The Survival of the Fittest is our Doctrine

History or Histrionics

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4456830
AutoresRobert C Bannister (Swarthmore College, autor de correspondencia)
Año1970
Volumen31
Número3
Páginas377
Fecha de publicación1970-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2708512
PMID11610032
OpenAlexW1980704140
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10

teenth century reached unusual agreement on one point. Opponents of increased state action, they alleged, were engaged in highly dubious enterprise of wedding to the virtues of classical economics, thus trading illicitly on the prestige of the new science. In Progress and Poverty (1879), Henry George charged that Malthusianism was now buttressed by the new science, and bemoaned a sort of hopeful fatalism, of which current literature full. final plea for any form of brutality in these days, wrote the Nationalist Edward Bellamy, is that tends to the of the fittest. of the our doctrine, echoed the reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd. representatives of science noted the sociologist Lester Ward more soberly, stand boldly in the track of current events. Ward acknowledged that appeals to natural law antedated the Darwinian doctrines of survival of the fittest and natural selection. But, he added, it cannot be denied that these doctrines ... have greatly strengthened this habit of thought.' This testimony important for two reasons. Urging programs that ranged from the Single Tax to socialism, these reformers were in common battle against theories of laissez-faire, individualism, and related success mythologies that had bloomed during America's first stage of industrialism. The charge that defenders of laissez-faire had misappropriated was an important part of their since usually prefaced correct reading of evolution, the reform Darwinism that informed many socialist and neo-liberal proposals. Moreover, these same charges were widely quoted in historical accounts of social Darwinism which appeared during the 1940's and 1950's, the most important of which Richard Hofstadter's Social in American Thought (1944). Darwinism-as embodied in the popular catchwords struggle for existence, natural selection, and survival of the fittest, as well as in general evolutionism-was, Hofstadter

Biology · Doctrine · Evolutionary biology · Survival of the fittest · Theology · Economic Theory and Institutions · Philosophy