Social Darwinism takes the idea of the survival of the fittest in nature and imposes it on economic systems by arguing that fierce and unregulated competition builds individual character and national economic health.~1 Social Darwinism is "a secularist philosophy," explains Richard Hofstadter, but it is influenced by "a kind of naturalistic Calvinism in which man's relation to nature is as hard and demanding as man's relationship to God under the Calvinistic system."2

There was "nothing in Darwinism that inevitably made it an apology for competition or force," says Hofstadter, so how "can one account for the ascendancy...of the rugged individualist's interpretation of Darwinism?" The answer, he explains, is that in the unregulated economic system of the 1800s, "American society saw its own image in the tooth-and-claw version of natural selection, and that its dominant groups were therefore able to dramatize this vision of competition as a good thing in itself. Ruthless business rivalry and unprincipled politics seemed to be justified by the survival philosophy."~3

In the late 1800s, "it was natural for conservatives to see the economic struggle in competitive society as a reflection of the struggle in the animal world."~4

An influential Social Darwinist in the late 1800s was William Graham Sumner of Yale University.~5 Sumner was a sociologist who believed in evolution, and at the same time was a preacher in the Puritan tradition.6 Sumner justified his views by arguing that in the United States, the terms "strong" and "weak" are "terms which admit no definition unless they are made equivalent to the industrious and the idle, the frugal and the extravagant...if we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest."7

Social Darwinism was used to justify great disparities between a wealthy few and the vast majority of working Americans. This was true in the late 1800s, and it is true in the early years of the new millennium.

Endnotes

1 Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought; Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought; Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought.

2 Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, p. 10.

3 Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, p. 201.

4 Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, p. 57.

5 Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.

6 Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, p. 51.

7 Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, p. 57, citing Sumner, Essays, Vol. 2 p. 56. Similar sentiments are found in Sumner's essay, "The Challenge of Facts," in Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, especially pp. 25-31.

Books Cited