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Social Darwinism

The application of evolutionary vocabulary to social and political questions began in Darwin’s own lifetime and has continued since. “Social Darwinism” is the label most commonly applied to this tradition, though the label itself has a history that needs distinguishing from the thing it names. Four objects get conflated in popular usage and sometimes in academic discussion:

  1. Darwin himself and his own views
  2. Darwinian biology as a science
  3. Social Darwinism as a 19th- and early-20th-century political-social movement
  4. The mid-20th-century historiographic naming of Social Darwinism as a category

Most damaging conflations come from collapsing these. The page below tries to keep them apart.

Spencer and “survival of the fittest”

Herbert Spencer coined “survival of the fittest” in Principles of Biology (1864): “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection’, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” Spencer’s project — extending evolutionary thinking to society, economics, ethics, and cosmology — predates Darwin’s Origin in some respects (Spencer’s developmental evolutionism was already published by the 1850s) and overlaps with it in others, but it is its own programme with its own premises.

Darwin adopted “survival of the fittest” in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species (1869), on Alfred Russel Wallace’s suggestion, as an alternative to “natural selection” — which some readers misread as implying a conscious selector. The phrase carried Spencer’s framing into Darwin’s text and has been associated with Darwin ever since, despite originating outside his biology.

Spencer’s social application was laissez-faire: if nature produces fitness through competition, interference with competition (welfare, regulation, charity to the “unfit”) impedes the natural improvement of the race. This reasoning moved from Spencer’s writing into late-19th-century economic and political argument, particularly in the United States and Britain.

Late-19th-century Social Darwinism

William Graham Sumner, often cited as the most prominent American Social Darwinist, argued in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883) that social inequality reflected natural differences in fitness, and that attempts to redistribute wealth impeded the natural sorting of the capable from the incapable. Sumner drew explicitly on Spencer and presented the case in evolutionary terms.

The broader movement applied evolutionary vocabulary — “struggle for existence,” “survival of the fittest,” “natural selection” — to questions of poverty, race, empire, and social policy. The connection between biological evolution and these political arguments was not logically required — the inference from “this is how nature works” to “this is how society should be organised” involves additional premises that the biology does not supply — but it was made routinely, by figures who believed themselves to be reasoning scientifically.

Eugenics

Francis Galton, Darwin’s half-cousin, coined “eugenics” in 1883 and defined it as the science of improving the human race through selective breeding. Galton’s work on heredity and statistical methods was technically innovative; his social programme was to encourage reproduction among the “fit” (positive eugenics) and discourage it among the “unfit” (negative eugenics).

The eugenics movement grew through the late 19th and early 20th centuries into a mainstream programme with institutional support in Britain, the United States, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. In the United States, compulsory sterilisation laws were enacted in many states from the early 1900s onward; the Supreme Court upheld them in Buck v. Bell (1927), with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Across the programme’s full course, more than 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilised under such laws. Similar programmes operated in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and other countries.

The catastrophic culmination came in Nazi Germany, where eugenic ideology was integrated into state policy as racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene). The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring mandated sterilisation for a range of conditions. The programme escalated through the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme (systematic killing of disabled people from 1939) and into the industrial extermination of the Holocaust. The Nazi regime drew explicitly on eugenic science, including American models — and American eugenicists, in some cases, expressed admiration for the German programme before the full scale of its consequences became clear.

The post-war reckoning with eugenics was slow and uneven. The scientific community gradually distanced itself from eugenics as a programme, though the underlying attitudes persisted longer than the label. Many of the field’s leading figures — Ronald Fisher among the founders of population genetics, Karl Pearson among the biometricians, Julian Huxley among the Synthesis’s public advocates — were active eugenicists. The field’s reckoning with this history is ongoing.

Hofstadter and the term

Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) gave the label “Social Darwinism” its broad mid-century currency. Hofstadter argued that evolutionary ideas had been used to justify laissez-faire economics and opposition to social reform in late-19th-century America, and that this represented a misapplication of biological theory to social questions.

Hofstadter’s account has been influential but is not the last word. Historian Robert Bannister (Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought, 1979) argued that Hofstadter’s category was retrospectively constructed — that many of the figures Hofstadter labelled “Social Darwinists” did not see themselves that way, and that the term as Hofstadter used it served particular mid-20th-century political purposes (specifically, the New Deal liberalism Hofstadter favoured). Thomas Leonard (Illiberal Reformers, 2016) complicated the picture further, showing that eugenic thinking was not confined to laissez-faire conservatives but was equally present among Progressive reformers.

The historiographic status of “Social Darwinism” as a coherent category is genuinely contested. The underlying historical material — Spencer’s programme, Sumner’s political economy, the eugenics movements, the Nazi application — is not in doubt. Whether “Social Darwinism” picks out a single coherent movement, or groups disparate phenomena under a label that serves more to condemn than to explain, is the open question.

Darwin’s own views

Darwin was vigorously anti-slavery — a conviction rooted in his Wedgwood family background (the Wedgwoods were prominent abolitionists) and deepened by his direct observation of slavery in Brazil during the Beagle voyage. Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause (2009) argued that Darwin’s commitment to the unity of the human species — all humans sharing common ancestry — was one of the motivating forces behind his theory.

Darwin did not advocate the political programmes that came to bear his name. He did not endorse Spencer’s laissez-faire application, and expressed reservations about the extension of competitive metaphors to social policy. The Descent of Man (1871) contains passages reflecting Victorian racial assumptions — hierarchical comparisons between “civilised” and “savage” peoples, speculation about the effects of natural selection on human populations — that reflect the racial assumptions of his time and social position. These are a separate matter from the political theories later constructed under the Social Darwinism label.

Contemporary uses and misuses

“Social Darwinism” continues to be invoked as a critical label for political-economic positions that justify inequality by appeal to nature or evolutionary process. The accuracy of the label varies by case. Some contemporary scientific racism explicitly invokes evolutionary biology; mainstream evolutionary biology and population genetics reject these claims. The inference from biological evolution to social prescription remains as logically unsupported now as it was in Spencer’s time — the gap between “this is how nature works” and “this is how society should be organised” is not bridged by the biology.

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See also: Darwin · Spencer · Kropotkin · Malthus · Huxley · Mutualism