Social Darwinism and Socialist Darwinism in Germany: 1860 to 1900

Abstract

Against Robert Young and others who draw causal connections too easily between science and its political applications. Diversity of cultural uses of Darwinism proves its malleability and the extent of ``conceptual confusions, indeterminacies, and controversies in evolutionary biology.`` Role of ``mediating discourses`` in making the ideological borrowings from biology possible. Social application of evolution depended on choice of which version of evolution and which mediating discourse.Haeckel's writings of the 1860 and 1870s serve liberal political asperations: Descent from the apes deflates hereditary principle of nobility and monarchy. Heredity of vice among aristocracy (except in Thuringia). Cultural and biological differences separate the races; human history transforms Darwinian struggle into an intellectual competition in the higher races. Firtation with eugenics. H against militarism, because of selection against the fittest, and medical selection that allows the unfit to reproduce more. But H stops short of endorsing negative eugenics. H applies evolutionary laws of specialization, division of labor, progress directly to human affairs. Concessions to authority not only in eugenical ideas but in hierarchy and centralisim, but this, too is supposed to be liberal Kompromisbereitschaft. Justification for colonialism in concept of struggle between the races. Haeckel's support for Bismarck's Kulturkampf also gets evolutionary support from refutation of teleology and vital forces. Further arguments for Kulturkampf from history of science and Church's obstruction of mechanico-causal program. However, polemics are more anticlerical than antireligious.Subscribes to a Sonderweg-interpretation of Haeckel. Sees in him the same compromises that the liberals made with the Junkers. Working-class socialism scared the liberals into compromising timidity. Haeckel alarmed by socialist appropriation of evolutionary arguments and realigns his Darwinism accordingly. Liberal Darwinism thus takes a Sonderweg instead of allying itself with socialism.Shift to August Bebel and arguments about women's inferiority and evidence from brain weights. Bebel takes up Darwinian view that external conditions cause organic change. Common anticlericalism with H, also commitment to secular culture, naturalistic approach to human history and society. Overlap between liberal and Social Democratic evolutionism also in inheritance of acquired characteristics. Policy differecnes on women, labor. For H progress means intellectual progress resulting from inheritance of psychological adaptations, while Bebel stresses the need to control social conditions that will bring progress.Haeckel-Virchow debate. Virchow wants to distance himself from whole Haeckelian program and its socialist interpretation. H's counterattack paints V's agnosticism as a cover for supernaturalism.Engels on Haeckel and Darwinism.