# Social Darwinism The doctrine that the struggle for existence operates in human society as it does in nature — that wealth, poverty, empire and race are the outcomes of selection, and that relieving the losers thwarts the process. It is the Gilded Age's ideology of itself, and the vault's page on it exists to keep three things separate that the label runs together: what [[Charles Darwin]] said, what [[Herbert Spencer]] said, and what their American readers did with both. ## Spencer, not Darwin "Survival of the fittest" is Spencer's phrase (1864), coined to describe his own evolutionary sociology, which predated *Origin of Species*; Darwin borrowed it for later editions. Spencer's system held that societies evolve from simple to complex, that state interference arrests the process, and that the poor who cannot survive should be allowed not to — "the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them." That was the doctrine that crossed the Atlantic and found its American voice in William Graham Sumner of Yale (*What Social Classes Owe to Each Other*, 1883: nothing) and its patron in [[Andrew Carnegie]], who wrote that he had found in Spencer "the truth of evolution" and built the Gospel of Wealth on it. It supplied the [[Gilded Age Plutocracy]] with a scientific reason to oppose factory laws, unions and relief, and the courts of the [[Dual Federalism]] era with the *Lochner* jurisprudence that struck them down — Holmes's dissent famously complained that the Fourteenth Amendment "does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics." Darwin's own view of selection in humans, set out in *The Descent of Man*, was nearly the reverse: that sympathy and mutual aid had themselves been selected for, that a society which abandoned its weak would lose "the noblest part of our nature." He disliked Spencer's abstractions. The misattribution is not innocent: it lets a political doctrine borrow the authority of a biological theory that does not support it. ## Where it went Two directions. Outward, into [[Scientific Racism]] and the imperial argument — races as competing species, colonization as selection — and through [[Francis Galton]]'s [[Eugenics]] into the sterilization laws and [[Madison Grant]]'s immigration restriction. Inward, into the persistent American belief that market outcomes reflect natural merit, which survives the discrediting of its biology and reappears in [[Libertarianism]], in the "makers and takers" framing, and in the Silicon Valley version that treats founders as a selected elite. Richard Hofstadter's *Social Darwinism in American Thought* (1944) is the book that named the pattern and, some historians argue, exaggerated how many Gilded Age figures actually held it — the label has always been more useful to its critics than to its adherents, which is worth remembering when applying it. [[Malthusianism]] is the adjacent doctrine about numbers rather than quality; [[Ecofascism]] is where the two meet now. ## See Also - [[Herbert Spencer]] · [[Charles Darwin]] · [[Andrew Carnegie]] · [[Gilded Age Plutocracy]] · [[Dual Federalism]] - [[Eugenics]] · [[Francis Galton]] · [[Scientific Racism]] · [[Madison Grant]] · [[Malthusianism]] · [[Ecofascism]] - [[Libertarianism]] · [[Evolution]]