After publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species it did not take long for his ideas about biology to be extended to the operation of human societies. Darwinism first caught on in the United States of America. (Darwin was made an honorary member of the American Philosophical Society in 1869, ten years before his own university, Cambridge, conferred on him an honorary degree.60) American social scientists William Graham Sumner and Thorsten Veblen of Yale, Lester Ward of Brown, John Dewey at the University of Chicago, William James, John Fiske and others at Harvard, debated politics, war and the layering of human communities into different classes against the background of a Darwinian ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘survival of the fittest.’ Sumner believed that Darwin’s new way of looking at mankind had provided the ultimate explanation – and rationalisation – for the world as it was. It explained laissez-faire economics, the free, unfettered competition popular among businessmen. Others believed that it explained the prevailing imperial structure of the world in which the ‘fit’ white races were placed ‘naturally’ above the ‘degenerate’ races of other colours.61 20
Fiske and Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899, flatly contradicted Sumner’s belief that the well-to-do could be equated with the biologically fittest. Veblen in fact turned such reasoning on its head, arguing that the type of characters ‘selected for dominance’ in the business world were little more than barbarians, a‘throw-back’ to a more primitive form of society.62
In the German-speaking countries, a veritable galaxy of scientists and pseudo-scientists, philosophers and pseudo-philosophers, intellectuals and would-be intellectuals, competed to outdo each other in the struggle for public attention. Friedrich Ratzel, a zoologist and geographer, argued that all living organisms competed in a Kampf um Raum, a struggle for space, in which the winners expelled the losers. This struggle extended to humans, and the successful races had to extend their living space, Lebensraum, if they were to avoid decline.63 Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), a zoologist from the University of Jena, took to social Darwinism as if it were second nature. He referred to ‘struggle’ as ‘a watchword of the day’.64 However, Haeckel was a passionate advocate of the principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and, unlike Spencer, he favoured a strong state. It was this, allied to his bellicose racism and anti-Semitism, that led people to see him as a proto-Nazi.65 For Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the renegade son of a British admiral, who went to Germany and married Wagner’s daughter, racial struggle was ‘fundamental to a “scientific” understanding of history and culture’.66 Chamberlain portrayed the history of the West ‘as an incessant conflict between the spiritual and culture-creating Aryans and the mercenary and materialistic Jews’ (his first wife had been half-Jewish).67 For Chamberlain, the Germanic peoples were the last remnants of the Aryans, but they had become enfeebled through interbreeding with other races.
Max Nordau (1849–1923), born in Budapest, was like Durkheim the son of a rabbi. His best-known book was the two-volume Entartung (Degeneration) which, despite being six hundred pages long, became an international best-seller. Nordau became convinced there was ‘a severe mental epidemic; a sort of black death of degeneracy and hysteria’, which was affecting Europe, sapping its vitality, and was manifest in a whole range of symptoms, ‘squint eyes, imperfect ears, stunted growth . . . pessimism, apathy, impulsiveness, emotionalism, mysticism, and a complete absence of any sense of right and wrong’.68 Everywhere he looked there was decline.69 The impressionist painters were the result, he said, of a degenerate physiology, nystagmus, a trembling of the eyeball, causing them to paint in the fuzzy, indistinct way that they did. In the writings of Baudelaire, Wilde and Nietzsche, Nordau found ‘overwheening egomania’, while Zola had ‘an obsession with filth’. Nordau believed that degeneracy was caused by industrialised society – literally the wear-and-tear exerted on leaders by railways, steamships, telephones and factories. When Freud visited Nordau he found him ‘unbearably vain’ with a complete lack of a sense of humour.70 In Austria, more than anywhere else in Europe, social Darwinism did not stop at theory. Two political leaders, Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, fashioned political platforms that stressed the twin aims of, first, power to the peasants (because they had remained ‘uncontaminated’ by contact with the corrupt cities) and, second, a virulent anti-Semitism, in which Jews were characterised as the very embodiment of degeneracy. It was this miasma of ideas that greeted the young Adolf Hitler when he first arrived in Vienna in 1907 to attend art school.
France, in contrast, was relatively slow to catch on to Darwinism, but when she did she had her own passionate social Darwinist. In her Origines de l’homme et des sociétés, Clémence Auguste Royer took a strong social Darwinist line, regarding ‘Aryans’ as superior to other races and warfare between them as inevitable in the interests of progress.71 In Russia, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) released Mutual Aid in 1902, where he took a different line, arguing that although competition was undoubtedly a fact of life, so too was co-operation, which was so prevalent in the animal kingdom as to constitute a natural law. Like Veblen, he presented an alternative model to the Spencerians in which violence was condemned as abnormal. Social Darwinism was, not unnaturally, compared with Marxism and not only in the minds of Russian intellectuals.72
Not dissimilar arguments were heard across the Atlantic in the southern states of the USA. Darwinism prescribed a common origin for all races and therefore could have been used as an argument against slavery, as it was by Chester Loring Brace.73 But others argued the opposite. Joseph le Conte (1823–1901), like Lapouge or Ratzel, was an educated man, not a red neck but a trained geologist. When his book The Race Problem in the South appeared in 1892, he was the highly-esteemed president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His argument was brutally Darwinian.74 He said that when two races came into contact one was bound to dominate the other.
The most immediate political impact of social Darwinism was the Eugenics movement, which became established with the new century. All of the above writers played a role in this, but the most direct progenitor, the real father, was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911). In an article published in 1904 (in the American Journal of Sociology), he argued that the essence of eugenics was that ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ could be objectively described and measured.75