Social Darwinism in American Political Thought

1. Social Darwinism in American Political Thought Princeton TAH July 8, 2009

2. Definition • Social Darwinism, simply put, applies the concept of natural selection from evolutionary theory to society. Proponents of evolution held that competition in nature is fierce. Some organisms win that competition and others lose. The ones that win get to pass on traits to successive generations. Favorable variations are preserved; unfavorable variations are destroyed. Social Darwinism took this framework for explaining the evolution of organisms and applied it to the evolution of society. (Is this foundational analogy proper?) They then suggested that just as progress is made in nature through fierce competition, progress is also made in society through the same process.

3. Definition • Social Darwinism is unapologetically “realistic,” even grim. There is a celebration within the theory of the elimination of “losers.” But in another sense, proponents of the theory were also profoundly optimistic about progress. Many believed that IF the natural world is left to do its work then progress is inevitable.

4. Definition • A word of warning. As Eric Foner points out in the introduction to Hofstadter’s classic, the term Social Darwinism was invented in Europe in the 1880s. But few individuals called themselves “Social Darwinists.” This has been a term of derision, one foisted primarily by the left onto the right as a critique of laissez faire capitalism and individualism.

5. Significance • Hofstadter holds that Social Darwinism was the public philosophy of the Gilded Age. Social Darwinism, he contends, had a more profound impact in the United States than in Europe because Americans used it to explain the individualism and ruthless and cutthroat competition that they saw around them. He also argues that Social Darwinism was a protean concept, capable of being adapted and appropriated by both the right and the left. Both opponents of government regulation and proponents of it adopted Darwinian ideas into their arguments.

6. Herbert Spencer • The English sociologist Herbert Spencer was the foremost proponent of Social Darwinism.

8. Spencer’s Teachings: Society is an Organism • Spencer took the idea of natural selection and transformed it into “social selection” and he applied the idea of the transmutation of the species from biology to society. Society was not an artificial creation, but an evolving organism.

9. Spencer’s Teachings: “The Persistence of Force” • Spencer was a highly derivative and synthetic thinker. He borrowed ideas from many places – particularly biology and physics – and applied them to society. Two are particularly important. First, from physics (thermodynamics), he took an idea that he called the “persistence of force” which is more commonly known as the “conservation of energy.” This idea suggested that matter and energy were never destroyed and that organisms are constantly changing forms.

10. Spencer’s Teachings: “The Persistence of Force” • Hofstadter’s summarizes this principle as follows: “Evolution is the progressive integration of matter, accompanied by dissipation of motion; dissolution is the disorganization of matter accompanied by the absorption of motion. The life process is essentially evolutionary, embodying a continuous change from incoherent homogeneity, illustrated by the low protozoa, to coherent heterogeneity, manifested in man and the higher animals.” (Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 37).

11. Spencer’s Teachings: “The Persistence of Force” • What is important about this is that for Spencer development takes place in individual species and societies from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. The homogeneous is unstable because the “persistence of force” will cause further variations in it to appear. It will continue to transform. Progress takes form as movement from homogeneity and instability to heterogeneity and equilibrium. Eventually, evolution stops but only with perfection.

12. Spencer’s Teachings: Malthus’ Theory of Overpopulation • Second, from Thomas Malthus he borrowed the idea that population reproduces exponentially (every human can produce many other who in turn can produce many others), but our ability to feed people does not keep pace with our ability to reproduce (production increases happen arithmetically). Spencer, like Darwin and many others, saw in population increases the engine of evolution. Population increases would create increasing pressure and competition and make evolution take place.

13. Spencer’s Teachings: Political Implications • Spencer and - his American disciple William Graham Sumner – drew immensely conservative – libertarian (free market) conclusions from social Darwinism. Their application of the theory of natural selection to society led them to the conclusion that progress would only be made if nature’s laws were allowed to take effect. The impact of the harsh realities of competition had to be realized if progress was to be made.

14. Spencer’s Teachings: Opposition to State Aid and Interference • Spencer gave a categorical repudiation of state supported education, regulation of housing conditions, and even state protection for the ignorant and gullible against medical quacks. Spencer also opposed labor unions. He insisted that he did not oppose private charity because this elevated the character of the person who was giving and hastened the development of altruism. Sound development had to be “natural,” slow and unhurried. State planning and regulation would have unintended consequences and impede progress by delaying (not preventing) the unfit organism, business, or society from being eliminated. Competition created what Hayek and many others would later call “creative destruction.”

15. William Graham Sumner • Yale Professor and cleric William Graham Sumner was Spencer’s most vigorous and articulate – but iconoclastic, uncompromising, and controversial spokesman.

17. William Graham Sumner’s Teachings • As Hofstadter points out, Sumner combined the Protestant Ethic, classical economics, and Darwinian natural selection to form a public philosophy that condemned state interference and justified existing inequalities as the product of natural selection and competition.

18. William Graham Sumner’s Teachings • Sumner was an uncompromising critic of both socialism and protectionism. He was not pro-business or pro-corporation – at least he was not a defender of any existing business or corporation. He was pro- free market. If a business failed, then it must have been flawed. Protecting businesses from failure created artificially expensive products and inefficient producers.

19. Sumner’s Opposition to the Natural Rights Tradition • Sumner was also an opponent of the natural rights tradition and the doctrine of equality. He did not believe that there were any rights in the jungle. “There can be no rights against Nature except to get out of her whatever we can, which is only the fact of the struggle for existence stated over again.” (Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 59) Rights were crystallized and socially habituated traditions or what he called “folkways.” Nor did he believe that men were equal in the state of nature.

20. William Graham Sumner’s Teachings • Sumner’s philosophy and worldview are best summed up in the titles of his two most famous essays: “What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other” and “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over.” In both of these essays, Sumner set forth a relentlessly libertarian public philosophy. “The world doesn’t owe anybody a living” summed up his beliefs. If the state acts, he argued, it ends up helpings someone at the expense of someone else.

21. William Graham Sumner’s Teachings • His libertarian philosophy was most vividly expressed in a statement that Hofstadter does not quote. He said, “It is not the function of the State to make men happy. They must make themselves happy in their own way, and at their own risk.” “Social meddlers” weakened society and eviscerate the character of men. Instead, the state had two functions: the prosperity of men and the honor of women. Governments should secure peace, order, and protect rights. If you do not like the survival of the fittest, he would quip, then consider that the only alternative is the survival of the unfit.

22. William Graham Sumner’s Teachings • Sumner did not consider himself an apologist for the captains of industry. He simply believed that they were rightful victors in a struggle for existence. They were the men who had accumulated capital and the accumulation of capital required industry and self-denial. (“Capital is only formed by self-denial.”) Indeed, Sumner considered himself the champion of the “forgotten man” – the hard working, industrious, frugal man who asked little from government and went about his way.

23. The Ethical Implications of Social Darwinism: Industry and Self- Denial • Finally, Sumner drew conservative implications involving character. The conservative Social Darwinists believed that the fierce competition of the market taught enduring and admirable ethical imperatives. For men, like Spencer and Sumner, according to Hofstadter, Social Darwinism “embodied a vision of life and, if the phrase will be admitted, expressed a kind of secular piety that commands our attention. Sumner, and no doubt after him all those who at one time or another were impressed by his views, were much more concerned to face up to the hardness of life, to the impossibility of finding easy solutions for human ills, to the necessity of labor and self-denial and the inevitability of suffering. There is a kind of naturalistic Calvinism …. Economic life was construed as a set of arrangements that offered inducements to men of good character, while it punished those who were, in Sumner’s words, “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.” (Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 10).

24. William Graham Sumner’s Teachings • “Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downward and favors all its worst members.”

25. Lester Frank Ward • Ward made the first major critique of Spencer and Sumner’s ideas. He is called a “reform” Darwinist by historians and students of American political thought because he accepted the teachings of Darwin but turned them in favor of social reform and the use of the state.

27. Lester Frank Ward’s Teachings: Challenging Spencer and Sumner’s Foundational Beliefs • Ward challenged the foundations of the conservative social Darwinists. They had argued that nature – left unimpeded – was efficient and that progress was only achieved by restraining from intervention. Their arguments also suggest that the rich and powerful were those who had won a competition by accumulating capital through self-denial and industry.

28. Lester Frank Ward’s Teachings • Ward made a fundamental distinction between passive, natural evolution and active or purposeful evolution. Man, he argued, is a purposeful animal with mental powers to exploit and guide nature: “The practical benefits of science are the result of man’s control of natural forces.”

29. Lester Frank Ward’s Teachings • Ward also denied that nature – left alone – was efficient. Nature, he pointed out, was designed around a strategy that was extremely inefficient. Millions of sperm were wasted in the fertilization of a single egg. Industrial competition, he observed, can be similarly wasteful.

30. Lester Frank Ward’s Teachings • Ward argued that natural competition would ultimately lead to monopoly. The natural conclusion of competition, he maintained, is victory for one or a few. In industry, the natural conclusion of competition is concentration, not progressive competition between increasingly better businesses. Government intervention, Ward argued, is necessary to insure competition.

31. Lester Frank Ward’s Teachings • Furthermore, competition, according to Ward, is destructive. Organisms and individuals grow stronger, he argued, only when shield from competition. “When man artificially cultivates a particular form of life, that form immediately makes great strides and soon outstrips those depending upon competition for their progress.”

32. Lester Frank Ward’s Teachings • Progress takes place through social organization and guided reform. “If nature progresses through the destruction of the weak, man progresses through the protection of the weak.” “There is no necessary harmony,” he concluded, “between natural law and human advantage.”

33. Lester Frank Ward’s Teachings • “Unable to find in society the crude processes he saw at work in nature, Ward evolved a twofold criticism of social Darwinism. He first debunked nature itself, displayed its wastefulness, and tore it from the high place it occupied in the popular mind. Then, by showing how the emerging human mind was able to mold the narrow genetic processes of nature into vastly different forms, Ward demolished the central figure of the monistic dogma – the continuity between process in nature and process in society.” (Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Political Thought, 81)

34. The Eugenics Movement and Buck v. Bell • What are the social implications of social Darwinism or reform Darwinism? For some, the idea that intervention in nature was necessary to help improve the human condition led to calls for selective breeding and mandatory sterilization. Eugenics means “good genes” and eugenicists made these proposals as well as called for anti -immigration laws and laws that forbade miscegenation.

35. The Eugenics Movement and Buck v. Bell • As Hofstadter notes, early eugenicists accepted the identification of the fit with the upper classes and the unfit with the lower classes. The poor, they believed, were held down by biological deficiency rather than environmental conditions.

36. The Eugenics Movement and Buck v. Bell • In their belief that society would be improved by selective breeding, the Eugenicists also followed social theorists who argued for intervention into the natural competition. The Darwinian idea of natural selection assumed the transmission of parental variations to children and thus the ability of those children to compete. The view was commonly held that disease, poverty, immorality, even promiscuity were inherited and conversely that genius and character were the product of good stock.

37. The Eugenics Movement and Buck v. Bell • These sets of belief led to movements for mandatory sterilization laws of “feeble minded” individuals. In 1907, Indiana passed a state law allowing sterilization of the poor. Some 20 additional states followed this example during the next decade or so. Earlier sterilization laws had been overturned by state courts, but a Virginia law was then drawn up and used as a test case for other laws. This law was based on the recommendation of one of the leaders of the Eugenicist movement. It provided that an administrator with the approval of a board could require the mandatory sterilization of a committed person. There was the possibility of appeal of any decision that was made.

38. The Eugenics Movement and Buck v. Bell • The infamous case in which this law was challenged was Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck, her daughter, and her mother were committed to a home for the “feeble-minded.” Carrie had been raped and had a child who was also in the institution. Thus, there were three generations of Bucks in the mental institutions.

39. The Eugenics Movement and Buck v. Bell • In Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court infamously upheld mandatory sterilization laws with Holmes declaring in chilling language, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Court ruled that Virginia had a legitimate state interest in the purity of the gene pool and the prevention of the passing on of unwanted traits.

40. The Eugenics Movement and Buck v. Bell • In Buck v. Bell, Holmes wrote in equally chilling language: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for the imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”