Darwinism and Social Darwinism

This chapter introduces the main scientific ideas associated with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and examines the public life of these ideas, above all so-called “social Darwinism”: the notion that the survival of the fittest applies to society as well as to nature. Although the phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Spencer, Darwin adopted it, and also linked his theory of evolution by natural selection with human inequality. Nevertheless some of the greatest fans of Darwinism in the later nineteenth century were socialists, who represented their struggle for social justice as a continuation of the struggle underpinning natural progress. Only after 1900 did the term “social Darwinism” come to be used in its current sense, initially as a disapproving name for a minority position within European sociology, and by the mid-twentieth century as a generalized label for the naturalizing of competition and inequality. The challenges that this history raises are nowhere more complex or more distressing than in the case of Germany and Austria, where recognizably Darwinian ideas were current in the highest military circles before and during both world wars.