Social Darwinism in Anglophone Academic Journals: A Contribution to the History of the Term
Top Cited Papers
- 17 November 2004
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Journal of Historical Sociology
- Vol. 17 (4) , 428-463
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6443.2004.00239.x
Abstract
This essay is a partial history of the term “Social Darwinism”. Using large electronic databases, it is shown that the use of the term in leading Anglophone academic journals was rare up to the 1940s. Citations of the term were generally disapproving of the racist or imperialist ideologies with which it was associated. Neither Herbert Spencer nor William Graham Sumner were described as Social Darwinists in this early literature.Talcott Parsons (1932,1934,1937) extended the meaning of the term to describe any extensive use of ideas from biology in the social sciences. Subsequently,Richard Hofstadter (1944) gave the use of the term a huge boost, in the context of a global anti‐fascist war.Keywords
This publication has 48 references indexed in Scilit:
- Darwinism and Death: Devaluing Human Life in Germany 1859-1920Journal of the History of Ideas, 2002
- The "Survival of the Fittest" and the Origins of Social DarwinismJournal of the History of Ideas, 2000
- The Origins of Social Darwinism in Germany, 1859-1895Journal of the History of Ideas, 1993
- The Making of a Method: A Historical Reinterpretation of the Early ParsonsAmerican Sociological Review, 1987
- The Condition of Man.American Sociological Review, 1944
- William Graham Sumner, Social DarwinistThe New England Quarterly, 1941
- The Individual and His Society: The Psychodynamics of Primitive Social Organization.American Sociological Review, 1940
- The History of Social Philosophy.Journal of Educational Sociology, 1938
- Thorstein Veblen and His America.American Sociological Review, 1936
- The Changing Effects of Race CompetitionScience, 1932