Social Darwinism: Background information when reading Banquet at Delmonico's

Social Darwinism

This article relates to Banquet at Delmonico's

It may seem that the concept of globalization is a very new one, and that the growth of free trade and its accompanying controversy belong to our era alone. In fact, the 1860s saw an explosion of trade between nations, accompanied by a doctrine of free markets unbridled by government intervention. Unlike today, though, many of the free marketeers of this earlier era were willing to apply their logic outside the realm of economics, to human societies and to human beings themselves.

These are the Social Darwinists (sometimes called Social Positivists) whose thinking stood behind the great economic expansion, was challenged by a global recession, and ultimately fell out of favor in the United States when the princely accumulation of wealth and power by a generation of Robber Barons was recognized as jarringly undemocratic.

The intellectual grandfather of the Social Darwinists was a Frenchman named August Comte, who argued that the progress of science would ultimately yield a perfect society. This faith in rational pursuits was transformed by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer into a belief that rationally sound laws could lead to the perfection of the human race, if only they were allowed to operate without interference.

Spencer and his many followers built on the older concept that humans in their natural state are locked in constant warfare with one another. To this they added the essentially Darwinian view that the struggle for survival will naturally result in the most fit emerging as the victors.

In practice, these arguments were used to justify unfettered accumulation of wealth by the few, racial superiority and imperial conquest.

Image: Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (1798-1857)

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Banquet at Delmonico's. It originally ran in January 2009 and has been updated for the April 2011 paperback edition. Go to magazine.