“Social Darwinism” is an intellectual fiction built mostly after Darwin, not by him. Spencer, Sumner, Galton, et al. turned evolutionary description into a moral and political imperative: the strong win, the weak lose, and this is good. It became an ideology of stratification rationalized as “natural law.” The most important counter-argument against this is not simply that the ideology is cruel (though it is), but that major philosophers, scientists, and sociologists of the past century have demonstrated that Social Darwinism basically rests on two invalid inferences: first, that nature is competitive more than cooperative; second, that nature supplies moral guidance.
Two lines of refutation emerged very early.
First: the naturalists who studied cooperation. The clearest is Kropotkin. His 1902 book Mutual Aid is a straight intervention against the supposedly Darwinian elevation of competition. Kropotkin doesn’t deny selection; he denies that competition is the only or dominant form. For social species, he argues, cooperation is often the decisive factor in survival. In a way, Kropotkin flips the Spencerian script from within biology itself: if nature can be a moral touchstone, then mutual aid is as “natural” as struggle. Kropotkin’s move does not fully reject the is→ought jump yet, but he prepares the ground by extracting the moral authority from the competitive model.
Second: the sociologists who demonstrated that society is not biology. Durkheim is essential here. His entire intellectual program stands against biological reductionism. Social facts are sui generis. The moral order is not caused nor justified by biological fitness. Lester Frank Ward, in the US, did something similar; he argued explicitly that intelligent planning and social welfare are superior to blind selection. Ward was saying, in the 1890s already, that leaving things to “nature” is just a refusal to use intelligence. This is the exact inverse of Spencer.
And then there is the strongest philosophical attack: you can’t get morality from nature. G.E. Moore formalizes this as the naturalistic fallacy. Even if evolution is universally true, nothing follows morally. There is no inference from what selection produces to what we should value. This is the fatal wound: Social Darwinism depends entirely on the idea that what nature does is what we should do.
Prior to Moore, Thomas Henry Huxley strongly differentiated between the “cosmic process” (nature's struggle) and the “ethical process” (human society). Huxley was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and they were close collaborators in the scientific community. He argued that the natural process was “a free fight,” but human ethical progress involved actively opposing this struggle. In his 1893 essay Evolution and Ethics, he argued that the moral end of humans was not to follow the cosmic process but to combat it through self-restraint, compassion, and justice.
The anti-racialist revolution in anthropology then finishes the job. Franz Boas, and the generation after him, dissolve the alleged linkage between biological traits and cultural or moral greatness. Boasian anthropology shows that racial typologies and hierarchies are conceptual fictions, not biological facts. Social Darwinism needed racial typology as its substrate. When Boas killed the typologies, the entire edifice lost empirical ground.
Later figures continue these lines. Dewey and James insist that democracy, melioration, and experimentation are moral projects not beholden to nature. Dewey criticized Social Darwinism for being used to justify the status quo and block reform. He stressed that humans could actively shape their environment and institutions through intelligence, democratic experimentation, and collective action, rather than being passively subjected to a "natural" struggle for existence. Sen and Nussbaum recast human flourishing in terms of capability, not competitive “fitness.” Sapolsky and Gould dismantle biological determinism at the level of contemporary science, showing the complexity and contingency of evolutionary processes.
Not Just Cruel, But Conceptually Bankrupt
Put all this together and you get a coherent picture: Social Darwinism failed because intellectual work across biology, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology showed that (1) competition is not the only or even the dominant mode of natural selection, (2) morality cannot be read off of empirical natural processes, and (3) the supposed “natural hierarchies” between peoples are pseudo-science.
Social Darwinism only works if nature is morally prescriptive, if competition is ontologically primary, and if “fitness” is a moral category. All three assumptions have been destroyed. The opposition to Social Darwinism was not merely a humanitarian reaction. It was a conceptual dismantling.
The great anti–Social Darwinist thinkers did not merely say: “be kind.” They said: you are extrapolating nature into normativity illegitimately, and they thoroughly dismantled this move. They said: be rigorous, and they dismantled the scaffolding of Social Darwinism across disciplines.
The Metamorphosis of Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism did not die with the waning of the Victorian imperial imagination. It did not vanish with the explicit discrediting of race science after the Second World War. It did not collapse under the weight of Mengele and Aktion T4. It simply shed the skin of overt ideology and redistributed itself into new registers. Its conceptual DNA persisted: in the assumption that there are “natural” winners and “natural” losers, that competition is reality, and that elimination—whether direct or indirect—is a legitimate sorting mechanism. And crucially: that the market, the race, the innovation frontier, the “future,” the algorithm, or the genome is the place where this sorting is revealed as truth. The rhetoric has become less explicit about “species” and “fitness,” and more coded around: optimization, efficiency, resource allocation, hard truths, tradeoffs and so on but the underlying eliminativist grammar is the same. These terms transform the brutal “struggle” into a sterile, technocratic problem, making the exclusion of the “weak” sound like a rational, inevitable conclusion rather than a moral choice.
Its afterlives are multiple.
The postwar fascination with genetics revived deterministic narratives about intelligence, criminality, and social behavior. The Bell Curve controversy in the 1990s, for instance, reignited debates about race, IQ, and social stratification—thinly veiled echoes of Galtonian thinking. While modern genetics has largely rejected such simplistic correlations, the cultural appetite for biological explanations of social difference remains strong.
One descendant is the technocratic bioethics that emerged in the late twentieth century and peaked again during the COVID pandemic. The idea of “QALYs”—quality-adjusted life years—as a utilitarian calculus of triage reintroduced the logic of selective discard under the guise of optimization. In this idiom, the weak are not eliminated by nature, but by spreadsheet. The ruck becomes a low-priority category. Nature’s supposed impersonal sorting mechanism becomes managerial.
Another descendant is the corporate libertarianism that masquerades as anti-ideology. The market will sort this out, we are told: the inefficient firm, the non-competitive worker, the redundant profession. Market logic is naturalized. The marketplace becomes evolutionary time compressed. In this framing, “life chances” and “fitness” are treated as the same commodity. One proves one’s right to exist not by being, but by outperforming. The invisible hand became a secular stand-in for natural selection: those who succeed deserve to, and those who fail must adapt or perish. Welfare and redistribution were cast as “unnatural” interventions, echoing Spencer’s warnings against aiding the “unfit.”
Another descendant—more obscure but arguably more dangerous—is the language of eugenics reappearing through genomics, polygenic scores, and the new rhetoric of “embodied potential.” This residue is often unconscious. It does not say: we must eliminate the weak. It rather says: we must optimize the human substrate for the future. “The future” becomes the new species. The present weak become an externality.
And there is yet another descendant, which looks very contemporary: the Silicon Valley accelerationist ethos that moralizes speed. The idea that slowing down harms “the future of intelligence” reintroduces selective elimination by temporal means: those who cannot keep up deserve to be left behind.
The constant across these transformations is that Social Darwinism never needed to be explicit to endure. It only needed to migrate into new conceptual skins. Whenever “nature” or “the market” or “the future” or “the algorithm” is invoked as that which will do the sorting, the old eliminationist grammar is smuggled in. The nineteenth century’s blunt ontology of fitness transmuted into new metaphysics of inevitability. The core proposition—some will and must fall into the ruck—still haunts the political unconscious.
The metamorphosis of Social Darwinism is therefore not a historical curiosity. It is a metamorphic grammar that continues to authorize the abandonment of the socially inconvenient. Its power is that it no longer calls itself by name.
It is a historical mistake to imagine that Social Darwinism lived only in the right-liberal domain of laissez-faire capitalism. Yes, Spencer and Sumner framed competition and market outcomes as evidence of natural hierarchy. But that was only one lineage. The deeper continuity is the assumption that life sorts itself into fitter and less fit, and that this sorting is objective, scientific, “real.”
Eugenics was the maturation of that logic. And crucially: the political left was deeply complicit.
Historically, elements of the early twentieth-century progressive and socialist movements embraced eugenics as enlightened statecraft. American Progressives, British Fabians, Nordic Social Democrats, Labour reformers—all took eugenics to be a modern, rational mode of social planning. They rejected laissez-faire capitalism; they rejected “nature red in tooth and claw.” They believed that leaving selection to markets was barbaric. But they did not abandon the premise of differential human worth—they simply transferred the agency from markets to bureaucracy.
This is the core: the underlying metaphysics was shared. There are human lives more worth preserving than others. There are traits and types that should be cultivated, and those that should be eliminated. Whether the sorting is done by markets or by state experts is just a secondary parameterization.
Thus we can write a formula:
Social Darwinism + faith in markets = laissez-faire “nature sorts the weak”
Social Darwinism + faith in expertise = progressive eugenics (“we will scientifically uplift humanity by pruning it”)
The continuity is the eliminationist grammar.
Eugenics is not an aberration but a natural continuation of the Social Darwinist fantasy—the fantasy of natural hierarchy made administrative.
Social Darwinism shed the language of markets and put on the language of planning. And this same mutation persisted into later domains: in the utilitarian bioethics; in the therapeutic moralization of suffering as personal failure; in characterological psychologies that reward “strong personality” types; in nationalist notions of population quality; even in egalitarian welfare thinking that relies on productivity-based metrics of who is “most likely to benefit” from support. The rhetorical dressing changes—scientific planning, efficient markets, group vitality, moral discipline, future optimization—but the deep structure remains: some human beings are more entitled to existence than others.
The metamorphosis of Social Darwinism is not a move from Right to Left or vice-versa. It is a move from one justification for elimination to another. The apparatus of justification changed; the eliminationist metaphysics did not.
That is the continuity line that matters.
If Social Darwinism only lived on in the liberal–techno–market axis, then it would be a niche pathology of one ideological lane. But it metastasized also into domains that superficially think themselves alter or anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, or even anti-modern. So this “afterlife section” needs at least one more branch which I will briefly sketch:
The moral continuation of Social Darwinism (the survival-of-the-holiest, the survival-of-the-most-virtuous)
This mutation is older than capitalism itself. Weber already saw how the Puritan conscience fused worldly success with inward righteousness, creating a moral Darwinism long before anyone coined the phrase. The secular world merely inherited the grammar. Taylor’s account of modern authenticity shows how this became an ethic of personal “self-responsibility,” and Rieff’s analysis of the therapeutic age shows how moral purity transmuted into psychological resilience. Thus in self-help, wellness optimization, stoic-influencer masculinity, and mindset culture, failure is the telltale mark of insufficient inner discipline. Sedgwick, Chen, and Puar trace how fragility and debility get recoded as spiritual or psychological lapses — the weak deserve their weakness because they could not maintain the proper “posture” toward life. The winners, naturally, win because they deserved to. Weber would simply recognize the old inquietude of salvation anxiety in new secular clothes.
The spiritual continuation
Some spiritual frameworks simply cosmologize the same logic. Arendt already warned about the privatization of suffering; Sontag showed how illness metaphors moralize misfortune. Contemporary critics like Sara Ahmed and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò show how this logic turns structural harm into an intimate failing of consciousness itself. Disability theorists like Garland-Thomson and Kafer have catalogued the evolutionary metaphors that haunt this terrain: to be disabled, chronically ill, traumatized, or depressed is to be spiritually “less evolved.” Ehrenreich’s critique of positive-thinking metaphysics shows how suffering becomes a metaphysical incompetence, while Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics exposes the machinery. If the universe gives you exactly what you “vibrate” at, then oppression is a personal error in attunement. Under the banner of cosmic law, structural violence gets smuggled back into the soul.
The communitarian continuation
Elsewhere the logic sheds individualism and dons collectivist armor. Nationalist and neo-reactionary subcultures revive a communitarian Social Darwinism: not “let the weak die,” but “the weak corrode the integrity of the group; they must be reshaped or cast out.” Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction supplies the architecture, while Mosse and Sternhell documented the older völkisch genealogies in which the nation is a body whose purity must be defended. Sloterdijk’s worries about “anthropotechnics” sketch out the same hardening impulse at the civilizational scale. The unit must be strong enough to withstand others. Anderson would remind us that nations are imagined communities, but Agamben would insist that they are imagined first through a field of inclusive and exclusive thresholds — precisely where this communitarian Darwinism nests.
The psychoanalytic continuation
Psychoanalysis was far from immune to this contagion. Adler’s inferiority/superiority dialectic, originally a theory of psychic compensation, became the template for the upward-striver personality championed in mid-century management discourse. Christopher Lasch recognized the narcissistic culture that grew from this ground. Foucault, and later Lennard Davis, show why: modern psychology — and psychoanalysis by extension — was built inside the expanding regime of normality, itself an offshoot of Galtonian statistical rationality. Goffman’s observations about maladaptation and “failure to cope” reveal the same evaluative hierarchy: the well-formed personality is the one most capable of adapting to the imposed norm. Social Darwinism in the register of character.
The therapeutic continuation
Vulgar forms of CBT and solution-focused thinking take the same logic and strip away even the remnants of metaphysics. Your thoughts generate your outcomes; suffering is an error in cognition. Nikolas Rose calls this the “governing of the soul,” where therapeutic culture becomes a technology of self-responsibilization. Eva Illouz tracks how emotional skill becomes a neoliberal competency measure. Hacking’s looping effects show how people reshape themselves under these categories, staging their inner lives in accordance with the demand to be psychologically “fit.” What remains is Calvinism without God, psychoanalysis without the unconscious, and Darwin without heredity: a world where the unfit have only themselves to blame.
The progressive utilitarian continuation
Even in progressive welfare logics, the ghosts linger. Sen and Nussbaum’s capability approach, while egalitarian, still risks reintroducing subtle hierarchies of “capacity” and “benefit potential.” Marshall’s social citizenship contained similar residues; Cruikshank’s work on empowerment shows how easily egalitarian projects become disciplinary. Stone and Gilmore reveal how triage logics — even in compassionate hands — encode racialized, ableist, and classed assumptions about whose flourishing counts. The rhetoric of “allocating scarce resources” sounds neutral, but the metrics used to justify it are often saturated in quasi-Darwinian statistical hierarchies. The meritocratic welfare subject is simply the “fit” subject in modern dress.
The Psychological and Managerial continuation
Managerialism absorbed the evolutionary grammar with barely a hiccup. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man already traced how intelligence testing carried eugenicist categories into 20th-century institutions. Drucker, corporate consulting, and organizational psychology translated these into the language of “talent,” “high performers,” and “leadership potential.” Kahneman and Tversky’s cognitive-bias revolution — transmitted through business books and HR workshops — often becomes an implicit anthropology dividing rational agents from defective ones. Ravitch and Freire document how education systems reproduce these same logics through standardized testing. Competitive worth becomes destiny; innate potential becomes the metric by which institutions sort their subjects.
The Pop Cultural and Self-Help continuation
Popular culture metabolizes the same logic into spectacle. Reality television, entrepreneurial self-help, YouTube masculinities, and grindset culture canonize ruthless competition as virtue. Mark Fisher called this market-driven fatalism “capitalist realism,” a world in which alternatives collapse into personality deficits. Berlant’s “cruel optimism” names the trap perfectly: clinging to fantasies of achievement that slowly kill you. Malabou’s notion of plasticity shows how neoliberal culture venerates self-remaking while punishing those who cannot or will not. Even wellness culture, as Cooper shows, shades into biological optimization — a soft evolutionary language dressed in pastel.
The Academic continuation
And academia is no refuge. Education systems internalize Social Darwinist grammar through meritocratic sorting machines that naturalize inequality as the revelation of innate difference. Bourdieu exposed how these systems misrecognize inherited advantage as talent; Bowles and Gintis demonstrated how school structures reproduce class hierarchy under the guise of merit. Michael Young coined “meritocracy” as a dystopian joke, yet the academy adopted it as an ideal. Kozol, Sennett, and Lareau have all shown how failure among the poor is framed as an individual deficit rather than the predictable effect of structural deprivation. It is Social Darwinism translated into the neutral language of standards, metrics, and “student potential.”
In summary:
Social Darwinism did not survive only in the “winners deserve to win” of markets or tech. It survived also in: moral meritocracy, therapeutic positivity, nationalist health-of-the-body-politic, characterological psychologies of “strength”, egalitarian efficiency metrics.
And all of these share one feature: They transform the evaluation of life into a pseudo-natural logic. They allow human beings to say:
“It is not I who judges —
it is Reality, the Market, the Nation, the Future, the Data, the Optimization Problem.”
This is what allows Social Darwinism to proliferate even in spaces that think themselves radically opposed to capitalism. The deeper vector was the desire to turn a moral judgement into a natural law. The core logic of eliminationist grammar and externalizing judgment has permeated diverse cultural domains, even those seemingly opposed to the original ideology.
The Rise of Social Darwinism
Several interacting forces produced the conditions for Social Darwinism. It was not simply an ideological distortion of Darwin’s biology—it was a worldview mutation that crystallized out of the 19th century’s industrial, imperial, and epistemic upheavals. It answered deep social anxieties about order, hierarchy, and legitimacy in a rapidly changing world.
Industrial Capitalism and Class Anxiety
The Industrial Revolution shattered traditional hierarchies of birth, rank, and landownership. New industrial fortunes rose from nothing; urban poverty exploded; mass labor became both indispensable and disposable. The old theological and aristocratic justifications of inequality were crumbling.
Social Darwinism filled the gap. It provided a “scientific” vocabulary for inequality: success and failure were no longer accidents of birth or divine providence but expressions of natural law. “Fitness” became a moral alibi for privilege, and poverty a biological inevitability rather than a political problem. It was a way for the bourgeoisie to naturalize their social position as earned by evolution itself.
Imperial Expansion and Racial Hierarchy
The 19th century was also the century of empire. European powers needed a moral rationale for domination, and Darwinian language supplied one: the “struggle for existence” justified conquest as natural selection on a global scale. This was the age of Kipling’s “white man’s burden” and Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest.” Both merged evolutionary metaphor with colonial ideology. The suffering of colonized peoples abroad and the poor at home could now be seen not as moral failure but as evidence of “unfitness” before history’s inevitable advance.
The Decline of Theological Legitimacy
Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) destabilized the religious teleologies that had long underwritten social order. But where faith waned, people sought a new metaphysics of necessity. Social Darwinism stepped in as a secular providence. Nature replaced God as the guarantor of justice. The world was still ordered, purposeful—but now by impersonal struggle rather than divine will. For many Victorians, this was psychologically comforting: even chaos had a moral pattern.
Positivism and the Prestige of Science
The late 19th century’s cult of “scientific objectivity” made biology’s metaphors unusually persuasive. Auguste Comte’s positivism, social statistics, and the rise of professional science gave enormous cultural authority to quantification and natural law. When thinkers like Spencer and Galton translated Darwinian principles into social policy, it sounded like reason conquering superstition. “Fitness” and “selection” were not metaphors; they were “facts.” This faith in the scientific ordering of society fed directly into social engineering and eugenics—the managerial application of evolution to humanity itself.
Malthusian Demography and the Fear of Degeneration
Darwin himself drew on Thomas Malthus’s population theory: more beings are born than can survive. In a rapidly urbanizing Europe, with slums, disease, and mass poverty, the fear of degeneration—physical, moral, racial—haunted intellectuals. Social Darwinism turned that anxiety into policy logic: the “unfit” must not be allowed to reproduce unchecked, or civilization would decay. This fear bridged left and right, from conservative racialists to progressive eugenic planners.
The Moral Crisis of Liberalism
Classical liberalism promised freedom, equality, and progress. But industrial society revealed freedom without security and progress without moral compass. Social Darwinism offered an ethic of realism—a hard doctrine of struggle that seemed to match the brutal facts of economic life. It allowed liberals to reconcile moral discomfort with systemic violence by declaring that suffering had a natural, even necessary, function in the great march of improvement.
In summary:
Social Darwinism arose from the convergence of capitalism, empire, secularization, scientific prestige, and social anxiety. It was a metaphysical repair mechanism for a world that had lost its old moral guarantees but still needed to believe in necessity. It transformed Darwin’s descriptive biology into a prescriptive moral law, turning the contingent into the inevitable, and inequality into destiny.
It was, in short, the first great scientific theodicy of modernity—explaining why the some prosper and some perish as though it were nature’s justice itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment