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Social Darwinism In The 1890s

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Social Darwinism In The 1890s
A term not widely used in Europe and America until after 1880 and then almost invariably employed as a pejorative tag, to mean the belief, based on a reading of Darwin, that natural selection entails the elimination of weak societies, or people, by strong ones. Popular in the innocent 1890s, social Darwinism seemed wholly discredited after Nazism. Some have seen its recurrence in sociobiology, which has therefore been controversial; but the “new social Darwinism,” if that is what it is, is based on the new genetics, which shows that Darwinism entails none of the racist or eugenicist inferences that were widely made between the 1890s and the 1930s (that one part of the human race is genetically superior to another, or that it is feasible and
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