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Scott Eric Kaufman, working on a dissertation, has discovered something. Namely, that "Social Darwinism" as it is commonly known and described never really existed, at least not as most of those who invoke it or mention it think.
This is something that my colleage Robert Bannister noted at length some time ago, that the common idea of "Social Darwinism" derived from a 1944 book by Richard Hofstader that was largely wrong on its particulars.
I think most historians know of something in their own field of speciality that the general public or most humanistic scholars take to be true which is not, or at least far more complicated than the general impression.
Many of us have discovered this less as a part of our training and more through the accidents of our own research, of realizing slowly over time as we did our work that common, repeated truths about a particular event or phenemonon simply didn't match the reality.
Sometimes that revelation becomes the subject of a monograph (like Bannister's). What's striking is that often such a monograph does little to unsettle or perturb the general mythology: there is a kind of thermodynamics to intellectual and cultural history that tends to conserve widely-held ideas and images unless they're subjected to a concerted assault. More often, we come to the conclusion that it's just not worth devoting a sustained effort to correcting the misperception.
I think this phenomenon ends up revealing something important about the general contours of intellectual and cultural history in the 20th Century and the way that scholarship, particularly historical scholarship, relates to wider circulations of knowledge. So much of what we do as historians rests on chains of transmission, on facts and evidence read and worked with by our predecessors. We have to take a great deal on faith in order to go about our business. Yet almost any attempt to probe deeply the creation of common perceptions of history will be unsettling. I once taught a class where the students did a deep reading of a single primary text from the 1920s, and all of us started to find that most of the scholarly invocations or descriptions of this source looked careless or simplistic in some fashion.
Certainly this means that anyone should read history skeptically, and be uncertain always about what they think they know about the past. But you could also take away a lot of encouragement from this: it's not necessary to run screaming in the direction of Hayden White and conclude that historical knowledge has no ability to describe the past as it was and that historical scholarship is composed of tropes that are mutably compliant to the intellectual and ideological needs of the present.
Besides the fact that we do manage to correct past histories with new research, that you can in fact discover misrepresentations and misunderstandings, the history of the reproduction of historical ideas is itself a powerful historical source. The boring reaction to Hofstader's description of Social Darwinism is just to say it's false and throw it out: what is more interesting is to ask, "And why was it so convincing in the late 1940s, why did it disseminate so rapidly as to become a kind of common sense about late 19th Century capitalism?" Potentially we learn a lot about the last half of 20th Century America in thinking from this angle: about our need to proclaim our New Deal capitalism morally triumphant in comparison to a representation of robber-baron capitalism, or our science and social science superior in its formal precision.
I also think this is where formal intellectual history is increasingly mingling with much messier and (to me) more interesting kinds of cultural history. It may be that "Social Darwinism" as a formal idea or ideology as described by Hofstader was not located where and when Hofstader thought it was; but at the same time, as Bannister and a number of other historians have noted in the last decade (and Scott Eric Kaufman is investigating now), tropes and images of Darwinian thought (sometimes misattributed to Darwin) were disseminating more pervasively and subtly throughout American society during the 20th Century, less as formal ideas or movements, more as part of the backdrop of common sense.
So sometimes we find that what we think is true about the past is not, but we then find that the real picture is not the diametric opposite of that common assumption, either. Maybe Oladauh Equiano, for example, wasn't really a West African, but the fact that he was able to represent himself as such suggests that there were West Africans telling such stories within the social worlds that Equiano lived within. Very rarely when you excavate a commonly held truth do you find an outright lie at the bottom.
That makes more sense...but I'm still well within my rights to call his inattention to Agassiz evidence that his historical account is, on occasion, suspect. (Which is all I initially said.)
Concerning telos, Gould's writing a historical account of "the structure of evolutionary theory" in which he favors those concepts which would eventually end up in the modern synthesis and would inform later evolutionary thinkers like him and unlike Dennett and Dawkins. His criticism of their criticism of punctuated equilibrium's a monument to unironic condemnations of others for things you yourself are also guilty of: he is no less "parochial" or partisan than Dennett or Dawkins, and he downplays the fact that both of them are taken as seriously--some would assert more seriously--than Gould himself. A "reliable" history of a discipline in which you've had an impact would assess the importance of that impact a little more impartially. Again, I'm not knocking Gould here, only pointing to some problems with his otherwise brilliant tome.
Jonathan Goodwin -
8/16/2005
You consider him more significant than Gould considers him, I mean.
The Plutarch analogy isn't off-base, because Agassiz was more a source than a participant.
I don't think your use of the word "teleological" here is responsible. He's not writing a history of the mentality of mid 19th C American naturalism.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/16/2005
I'm confused: Why do you think I consider Agassiz to be more significant than Gould? I certainly believe Agassiz to be historically significant, but it's not as if I'm having them compete. Your Plutarch remark, therefore, is way off-base. I'm only noting the absence of Agassiz from Gould's account of a period in the history of evolution during which Agassiz was widely considered the most important biologist/naturalist/natural philosopher around.
And yes, I know that Gould's building the historiographical model Robert Richards established in Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior--for my money the best book on the vagaries of Darwinian thought during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era--but Gould doesn't pull it off nearly so well as Richards...and yes, that may because SET's unfinished. That said, even if he says his history isn't teleological, the material that he doesn't address indicates otherwise.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/16/2005
Oscar, that's a damn fine question, and one I'm currently in the process of answering in the dissertation itself. There's no easy way to answer it because there's no there there; that is, there's a small group of scientists working with Weismann who consider themselves "neo-Darwinians," but other than that the labels are incredibly fluid...as are the conceptions they're supposed to encapsulate. For example: a thinker whose work is obviously Lamarckian will, while debating a creationist, claim to be a Darwinian. Is that a rhetorical tactic? The result of a felt need to keep up the appearance of a united front? I'm not sure. (But neither is anyone else, which is one of the reasons I find this so fascinating.)
That said, most sociologists knew the conception of cultural transmission they were developing was Lamarckian. Attempts were made to distance themselves from the label--especially after Weismann publicly trounced Spencer and his Lamarckian argument in 1895--most notably in the form of Baldwin's theory of "organic selection," which contended that natural selection works on both natural and acquired characteristics. "Organic selection" or, as it's called now, "the Baldwin effect," is a complicated Lamarckian gloss of Darwinian natural selection, so I won't go into it at length here. Fortunately, a version of Dennett's essay on it--"The Baldwin Effect: A Crane, Not a Sky-hook"--is available online. Needless to say, neither Baldwin nor Lloyd Morgan--who came up with the same theory at the same time and had the unfortunate luck of being the second panelist to speak at the conference in which Baldwin, speaking first, introduced the concept which now bears his name--considered himself to be a Lamarckian. In fact, both of them considered their work to refute Lamarckian models of acquired inheritance when it really just shifted it into a cultural frame of reference.
Jonathan Goodwin -
8/16/2005
He thinks there are connections. Makes quite a show of it, in SET, as a matter of fact.
It's possible to have for your reputation to far exceed your contributions to the subsequent development of the field. I can see that you consider Agassiz to be more significant than Gould because, if I understand you, his emphasis on the importance of taxonomy (and, in a more modest way, some of his own work in that area) helped provide relevant empirical data to what became evolutionary theory.
A more relevant example would be omitting Plutarch or one of the chroniclers from a history of Renaissance literature.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/16/2005
James, first, sorry for calling you Jim. I meant to address you by your first name, not by its diminutive. (I must've been anticipating Ralph's being Ulysses.)
I dug around a little and can tentatively say that the reason Hunter's book isn't an example of social Darwinism per se is becaue the chapters cited above aren't the chapters that deal with evolution. According to this article (available through JSTOR), the chapter entitled "Charles Darwin and Natural Selection" includes page 16, whereas the chapters cited at the Eugenics-Watch are all much later. Also, according to that page, eugenics is associated with selective breeding, and selective breeding implies a far different set of ideas than laissez-faire social Darwinism.
Another way to think about this is that there's no necessary relation between Darwinism and eugenics. (In fact, in The Origin Darwin introduces the radical idea of natural selection with the familiar example of selective breeding. It's one of many brilliant rhetorical moves on Darwin's part--his audience's comfortable with the process of artificial selection before Darwin yanks the breeder out of the picture--but it also points to the disconnect between ideas which involve letting the poor/unhealthy/degenerate classes die (textbook social Darwinism) and breeding a better humanity by sterilizing the poor/unhealthy/degenerate.
As for the pre-Modern Synthesis synthesizing of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian natural selection, I don't know nearly as much about the history of how the Modern Synthesis came about, so I won't say too much about it. What I do know is that while genes had been considered units of heredity since about 1908 or so (when Morgan started experimenting on fruit flies), it wasn't until Theodosius Dobzhansky book on genetic and speciation incorporated statistical analyses of mutations within populations that there was proof of the existence of the variability on which natural selection's predicated. Again, I don't know nearly as much about that period as the earlier one, so this could be as off-base as I think "social Darwinism" is.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/16/2005
Jonathan, the fact that you can even characterize Agassiz's evidentiary contributions to evolutionary theory is precisely my point. You can say I haven't written anything about the skewed picture of evolutionary theory Gould paints as much as you'd like; all it will do is demonstrate my point about the occasional unreliability of Gould's account. Another way to say this: that you can read Gould's account of the history of evolutionary theory and not get a sense of Agassiz's importance is a problem: he was considered the foremost naturalist of his time--his democratic dictum "study nature, not books" influenced the generation of American and British naturalists to abandon the project of elaborating older works "natural philosophy"--and the "Agassiz Club" (a.k.a. the "Saturday Club") included among its members Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Lowell, Henry James Sr., Benjamin Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes. To not include a figure of Agassiz's stature in a history of evolutionary theory is akin to writing a history of Renaissance drama and not include Shakespeare. The only reason to not to include him is if Gould's writing a teleological history in which the only theories included are ones that would eventually contribute to the modern synthesis...only there are long sections on Lamarck and Cuvier, so there must be some other reason. Again, I don't know precisely what that reason is, and I'm not too keen on psychologizing Gould's motivations, but there must be a reason a scientific figure of such obvious and recognized import doesn't factor into Gould's history.
(Also, don't confuse Gould-the-evolutionary-thinker and Gould-the-historian. There's no necessary connection between his theories of historical contingency vis-a-vis evolution and his historiographic principles.)
Jonathan Goodwin -
8/16/2005
First of all, I'm not at all convinced that Gould has underemphasized _anywhere_ this putative contribution, and it is a different matter altogether in the context of the argument he's making in SET. You have to demonstrate that it's somewhat logically necessary to the distinction between varieties of creationism he's discussing there, even if it is an underestimation, which I see no reason to believe.
Futhermore, I don't see why you would describe his history as teleological, particulary when you're talking about a thinker whose entire work stressed the importance of historical contigency. And what, again, is inaccurate about his picture of evolutionary theory in these two decades? You haven't written anything about that at all.
Oscar Chamberlain -
8/16/2005
Scott, To what extent did the reformers you label as Lamarckian evolutionists think of themselves as Lamarckian? Did they understand that they were departing from Darwin, or did they misunderstand Darwin?
James Lindgren -
8/16/2005
Scott:
What you wrote in your post sounds great and new and well worth a thesis.
I am still puzzled by the prevalence of what I think of as social Darwinist ideas from 1914-1940.
The post-1914 writings that I have seen so far do not seem necessarily Lamarkian, but I've not read widely enough to generalize.
People like Grant in 1916 write against Lamarkian inheritance of traits (p. 14), but he refers to and criticizes a 1910 report of the Congressional Immigration Commission that finds skull shape changes in the children of Jewish immigrants (p. 15).
On p. 11 Grant endorses "Mendelian Laws of Inheritance" and he writes about selection at several points, so some intellectuals were combining the two by 1916.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/16/2005
Jim (if I may), I appreciate the attention you've paid to these issues, and I want to answer them as fully and respectfully (even if contradictorily) as I can.
To address your first point, let me say that I'm working about a decade and a half before 1916, and that difference is significant because the eugenics movement fed off of the anti-German sentiment of WWI in two mutually exclusive ways: the first was to posit that the Germans practiced "social Darwinism" and that was the reason they must be defeated...and yes, that's another lame Wilsonian ex post facto justification for entering the fray. The second, far less common argument was that Eastern Europeans, like the Germans, weren't as refined a "breed" as the Western Europeans, and that the real conflict in WWI was really a matter of survival of the fittest. But that only becomes an issue after 1914, whereas the period I'm looking at is from approx. 1890-1910. (That may not have been clear from my post or Tim's summary of it. I blame it on dissertation myopia and apologize for the confusion.)
You're right to assume that I don't think anyone called their thought "social Darwinist," but I don't want you to think that I'm mistaking the absence of the term for the absence of the idea. The idea was there in Sumner's work and Carnegie's public speeches; however, what Hofstadter ignored was the far more frequent references to evolution--Lamarckian evolution, mind you--in the work of liberal reformers, early sociologists and popular writers. My first chapter is on the "Darwinian" rhetoric of Jack London, the most popular author of the period--and the one most closely associated, paradoxically, with both evolutionary theory and socialism. In trying to reconcile what I initially believed to be his incompatible views on socialism and evolutionary theory I discovered rich veins of quasi-socialist evolutionary theory that've been neglected...and I've come to the conclusion that their neglect is based in large part on the stature of Hofstadter. Now, I'm not dead-set on opposing Hofstadter, but I'm certainly interested in nuancing his claims so that they more closely accord with the primary research I've done on the period. (That's my way of saying that while I will be refuting Hofstadter, that's not the end-all-be-all of my dissertation.)
As you might guess, this addresses your third point about how Darwinian this beast called "social Darwinism" actually was, if it was at all...and the answer, which may sound cryptic even though I don't mean it to, is "not recognizably." We share with Hofstadter a conception of Darwinism that's been irrevocably colored by the Modern Synthesis (the combining of Darwin's theory of natural selection with Mendel's theory of genetics); it's difficult for us to realize the extent to which evolutionary thought at the turn-of-the-century wasn't at all Darwinian. Despite Weismann's "germ-plasm" theory of the transmission of traits, there's a real way in which Darwinism spent the period between 1890 and 1940 on the defensive, always having to justify the validity of natural selection even though it lacked the physical mechanism for doing so. Because of that, many other "evolutionisms" flourished...but most of them (with the exception of a very general understanding of Lamarckism) have been obscured by the Modern Synthesis. One of the things I hope to do with my dissertation is demonstrate the vitality of those theories, show how they weren't dead theories held fast to the chest of apostates but were, in fact, seriously considered by scientists, political theorists and sociologists of the time to be the cutting edge of evolutionary thought. And at that, I have to say that the midnight oil's nearly burned out. I'll continue responding to your comments in the morning, as they certainly deserve more attention than I'll be able to give them if I write much longer.
Best,
Scott
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/16/2005
That's actually sort of my point: Gould chooses to highlight the least flattering aspects of Agassiz's thought, and in doing so necessarily neglects his evidentiary contributions to both Darwin and Weismann's projects...in other words, sometimes only mentioning a person in one context actually constitutes doing a disservice to his or her thought, and this is one of those times. But again, I reiterate, that Gould's history of evolutionary theory is teleological, so it's no surprise he only mentions Agassiz as a foil to those who contributed to the march of the Modern Synthesis. That said, it doesn't mean he's presented an historically accurate picture of what constituted evolutionary theory in the 1890s and 1900s. (Actually, he knew better but suppressed it so that his anti-Lamarckian polemic would have legs. This, of course, is my other way of acknowledging that Gould knew what he was doing [rhetorically] and therefore can be "indicted" to the microscopic degree that I'm indicting him on charges of distorting the historical record.)
James Lindgren -
8/16/2005
In the post above, I point out how widespread were some of the ideas associated with Social Darwinism.
Here are some excerpts from George Hunter's Civic Biology (the most popular high school biology text of the era and the book involved in the Scopes trial), courtesy of Eugenics Watch:
Hunter's Civic Biology, p. 195-196
The Races of Man. — At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
Hunter's Civic Biology, p. 261-265
Improvement of Man. — If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which we as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment.
Eugenics. — When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics.
The Jukes. — Studies have been made on a number of different families in this country, in which mental and moral defects were present in one or both of the original parents. The "Jukes" family is a notorious example. The first mother is known as "Margaret, the mother of criminals." In seventy-five years the progeny of the original generation has cost the state of New York over a million and a quarter dollars, besides giving over to the care of prisons and asylums considerably over a hundred feeble-minded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal persons. Another case recently studied is the "Kallikak" family. (Footnote: The name Kallikak is fictitious.) This family has been traced back to the War of the Revolution, when a young soldier named Martin Kallikak seduced a feeble-minded girl. She had a feeble-minded son from whom there have been to the present time 480 descendants. Of these 33 were sexually immoral, 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143 feeble-minded. The man who started this terrible line of immorality and feeble-mindedness later married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple a line of 496 descendants have come, with no cases of feeble-mindedness. The evidence and the moral speak for themselves!
Parasitism and its Cost to Society. — Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.
The Remedy. — If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.
Blood Tells. — Eugenics shows us, on the other hand, in a study of the families in which are brilliant men and women, the fact that the descendants have received the good inheritance from their ancestors. The following, taken from Davenport's Heredity in Relationship to Eugenics, illustrates how one family has been famous in American History.
It seems that your project needs to be sorted out somewhat, which some of your comments begin to do.
1. How widespread were Social Darwinist ideas? One question is whether Social Darwinist ideas were widespread, widely believed, and influential. From what I know about it (and I am not an expert on this), the answer would seem to be YES. The most widely used science textbooks of the 1920s taught Social Darwinism. The most popular Biology text of the day was George Hunter’s Civic Biology. (I excerpt the 1914 edition in a post below.)
Eric, are you arguing that Social Darwinism was taught to many if not most high school students, but they didn’t believe it because they didn't believe in evolution? Or are you arguing that educated people were taught evolution and Social Darwinism in high school, yet they believed in evolution but not in Social Darwinism? What evidence would there be for that, given the widespread sterilization of the day. Social Darwinism was a staple of many strains of reformist and progressive thought.
I pulled from my shelf Madison Grant’s The Passing of a Great Race (1916), which is chock full of Social Darwinist ideas, talk of superior races determined by selection and by evolution. BTW, the title page lists Grant as the Chairman of the New York Zoological Society, which sounds pretty mainstream to me.
Buck v. Bell (1927) seems to reflect Social Darwinist ideas, and it sparked massive numbers of sterilizations of people over the next two decades, as Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak reports (pp. 121-123). For the generation raised on Social Darwinism in high school textbooks, lionized as modern science in cases such as the Scopes Monkey trial and Buck v. Bell, these ideas had real effects: tens of thousands of convicts, the poor, and the less intelligent were sterilized between 1927 and 1940.
2. Did those pushing Social Darwinist ideas call them “Social Darwinism”? Your work suggests that they usually didn’t. Fine. But don’t mistake the use of different terminology for the absence of ideas. For example, it is widely accepted that England in the late 17th century had an extensive system of censors and censorship, though the English did not refer to their censors as “censors” at the time. If you don’t want to call what may be the prevailing belief among educated elites in the 1920s “Social Darwinism,” then you can call it something else, but don’t pretend it didn’t exist or that it wasn’t extremely influential. Don’t confuse the conception of an idea with the idea itself (see David Hackett Fisher on the Fallacy of the Hypostatized Proof in Historian’s Fallacies for a different but analogous form of reification error).
3. Was Hofstader right that a central part of Social Darwinism was a justification of capitalism? Given Hofstader’s Marxist, anti-capitalist background, it is perhaps not surprising that by the 1940s he would fail to see that Social Darwinism was more often associated in the US with progressive ideas than with capitalism. Apparently it was tied to pro-capitalism in some people some of the time, but not in most adherents. I take it that Bannister (whom I have not read) deals with this issue, as does Black. It seems that it would make sense to separate this idea out from Social Darwinism, since it is not central to the notion.
4. How Darwinist was Social Darwinism? From reviews such as Barry Mehler’s (http://www.ferris.edu/ISAR/archives/mehler/social.htm), it seems as if Bannister goes to extreme lengths to divorce Social Darwinism from Darwinism. If Mehler’s characterization is fair, you might find with more research that Social Darwinism may be a perversion of Darwinism or an unwarranted extension of Darwinism, but it is explicitly based on Darwinism and evolution nonetheless.
Further, eugenics itself may be seen as an act in furtherance of competition within a species, just as war has been. Some people view everything that humans do as "natural," others view some human actions as more "natural" or tending more toward "natural selection" than others.
5. Where to go? Eric, one of your commentators suggested that you not do primarily a historiographical thesis. I would agree. You should set out your own sorting of the issues, using both Hofstader and Bannister as contrasts. You should separate the ideas that Hofstader attributed to Social Darwinism and that Bannister excluded from Social Darwinism and establish the history and inter-relation (if any) of each strand and any other strands they missed. Don’t buy into either of their reifications of the concept. Build a conception based on the thought of the era, not on the later historiography.
That would make a great thesis that would be different from what both Hofstader and Bannister did.
Jim Lindgren
Jonathan Goodwin -
8/15/2005
I suppose I don't see two things: 1) how your criticism would be relevant to Gould's contrast of Agassiz's Platonism with Paley's functionalism in his argument, which is the only real substantive discussion of Agassiz in the entire work. 2) How this minor point of attribution supports your earlier claim of Gould's work being misleading in several ways.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/15/2005
First, I read the whole darn book, by now multiple times (though never sequentially after the first). If I'd had a blog when I first read it, you'd have been subjected to about three months of daily Gouldian updates. I only said that I won't claim to be able to speak authoritatively on the subjects broached after the end of chapter six. (And I mean I "read it," not like I've "read" "most" of Wolfe.)
Second, as I mentioned earlier, Gould does Agassiz a disservice because he's interested in finding "the Basis of Modern Orthodoxy." Because of this, for example, Darwin's debt to Agassiz (and his son, not to mention his students) and his taxanomic work is well-established, but Gould only discusses him in light of the conclusions he draws, not the evidence on which he draws them. Gould knows nineteenth century science well enough to know the value of Agassiz's meticulous work to someone who would write: "I sympathize more with & estimate higher the slow induction that leads step by step to sound conclusions as far as they go, than the bolder flights of genius which so often leads the possessor to mount three pairs of steps only to jump out the garret window." Darwin's "slow induction" can't occur without the work of the taxonomists around the globe who supported him--endlessly sending him samples for decades--and many of them were trained, soundly, by Agassiz. But reading Gould's account, you'd think that all Agassiz ever did was mount three pairs of step and jump out the garret window.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/15/2005
To exonerate Jonathan, yes, part of this is about Gene Wolfe. However, I also thought part of it was an allusion to the conversation we had way, way back in March or so, concerning what literary scholars could and couldn't declaim with authority.
That said, I'll answer your criticism in the other thread.
Oscar Chamberlain -
8/15/2005
Mr. Kaufman, I can understand not wanting to expand your dissertation to deal with eugenics. Like all fascinating topics it could spin out of control all too easily without strict discipline. However, your work certainly may have an impact on understanding of eugenic's history.
Right now, the early proponents of eugenics are often described responding a paradox. (The opening of this adaptation of an essay by Daniel Kevles gives a sense of this.) They accept that natural selection applies to humans, and that its continued operation in human society is essential for the good of humanity. And they believe that their society represents the current zenith of human evolution.
However, because the values of their superior society--as they see it--preclude allowing natural selection to function "red in tooth and claw" it is threatened with decay by its own virtues. Eugenics is intended to resolve the paradox.
My point is that social darwinism as an option seems intrinsic to the world view of early eugenics supporters. That is what I meant to indicate in my first post.
David Silbey -
8/15/2005
" find that a bit off too. That's why I didn't do it"
I read your comment the same way as Dr. Burke did, most notably the "Who are you to judge..."
Jonathan Rees -
8/15/2005
I agree, but if the whole reason for the dissertation is to correct others' mistakes this would be very hard.
Jonathan Goodwin -
8/15/2005
I responded elsewhere in this thread, but part of my phrasing there results from a running joke Scott and I have about his reading of Gene Wolfe. I have no doubt that he's a very thorough scholar, but I think he might have been exaggerating a bit here.
And of course Gould can be criticized on many fronts, but you shouldn't presume your audience will immediately accept the validity of just-alluded criticisms.
Timothy James Burke -
8/15/2005
Jonathan, you wrote "Who are you to judge?" Come on. That's not a critique of content, where you just say, "No, I think you're wrong". That's an attempt to say, "You're not <em>entitled</em> to criticize this person".
The critiques that I've seen of Gould's intellectual history of evolution (as opposed to his evolutionary work) come mostly from his scientific enemies like Pinker, and so I don't regard most of them as particularly accurate or sharply researched. But I do think now and again it's been observed that Gould's particular take on evolutionary theory in the present causes him to shade his arguments about past intellectual traditions--for example, simplifying and exaggerating the character of eugenicist thought and its ties to more recent bodies of scientific theory.
Jonathan Goodwin -
8/15/2005
I wrote above that Scott's comments about Agassiz in SET seemed somewhat removed from anything I could find in the book. I don't know what the other misleading parts of it he had in mind were.
The controversies about the interpretation of punctuated equilibrium are distinct from criticisms of Gould's historical work, with <em>Ontogeny and Phylogeny</em> being the best example--<em>SET</em> remaining unfinished because of Gould's untimely death. While the former are well known, I don't know as much about the latter. Do you have some ready examples?
I find that a bit off too. That's why I didn't do it. Your remark about "sainted hems," faintly sanctimonious, is unwarranted by anything I wrote.
Jonathan Dresner -
8/15/2005
Umm.... not very, I'd guess. By the R-J war (that's 1904-1905, for those of you who haven't been enjoying the centennial festivities...), I think the big wave of SD would have been pretty well played out in Japan, and the discussion had gotten considerably more subtle now that Japan was clearly closer to parity with the big powers.
You might check out Sino-Japanese war (1894-1895) reporting, though, or reportage around Japan's annexation of Korea over the half-decade following 1905.
Timothy James Burke -
8/15/2005
Jonathan:
Scott's hardly the first person to critique Gould's historical work, you know. Nor in some sense is Gould necessarily any more authoritative on the intellectual history of Darwinism or evolutionary theory than any scholar who spends a goodly amount of time looking at the same material.
I always find it a bit off when someone starts criticizing a scholar on the grounds that some other scholar is intrinsically or inherently more authoritative and therefore to be trusted no matter what. Indeed, that's sort of the point of my post here: that many historical arguments that we take as authoritative because of the reputation of the thinker or the relatively established nature of the claim don't necessarily work out quite so clearly on close examination. I'd say the only issue between Scott and Gould is what they actually say about actual material, not whether Scott is not fit to touch the hem of the sainted man's garment.
Timothy James Burke -
8/15/2005
Actually many committees tediously seem to expect a review chapter at the outset of a dissertation, but this is something different. I don't think Scott should frame himself as a schoolmarm out to correct Hofstader--I'm not sure why people aren't hearing this, but that was done in a monograph published some time ago. But the point he's making about historicism among literary scholars is a considerably more sharply observed and potentially inflammatory (in a good way) angle of critique, that lit-crit historicism has trapped itself in a kind of neither fish-nor-fowl niche. It doesn't pay enough attention to the historiography to catch it when historians have revised or rethought commonly held notions, but it also doesn't pay enough attention to intertextuality and the circulation of ideas in ways that literary criticism ought to be well positioned to achieve, and so doesn't offer a richer sort of history of ideas and readings and writings than most intellectual history by historians can. So what you get is literary critics quickly snatching at sketches of concepts like "Social Darwinism" as a kind of functionalist frame for a reading of literary works, not paying much attention to either the concept they're grabbing at or to the interrelationships between literature and the wider circulations of ideas, tropes and so on.
I think that's far from being a dull historiographical point in the context of literary criticism and cultural history: indeed, it's a very provocative critique of historicism, especialy if it isn't just made as a kind of "historians do history and lit crit doesn't", but instead looking for some alternative practice of historicism that goes beyond the limits of either discipline.
David Silbey -
8/14/2005
"ou are much better off writing a dissertation that stands on its own rather than one that depends upon framing against Richard Hofstadter, Stephen Jay Gould or anybody else. Your committee may like historiography, but most readers and publishers I've encountered since I left graduate school hate it. Historiographic arguments are really dull and if you have to include them, put them in the footnotes."
There's nothing to say that he can't include a nice long historiographical section in the dissertation and then cut it out for the book manuscript.
Jonathan Goodwin -
8/14/2005
Agassiz is mentioned a few times in SET.
On p. 271, there's the "Louis Agassiz and Continental Formalism" subsection. Gould mentions that the taxonomic work of <em>The Natural History of the United States</em> only had four volumes out of a planned ten and that its "descriptive and taxonomic work [was] largely done by others." I assume that you dispute this claim, but why?
This section discusses Agassiz vis-à-vis Paley. I'm not sure what you're describing as "clearly prejudicial, as Agassiz's thought is not being contrasted with Darwin's here. I don't see where Agassiz's rhetoric, etc. is discussed by Gould at all or why it would be relevant.
Some brief mentions about how Charles Otis Whitman studied with Agassiz on 382-83. Baer's quotation of him on 687 (past where you read). Repeated on 1021-22.
Jonathan Rees -
8/14/2005
I really don't mean this to seem snotty, because I've been there and done the same thing. So here it goes:
You are much better off writing a dissertation that stands on its own rather than one that depends upon framing against Richard Hofstadter, Stephen Jay Gould or anybody else. Your committee may like historiography, but most readers and publishers I've encountered since I left graduate school hate it. Historiographic arguments are really dull and if you have to include them, put them in the footnotes.
I'm sorry if that sounds like a sermon. I really just want to help.
JR
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/14/2005
Quick question: How aware of this would Americans have been at the time? I haven't come across many references to it from the war reports of the Russo-Japanese war. Granted, I haven't looked into this too extensively however, so maybe my question's a little premature.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/14/2005
Actually, I've spent the past two years researching evolutionary theory at the turn-of-the-century, and have done so not with an eye towards what could and could not be incorporated into the Modern Synthesis (the debates with which the majority of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is concerned). In other words, after page 503 or so I can't really speak to the veracity of Gould's claims (only, as I've already mentioned, to what others in his field have said about them). But prior to 503, I'm certainly qualified to make claims to the effect that Gould's estimation of Agassiz is clearly prejudicial; that Gould presented the Darwin/Agassiz controversy in a way that minimized Agassiz's reservations about certain tenets of his argument; that he didn't recognize some of the hallmarks of Agassiz's rhetoric, foremost among them that both in person and print he became increasingly bombastic as he observed the foundations of his arguments erode before him; that he downplays the significance of Agassiz's extensive taxanomic research in order to emphasize his frequently off-the-cuff elaborations of what it may or may not imply; &c. I could go on, Jonathan, but it's silly to claim that someone who's immersed himself in the literature of what was really an age of "gentlemen's science" can't criticize Gould when he stacks the deck.
Jonathan Goodwin -
8/14/2005
The issue here is that Gould spent his entire life studying these issues and was regarded as a world-authority on the history of the field, particularly in the area covered by <em>Ontogeny and Phylogeny</em>. Compared to Gould, you have not (and could not have) done even a fraction of the research.
So, while you could accept the criticisms of other evolutionary historians about Gould's interpretations, you don't have any warrant to claim that, based on your own reading of the primary material, Gould was mistaken.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/14/2005
Ralph and Tim, I knew there was some reason I thought Ralph had written what Tim had and vice versa. You'd both written a little something on my post. I'm now thrice sheepishly-apologetic and swelled with pride.
Jonathan Dresner -
8/14/2005
Well, again complicating the matter with Asian material, the dominant version of SD in Asia was not eugenic (though I believe Japan did have a "eugenics law" it wasn't anywhere near as comprehensive as the California version, for example) but the view of nation-states as competing organisms which could improve themselves through education, economic development, etc. It wasn't a natural process that had an inevitable end, but a mechanism which could be manipulated by active participants.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/14/2005
Two things: first, I just noticed that Tim wrote the original post, when I thought Ralph did. Sorry about that.
Jonathan, I can talk about Gould's reliability because I've done the research on the history of evolutionary theory, and in the chapters in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory in which he concerns himself with the aforementioned history, sometimes his account jives with what I've read and sometimes it doesn't. Hence, he's "unreliable on some fronts." (That said, I've read a number of critiques by a number of different, mutually incompatible thinkers who dismiss Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium.)
Jonathan Goodwin -
8/14/2005
Who are you to judge on what fronts Stephen Jay Gould was reliable, *particularly* if you're talking about the history of evolutionary theory?
Ralph E. Luker -
8/14/2005
Scott, Lest I be misunderstood, I think that you are correct to resist a broadscale re-evaluation of Hofstadter in your dissertation. My point was that there's a terrific book to be done that attempts an intellectual biography of Hofstadter. For one thing, he's a crucial figure (crucial because he was half-Jewish and half Lutheran -- there's an angst-ridden combination for you) in the transition of Columbia's history department away from domination by WASPs. That department, during his tenure there, was enormously productive and enormously influential. More importantly, he published a number of books (Social Darwinism among them) that were enormously stimulating, but also contested within his lifetime. We have a number of re-assessments of C. Vann Woodward's ouevre, but I don't know of a comparable re-assessment of Hofstadter's work as a whole.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/14/2005
Ralph, while I completely agree with your sentiments that it'd be worthwhile to examine what it was about the American intellectual culture since the mid-1940s that has kept Hofstadter's ideas in circulation (New Deal triumphalism, &c.), I think that would take me a little far afield--literally and figuratively--from my project. My advisor, Michael Szalay, author of New Deal Modernism, pushes me in that direction during discussions because it's something that he's heavily invested in, and it was actually one of the topics on my qualifying exams. All this by way of saying: you're right, and it's something I want to look into, but then I'd have to throw out all this wonderful archival work...
...and also, I'm not out to discredit Hofstadter, to claim that what he propounded was an "outright lie," only that his work has created an intellectual environment in which the significance of one particular strain of politically-inflected evolutionary thought has been exaggerated at the expense of many others. Stephen Jay Gould, while unreliable on some fronts, nailed the 1890s down perfectly when he described it as a "decade of maximal agnosticism and diversity in evolutionary theories." All of those "evolutionisms" had proponents, and almost all of them birthed some strain of political theory that ends up, often as not, represented in the pages of the American Journal of Sociology.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/14/2005
Tim's said it as well (if not better) than I could've. Evolutionary theory was as pervasive an influence as Hofstadter claims it was; only it wasn't limited to Darwinism nor only articulated by capitalist sympathizers. A kind of "soft heredity," based on Lamarckian principles, was a far more popular application; and the people applying it were more likely to on the progressive side of the political spectrum...because Lamarckian evolution dovetails nicely with reform "up-lift" philosophies.
Scott Eric Kaufman -
8/14/2005
Mr. Chamerlain, at this point I've tried avoid dealing with eugenics because it's a positive platform--in which a distinct reproductive policy improve the quality of the race--whereas social Darwinism (so considered) is a negative platform in which natural selection will presumably take its course.
I've actually read almost all of the American Journal of Sociology from its founding to about 1911 (as part of what my advisor called "the 90% of the iceberg no one needs to see"), and while you do have references to eugenics, far more frequent are statements of what could be called "reform Darwinists," or better yet, "reform Lamarckians" like Baldwin and Ward. The only explicit mention of the term itself occurs in Colin Wells' 1907 article called "Social Darwinism," but if you look at Ward's reply to that article, you can see one of the problems I've encountered:"not all scholars…agree as to what [social Darwinism] is, but certainly none of them use the expression in the sense that Dr. Wells uses it." In fact, no one could agree what it meant; it almost seems like the sociological equivalent of the obscenity argument.
Mr. Beito, I've also noted that disconnect between racially-motivated imperialism and the anti-imperialism of the only two people readily identifiable with social Darwinism, but I've done little more than notice it as this point. I will, however, be researching this line of thought in more detail as I start to work through the argument of Jack London's "The Yellow Peril," in which Asian imperialism is clearly a concern.
Timothy James Burke -
8/14/2005
Bannister deals with Hofstader in some detail: the main point being that in the US inasmuch as anyone was applying Darwin to social experience in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, it wasn't the leading capitalists of the day.
But of course my point is also that you can sustain Hofstader's point somewhat but it requires moving away from formal intellectual history towards a much more diffuse sense of ideas and their circulation, a history of what was known and thought on a more everyday basis.
It's also that historians sometimes reify heuristics too much, and something like "the cult of domesticity" starts to become not a shorthand description of a general, diffuse tendency but something far more concretized than it actually was. So it's not the first person who uses the term who has the problem; it's what happens after the term has been cited, re-cited and become part of general knowledge that you start to have an issue.
Jonathan Rees -
8/14/2005
It's been a long time since I've read _Social Darwinism in American Thought_, but I feel like somebody has to defend Richard Hofstadter.
Just because someone can't find references to a particular idea in contemporary texts (and that's assuming they're looking in the right texts) doesn't mean that the idea didn't exist. Think for a moment about the so-called "Market Revolution" or the "Cult of Domesticity." These useful notions were created by historians to help explain abstract notions that might not necessarily have made it into print at that time.
Of course the creation of these ideas require a certain amount of projection of a historian's biases that come with them from the time they live, but all historical scholarship carries that peril with it.
I wouldn't throw around terms like "true" in this discussion, so that you yourself don't look like a jerk in 50-100 years.
JR
David T. Beito -
8/14/2005
I am equally interested in how Kaufman deals with imperialism. The textbooks often identify "social darwinism" as a cause of imperialism but never address a critical problem this claim: the two key social darwinists these texts identify, Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, were ardent anti-imperialists.
Oscar Chamberlain -
8/14/2005
First of all thanks for a provacative recommendation.
I do find myself wondering how Kaufman deals with eugenics. That movement rises up from acceptance of the assumption that natural selection does apply to human society and that races are something close to distinct species.
Karl Pearson, in a comment on a paper presented by Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, asks this question, "Are we to make the whole doctrine of descent, of inheritance, and of selection of the fitter, part of our everyday life, of our social customs, and of conduct?"
