Social Darwinism in five minutes
Social Darwinism is the belief that human societies, nations and races compete the way living species do, and that the “fittest” win and deserve to win. It was never one tidy theory. It was a loose family of arguments, most popular between about 1870 and 1914, that borrowed the language of evolution to defend free-market capitalism, empire, racial hierarchy and, later, eugenics. It is one of the ideas that shaped the 19th century.
The name misleads in two ways. First, the thinker most responsible, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, was writing about social progress before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Second, Darwin never said the poor should be left to fail. In The Descent of Man (1871) he argued that sympathy for the weak is among the finest parts of human nature.
The label was used mostly by critics. It became famous through the American historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1944 book Social Darwinism in American Thought. Hardly anyone at the time called themselves a “social Darwinist”.
What the term actually means
Social Darwinist arguments usually share three claims. Society is a struggle for survival. The winners of that struggle are naturally better. So helping the losers, through charity, welfare or protection, is wasteful or even harmful because it slows progress.
Different groups stressed different parts. Economic writers stressed competition between individuals and firms. Imperialists stressed competition between nations and races. Eugenicists stressed heredity and wanted to control who had children. Because the word covers such different positions, historians use it carefully and name the specific thinker when they can.
Where the ideas came from
The starting point was Thomas Malthus, who argued in 1798 that population grows faster than food and that hunger keeps numbers in check. Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both read Malthus and used the idea to explain how species change.
Spencer reached an evolutionary view of society on his own. In Social Statics (1851) he argued that societies move from simple to complex forms and that the state should interfere as little as possible. After reading Darwin, he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in his Principles of Biology (1864). Darwin adopted it in the fifth edition of the Origin (1869).
Spencer was in fact closer to Lamarck than to Darwin. He believed that traits acquired in a lifetime could be inherited, and he kept defending this view against the German biologist August Weismann in the 1890s. You can see how the two theories differ in Lamarck vs Darwin.
Business, wealth and the state
The ideas found their warmest audience in the United States of the Gilded Age. William Graham Sumner, a Yale professor, argued in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883) that the state should not take from the successful to help the unsuccessful. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who admired Spencer, wrote in 1889 that competition produces progress and that the rich should act as trustees of their wealth. Both men supported free competition, but Carnegie also gave away most of his fortune.
Spencer’s own politics were more complicated than the caricature. He opposed state-run welfare and, in The Man versus the State (1884), warned against government growth. But he also cared about individual liberty and was a critic of war.
Many scholars pushed back at the time. The American sociologist Lester Ward argued that human intelligence lets societies plan and cooperate, so they need not simply copy nature’s struggle.
Race, empire and nation
In the age of empire, European powers carved up Africa and parts of Asia. The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 is a well-known marker. Supporters of empire often said that “higher” races were destined to rule “lower” ones, and described nations as organisms that must grow or die. This gave scientific-sounding cover to conquest and to racial hierarchy, which modern genetics has shown to be baseless. Nationalists drew on the same picture of nations in permanent competition (see What Is Nationalism?).
Biology was also used against women. Some writers claimed that evolution had fitted women for the home and not for public life. Campaigners for the vote rejected this, and the claim collapsed as the movement succeeded (see Women’s Suffrage Movements (1848–1918)).
Eugenics: the most harmful result
Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, coined the word “eugenics” in 1883. He wanted societies to encourage “fit” people to have children and discourage others. The idea spread across Britain, the United States, Scandinavia and Germany in the early 20th century.
Indiana passed the first US forced-sterilisation law in 1907, and in Buck v. Bell (1927) the US Supreme Court upheld such laws. In Germany, the Nazi government passed a sterilisation law in 1933, and about 400,000 people were sterilised under it. The regime then went further, into the murder of disabled people and the Holocaust, justified by a doctrine of racial struggle. After 1945, this history made the label “social Darwinism” a term of strong criticism.
Social Darwinism in Japan
Evolution reached Japan in the 1870s. The American zoologist Edward Morse lectured on it at Tokyo University in 1877, and Spencer’s books were translated and widely read. Some people in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement used Spencer’s ideas about liberty to argue against the government.
The best-known Japanese social Darwinist was Katō Hiroyuki, the president of Tokyo University. He had earlier supported natural rights, but in Jinken shinsetsu (1882) he rejected them, arguing that rights are not given by nature and that the strong win in the struggle for survival. Movement writers answered him in print. As Japan became an empire after 1894, similar arguments about competition between nations became common.
Why it fails
“Fitness” in biology means leaving offspring in a particular environment. It does not mean strength, intelligence or moral worth. Evolution has no ladder and no goal, so there is no “higher” race to be found. And describing how nature works does not tell us how people ought to behave.
Critics said so at the time. Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s defender, argued in Evolution and Ethics (1893) that ethics means resisting the struggle, not copying it. The Russian geographer Peter Kropotkin showed in Mutual Aid (1902) that cooperation is also a powerful factor in survival.
What exams ask
AP-style questions usually ask you to do three things: identify Spencer and Sumner as the main voices; explain how these ideas justified laissez-faire economics, imperialism and eugenics; and note that they distorted Darwin’s work. A strong answer also names a critic, such as Ward, Huxley or Kropotkin, and avoids saying that Darwin himself taught these ideas.
Read next
- Ideas That Shaped the 19th Century: the hub that places social Darwinism beside liberalism, socialism and nationalism.
- Lamarck vs Darwin: the two theories of heredity behind Spencer’s ideas.
- What Is Nationalism?: how the image of nations as competing bodies took hold.
- Women’s Suffrage Movements (1848–1918): how campaigners answered arguments from biology.
