary for Social Darwinism, he had of course spoken too soon. In part because it is an intuitively simple theory, and in part because it tells unscrupulous conservatives what they want to hear, Social Darwinism has made many an attempted comeback in the years since Hofstadter’s book came out in 1955. The anthropologist Leslie White, for example, published a book in 1959 called The Evolution of Culture. White argued that humans do advance culturally in a way that can be physically measured as the amount of energy expended per person. We in the West are most evolved because we use a huge amount of energy. And by energy we do not mean just fuel. All products of the industrial revolution are made with the expense of human labor power together with the power of machines. White was not a Social Darwinist per se, but he did for a while revive the notion of evolution in cultural anthropology. In 1976, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene. As with classic Social Darwinism, Dawkins depicts humans as being at the mercy of their evolution. Dawkins seems to see human beings as parasitic on their chromosomes. We might fall in love with a mate, fight for a mate, or philander for one, but ultimately we are doing what our genes ‘want’ us to do, disseminate ourselves as widely as possible. But today, for nearly all anthropologists, cultural evolution is dead. Johannes Fabian, in his 1983 Time and the Other, reminds the reader of something that should have been obvious to everyone: that we have all been evolving here on Earth for the same amount of time. All cultures are equally old, and so it makes no sense to see another society as historically prior in a universal scheme which conveniently enough points to the West as the end point of all progress. I am reading a book now which follows an evolutionary ‘plot.’ The chapters of this 1997 book about comparative rhetoric and communication go like this: animal communication—human evolution—Australian Aborigines--Africans--Native Americans—ancient Near Easterners—Chinese—India Indians—Greco-Romans. It is not hard to see this ‘evolution’ of rhetoric as both ‘progressive’ (following a universal hierarchical pattern upward) and ‘conservative’ (white Europe wins again).
And so the debate continues. Hofstadter’s own faith in social progress points to an important irony, if not a contradiction, in the meaning of progress itself. For example, by irrevocably getting rid of the my-folk-is-an-organism metaphor (which stretches back to Hobbes and Comte), can we be said to have now achieved ‘progress’ in social thought? In the end I think the answer is yes. Progress in the utilitarian or liberal sense is necessary. It encourages humans to plan and work for a better tomorrow, one rooted in mutual benefit and not in a hedonistic and selfish struggle of bellum omnium contra omnes. But ‘progress’ in the authoritarian frame, as a naturalization of current social conditions, for example, does no good for anyone, except maybe for the authoritarian top dog himself. For me, the lesson to be gathered from Hofstadter is that progress is only worthwhile when it brings out the best in both us and our fellow humans. Struggle for its own sake, and against other people no less, never leads to progress, regardless of what our selfish genes’ humunculus might be whispering to us.
Before 1900, practitioners of the human sciences often found it difficult to distinguish between evolution and progress. By conflating these two terms, social scientists and historians hoped to gain some prestige from a solidly defensible paradigm of biology, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet while claiming to apply the laws of biological evolution to questions of social progress, Social Darwinism did little more than buttress ugly ideologies. Some of Social Darwinism’s vicious effects on the collective psyche are with us still. These ideologies naturalized social hierarchy while positing a universal human destiny. This metaphorical way of seeing cultural progress as part of an inevitable human evolution fertilized both academic debate and popular thinking during the Victorian era. Hofstadter’s historical critique of Social Darwinism traces how this errant approach to evolution spread like a plague through a range of academic discourses. And beyond the university, this theory of human progress was so simple yet so potent that it fired the imaginations of politicians and reformers on both the left and the right. But for the most part, Social Darwinism supported a quietism in politics, an extreme laissez faire passivity in economics, and above all a racist-imperialist bourgeois individualism, whose battle cry was the oft repeated but seldom understood “survival of the fittest.”
Compared to Social Darwinism, evolutionary biology had a much better grasp of what “survival of the fittest” actually means when applied to humans. On the one hand, “survival of the fittest” among humans usually refers to survival of populations working together in social solidarity. On the other hand, “survival of the fittest” among humans is not dependent on predetermined adaptations to a specific natural environment but rather depends on humans “becoming plastic to the environment,” whatever that environment might be. Darwin also noted how the long maturation period for the human child leaves plenty of time for local learning and complex socialization. All people--rich and poor, primitive and modern--rely on this time of play and learning. As a result, we humans do not rely on our instincts to the extent that other animals do. Instead, we all adapt through our education and experience, learning to navigate in an environment that is as much man-made as it is a product of nature.
Herbert Spencer was the most famous proponent of Social Darwinism. It should be pointed out that Spencer’s Social Darwinism was neither social nor Darwinist. It was not social, since no amount of cooperation or solidarity was considered valid in Spencer’s dog-eat-dog system. Nor was it especially Darwinist, for Spencer focused exclusively on the struggle of man against man whereas Darwinism comprehended man’s struggle for survival in the context of his holistic environment (physical, social, and aesthetic). Spencer didn’t understand the complexities of Darwin’s arguments about the uniquely human aspects of evolution. Or he just didn’t care. Ideas of absolute human progress could be derived elsewhere, from political economy (‘unseen hand’ of Smith, communist utopia in Marx), or else from anthropologists (either E. B. Tylor or L. H. Morgan would do nicely). In his own writings, Spencer insisted on a mechanistic fatalism for humanity’s development. For Spencer, there is no reason ever to interfere with the ‘natural course of events’ by helping out our fellow humans. If people are poor, they are poor because they are weak and should be eliminated from the population, according to Spencer. Spencer also believed that since progress always unfolds mechanically and slowly, nothing can be gained through an attempted quick social transformation.
Despite Spencer’s political-economic complacency, or maybe because of it, Social Darwinism had a wide impact on the human sciences, especially anthropology, sociology, history, and political economy. Both academia and the wider public showed enthusiasm for the new paradigm. Some approved of how the tenets of Social Darwinism justified both proto-fascist movements like the Anglo-American alliance for the Saxon race as well as terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Some were happy to invoke spurious biological laws to justify eugenics as the path to social progress. And of course, Social Darwinism pandered to the self-interested rich by declaring the wealthiest and most successful to be the most ‘fit’ in biological terms; the poor meanwhile are less ‘fit’ and so deserve whatever fate they get. (This I suppose is the sort of thing that happens when only the wealthy formulate social theory.) Spencer was telling the self-appointed guardians of human society exactly what they wanted to hear. Even though competition was waning under a trust-infested, near-monopoly capitalism, the Social Darwinists continued to advocate for non-interference in economic affairs on the part of governments or unions. As Hofstadter put it (p. 57), “The competitive order was now supplied with a cosmic rationale. Competition was glorious. Just as survival was the result of strength, success was the reward of virtue.” Similar Social Darwinist arguments provided justification for two of America’s most unnatural ideologemes: Manifest Destiny and Rugged Individualism.
There were of course prominent academics who argued vociferously against the fallacies of Social Darwinism. The pragmatist philosopher John Dewey for one attacked Spencer’s idea of a deterministic system dictating the fate of human populations. A big part of what makes humans human, according to the pragmatists, is our knack for functioning well in conditions of uncertainty. Humans do not live in a haphazard world, nor in a predetermined one. We live in a world that offers plenty of choices, including whether to be cruel and compete, or else be kind and cooperate. Anthropologists, too, rejected Social Darwinism. In the twentieth century, Anthropology’s preferred paradigm for interpreting how human groups change over time was neither grand-theoretical nor reductive. Rather, ethnological understanding emerged through historical particularism and cultural relativism. Hofstadter gives in his conclusion (p. 204) a fantastic synopsis of modern anthropology’s orthodox views on social evolution:
‘Whatever the course of social philosophy in the future, however, a few conclusions are now accepted by most humanists: that such biological ideas as the “ survival of the fittest,” whatever their doubtful value in natural science, are utterly useless in attempting to understand society; that the life of man in society, while it is incidentally a biological fact, has characteristics that are not reducible to biology and must be explained in the distinctive terms of a cultural analysis; that the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa; that social improvement is a product of advances in technology and social organization, not of breeding or selective elimination; that judgments as to the value of competition between men or enterprises or nations must be based upon social and not allegedly biological consequences; and, finally, that there is nothing in nature or a naturalistic philosophy of life to make impossible the acceptance of moral sanctions that can be employed for the common good.’
The times they were a-changing. In the first decades of the twentieth century (dubbed by American historians as the ‘Progressive Era’), the human sciences were no longer impressed with fatalist apologies for capitalism or imperialism. Social Darwinism went out of favor with nearly everyone in part because it promoted violence, war, and even genocide as a means for sorting out who is most ‘fit.’ In the Progressive Era, what was called for was human action in pursuit of a better world. Rather than wait for progress passively and at the mercy of natural selection, people may, through education and democracy, self-select their way to the progress of their choosing. Progressives strove to attain the best society possible, not through a dismal passiveness but rather by their choices made and actions taken.
If Hofstadter intended to pen the obituary for Social Darwinism, he had of course spoken too soon. In part because it is an intuitively simple theory, and in part because it tells unscrupulous conservatives what they want to hear, Social Darwinism has made many an attempted comeback in the years since Hofstadter’s book came out in 1955. The anthropologist Leslie White, for example, published a book in 1959 called The Evolution of Culture. White argued that humans do advance culturally in a way that can be physically measured as the amount of energy expended per person. We in the West are most evolved because we use a huge amount of energy. And by energy we do not mean just fuel. All products of the industrial revolution are made with the expense of human labor power together with the power of machines. White was not a Social Darwinist per se, but he did for a while revive the notion of evolution in cultural anthropology. In 1976, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene. As with classic Social Darwinism, Dawkins depicts humans as being at the mercy of their evolution. Dawkins seems to see human beings as parasitic on their chromosomes. We might fall in love with a mate, fight for a mate, or philander for one, but ultimately we are doing what our genes ‘want’ us to do, disseminate ourselves as widely as possible. But today, for nearly all anthropologists, cultural evolution is dead. Johannes Fabian, in his 1983 Time and the Other, reminds the reader of something that should have been obvious to everyone: that we have all been evolving here on Earth for the same amount of time. All cultures are equally old, and so it makes no sense to see another society as historically prior in a universal scheme which conveniently enough points to the West as the end point of all progress. I am reading a book now which follows an evolutionary ‘plot.’ The chapters of this 1997 book about comparative rhetoric and communication go like this: animal communication—human evolution—Australian Aborigines--Africans--Native Americans—ancient Near Easterners—Chinese—India Indians—Greco-Romans. It is not hard to see this ‘evolution’ of rhetoric as both ‘progressive’ (following a universal hierarchical pattern upward) and ‘conservative’ (white Europe wins again).
And so the debate continues. Hofstadter’s own faith in social progress points to an important irony, if not a contradiction, in the meaning of progress itself. For example, by irrevocably getting rid of the my-folk-is-an-organism metaphor (which stretches back to Hobbes and Comte), can we be said to have now achieved ‘progress’ in social thought? In the end I think the answer is yes. Progress in the utilitarian or liberal sense is necessary. It encourages humans to plan and work for a better tomorrow, one rooted in mutual benefit and not in a hedonistic and selfish struggle of bellum omnium contra omnes. But ‘progress’ in the authoritarian frame, as a naturalization of current social conditions, for example, does no good for anyone, except maybe for the authoritarian top dog himself. For me, the lesson to be gathered from Hofstadter is that progress is only worthwhile when it brings out the best in both us and our fellow humans. Struggle for its own sake, and against other people no less, never leads to progress, regardless of what our selfish genes’ humunculus might be whispering to us.
January 21, 2020
The Dragon was defeated. Social Darwinism has disappeared. Good riddance.
But this is a partial story. The cost of the hunt was dear. In slaying the roaring beast, Hofstadter and the progressive generation of scholars paved the way for the wholesale abandonment of evolutionary theories in the social sciences, economics, and the humanities. I believe that the sunset of Darwinism led to two problems: 1) an unchecked rise in collectivism (the normative failure) and 2) an unchecked rise in bad models of social progress, social change, and human improvement (the descriptive failure). Now, it is true that, luckily enough, American Thought (since the book focuses narrowly in the United States), was nourished with first rate replacement ideologies to Darwinism. As Hofstadter explains, these included pragmatism (influenced, in its own way, by Darwinism) and anthropological relativism (influenced, ironically, by the sociological theories of Spencer/Sumner as much as Boas). These new movements, stripped of 19th century stuffiness, gave psychology, sociology, and - to a lesser extent - economics, new vitality that softened the blow that resulted from the intellectual abandonment of Darwinian principles. But such theories, in their abandonment of the institutional insights of 19th century evolutionary sociology, could never fully replace the vital spirit and intellectual excitement of the slain Dragon. In particular, their theories of sociological change and economic progress were nonexistent.
The first thing to note is that there is a vast gap between the different varieties of Social Darwinism. Although Hofstadter knows about and mentions the difference, he contributed to the intellectual confusion by starting the book with Spencer and Sumner and ending it with racialist imperialism and militarism, and calling it all "Social Darwinism." Little wonder then that, in the public imagination, "Social Darwinism", Spencer, Darwin, eugenics, racism, and Nazism became all entangled in the same web of horrors. It did not matter whether the Darwinian ideas were individualistic and pacifistic, like those of Herbert Spencer, or collectivist and militaristic, like those of the Nazi movement. They were all brushed aside as needlessly red in tooth and claw.
The observed survival of the fittest in the history profession, at least in the category of public intellectuals, correlates with penmanship. The smooth eloquence that flows from Mr. Hofstadter's pen is a weapon of mass destruction that would keep even Saddam Hussein in power. His prose is funny, engaging, marvelously written, and rather funny. However, the author is often a better stylist than a philosopher. His beautiful prose commits ugly factual and normative sins.
For example, he constantly mischaracterizes Spencer as a defender of the 19th century status quo who saw human beings as passive products of their environment. This is unfair and inaccurate. Sure, there was certainly a conservative element in Spencer, in particular in his older years. But he was always, first and foremost, a theorist of change and social progress. This active, progressive side of Spencer is so obvious that Hofstadter is forced to pay lip service to it but he fails to recognize its central role in Spencer's philosophy. This is evident when he dismisses the individualistic liberalism of "The Man Versus the State" as methodologically disjointed from the organismic evolutionary theory of his "Synthetic" philosophy. But here Hofstadter is failing to connect the dots. In fact, the individualistic liberalism of Spencer is a cornerstone of his active theory of change that complements and supports his organismic conception of social evolution. Spencer's theory gives full power to the individual as the agent of change, albeit a socially embedded agent. The power of human agency is to gradually challenge the existing norms and institutions of the society. This goes beyond Burkean conservatism or Victorian moralizing.
Another egregious error is found in the conclusion of the book, where he claims, behind the unsourced authority of "most humanists" (who? himself and his friends?), that "such biological ideas as the 'survival of the fittest', whatever their doubtful value in natural science, are utterly useless in attempting to understand society." This statement, and the common sentiment behind it, has done serious harm to the scientific methodology of the social sciences. The abolition of evolutionary thinking has deprived sociology of some of its sharpest tools: the theories of evolution, variation, selection, emergence, complexity, network theory, complex adaptation, information systems theory, etc. Only today are they making a deserved comeback. What we need to realize today, in the 21st century, is that Hofstadter course corrected too much. Hofstadter's book, although often illuminating and always charmingly written, exaggerates the obvious methodological faults of 19th century liberal Darwinism out of proportion and, what is worse, conflates them with the wholly separate faults of the eugenics and racism movements.
What we need today is to rediscover what is worthy in 19th century Darwinism, including the ambitious and mutually enriching works of people like Herbert Spencer and Peter Kropotkin. Combined with the tools of 21st century science, such as complex adaptive system theory, behavioural psychology, and evolutionary economics, we can show the falsehood in Hofstadter's overly pessimistic assessment of the merits of evolutionary theorizing. By doing so, we can criticize Hofstadter's overly optimistic faith in central planning, shared by the entire progressive / New Deal generation. We can take what is great in Social Darwinism, both left and right, without falling back on the Lamarckian and Malthusian intellectual errors that plagued the 19th century greats. In so doing, we will have brought back to life the much neglected sociological legacy of Darwin.
But this is a partial story. The cost of the hunt was dear. In slaying the roaring beast, Hofstadter and the progressive generation of scholars paved the way for the wholesale abandonment of evolutionary theories in the social sciences, economics, and the humanities. I believe that the sunset of Darwinism led to two problems: 1) an unchecked rise in collectivism (the normative failure) and 2) an unchecked rise in bad models of social progress, social change, and human improvement (the descriptive failure). Now, it is true that, luckily enough, American Thought (since the book focuses narrowly in the United States), was nourished with first rate replacement ideologies to Darwinism. As Hofstadter explains, these included pragmatism (influenced, in its own way, by Darwinism) and anthropological relativism (influenced, ironically, by the sociological theories of Spencer/Sumner as much as Boas). These new movements, stripped of 19th century stuffiness, gave psychology, sociology, and - to a lesser extent - economics, new vitality that softened the blow that resulted from the intellectual abandonment of Darwinian principles. But such theories, in their abandonment of the institutional insights of 19th century evolutionary sociology, could never fully replace the vital spirit and intellectual excitement of the slain Dragon. In particular, their theories of sociological change and economic progress were nonexistent.
The first thing to note is that there is a vast gap between the different varieties of Social Darwinism. Although Hofstadter knows about and mentions the difference, he contributed to the intellectual confusion by starting the book with Spencer and Sumner and ending it with racialist imperialism and militarism, and calling it all "Social Darwinism." Little wonder then that, in the public imagination, "Social Darwinism", Spencer, Darwin, eugenics, racism, and Nazism became all entangled in the same web of horrors. It did not matter whether the Darwinian ideas were individualistic and pacifistic, like those of Herbert Spencer, or collectivist and militaristic, like those of the Nazi movement. They were all brushed aside as needlessly red in tooth and claw.
The observed survival of the fittest in the history profession, at least in the category of public intellectuals, correlates with penmanship. The smooth eloquence that flows from Mr. Hofstadter's pen is a weapon of mass destruction that would keep even Saddam Hussein in power. His prose is funny, engaging, marvelously written, and rather funny. However, the author is often a better stylist than a philosopher. His beautiful prose commits ugly factual and normative sins.
For example, he constantly mischaracterizes Spencer as a defender of the 19th century status quo who saw human beings as passive products of their environment. This is unfair and inaccurate. Sure, there was certainly a conservative element in Spencer, in particular in his older years. But he was always, first and foremost, a theorist of change and social progress. This active, progressive side of Spencer is so obvious that Hofstadter is forced to pay lip service to it but he fails to recognize its central role in Spencer's philosophy. This is evident when he dismisses the individualistic liberalism of "The Man Versus the State" as methodologically disjointed from the organismic evolutionary theory of his "Synthetic" philosophy. But here Hofstadter is failing to connect the dots. In fact, the individualistic liberalism of Spencer is a cornerstone of his active theory of change that complements and supports his organismic conception of social evolution. Spencer's theory gives full power to the individual as the agent of change, albeit a socially embedded agent. The power of human agency is to gradually challenge the existing norms and institutions of the society. This goes beyond Burkean conservatism or Victorian moralizing.
Another egregious error is found in the conclusion of the book, where he claims, behind the unsourced authority of "most humanists" (who? himself and his friends?), that "such biological ideas as the 'survival of the fittest', whatever their doubtful value in natural science, are utterly useless in attempting to understand society." This statement, and the common sentiment behind it, has done serious harm to the scientific methodology of the social sciences. The abolition of evolutionary thinking has deprived sociology of some of its sharpest tools: the theories of evolution, variation, selection, emergence, complexity, network theory, complex adaptation, information systems theory, etc. Only today are they making a deserved comeback. What we need to realize today, in the 21st century, is that Hofstadter course corrected too much. Hofstadter's book, although often illuminating and always charmingly written, exaggerates the obvious methodological faults of 19th century liberal Darwinism out of proportion and, what is worse, conflates them with the wholly separate faults of the eugenics and racism movements.
What we need today is to rediscover what is worthy in 19th century Darwinism, including the ambitious and mutually enriching works of people like Herbert Spencer and Peter Kropotkin. Combined with the tools of 21st century science, such as complex adaptive system theory, behavioural psychology, and evolutionary economics, we can show the falsehood in Hofstadter's overly pessimistic assessment of the merits of evolutionary theorizing. By doing so, we can criticize Hofstadter's overly optimistic faith in central planning, shared by the entire progressive / New Deal generation. We can take what is great in Social Darwinism, both left and right, without falling back on the Lamarckian and Malthusian intellectual errors that plagued the 19th century greats. In so doing, we will have brought back to life the much neglected sociological legacy of Darwin.
July 22, 2014
His first published book. More impressive scholarship than both his later Age of Reform & The Idea of a Two-Party System, perhaps combined. Why? Originally written in 1940-42, published in 44. "Completely rewritten" for the revised edition, curiously, for the author was "jarred by the rhetoric of the original version." Might be interesting to take a look at the original text.
In the context of what came before it, the progressive/reform consensus moment in American thought rejected individualism and competition. What the author doesn't do, & perhaps he couldn't considering the vantage point of the 1940s, is identify and project the contradictions of the consensus as they would unfold into the second half of the 20th century. The political economy of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner is alive and well in 21st century American politics, as a politics of resentment. A new-left consensus, which perhaps seemed clear from FDR to Kennedy, now seems inaccurate. Who defends John Dewey or Lester Ward with zeal? What is there to defend in Dewey? Certainly one must defend his egalitarian/democratic attitude with respect to education; education is a social problem. But is one to defend the utilitarian tendency? to pronounce the erasure of geographical and cultural differences? Do we see monism or pluralism in Dewey? Perhaps pluralism within a monistic framework. Is this tenable? Sumner and Spencer lead us to a monistic or a kind of racial patriotism. Lester Ward, who hated Sumner and Spencer passionately, seemed to take up a dangerous sort of social engineering. In a sense, the argument of Sumner and Ward continues today. The political horizon is pretty bleak.
In the context of what came before it, the progressive/reform consensus moment in American thought rejected individualism and competition. What the author doesn't do, & perhaps he couldn't considering the vantage point of the 1940s, is identify and project the contradictions of the consensus as they would unfold into the second half of the 20th century. The political economy of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner is alive and well in 21st century American politics, as a politics of resentment. A new-left consensus, which perhaps seemed clear from FDR to Kennedy, now seems inaccurate. Who defends John Dewey or Lester Ward with zeal? What is there to defend in Dewey? Certainly one must defend his egalitarian/democratic attitude with respect to education; education is a social problem. But is one to defend the utilitarian tendency? to pronounce the erasure of geographical and cultural differences? Do we see monism or pluralism in Dewey? Perhaps pluralism within a monistic framework. Is this tenable? Sumner and Spencer lead us to a monistic or a kind of racial patriotism. Lester Ward, who hated Sumner and Spencer passionately, seemed to take up a dangerous sort of social engineering. In a sense, the argument of Sumner and Ward continues today. The political horizon is pretty bleak.
January 17, 2012
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 evolutionary theory was also taken up by pragmatists like William James and John Dewey. I feel like too often treatments of how scientific concepts were popularized at this time focus only on the negative angle, on evolution coming to only mean 'survival of the fittest' and a social and economic determinism. But here, Hofstadter looks at the way it opened up avenues for thinking about chance, agency, and social experimentation as well.
Also, Foner's introduction does a decent job of highlighting the main points for critique in this volume.
The chapter I liked most is the exploration of the way evolutionary theory was also taken up by pragmatists like William James and John Dewey. I feel like too often treatments of how scientific concepts were popularized at this time focus only on the negative angle, on evolution coming to only mean 'survival of the fittest' and a social and economic determinism. But here, Hofstadter looks at the way it opened up avenues for thinking about chance, agency, and social experimentation as well.
Also, Foner's introduction does a decent job of highlighting the main points for critique in this volume.
May 20, 2016
The best of Hofstadter's books.
June 29, 2016
An exceptional short overview of this topic. Lots of meat. Hofstadter always out performs.
July 29, 2022
A brief and very readable account of, well, exactly what the title says.
The story of American social darwinism is something we see time and time again: those with wealth and power appropriating ideas with a large amount of prestige in order to justify their own interests.
What was strictly a theory in biology was analogized and forced to fit into a wide range of other disciplines to lend credence to the author's own ideas; Herbert Spencer's social thought and metaphysics, William Graham Sumner's extremely laissez faire economics and sociology (an appeal to individualism so radical it allowed for the extermination of the destitute and the "unfit", if not through active malice then through gross neglect, framed as the natural evolution of things). Critics and dissenters also take center stage, people such as Lester Ward and Kropotkin. Pragmatists took issue with Social Darwinism's deterministic implications, talking of a world destined to be the way that it is, while anarchists and socialists took issue with the complete lack of acknowledgement towards the fact that we are social creatures, that we as people largely thrive when everyone is acting out a healthy role in one's social group, and that this can be found overwhelmingly in nature as well.
Also, as Social Darwinism started to die out, its biological essentialism, as well as its determinism, started to take on a more racial and able-bodied tone, spawning from its cline the dreadful ""science"" of Eugenics.
The last chapter, on racism and imperialism, is something I'd recommend to anyone studying the American colonization of the Philippines. It mentions my country just a handful of times, but the chapter as a whole serves as a great introduction or supplement to part of the colonial ideology that led to the "acquisition" of these Philippine islands, while also being a very useful resource to those who were explicitly for these atrocities and those who were against, calling out the explicit brutality and injustice in the act.
The story of American social darwinism is something we see time and time again: those with wealth and power appropriating ideas with a large amount of prestige in order to justify their own interests.
What was strictly a theory in biology was analogized and forced to fit into a wide range of other disciplines to lend credence to the author's own ideas; Herbert Spencer's social thought and metaphysics, William Graham Sumner's extremely laissez faire economics and sociology (an appeal to individualism so radical it allowed for the extermination of the destitute and the "unfit", if not through active malice then through gross neglect, framed as the natural evolution of things). Critics and dissenters also take center stage, people such as Lester Ward and Kropotkin. Pragmatists took issue with Social Darwinism's deterministic implications, talking of a world destined to be the way that it is, while anarchists and socialists took issue with the complete lack of acknowledgement towards the fact that we are social creatures, that we as people largely thrive when everyone is acting out a healthy role in one's social group, and that this can be found overwhelmingly in nature as well.
Also, as Social Darwinism started to die out, its biological essentialism, as well as its determinism, started to take on a more racial and able-bodied tone, spawning from its cline the dreadful ""science"" of Eugenics.
The last chapter, on racism and imperialism, is something I'd recommend to anyone studying the American colonization of the Philippines. It mentions my country just a handful of times, but the chapter as a whole serves as a great introduction or supplement to part of the colonial ideology that led to the "acquisition" of these Philippine islands, while also being a very useful resource to those who were explicitly for these atrocities and those who were against, calling out the explicit brutality and injustice in the act.
January 4, 2025
I love the work of Richard Hofstadter. His critical historical analysis, his wit and sarcasm, his inclusion of insights and analysis from other social sciences and his literary excellence make reading his works an absolute joy. Of all of his works which I have read this volume may have been the most enjoyable for me to read. All historians, academic and lay alike, should treat themselves to Hofstadter's work.
In Social Darwinism in American Thought Hofstadter analyzes, as the name of the book indicates, the influence of social Darwinism on American thought; in particular its influence upon economic, political, and social thought. He makes clear that American political, economic, and social thinkers did not so much form their ideologies around Darwinism, particularly natural selection, so much as adapt its language to ideas and paradigms already dominant in American thought. Furthermore, he reveals how those dominant ideas and paradigm influenced the way that American thinkers and American society viewed and interpreted the ideas and mechanisms of Darwinism itself.
His argument is that the ideas, language, and concepts of Darwinism can be and were utilized and interpreted by various and even competing schools of political, economic, and social thought but that a certain preexisting American ideology and political and economic practice determined the way in which prominent American thinkers interpreted it in the late nineteenth century. Eric Foner writes an excellent introduction that is worth reading again once the book is finished. Much more could be said but Hofstadter is the best one to say it and so it is to his book I point the reader's attention.
In Social Darwinism in American Thought Hofstadter analyzes, as the name of the book indicates, the influence of social Darwinism on American thought; in particular its influence upon economic, political, and social thought. He makes clear that American political, economic, and social thinkers did not so much form their ideologies around Darwinism, particularly natural selection, so much as adapt its language to ideas and paradigms already dominant in American thought. Furthermore, he reveals how those dominant ideas and paradigm influenced the way that American thinkers and American society viewed and interpreted the ideas and mechanisms of Darwinism itself.
His argument is that the ideas, language, and concepts of Darwinism can be and were utilized and interpreted by various and even competing schools of political, economic, and social thought but that a certain preexisting American ideology and political and economic practice determined the way in which prominent American thinkers interpreted it in the late nineteenth century. Eric Foner writes an excellent introduction that is worth reading again once the book is finished. Much more could be said but Hofstadter is the best one to say it and so it is to his book I point the reader's attention.
May 1, 2021
Hofstadter analyzes the historical development of social darwinism in American thought. I felt he did an excellent job guiding the reader through the thinkers and historical events that cultivated this full embrace of an individualistic "survival of the fittest" ethic behind the wheel our political, economic and social ethic.
While it's clearly implied Hofstadter is critical of this development in American thought, he doesn't necessarily offer any alternatives. He does however record some of the intellectual forces that countered the social Darwinism that gave us the Gilded Age (and arguably the Neoliberal one we are debatably still living through). He gives special attention to the work of Henry George and Thorstein Veblen throughout as two thoroughly American outlooks that could potentially help in paving a path out and away from the brutally unforgiving barbarism that social Darwinism has produced in American society.
While it's clearly implied Hofstadter is critical of this development in American thought, he doesn't necessarily offer any alternatives. He does however record some of the intellectual forces that countered the social Darwinism that gave us the Gilded Age (and arguably the Neoliberal one we are debatably still living through). He gives special attention to the work of Henry George and Thorstein Veblen throughout as two thoroughly American outlooks that could potentially help in paving a path out and away from the brutally unforgiving barbarism that social Darwinism has produced in American society.
January 9, 2023
Enjoyed reading it! Excellent and thought provoking!
December 17, 2023
Would not read
December 30, 2025
Interesting study of the intellectual history of Social Darwinism. Accessible and well written.
July 2, 2010
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.
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.
February 23, 2008
Taylor Ranch, Idaho
Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness
Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness
Currently reading
March 24, 2011NOT A REVIEW
Reese has it shelved as reference; Book Pig as to-read.
Decent library h/c arrived 3/24/2011
Reese has it shelved as reference; Book Pig as to-read.
Decent library h/c arrived 3/24/2011
June 8, 2020
Sociology, “queen of the sciences”...
Read
February 15, 2016sdfsgec defefgr ergvewrgwev ewfeg56t4u76wec
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2015
You have to read it!
April 13, 2017
Definitely a product of its time with some outdated accounts, but an outstanding history of ideas that chronicles Darwin's impact on American political philosophy around the turn of the 20th century.
April 14, 2017
The classic history of 'Social Darwinism' in America - from its Spencerian heyday to its decline and afterlife in the Eugenics and Progressive Social Engineering of the 20s - is a captivating read, on account of Hofstader's erudition, breadth of analysis and ability to weave a cohesive narrative. It is a great achievement, for the subject is complex - Social Darwinist is something no one wanted to be - and, yet there was huge range of ideas that expropriated Darwin to promote various social ideas. The narrative finishes somewhat abruptly for me, in the dissipation of Darwinist individualist fervor in the aftermath of the First World War, when Darwinist militarism suddenly became a German characteristic; all the racial experimentation, IQ testing, sterilisation that will follow remains outside the scope of the narrative. Technically, indeed, those had nothing to do with Social Darwinism, and yet the ideas were very much the same, only derived from Galton rather than Spencer. This is where I seek to turn next in my reading.
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