Definition of Social Darwinism

lilen gomez | May. 2022
Professor in Philosophy

Broadly speaking, social Darwinism holds that human societies historically progress according to natural laws, namely, law of natural selection, through the survival of the fittest individuals. Thus, there would be a biological determinism of human groups, which would necessarily justify the existence of relations of oppression between classes and the inequality Between the men. That is why, well into the 20th century, this notion will be widely questioned, not only from theoretical currents inscribed in the sciences social sciences and the humanities, but also within the realm of the biological sciences, for example, from the point of view of genetics modern.

The main referent of the idea of ​​social Darwinism has been Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), according to whom human society it behaved like a living organism, in such a way that it had to respond to the same laws as any other organism. In this way, he found a natural causation of society, which was expressed in a identity Come in evolution social and progress.

The origin of the concept

Although Darwin's main work, The origin of species (1859) was not the first to suggest the idea of ​​evolution and the mechanisms of natural selection in the field of biology, it had a great pregnance that can be explained by the context of its publication. England was, towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, in full colonial expansion and at the height of the Industrial Revolution, whose counterpart had been the deepening of the inequality between the bourgeoisie and the class worker. At this juncture, theories were developed such as that of the economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who established the hypothesis that population growth, faced with the availability of food resources under favorable production conditions, is always resolved through a struggle for survival.

The Malthusian theory concluded that, by virtue of the natural dynamics of populations, it was useless allocate social policies to combat economic inequality, since this was the necessary result of laws natural. Thus, it was a justification ideological of the politics liberal laissez faire, according to which the state should not intervene in the free game of the market, self-regulated by an "invisible hand", in the terms of Adam Smith (1723-1790). In this way, a scientific-conceptual framework was formed that served as support for the interests of the ruling classes.

Around 1851, Herbert Spencer recovers, in his work Social Statics, such a conceptual framework, under the figure of the survival of the fittest as the engine of social relations, always traversed by competition to survive. According to Spencer, science confirmed that the most biologically effective individuals are those who prevail in said competition. under this climate period, the economic and social doctrines of Malthus and Spencer were associated, among the English bourgeoisie, to the Darwinian explanation of the evolution of populations, from a perspective that was convenient to his social position.

Social Darwinism and the naturalistic fallacy

Notwithstanding what has been said, there are many criticisms of the interpretation that the Darwinian theory of evolution can be explained as a succession of competition processes with a naturally beneficial purpose and, therefore, acceptable in moral terms within societies human. In this line, it has been called naturalistic fallacy to the idea that transpolating a natural order to the explanation of social processes of the human being would be ethically acceptable. This fallacy is based on three premises: first, that natural processes occur according to ends; second, that such ends are naturally perfect; and, thirdly, as a consequence, that all the previous stages are progressively perfected until reaching such an end.

Since the Darwinian theory of evolution does not hold, in any case, that evolutionary processes tend towards a previously determined end, on the one hand, it could not be interpreted under the scheme of the fallacy naturalist; On the other hand, the name of social "Darwinism" that this trend has received is erroneous, since it lacks support in the developments of Darwin himself.

Bibliographic references

Perez, J. L. m. (2010). The ideology of "social Darwinism": the social policy of Herbert Spencer (II). Labor Documentation, (90), 11-57.

Sandin, M. (2000). On a redundancy: social Darwinism. Asclepius, 52(2), 27-50.