Social Darwinism

by Adina Lopatin

Social Darwinism, a sociological theory developed by Herbert Spencer as a response to urban poverty in industrial England, justifies modern socioeconomic inequality by invoking evolution. Spencer argued that society is an organism that naturally differentiates into social classes. Spencer wrote:

A dominant class arising does not simply become unlike the rest, but assumes control over the rest; and when this class separates into the more and the less dominant, these, again, begin to discharge distinct parts of the entire control. With the classes whose actions are controlled it is the same. The various groups into which they fall have various occupations each of such groups also, within itself, acquiring minor contrasts of parts along with minor contrasts of duties. [1]

The wealthy classes are the healthy organisms, and the poor are the unfit, destined for extinction. Spencer coined the catch phrase now associated with biological evolution, "survival of the fittest." This meant that the evolutionary process of natural selection worked within the human species to create a superior race marked by wealth, industriousness, and prudence.

Spencer wrote:

...this formation of larger societies by the union of smaller ones in war, and this destruction or absorption of the smaller un-united societies by the united larger ones, is an inevitable process through which the varieties of men most adapted for social life, supplant the less adapted varieties. [2]

Spencer's belief that the absorption and extinction of weaker societies was a healthy, natural process led him to claim that any attempts at social reform or government intervention on behalf of the lower classes would interfere with the natural processes and hamper the development of the perfect race. Social Darwinist attitudes flourished under liberalism's celebration of laissez faire government, in opposition to paternalism and socialism. Social Darwinism provided the justification immediately for Victorian poverty, but later for imperialism, colonialism, and racism.

Picture Sources

A. http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1848-CM/cm.html

Footnotes

1. http://www.runet.edu/~lridener/DSS/Spencer/SPENCER.HTML

2. http://www.agner.org/cultsel/chapt2.htm