By Robert Bannister
"The such a lot systematic and accomplished attempt but made to evaluate the function performed by way of Darwinian rules within the writings of English-speaking social theorists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries." --Isis "In looking to set the checklist directly, Bannister cuts during the amalgam with an highbrow shredder, exposing the illogic and incompatibility keen on fusing Charles Darwin's at the foundation of Species with Herbert Spencer's Social Statics... Bannister's familiarity with correct texts and their reception via modern social theorists, students, and critics on either side of the Atlantic is impressive." --Journal of Interdisciplinary background "A high-quality contribution to Anglo-American highbrow history." --Journal of yankee heritage
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Extra resources for Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought
Sample text
But the rest of Lamarck's theory, stripped of the sentiment interieur, had great influence on him. He read Lamarck's work extensively in his student days, and accepted the Frenchman's account of direct adaptation (the laws of use and disuse and the inheritance of a In more charitable moods, the President's critics might admit that his Hollywood-cum-cowboy world view owes little to the Origin of Species. Not, however, The New Republic, which in 1982 featured an article titled "Social Darwinism, Reagan Style," complete with a cover drawing showing the President's three-stage emergence from simian ancestry. Although the article itself was a review of two technical works in economics, these were joined by discussion of a reissue of Spencer's Principles of Sociology. This unfortunate marriage set tongues wagging, Rogers continued, as partisans of industrial competition and Machtpolitik made struggle the engine of progress. The result was a harsh social Darwinism that Darwin was the last to want. "3 In fact, Darwinism was neither neutral nor inherently conservative. On this point the reform Darwinists were correct: their theory that human control must replace the laws of nature was the accurate reading of Darwin's theory. In the words of the psychologist-historian Howard Gruber: It would be entirely in harmony with [Darwin's] thinking to insist that the struggle for survival of the human species must be, in the years to come, a struggle to develop social forms that enhance cooperation and rational, long-term planning for collective ends rather than shortsighted, individualistic efforts for private gain.