Social Darwinism owes more to Herbert Spencer than to Darwin himself
The phrase survival of the fittest sounds like pure Darwin, but it was coined by the sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose ideas about social evolution were published before On the Origin of Species and leaned on Lamarck rather than natural selection. Social Darwinism carries Darwin's name while resting largely on other men's work.
Social Darwinism is a loose family of pseudoscientific theories and practices claiming that evolutionary competition should govern class, economics and politics, with the strong gaining wealth and power while the weak lose out. Spencer's Progress: Its Law and Cause appeared in 1857, two years before Darwin's book, and his vision of cosmic evolution had more in common with Lamarck and Auguste Comte. Other figures now linked to the label include Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 essay warned that population would outrun food, and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, who founded eugenics.
Where the label came from is murky. Thomas Henry Huxley coined Darwinism in an 1861 review, and the phrase social Darwinism first surfaced in an 1877 article on Irish landholding by Joseph Fisher, who used it to reject the notion that Irish chiefs had evolved into feudal barons. Nobody pinned the label on Spencer himself until the 1930s, decades after he had died. The American historian Richard Hofstadter made the term common currency in 1944, and it has almost always been used as an insult by opponents rather than as a badge by supporters.
Part of the problem is that the idea never pointed in one political direction. A self-described social Darwinist might defend free markets or state socialism, imperial expansion or domestic eugenics. In the era of New Imperialism it was used to justify colonial conquest as natural. Darwin's own writings cut both ways, but his opposition to slavery clashed with later claims about colonised peoples.
Creationists such as William Jennings Bryan argued that social Darwinism followed logically from evolution. Most scholars, including Steven Pinker, call that an appeal-to-nature fallacy: how nature works says nothing about how people ought to treat one another. The doctrine faded after the First World War and was largely discredited by 1945, tainted by Nazism and by scientific rejection of eugenics and racial theories.
Source: Social Darwinism
