The objections to social Darwinism as a coherent political theory are varied but fall into three main categories:
- 1) The term is a misnomer since the central concepts of what came to be called social Darwinism were already in place prior to the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species.
- 2) Social Darwinism has no core theoretical framework and is a mere amalgamation of largely unconnected ideas.
- 3) Social Darwinism lacks historical documentation concerning those deemed to be proponents of the theory itself.
To take each point in turn, one of the most common objections by scholars to the use of social Darwinism is that they view it as a misattribution of Darwin’s science to ideas that already existed and, hence, should not be labeled “Darwinian.” Those scholars who have written histories of social Darwinism typically adopt the standard methodology of using specific terms such as “survival of the fittest” or “struggle for existence” that were central to Darwin’s science. Any historical figures that used these buzz words, the argument goes, must have been inspired by Darwin’s work for their political views. This was the methodology that Hofstadter utilized in Social Darwinism in American Thought. Other scholars have expanded this by incorporating additional terms such as “natural selection,” “adaptation,” and “variation” to the list.
However, as mentioned in Part I, a problem with this approach is that the core philosophy of laissez-faire social Darwinism was already present in Herbert Spencer’s (1851) Social Statics eight years before Darwin’s Origin was published. Likewise, the term “survival of the fittest” was coined by Spencer in 1852 and wasn’t incorporated into Darwin’s Origin until the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species in 1869. The term “struggle for existence” appeared even earlier, in Thomas Malthus’ immensely influential (1798) Essay on the Principle of Population, a work that inspired both Spencer and Darwin equally. Spencer didn’t use this specific terminology until after it appeared in Darwin’s Origin, but he had employed Malthus’ reasoning of overpopulation and intragroup competition as early as 1852.
The fact that the terms used to define social Darwinism already existed prior to the theory itself casts doubt on the methodology employed and may have lead to falsely attributing the theory beyond it’s actual use in the historical literature. To quote Gregory Claeys in his paper “Survival of the Fittest” and the Origins of Social Darwinism:
“Social Darwinism,” insofar as it focuses centrally on the idea of the “survival of the fittest,” is to a significant degree a misnomer. Much of what we associate with the concept had been in formation for over half a century by the time the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. . . Darwin’s discoveries occasioned no revolution in social theory, but instead involved remapping, with the assistance of a theory of the biological inheritance of character traits, a preexisting structure of ideas based largely, though not exclusively, upon a Malthusian and economic metaphor of the “struggle for existence.”
An additional objection concerning social Darwinism as a misnomer is that, while Spencer often championed Darwin’s evolutionism, he rejected the mechanism of natural selection that formed the basis of Darwinian biology. Instead, Spencer embraced the key tenets of the earlier Lamarckian system such as use-inheritance, or “soft heredity,” a biologically driven hierarchy, and the belief that evolution was inherently progressive.
Spencer’s rejection of Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection was most blatant following the famous 1892 experiment by August Weismann. This simple (and somewhat cruel) experiment tested Lamarck’s hypothesis of use-inheritance, the idea that offspring would inherit the acquired characteristics from their parents. Weismann cut off the tails of a group of mice and continued to cut off the tails of their offspring over many generations to see if, according to Lamarck’s logic, their tails would be shorter in the offspring of short-tailed mice. When they weren’t Weismann concluded that the Lamarckian theory was flawed.
According to historian Peter J. Bowler in his book Evolution: The History of an Idea:
Weismann’s experiment had a valid point, because Lamarckism must rest on a theory of soft heredity. His test proved that heredity is hard: mice deprived of their tails still carried the complete germ plasm for this characteristic. . .
To those naturalists who had decided–generally for other than experimental reasons–that use-inheritance must have a role in evolution, Weismann’s theory symbolized the increasing dogmatism of neo-Darwinism. . . Herbert Spencer, who always had insisted on a role for Lamarckism, now felt it necessary to challenge Weismann and proclaim his separation from the Darwinian camp (pp. 238-9).
What all of this suggests, quite obviously, is that “social Darwinism” had very little Darwinism in it. What is more likely to have occurred is that, because Darwin was the most famous naturalist of the nineteenth century, any ideas that were associated with evolution (whether based on his theory or not) were lumped together and labeled “Darwinian.” However, as the second and third categorical objections will emphasize, the entire label itself may have very little explanatory power.
Claeys, G. (2000). The “Survival of the Fittest” and the Origins of Social Darwinism Journal of the History of Ideas, 61 (2) DOI: 10.2307/3654026