Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945 PDF Download

Author: Mike Hawkins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521574341
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

View

Book Description
An analysis of the ideological influence of Social Darwinists in Europe and America.

Author: Mike Hawkins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521574006
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

View

Book Description
This original and wide-ranging study clarifies the meaning of Social Darwinism and demonstrates its relevance through a study of European and American social and political thinkers. It is the only study of Social Darwinism that combines the study of individual thinkers with the distinctive ideological themes (e.g., eugenics) and does so in a comprehensive historical and comparative framework. A wide spectrum of academic readers will enjoy Dr. Hawkins' lucid and subtle analysis and find it a useful guide through a difficult and complex subject.

Author: Richard Hofstadter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 266

View

Book Description

Author: Richard Hofstadter
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807055038
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

View

Book Description
Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory and the notable battle waged among thinkers over the implications of evolutionary theory for social thought and political action. Theorists such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner adopted the idea of the struggle for existence as justification for the evils as well as the benefits of laissez-faire modern industrial society. Others such as William James and John Dewey argued that human planning was needed to direct social development and improve upon the natural order. Hofstadter's classic study of the ramifications of Darwinism is a major analysis of the social philosophies that animated intellectual movements of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

Author: Robert J. Richards
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022605909X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

View

Book Description
In tracing the history of Darwin’s accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most scholars agree that Darwin introduced blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing moral values from the understanding of nature. According to the standard interpretation, the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including moral behavior, ultimately selfish. Few doubt that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by the master’s German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, inspired Hitler and led to Nazi atrocities. In this collection of essays, Robert J. Richards argues that this orthodox view is wrongheaded. A close historical examination reveals that Darwin, in more traditional fashion, constructed nature with a moral spine and provided it with a goal: man as a moral creature. The book takes up many other topics—including the character of Darwin’s chief principles of natural selection and divergence, his dispute with Alfred Russel Wallace over man’s big brain, the role of language in human development, his relationship to Herbert Spencer, how much his views had in common with Haeckel’s, and the general problem of progress in evolution. Moreover, Richards takes a forceful stand on the timely issue of whether Darwin is to blame for Hitler’s atrocities. Was Hitler a Darwinian? is intellectual history at its boldest.

Author: David Paul Crook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521258043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

View

Book Description
This is an intellectual biography of Benjamin Kidd, a leading Social Darwinist in the years before World War I, and a social prophet in the tradition of Comte and Spencer. His first book Social Evolution, published in 1894, was an immediate and enormous success around the world. In it, Kidd developed a collectivist form of Social Darwinism in tune with the values of Progressivism in America and the 'new liberalism' in Britain. By many it was regarded as the basis for a properly scientific sociology, and the combination of its claims to scientific methodology, with an emphasis on non-rational forces as the agents of progress accurately caught the temper of its times. Launched on his career as a writer, Kidd's subsequent books and journalism continued to exercise extraordinary influence. His 'social imperialism', linking a bio-political defence of empire with a programme of social reform, won currency in the Anglo-American world at a time of expansionary fervour.

Author: Wiebke Schröder
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656392773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 22

View

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject History - Miscellaneous, grade: A, Indiana University (History and Philosophy of Science), course: The Meanings of Darwinism, language: English, abstract: [...] In this paper I want to show how one particular difference in defining social Darwinism affects the manner of telling history. Namely, the difference between social Darwinism as a world-view that is clearly independent of Darwin’s theory and social Darwinism as an application of Darwin’s theory in one way or the other. In the next section I explain why I use Hawkins as a representative of the latter version even though he claims to define social Darwinism independently of Darwin. After a short review of Hofstadter’s reasons for classifying Carnegie as a social Darwinist, I will analyze Carnegie’s essays in some depth. As the only historian who does not take Darwin’s theory as the basis for social Darwinism, I will then confront the analysis with Greene’s perspective. Finally I conclude with an answer to the question of historiographical relevance of defining social Darwinism one way or the other.

Author: Marwa Elshakry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022600144X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

View

Book Description
In Reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa Elshakry questions current ideas about Islam, science, and secularism by exploring the ways in which Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. Borrowing from translation and reading studies and weaving together the history of science with intellectual history, she explores Darwin’s global appeal from the perspective of several generations of Arabic readers and shows how Darwin’s writings helped alter the social and epistemological landscape of the Arab learned classes. Providing a close textual, political, and institutional analysis of the tremendous interest in Darwin’s ideas and other works on evolution, Elshakry shows how, in an age of massive regional and international political upheaval, these readings were suffused with the anxieties of empire and civilizational decline. The politics of evolution infiltrated Arabic discussions of pedagogy, progress, and the very sense of history. They also led to a literary and conceptual transformation of notions of science and religion themselves. Darwin thus became a vehicle for discussing scriptural exegesis, the conditions of belief, and cosmological views more broadly. The book also acquaints readers with Muslim and Christian intellectuals, bureaucrats, and theologians, and concludes by exploring Darwin’s waning influence on public and intellectual life in the Arab world after World War I. Reading Darwin in Arabic is an engaging and powerfully argued reconceptualization of the intellectual and political history of the Middle East.

Author: Pauline Mazumdar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134950217
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

View

Book Description
This scholarly and penetrating study of eugenics is a major contribution to our understanding of the complex relation between science, ideology and class.

Author: Micheline Ishay
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816624704
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

View

Book Description
Internationalism and Its Betrayal was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. A new world order, proclaimed Western leaders after the cold war, could extend liberal democracy and human rights around the globe. Yet the specter of nationalism once again haunts the world, threatening to extinguish the spirit of internationalism. Although internationalism is typically understood to be diametrically opposed to nationalism, Micheline Ishay argues to the contrary, maintaining that internationalism often incorporates an individualist element that manifests itself as nationalism during critical periods such as war. For example, the new liberal internationalism invoked after the cold war is now revealing its limits-as reflected by the UN's inability to interfere promptly to stop ethnic and nationalist conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Internationalism and Its Betrayal explores the tensions and contradictions between ideas of nationalism and internationalism, focusing on the major political thinkers from the early modern period into the nineteenth century. Ishay examines the writings of Vico, Grotius, Rousseau, Kant, Paine, Robespierre, Burke, Fichte, de Maistre, and Hegel. She speaks to an audience of individuals interested in the spread of democracy, students of human rights and international relations, historians of the French Revolution, and political theorists. Micheline Ishay was born in Tel Aviv, and raised in Israel, Luxembourg, and Brussels, Belgium. She is currently assistant professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Denver University, where she is also serving as director of the human rights program and executive director of the Center on Rights Development. She is coeditor of The Nationalism Reader (1994). Craig Calhoun is professor of sociology and history and director of the University Center for International Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the editor of the Contradictions of Modernity series for the University of Minnesota Press.