Evolutionism and British sociology

Abstract

In 1902, in its eighth edition, the Encyclopaedia Britannica included an article on sociology for the very first time. Written by Benjamin Kidd (1858-1916), the now forgotten but then widely-read author of Social Evolution, the entry outlined the history and scope of a field that ‘may be defined as the science of human society, in the same manner that biology may be taken to imply the science of life’ (Kidd, 1902, p. 692, 1894; Crook, 1984). As Kidd went on to explain, whilst ambitions for a general science of society had a long past, sociology had a relatively short history. At the period between 1830 and 1842, when Comte published the Philosophie Positive, the conditions were not ready for a science of society to be instituted. The Darwinian doctrine of evolution by natural selection had not yet been enunciated, and knowledge of social phenomena was limited and very imperfect. As an instance of the character of the change that has since been in progress, it may be mentioned that one of Comte’s main positions - that, indeed, to which most of the characteristic conceptions of his system of philosophy were related - was that ‘the anatomical and physiological study of individual man’ should precede the theory of the human mind and of human society. It is probable, however, that it must now be considered that no really fundamental or far-reaching principle of human development can be formulated as the result of such a position. For with the application of the doctrine of evolution to society a position is becoming defined which is almost the reverse of it, namely that the development of the individual, and to a large extent of the human mind itself, must be regarded as the correlative of the social process in evolution. (Kidd, 1902, p. 694).