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More on that first use of "social Darwnist"

 


Here are some dates.

Herbert Spencer, SOCIAL STATICS (1851)

Charles Darwin, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859) 

Henry Maine ANCIENT LAW (1861)

Henry Maine, VILLAGE COMMUNITIES (1871) 

Charles Darwin, THE DESCENT OF MAN (1871)

Joseph Fisher, THE HISTORY OF LANDHOLDING (1877)

Herbert Spencer, THE DATA OF ETHICS (1879)  

Social Statics, the one specific ally cited (and rejected as a constitutional authority) by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Lochner case, was early Spencer, and preceded the great Darwinian controversy.

Maine did develop his legal theories subsequent to Darwin, but there is no biologism in them. Maine believed that human societies have passed through predictable stages, and that the overall direction of progress in which the world was engaged in the 19th century was a move away from status toward contract. A movement away from inborn identity to voluntary choices and the acceptance of their consequences. 

The later Spencer may well owe a lot to Maine (whose picture is above). But probably mush less to Darwin. 

Where does Fisher fit in? His views seem to have been essentialist. The Celts have their own patterns of thought, Anglo-Saxons have another. The history of landowning in a place is the manifestation of the patterns of thought that follow from the inheritance of that place, until it is invaded and conquered, in which case it is the new ruling class whose genetic essence counts. 

Maine, as a detail within the big picture I have described, wrote of the development of a feudal system in Ireland from an earlier system of mobile chieftains.  This wasn't part of a movement from status to contract, but it helped define status, making it geographical in nature. 

As I noted yesterday, the commonality of Maine and Darwin that seems to have led to Fisher's jibe was their common anti-essentialism. Both theories treat things (institutions in the one case and species in the other) changing into other things over time, rather than sticking to a genetic (and, in Fisjer's case, an ethnic) essence.  

In that sense, I submit, all serious 21st century thinkers are social Darwinists.  

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  1. HenryOctober 1, 2020 at 8:09 AM

    Christopher,

    Is it fair to say that you have an idiosyncratic sense of social Darwinism? Of course institutions change; they are more likely to change than species, because a change in species depend upon random genetic mutations, whereas people can choose to change institutions.

    Darwinism posits both evolution and the cause of evolution, which is natural selection. To call 21st century thinkers social Darwinists simply because they recognize that institutions change is to focus solely on evolution. But the ordinary meaning of social Darwinism is that institutions change through natural selection through the survival of the fittest. If the institution of a largely capitalist system of health insurance, for example, results in poor people dying from a lack of health care, then so be it; it is not our place to replace the largely capitalist system of health insurance with a more socialist one.

    I see one element of confusion in what I just wrote. Is it the institution, such as our system of health insurance that survives if it is fit, or is it the people affected by the institution? Can you help me?

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  2. ChristopherOctober 1, 2020 at 3:32 PM

    I think you are attributing to me a view I'm only attributing to Fisher. I'm simply thinking through the history of the term. And, it seems, the original use of it was in service of something that look, in hindsight, like an "idiosyncratic use." For exactly the reason you claim.

    But I don't think Fisher was necessarily so much an outlier here as you might suspect. We of the 21st century say "of COURSE social institutions change." Yet a more essentialist view of them was taken very seriously for a long time. Medieval artists used to imagine ancient battles in full suits of armor. Even there, they could hardly imagine that battles and weaponry had changed.

    The irony here is that if I am right in how I read the situation, Fisher was a social Darwinist himself, in the John D. Rockefeller sense or something close to it, and much more so than Maine (somewhat more so than Spencer).

    I suppose which entity survives or dies in a survival-of-the-fittest reading depends upon the theorist. For old Rockefeller, it was presumably the fittest oil company that survived. I doubt he wished death upon the employees of his competitors. He might have said, "let them all come work for me!"

    Theodore Roosevelt, I think, was a social Darwinist on the level of the nation state. If the U swallows up the Philippines, it suggests the former is fit and the latter is or was not.

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