Except for a possible reversion to a cultural situation strongly characterized by ideas of emulation and status, the ancient racial bias embodied in the Christian principle of brotherhood should logically continue to gain ground at the expense of the pecuniary morals of competitive business.
THORSTEIN VEBLEN
The Struggle for Existence is another of these glimpses of life which just now seems to many the dominating fact of the universe, chiefly because attention has been fixed upon it by copious and interesting exposition. As it has had many predecessors in this place of importance, so doubtless it will have many successors.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Evolution had a profound impact upon psychology, ethnology, sociology, and ethics but it failed to work a similar transformation in economics. William Graham Sumner was alone among those who could be considered economists in his attempt to assimilate evolution to the traditional concepts of political economy. During the 1870’s and 1880’s, when he was working out the fundamentals of his social philosophy, most other economists were far more traditional in their thinking.
The most plausible explanation of the inflexibility of the received political economy is that its spokesmen were satisfied that there was little their science could learn from biology. The accepted function of political economy, as taught in American colleges and propagated in the forums of opinion, was apologetic. It had always been an idealized interpretation of economic processes under the competitive regime of property and individual enterprise; violations of the set pattern had been discouraged as infringements of natural law As Francis Amasa Walker said of the laissez-faire principle in the period before the founding of the American Economic Association, “Here [in the United States] it was not made the test of economic orthodoxy, merely. It was used to decide whether a man were an economist at all.”1
The common failure of orthodox economists to embrace social Darwinism as preached by Sumner—so obviously adapted to the function of their science as they conceived it—was only incidentally due to the unsettled status of evolution in its relation to religious beliefs. More important was the fact that classical economics already had its own doctrine of social selection. Since it had been one of the great figures of the classical economic tradition who had led Spencer, Darwin, and Wallace toward their evolutionary theories, the economists might have had some justification for proclaiming that biology had merely universalized a truth that had been in their possession for a long time.
A parallel can be drawn between the patterns of natural selection and classical economics,2 suggesting that Darwinism involved an addition to the vocabulary rather than to the substance of conventional economic theory. Both assumed the fundamentally self-interested animal pursuing, in the classical pattern, pleasure or, in the Darwinian pattern, survival. Both assumed the normality of competition in the exercise of the hedonistic, or survival, impulse; and in both it was the “fittest,” usually in a eulogistic sense, who survived or prospered—either the organism most satisfactorily adapted to its environment, or the most efficient and economic producer, the most frugal and temperate worker. Here, it should be added, economics was the better suited to a kindly interpretation of the status quo since it accepted the present environment as a natural datum, while conscientious and perceptive followers of Darwin saw that the “fittest” might be understood to be fit to inferior and degrading surroundings. Veblen, writing in 1900, found that “identification of the categories of normality and right gives the dominant note of Mr. Spencer’s ethical and social philosophy, and that later economists of the classical line are prone to be Spencerians.”3 Further, both classical economics and natural selection were doctrines of natural law. At this point, once again, classical economics was more conducive to intellectual stability, because its concept of equilibrium was Newtonian and hence static,4 whereas a dynamic theory of society raised possibilities of an unsettled world.
The conception of the pressure of population upon subsistence, so important in the historic connection between biology and political economy, not only played its part in the doctrine of Malthus but was closely related to the classic wage-fund doctrine. According to the wage-fund theory, which was popular among extreme proponents of laissez faire in the United States,5 labor is paid out of a capital fund which is fixed at any given time; and the average wage of the laborers is determined by the ratio of the number of workers seeking employment to the amount of the wage-fund. According to the logic of the wage-fund theory, neither legislative regulation nor any action of the laborers could alter this state of affairs, and a policy of strict acquiescence was indicated. Competition was generally considered the perfect means of distributing wealth. According to this doctrine the increase in numbers among the working class pressed upon the limited wage-fund with the same inexorability as the total population on the means of subsistence. This doctrine, said Walker, “was not a little favored by the fact that it afforded a complete justification for the existing order of things respecting wages.”6 After the publication in 1876 of his study of The Wages Question, however, its prestige declined rapidly.
The content of American economic thought was not quickly changed. In the post-bellum decades the most popular college textbook was a revised version of the Rev. Francis Wayland’s The Elements of Political Economy—originally written in 1837. It was from this book that both Sumner and Veblen learned their college economics. Wayland’s original aim had been to present a methodical restatement of the doctrines of Smith, Say, and Ricardo. Wayland and such other representatives of the classic tradition as Francis Bowen, Arthur Latham Perry, and J. Laurence Laughlin were in substantial agreement on the premises of economic science. Man is a creature of desires, universally motivated by self-interest; the mechanism of competition, if free and fair, transmutes the self-seeking of the economic man into deeds that work for “the greatest good of the greatest number.” But this machinery is delicate and must be permitted to operate under “normal” conditions and must not be overridden by government interference; to enjoy the fruits of an inherently beneficent natural economic law, men must permit it to operate unhampered; they must be industrious, frugal, temperate, and self-reliant; self-help, and not a weak recourse to state intervention, is the way of economic salvation.7 It had required no hard labor on Sumner’s part to fit this pattern to Darwinian individualism.
Developments in the middle 1880’s indicated that traditional economic thought was losing its grip on younger scholars, partly through the influence of the German historical school. Richard T. Ely, fresh from his graduate education at Halle and Heidelberg, published an essay on “The Past and the Present of Political Economy,” in which he attacked classical economics for its dogmatism and simplicity, its blind faith in laissez faire, and its belief in the adequacy of self-interest as an explanation of human conduct. Ely praised the historical school as an antidote, arguing that the historical method could not lead to such doctrinaire extremes.
. . . this younger political economy no longer permits the science to be used as a tool in the hands of the greedy and the avaricious for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes. It does not acknowledge laissez-faire as an excuse for doing nothing while people starve, nor allow the all-sufficiency of competition as a plea for grinding the poor.8
In the following year Simon Patten, a midwestern farm boy who had taken his doctorate at Halle, published a critique of The Premises of Political Economy, in which he questioned the social utility of unrestricted competition and expressed his dissatisfaction with Malthus, Ricardo, and the wage-fund doctrine. Darwin was generally thought to confirm Malthus’ law, Patten said, but in one critical respect Darwin’s theory was the exact opposite of Malthusianism. Malthus assumed that man has a definite and unalterable set of attributes; but Darwinism holds that man is pliable and circumstances determine his characteristics. On true Darwinian premises one can assume no such thing as a permanent natural rate of increase; for the human rate of increase would be susceptible to change in accordance with man’s surroundings and circumstances.9
In 1885 a group of younger economists under Ely’s leadership formed the American Economic Association. Its statement of principles read in part as follows:
We regard the state as an agency whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable conditions of human progress.
We believe that political economy as a science is still in an early stage of its development. While we appreciate the work of former economists, we look not so much to speculation as to the historical and statistical study of actual conditions of economic life for the satisfactory accomplishment of that development.10
The membership of the Association as a whole was by no means as critical of tradition as Ely, who was himself not a drastic opponent of the principle of competition.11 Rather, this statement was expressive of a growing discontent with the simple dogmatism of conventional apologetics. Although Darwinian science meant somewhat more to the young rebels than to most spokesmen of orthodoxy, it was chiefly significant to them as a broad doctrine of change or development; the German historical school rather than Darwinism was their model. “The most fundamental things in our minds,” Ely wrote, “were on the one hand the idea of evolution, and on the other hand, the idea of relativity.” These things were more important to them than any debate about economic method. “A new world was coming into existence, and if this world was to be a better world we knew that we must have a new economics to go along with it.”12
However limited the impact of Darwinism on economic theory, one could doubtless compile a formidable list of obiter dicta in which competition was justified in Sumnerian fashion as a special case of the struggle for existence. Probably the most memorable of such statements was Walker’s criticism of Bellamy’s case against competition. Walker bridled at the Nationalist argument that the survival, of the fittest was a precept of sheer brutality and nothing else. “I must deem any man very shallow in his observation of the facts of life,” he commented, “who fails to discern in competition the force to which it is mainly due that mankind have risen from stage to stage in intellectual, moral, and physical power.”13
Such pronouncements were usually incidental to larger discussions in which Darwinism played no special part. However, two economists, Simon Patten and Thomas Nixon Carver, attempted to go beyond such casual uses of Darwinism and to integrate economics and biology. Patten began his effort with an analysis of the shortcomings of classical economics. Its chief failure was a static conception of human economy. “The environment has so strong an influence over men that their subjective qualities can be neglected. Nature is so niggard and its surplus is so small that no radical change in social relations is possible.” Nature seems niggardly until it is shown that the economic environment changes with the changes in men. New classes of men look upon the world in different ways, and the environment they find depends upon their mental characteristics. The laws of a given society are not simply the laws of nature; they are “laws derived from the particular combination of natural forces of which the society makes use.”
Modifications of the environment react on men by changing their habits of consumption. Every reduction of cost creates another order of consumption, a new standard of life, which by inducing a new race psychology tends to stimulate new motives in production, new devices, new reductions in cost. This is how a dynamic economy works: progress occurs as a steady upward spiral.14
In an essay entitled The Theory of Social Forces (1896), Patten enlarged his criticism of prevailing social theory. Current speculation was still dominated by eighteenth-century philosophy and but little affected by the theory of evolution. Here the idea of a changing rather than a static environment held a central position in Patten’s system. The theory of goods in economics is in fact study of the environments of organisms. The environment of each organism, being the sum of its economic conditions, changes as these conditions change. In reality there is an indefinite number, a series, of environments. Any given environment, once occupied, is soon filled with struggling beings. “A progressive evolution depends upon the power of moving from one environment to another and thus avoiding the stress of competition.” A series of differing environments presents increasingly complex conditions, requiring a new mental evolution for each transition. A progressive nation passes through a complete series of different environments, even though its geographical location does not change. In a progressive evolution the higher type of animal adjusts to a new environment; among lower animals there is a static competition for the existing limited resources. Thus the essence of progress is escape from competition.
Like Ward, Patten distinguished sharply between the biologic and social stages of progress. To this he added his own ad hoc distinction between organisms characterized by superior sensory equipment and those having superior motor equipment. Sensory organisms gain clearer ideas of the environment; motor organisms “act with vigor and promptness.” In the biologic stage of progress, “beings are pushed into a local environment” in which little thought is required to supply the necessaries of life. The development of motor powers determines who shall survive, and those with inferior motor powers are driven out. Some of these, however, are better fitted to occupy a more general environment in which highly developed sensory powers are of more use. The conquered find a new place to live and create a new society with new requisites for survival. In time the residents of this new society who have the better motor powers will again survive, and those with imperfect motor organization but improved sensory powers are driven once again into a more general environment where new social instincts are needed and a new order is formed. The characteristics of social progress, as distinguished from biological, depend upon this ability to break through from one environment to another.
Applying his concepts to modern society, Patten argued that man has achieved such control over his environment, such development of his sensory faculties, that he has passed out of a pain economy—the primitive economy portrayed in Ricardian economics—into a pleasure economy. The essence of a pleasure economy is not the total absence of pain but the disappearance of fear as a dominant motive. The race slowly loses the instincts of a pain economy and acquires those best suited to the new conditions. In time the pleasure economy’s surplus population will be carried off by temptation, disease, and vice, and thus will be bred a race with “instincts to resist extinction by such devices”—a truly superior race of men in a social commonwealth.
In accordance with his general emphasis on the importance of consumption, Patten believed that peoples with varied diets and many wants have a decided advantage over those with simple diet and few wants. “The latter class would require a large area of land to support a given number of persons and would thus be at a disadvantage in an economic contest for survival.” Consumption itself becomes a lever in progressive evolution.15
Patten failed to make many converts to his novel social theory; and perhaps not without reason, for whatever the merit of his criticisms of classical economics, his own positive theory was more original than substantial. His method was excessively deductive, his distinctions artificial, his expositions exasperatingly vague, his psychology bound by all the limitations of hedonism; but he was an effective teacher and left a lasting impression on many students.16 In some ways his writings were symptomatic of the Progressive period. He attempted to absorb evolution into economic theory in a thoroughgoing way and to modify classical economics accordingly; and he tried to open new perspectives on the possibilities of a life based upon abundance rather than want.17
If Patten sought to find a new place for biology in social and economic theory, it was the task of Thomas Nixon Carver to keep alive the individualism of an earlier day. Appearing chiefly during the Wilsonian period, Carver’s ideas sound like a pale echo of the doctrines made familiar by Sumner a quarter of a century before. In a short popular volume entitled The Religion Worth Having, Carver preached the life of productive virtue in traditional terms. The best religion, he declared, is that which acts most powerfully as a spur to energy and directs that energy most productively. The religion which best fits men for the struggle to survive will be left in possession of the world, just as the “work-bench” philosophy of life is destined to prevail over the “pig-trough” philosophy. The struggle for existence is primarily a group struggle, but the struggle among individuals continues, and promotes the efficiency of the group in its larger conflict. The group that regulates individualistic competition by rewarding those who strengthen it most and penalizing, through poverty and failure, those who strengthen it least, is the group that will survive. The best method of getting productive work out of men is the selective method of competition, and rewards are best meted out to valuable citizens by means of private property. “The laws of natural selection are merely God’s regular methods of expressing his choice and approval,” asserted Carver. “The naturally selected are the chosen of God.” To help in the essential business of survival the churches should preach obedience to the laws of God through pursuit of the productive life.18 In his subsequent work Carver continued to defend competition on Darwinian grounds.19
More concerned than any other economist with the bearings of post-Darwinian science on economic theory was Thorstein Veblen. Veblen’s conception of the uses of Darwinism in economics was not the most representative of his generation, but in the long run it may be the most enduring. Although Veblen was something of an evolutionary anthropologist, an aspect of his theory best represented in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Instinct of Workmanship (1914), two other features of his achievement may be taken as most relevant to the theme of this study: his assault upon the traditional image of the captain of industry as the “fittest,” and his drastic criticism of classical economics in the light of evolutionary science.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, his own association with Sumner at Yale, where he received his doctorate, Veblen had little use for the type of social Darwinism Sumner taught. Veblen once remarked in a review of Enrico Ferri’s Socialisme et Science Positive that Ferri had shown “in rather more convincing form than is usual with the scientific apologists of socialism” that the equalitarian and collectivist features of socialist theory were not in conflict with the facts of biology. Veblen also expressed cordial approval of Lester Ward’s Pure Sociology, which he felt had succeeded brilliantly in bringing “the aims and methods of modern science effectively into sociological inquiry.”20
Veblen’s criticisms of the leisure class flatly contradicted Sumner’s belief that the well-to-do could be equated with the biologically fittest. In a large sense the greater part of Veblen’s work was an inferential criticism of the theoretical scheme of things that equated an individual’s productivity with his capacity for acquisition, and the fitness of his character with his pecuniary status. To Sumner accumulation was the reward of personal merit and millionaires were “a product of natural selection”; to Veblen the business class was essentially predatory in outlook and habits. The personal attributes of “the ideal pecuniary man” he described in terms ordinarily reserved for moral delinquents.21 Where the function of the captain of industry was conventionally considered a productive one, Veblen characterized the methods of a developed business society as an attenuated form of sabotage. Where pecuniary acquisition was regarded as the reward of social service, Veblen distinguished between the productive function of industry as an expression of workmanship, and the partially fraudulent character of business as an expression of salesmanship and chicanery. Where men like Sumner, Walker, and Carver looked upon competition chiefly as a rivalry in productive service, Veblen held that this had been true only in the past when there had been no divorce between business and industry. Competition had once centered about rivalry between producers for industrial efficiency; but when business became supreme over industry it had become chiefly a contest between seller and consumers with a large admixture of fraudulent exploitation.22
Not long before the appearance of The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen wrote a review of Mallock’s Aristocracy and Evolution which foreshadowed the later development of Veblen’s thought. He said his first temptation was to dismiss Mallock’s economic argument with the observation that “Mr. Mallock has written another of his foolish books,” but he discovered that he could use Mallock’s assertions about the value of the captain of industry to enlarge on his own thesis—the unproductive character of the business man.23
In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen interpreted institutions, individuals, and habits of thought as results of selective adaptation; but his views on the types of character selected for dominance in business society were hardly congenial with the Spencer-Sumner outlook. Protesting that he had no intention of making moral judgments, Veblen claimed that the simple aggression characteristic of barbarian culture had given way to “shrewd practise and chicanery, as the best approved method of accumulating wealth.” These are the qualities which have become essential for selective admission into the leisure class. “The tendency of the pecuniary life is, in a general way, to conserve the barbarian temperament, but with the substitution of fraud and prudence, or administrative ability, in place of the predilection for physical damage that characterizes the early barbarian.” The process of selection, under the conditions of modern society, has caused the aristocratic and bourgeois virtues—“that is to say the destructive and pecuniary traits”—to be found among the upper classes, and the industrial virtues, the peaceable traits, largely among “the classes given to mechanical industry.”24
A more fundamental aspect of Veblen’s use of Darwinism was his criticism of the methods of economic theory, best expressed in an essay entitled “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” which was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1898. What, asked Veblen, is the thing that distinguishes post-Darwinian science from pre-evolutionary science? It is not the insistence on facts, nor again the effort to formulate schemes of growth or development. It is a difference of “spiritual point of view . . . a difference in the basis of valuation of the facts for the scientific purpose, or in the interest from which the facts are appreciated.” Evolutionary science is “unwilling to depart from the test of causal relation or quantitative sequence.” The modern scientist who asks the question “Why?” demands an answer in terms of cause and effect and refuses to go beyond it to any ultimate system, to any teleological conception of the cosmos. This is the crux of the distinction; for earlier natural scientists were not satisfied with this bare formula of mechanical sequence, but sought for some ultimate systematization of the facts within a framework of “natural law.” They persistently clung to the notion of some “spiritually legitimate end” resident in and underlying the matters of fact which they observed. Their object was “to formulate knowledge in terms of absolute truth; and this absolute truth is a spiritual fact.”
This pre-Darwinian viewpoint, Veblen insisted, and not that of evolutionary science, still dominates the conceptions of modern economics. The “ultimate laws” formulated by the classical economists are laws setting down the normal or natural in the light of their preconception “regarding the ends to which, in the nature of things, all things tend”; and this preconception “imputes to things a tendency to work out what the instructed common sense of the time accepts as the adequate or worthy end of human effort.” Yet evolutionary natural science deals only with cumulative causation, and not with the formulation of some “normal case” which is constructed not out of any available facts but out of the investigator’s ideal of economic life. Traditional economics, following a preconceived notion of the normal, formulates an abstraction of the hedonistic man as “a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness,” passive under the buffetings of pain and pleasure stimuli. In the light of evolutionary science, on the contrary, man is seen to be “a coherent structure of propensities and habits which seeks realization and expression in an unfolding activity.” Instead of seeking for normal cases in the existence of an imaginary normal hedonistic man, a truly evolutionary economics must be “the theory of a process of cultural growth as determined by the economic interest, a theory of cumulative sequence of economic institutions stated in terms of the process itself.”25
Where other economists had found in Darwinian science merely a source of plausible analogies or a fresh rhetoric to substantiate traditional postulates and precepts, Veblen saw it as a loom upon which the whole fabric of economic thinking could be rewoven. The dominant school of economists had said that the existing is the normal and the normal is the right, and that the roots of human ills lie in acts which interfere with the natural unfolding of this normal process toward its inherent end in a beneficent order.
By virtue of their hedonistic preconceptions, their habituation to the ways of a pecuniary culture, and their avowed animistic faith that nature is in the right, the classical economists knew that the consummation to which, in the nature of things, all things tend, is the frictionless and beneficent economic system. This competitive ideal, therefore, affords the normal, and conformity to its requirements affords the test of absolute economic truth.26
In so far as economists had tried to use Darwinism, it was only to fortify this theoretical structure. Henceforth economics should abandon such preconceived notions and devote itself to a theory of the evolution of institutions as they actually are.
Although coinciding with the general atmosphere of protest, Veblen’s criticisms were often misunderstood and took effect but slowly. For some time his work was most popular among radicals for whom he had little respect. Yet a quarter-century after his essays on the evolutionary method in economic science, a colleague found him an effective force “with the large group of his disciples and the larger group of those who have been driven to rethink their premises and reorient their efforts by the challenge of his pitiless subversions of orthodoxy.”27
The methods and concepts of sociology, which was still striving for an established place in American schools, underwent a transformation much more sweeping than that in economics. Between 1890 and 1915 sociology was affected by changes both in the social scene and in other disciplines, particularly psychology. So rapidly did sociology develop, and so profuse was its literature, that it is impossible to give a full account of the fate of Darwinian sociology or do more than indicate leading tendencies in theory.
Outstanding sociologists followed either the Spencer-Sumner pattern or the one set by Lester Ward. Ward himself held an increasingly prominent place after 1893, and his election as first president of the American Sociological Society in 1906 was an acknowledgment of his leadership in the field. E. A. Ross and Albion Small considered themselves his disciples. Small, who was particularly concerned with the history and methodology of social science, took a special interest in promoting Ward’s works. Ross, who had married Ward’s niece, was an enthusiastic follower.
Among Spencerians the leader was still Sumner, who, however, had turned from his individualist sermons to enter upon the massive study that produced Folkways and the posthumous Science of Society. Sumner’s chief disciple, Albert Galloway Keller, extended his master’s work by applying in temperate fashion the Darwinian concepts of variation, selection, transmission, and adaptation to human folkways. While Keller’s approach was institutional rather than atomistic, reflecting the later phase of Sumner’s own development, he was as skeptical as his teacher of proposals for a quick or drastic reconstruction of society, and as heartily devoted to a rigidly deterministic view of social evolution. The persistence of this view emerged most clearly in his attitude toward adaptation. “If we can accept the conclusion . . . that every established and settled institution is justifiable, in its setting, as an adaptation,” Keller wrote, “it seems to me that we are thereby accepting the extension of the Darwinian theory to the field of the science of society.”28
Franklin H. Giddings at Columbia University continued to work with the Spencerian concepts of differentiation and equilibration and similar cosmic principles long after they had been abandoned by most other writers;29 but he readily admitted that sociology is a psychological rather than a biological science, and was quick to point out that the cornerstone of his own social theory, “the consciousness of kind,” which he held to be the basis of all social organization, is a mental state and not a biological process.30 A thoroughgoing individualist, he took a conservative view of the selection principle in society. Although he recognized that the fittest is not always the best, he held it to be characteristic of the social process to make them identical. Society, however, in selecting the best, gives weight to such qualities as sympathy and mutual aid. It usually eliminates “the incompetent and the irresponsible.”31 Since the days when political economy had been his primary interest, Giddings had been devoted to the competitive principle, and he believed with Spencer that its permanence in the economic process could be deduced from the conservation of energy and the facts of heredity.32 He drew upon biology to support the ancient doctrine of a natural aristocracy, and accordingly argued for a modification of pure democracy.33
The most important change in sociological method was its estrangement from biology, and the tendency to place social studies on a psychological foundation. Spencer had not long completed his Principles of Sociology when the tide began to turn powerfully against him, and repudiations of his method were so drastic as to be unmindful of the qualifications Spencer himself had made. Albion Small wrote in 1897:
Mr. Herbert Spencer has been a much mixed blessing. . . . He has probably done more than any man of recent times to set a fashion of semi-learned thought, but he has lived to hear himself pronounced an anachronism by men who were once his disciples. . . . Mr. Spencer’s sociology is of the past, not of the present. . . . Spencer’s principles of sociology are supposed principles of biology extended to cover social relations. But the decisive factors in social relations are understood by present sociologists to be psychical, not biological.34
Small’s attitude was the prevailing one. “I believe that the biologic bias creates erroneous notions of social phenomena, and stimulates activity along fruitless lines of investigation,” Simon Patten had declared.35 Even the Spencerian Giddings was moved to concede that “the attempt to construct a science of society by means of biological analogies has been abandoned by all serious investigators of social phenomena.”36 Ross’s Foundations of Sociology (1905) contained a critique of Spencerianism and related tendencies. Albion Small observed that the general line of methodological progress in sociology was “marked by a gradual shifting of effort from analogical representation of social structures to real analysis of social processes.”37 Small’s own Introduction to the Study of Society (1894), written in collaboration with George E. Vincent, had employed a moderate use of analogical representation. Twenty years later Small confessed that “the emptiness of this sort of work now makes my teeth chatter . . .”38 Charles A. Ellwood, writing fifty years after The Origin of Species, found Darwinism of great use to sociology, but disparaged Spencer’s attempt to carry over physical and mechanical principles to society. Spencer’s interpretations, “being fundamentally in terms alien to the social life, were foredoomed to failure.”39 James Mark Baldwin agreed:
The attempt . . . very current at one time through the influence of Spencer, to interpret social organization by strict analogy with the physical organism is now discredited. Such a view will not stand before the consideration of the most elementary psychological principles.40
The tendency to draw upon psychology instead of biology was in line with Ward’s appeals for a proper evaluation of the psychic factor in civilization, and took place under his leadership, but the psychology that the most fruitful innovators in social theory were adopting was less traditional than either Ward’s or Spencer’s, deriving its impetus largely from the work of James and Dewey. Before their work, psychology had been bound to traditional hedonism. The Spencerian and Wardian conception of human motivation, like that of the classical economists whom Veblen criticized, was substantially bounded by the pleasure-pain, stimulus-response horizon. The new psychology, whose most eminent representatives were Dewey and Veblen portrayed the organism as a structure of propensities, interests, and habits, not as a mere machine for the reception and registering of pleasure-pain stimuli.
The new psychology, moreover, was a truly social psychology. The social conditioning of the individual’s reaction pattern was stressed by Dewey and Veblen, and insistence upon the unreality of a personal psyche isolated from the social surroundings was a central tenet in the social theory of Charles H. Cooley and the psychology of James Mark Baldwin.41 The older psychology had been atomistic; Spencer, for example, had seen society as the more or less automatic result of the characters and instincts of its individual members; and this had given color to his conclusion that the improvement of society must be a slow evolutionary process waiting upon the gradual increment of personal characteristics “adapted” to the life conditions of modern industrial society. The new psychology, prepared to see the interdependence of the individual personality with the institutional structure of society, was destroying this one-way notion of social causation and criticizing its underlying individualism. “The individual,” wrote Baldwin, “is a product of his social life and society is an organization of such individuals.”42 The thesis of Cooley’s social psychology was “that man’s psychical outfit is not divisible into the social and the nonsocial; but that he is all social in a larger sense, is all a part of the common human life . . .”43 John Dewey analyzed the implications for social action of this view of human nature:
We may desire abolition of war, industrial justice, greater equality of opportunity for all. But no amount of preaching good will or the golden rule or cultivation of sentiments of love and equity will accomplish the results. There must be change in objective arrangements and institutions. We must work on the environment, not merely on the hearts of men.44
The tempo of the change in social theory should not be exaggerated, however. For many years after its appearance in 1908, William McDougall’s Introduction to Social Psychology was the most popular book in its field; and McDougall was the proponent par excellence of the “fixed structure of mind.” McDougall derived the salient features of the human equipment from instincts traceable far back into the biological past of the race. For many who were influenced by McDougall’s instinct theory, progress toward a cultural analysis of social phenomena was as difficult as for those who had listened to Spencer a generation before.45
Influenced by the humanitarianism of the day and the political renaissance of the common man, the new sociology was pulled along in the current of Progressivism. The discipline was no longer seen by its practitioners as a complicated way of justifying laissez faire. Men like Ross and Cooley refused to look upon the poor as unfit or to worship at the shrine of the fittest.46 It is significant that Ross, the most popular spokesman of sociology,47 fits the pattern of the typical Progressive thinker. A midwesterner, a supporter of Populism in his early days, later a friend of many of the muckrakers, he expressed in his formal writings the aggressive spirit of protest and reform. “Suckled on the practicalism of Lester F. Ward,” he explained, “I wouldn’t give a snap of my finger for the ‘pussyfooting’ sociologist.”48 In his early work Ross tore down the analogy between natural selection and the economic process, and condemned it as “a caricature of Darwinism, invented to justify the ruthless practices of business men.”49 In his Sin and Society (1907) Ross criticized the prevailing code of morals for failing to pierce the veil of the impersonal corporate relations of modern society and to fix blame for social ills on absentee malefactors. The spirit of reform had been set loose within the very discipline that Spencer had hoped would teach men to let things alone.
During these same years when social Darwinism was under increasingly strong criticism among social theorists, it was being revived in a somewhat new guise in the literature of the eugenics movement. Accompanied by a flood of valuable genetic research carried on by physicians and biologists, eugenics seemed not so much a social philosophy as a science; but in the minds of most of its advocates it had serious consequences for social thought.
The theory of natural selection, which had assumed the transmission of parental variations, had greatly stimulated the study of heredity. Popular credulity about the scope and variety of hereditary traits had been almost boundless. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, had laid the foundations of the eugenics movement and coined its name during the years when Darwinism was being sold to the public. In the United States, Richard Dugdale had published in 1877 his study of The Jukes, which, although its author gave more credit to environmental factors than did many later eugenists,50 had nevertheless offered support to the common view that disease, pauperism, and immorality are largely controlled by inheritance. While Galton’s first inquiries into heredity—Hereditary Genius (1869), Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), and National Inheritance (1889)—had been received here with much acclaim, it was not until the turn of the century that the eugenics movement took organized form, first in England and then in the United States. Eugenics then grew with such great rapidity that by 1915 it had reached the dimensions of a fad. While eugenics has never since been so widely discussed, it has proved to be the most enduring aspect of social Darwinism.
In 1894, Amos G. Warner, in his standard study of American Charities, had wrestled with the problem of the relative importance of heredity and environment in the background of poverty.51 At the turn of the century there was a notable rise of interest in the social significance of hereditary characteristics.52 The American Breeders’ Association, founded in 1903, rapidly developed a strong eugenics subsection, which by 1913 became influential enough to have the name of the organization changed to the American Genetic Association. In 1910 a group of eugenists, with the financial assistance of Mrs. E. H. Harriman, founded at Cold Spring Harbor the Eugenics Record Office, which became a laboratory and a fountainhead of propaganda.
The National Conference on Race Betterment in 1914 showed how thoroughly the eugenic ideal had made its way into the medical profession, the colleges, social work, and charitable organizations.53 The ideas of the movement began to receive practical application in 1907, when Indiana became the first state to adopt a sterilization law; by 1915 twelve states had passed similar measures.54
Doubtless the rapid urbanization of American life, which created great slums in which were massed the diseased, the deficient, and the demented, had much to do with the rise of eugenics. The movement was also favored by a growing interest in philanthropy and increasing endowments for hospitals and charities and appropriations for public health. Especially stimulating to the study of mental disease and deficiency was the rapid expansion of American psychiatry after 1900. As more and more diseased and defective families in great cities came to the attention of physicians and social workers, it was easy to confuse the rising mass of known cases with a real increase. The influx of a large immigrant population from peasant countries of central and southern Europe, hard to assimilate because of rustic habits and language barriers, gave color to the notion that immigration was lowering the standard of American intelligence; at least so it seemed to nativists who assumed that a glib command of English is a natural criterion of intellectual capacity. The apparent economic deceleration at the end of the century was also seen by many observers as the beginning of a national decline; and it was in accordance with the habits of a Darwinized era to find in this apparent social decline a biological deterioration associated with the disappearance of “the American type.”55
Among scientists and physicians the movement was spurred by several biological discoveries. Weismann’s germ-plasm theory stimulated a hereditarian approach to social theory.56 The rediscovery in 1900 by DeVries, and others, of Mendel’s studies in heredity placed in the hands of geneticists the organizing principle which their inquiries had lacked and gave them fresh confidence in the possibilities of their research for prediction and control.
Few of the eugenists presumed to be social philosophers or to offer a full program of social reconstruction; and they were sometimes careful to qualify their hereditarian theses with a nod to the uses of environment; but this did not prevent them from adopting the biological approach to social analysis at the very time that it was being dropped by leaders in social theory. William E. Kellicott probably spoke for a majority when he said that “the Eugenist believes that no other single factor in determining social conditions and practices approaches in importance that of racial structural integrity and sanity.”57
Early eugenists tacitly accepted that identification of the “fit” with the upper classes and the “unfit” with the lower that had been characteristic of the older social Darwinism. Their warnings about the multiplication of morons at the lower end of the social scale, and their habit of speaking of the “fit” as if they were all native, well-to-do, college-trained citizens, sustained the old belief that the poor are held down by biological deficiency instead of environmental conditions. Their almost exclusive focus upon the physical and medical aspects of human life helped to distract public attention from the broad problems of social welfare. They were also in large part responsible for the emphasis upon preserving the “racial stock” as a means of national salvation—an emphasis so congenial to militant nationalists like Theodore Roosevelt.58 They differed, however, from earlier social Darwinists in that they failed to draw sweeping laissez-faire conclusions; indeed a part of their own program depended upon state action. Still, they were almost equally conservative in their general bias; and so authoritative did their biological data seem that they were convincing to men like E. A. Ross, who had thoroughly repudiated Spencerian individualism.
The social preconceptions of Sir Francis Galton were not seriously questioned by the early eugenists; and Galton, like Bowen, Sumner, and Arthur Latham Perry, had postulated the free competitive order in which awards are distributed according to ability. He was convinced “that the men who achieve eminence, and those who are naturally capable, are, to a large extent, identical.” “If a man is gifted with vast intellectual ability, eagerness to work, and power of working,” he added, “I cannot comprehend how such a man should be repressed.” Galton insisted that “social hindrances” cannot prevent men of high ability from becoming eminent, and, on the other hand, that “social advantages are incompetent to give that status to a man of moderate ability.”59
Karl Pearson set the tone of eugenics on this point when he estimated that heredity accounts for nine-tenths of a man’s capacity.60 Henry Goddard, as a result of his investigation of the Kallikaks, concluded that feeble-mindedness is “largely responsible” for paupers as well as criminals, prostitutes, and drunkards.61 David Starr Jordan declared that “poverty, dirt and crime” could be ascribed to poor human material, and added, “It is not the strength of the strong but the weakness of the weak which engenders exploitation and tyranny.”62 Lewellys F. Barker, a distinguished physician, suggested that the decline and fall of nations could be explained through the relative fertility of the fit and unfit elements.63 Charles B. Davenport, the leader of American eugenics, challenged the environmentalist assumptions that dominated current social practice, and argued that “the greatest need of the day for the progress of social science is additional precise data as to the unit characteristics of man and their methods of inheritance.”64
Edward Lee Thorndike did much to spread among educators the eugenists’ idea of inherited mental capacity. Thorndike believed that men’s absolute achievements can be affected by environment and training, but that their relative achievements, their comparative performances in rivalry with each other, can be accounted for only by original capacity.65 Fundamentally it is the soundness and rationality of the racial stock that creates the environment and not vice versa. “There is no so certain and economical way to improve man’s environment as to improve his nature.”66 For educational policy this view demanded the development of the intellectual faculties of the few who have outstanding abilities, and giving limited vocational training to the mediocre.67
The consequences for social policy of the eugenic point of view were treated at some length by Popenoe and Johnson in their popular textbook, Applied Eugenics. Among the reforms they favored were large inheritance taxes, the back-to-the farm movement, the abolition of child labor, and compulsory education. Rural living would counteract the dysgenic effect of urban society. The abolition of child labor would cause the poor to restrict their breeding. Compulsory education would have the same effect by making the child an expense to its parents; but it should not be supplemented by subsidies to children of the poor in the form of free lunches, free textbooks, or other aids that would lower the cost of child care. The authors opposed minimum-wage legislation and trade unions on the ground that both favored inferior workmen and penalized the superior by fixing wages in industry without regard to individual merit. They also opposed socialism for its belief in the benefits that would flow from environmental changes and for its faith in human equality; but they did break with individualism in so far as eugenics sought a social end requiring some individual subordination.68
Although eugenists were given to attacking the Jeffersonian doctrine of natural equality, few were willing to go far enough to challenge the ideal of democratic government. When Alleyne Ireland, a noted critic of democracy, wrote in the Journal of Heredity that Weismann’s germ-plasm theory sapped the intellectual foundations of democracy by ruling out the possibility that the inferior could be improved from generation to generation by education and training, he was immediately challenged by biologists who saw no inevitable contradiction between natural inequality and democratic government.69
Some biologists had remarkable confidence in their ability to resolve the problems of politics by the methods of science. When the First World War threw the menace of “Kaiserism” into the limelight, Frederick Adams Woods, a student of heredity in royal families, pointed out that the most despotic Roman emperors had been closely related. If despots are largely the result of hereditary forces, he concluded, “then the only way to eliminate despots is to regulate the sources from which they spring.” In so far as the despots are recast in their ancestral mold, “the number of despots can be reduced by a control of the marriages from which they originate.”70
The ideology of the movement drew fire from representatives of the trend toward cultural analysis in sociology. Lester Ward, who had long before tried to refute Galton, saw in the eugenics ideology a menace to his own theories, and he devoted the greater part of his Applied Sociology to an attack upon the hereditarian argument. Analyzing the very cases used by Galton to prove that genius is hereditary, Ward showed that opportunity and education were also universally present.71
In 1897 Charles H. Cooley, influenced by Ward’s own early work,72 published a critical review of Galton’s thesis, pointing out that all his cases of “hereditary genius” had been provided with certain simple tools—literacy and access to books—without which no amount of genius could make its way. Remarking that there had been a very high percentage of illiteracy among the common people of England in the middle of the nineteenth century, Cooley asked how the geniuses in this mass of illiterates could have risen to fame, no matter how great their native endowment.73 Albert Galloway Keller also reminded eugenists that their proposals involved a thoroughgoing transformation in the mores, above all in the strong and deep-rooted mores of sex.74 It was Cooley who summarized most pointedly the objections of mature sociologists to the eugenists’ conception of social causation:
Most of the writers on eugenics have been biologists or physicians who have never acquired that point of view which sees in society a psychological organism with a life process of its own. They have thought of human heredity as a tendency to definite modes of conduct, and of environment as something that may aid or hinder, not remembering what they might have learned even from Darwin, that heredity takes on a distinctively human character only by renouncing, as it were, the function of predetermined adaptation and becoming plastic to the environment.75
In spite of its fundamental conservatism, the eugenics craze had about it the air of a “reform,” for it emerged at a time when most Americans liked to think of themselves as reformers. Like the reform movements, eugenics accepted the principle of state action toward a common end and spoke in terms of the collective destiny of the group rather than of individual success.
This is significant of the general trend of thought in the Progressive era. A rising regard for the collective aspects of life was one of the outstanding characteristics of the shift in the dominant pattern of thought. The new collectivism was not socialistic, but was based upon an increasing recognition of the psychological and moral relatedness of men in society. It saw in the coexistence of baronial splendor and grinding poverty something more than the accidental dispensations of Providence. Refusing to depend upon individual self-assertion as an adequate remedy, men turned toward collective social action.
The change in the political outlook of the common man was responsible for a change in the fundamental mechanisms of thought among workers in the social sciences. The formalistic thought of the nineteenth century had been built upon an atomistic individualism. Society, men had believed, was a loose collection of individual agents; social advance depended upon improvements in the personal qualities of these individuals, their increased energy and frugality; among these individuals the strongest and best rose to the top and gave leadership to the rest; their heroic accomplishments were the ideal subject matter of history; the best laws were those that gave them the greatest scope for their activities; the best nations were those that produced most leaders of this type; the way of salvation was to leave unhindered the natural processes that produced these leaders and gave the affairs of the world into their hands.
This pattern of thought was static; instead of inquiry it seemed to encourage deductive speculation; its essential function was the rationalization of existing institutions. Those who were satisfied with it had felt relatively little need for concrete investigation or even for significant novelty in their abstractions.
Between the Spanish-American War and the outbreak of the First World War there was a great restlessness in American society, which inevitably affected the patterns of speculative thought. The old scheme of thought was repeatedly assailed by critics who were in sympathy with the new spirit of the Progressive era. The intellectual friction engendered by this discontent fired the energies and released the critical talents of new minds in history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and law. The result was a minor renaissance in American social thought, a renaissance which saw in a relatively short span of years the rise to prominence of Charles A. Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, John Dewey, Franz Boas, Louis D. Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
It is easier to enumerate the achievements of this renaissance than to characterize its intellectual assumptions, but certainly its leading figures did share a common consciousness of society as a collective whole rather than a congeries of individual atoms. They shared also an understanding of the need for empirical research and accurate description rather than theoretical speculation cast in some traditional mold.
A drastic departure from ancestor worship in history was marked by Charles Beard’s study of the origins of the Constitution and by Frederick Jackson Turner’s quest for environmental and economic explanations of American development. Brandeis opened up new possibilities in law by drafting for the first time factual sociological brief in defense of a state law regulating conditions of labor in private enterprise. Franz Boas led a generation of anthropologists away from unilinear evolutionary theory toward cultural history and took pioneer Steps in the criticism of race theory. John Dewey made philosophy a working instrument in other disciplines, applying it fruitfully to psychology, sociology, education, and politics. V-blen exposed the intellectual sterility of prevailing economic theory, and pointed the way to an institutional analysis of the facts of economic life.
In accordance with the spirit of the times, the most original thinkers in social science had ceased to make their main aim the justification and perpetuation of existing society in all its details. They were trying to describe it with accuracy, to understand it in new terms, and to improve it.