Social Darwinism, the British Labour Party, and the First World War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3970566 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Redvaldsen (0000-0001-8531-0726, University of Agder, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-19 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The European Legacy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10848770.2021.1972540 |
| OpenAlex | W3196820723 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 28 |
This article investigates whether the doctrine of social Darwinism had any bearing on the Labour Party’s decision to support Britain’s participation in the First World War. Many socialist intellectuals were wedded to social Darwinist conceptions of the world. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) published a number of tracts on the interrelationship between Darwinism or science and politics. The article looks for evidence of biological thinking in the Labour Party and the ILP prior to the First World War. It finds only small traces, vastly outweighed by environmental remedies to problems that were regarded as biological by social Darwinists. The labour movement also stood for pacifism as a signature policy. Yet when the war erupted, there was a sudden shift among Labour MPs towards supporting belligerent action. Did social Darwinism finally begin affecting them? Since there was only a slight connection between the doctrine and a few MPs, the article concludes that it was hardly an influence. Pragmatic reasons such as rallying to one’s own nation, supporting working-class communities and resisting atrocities predominated. Social Darwinism was in fact more likely to be utilized by neutralists who argued that Germany was more “civilized” than Russia and therefore deserved to win the war
Belligerent · Darwinism · Doctrine · Epistemology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social Darwinism · Sociology · World War II · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Philosophy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
Breeding Superman
Evolution and the war
The Lowell lectures on the ascent of man /
The Moral Aspects of Socialism
Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution
Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945
History of Political Thought
Social Darwinism
Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party
British National Dailies and the Outbreak of War in 1914
A Class Society at War
Pacifist Radicalism in the Post-War British Labour Party
Revolutionary Socialist Internationalism
The Abolition of War
MacDonald, Henderson, and the Outbreak of War, 1914
Origins of the myth of social Darwinism
The Union of Democratic Control during the First World War
Socialism and the Challenge of War
Social Darwinism in Anglophone Academic Journals
Social Darwinism and English Thought
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |