3
The question of Darwin

When someone has behaved like an animal, he says: “I’m only human!” But when he is treated like an animal, he says: “I’m human too!”

(Karl Kraus)

In claiming at Marx’s graveside that “Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature”, Engels did much to set the terms of future comparisons between Marx and Darwin. But how does Engels’s claim about Darwin square with what Darwin accomplished and thought he had accomplished? Marx had applauded Darwin for having undercut teleological argument in the natural sciences, and Engels had too. This being so, we need to ask questions about the “law of development” Engels in 1883 credited Darwin with having “discovered”. Darwin himself propounded no such discovery. Engels’s “law of development” cannot refer to evolution at large, which Darwin never claimed to have discovered. If Engels had in mind the principle of natural selection, which Darwin did claim to have discovered as a means of refiguring and refining the concept of evolution, we are no better off: Darwin certainly uses the term “law”, but he does not use it to refer to his principle of natural selection.

Engels’s claim at Marx’s graveside was, just as we might expect, less about the character of Darwin’s discoveries than about their supposed comparability with Marx’s. Engels, that is to say, raises an important question about Darwin, but is of little help in answering it. He had his own ideas about what the “law of development of organic nature” comported, and these in truth owed little enough to Darwin. It does not follow from this that the question Engels raises is unanswerable. What follows is that Engels, in raising it, has (perhaps despite himself) obliged us to turn to Darwin himself.

The belief system that Darwin (1809–82) inherited, then subverted, was in various ways “inculcated through the writings of theologians, scientists, scientific popularisers, and political economists”. It

included the idea – indeed the perception – that the adaptation of organisms to their environment is perfect, that nature is a well-adjusted mechanism, that there is a harmony among organisms and between them and the inorganic world; the idea that the laws of nature were established by God to achieve his ends; and the idea that all natural phenomena serve purposes relative to the whole economy of nature.

After 1859, as Dov Ospovat points out, “Darwin’s theory contributed to the complex process, already under way, by which [all these ideas] lost currency”, and contributed to this process decisively. Yet “for many years and in some respects throughout his life, Darwin shared his contemporaries’ belief in harmony and perfection”, a belief that proved notably difficult to shake off once and for all.1 Moreover, none of the constituent ideas listed above, either in themselves, or in combination with any (or all) of the others, is necessarily inconsistent with “evolution”, if evolution is but vaguely defined. The belief-system these ideas constitute is, however, resolutely teleological, and this is why Darwin’s onslaught on teleological explanation needs to be positioned with some care, and considered not just in its effects, but also in its genesis. Darwin at first imbibed the elements of a belief-system his later researches subverted. He did not subvert these elements all at once, however trenchantly he interrogated their various presuppositions. There was no singular flash of insight animating Darwin’s quest, but this does not rob it of its drama, which was one of questioning and self-questioning, of learning to take nothing on authority, nothing on trust, nothing for granted – not even his own, once-cherished beliefs and preconceptions.

Several of Darwin’s precursors and contemporaries – Theodor Schwann, Richard Owen, Louis Agassiz and William B. Carpenter are among those that come to mind – believed or came to believe that the facts of natural science were incompatible with a strictly teleological interpretation of organisms, but remained committed to the idea that the universe taken as a whole exhibits both order and purpose. Darwin at first was in full agreement with them.2 It was perfectly possible to argue against teleological explanations without abandoning the ideas of harmony, “progress” and “development”; in doing so at first himself, Darwin was in good company, the best his age had to offer.3 Much has been made in biographical accounts of Darwin of the influence of Malthus’s argument about population and scarcity. (Marx duly took note of this.) Yet, when he first read Malthus in 1838, Darwin did not at once abandon his belief in perfection and harmony. Nor indeed would the Revd Malthus have expected otherwise. Nature at large could still be seen, and was seen (by Malthus as well as Darwin) as a system of beneficent laws designed to produce pre-ordained, God-given ends. Malthus believed that society as well as nature proceeded according to divinely appointed laws. His concern was not just to explain the operation of his principle of population; it was also to show how this principle fits into the creator’s grand design. By demonstrating “how little the price of labour and the

means of supporting a family depend upon a revolution”, Malthus hoped, and as a clergyman hoped devoutly, to “induce every man in the lower classes of society … to bear the distress in which he might be involved with more patience … and feel less discontent and irritation at the government and the higher classes of society on account of his poverty”. Malthus urged the “lower classes” to “become more peacable and orderly,… to be less inclined to tumultuous proceedings in seasons of scarcity, and … at all times be less influenced by inflammatory and seditious publications”. This helps explain why Marx, as author of seditious and inflammatory publications, loathed Malthus as much as he did; but it also helps explain Malthus’s appeal to Darwin, which was more resonant than many have supposed. Malthus was bent on encouraging people consciously to adapt, in the belief that adaptation, be it conscious or not, is part of nature’s plan. This belief in the efficacy of adaptation, a belief that progress could and should be based on adaptation, was one that Darwin shared and extended. The principle of population was for Malthus (as it was for Paley) by no means destructive of the harmonistic view of nature or “creation”. To the contrary, the principle of population is, as Ospovat says, “part of the plan”.

Malthus’s emphasis on competition for scarce resources may well have inspired Darwin’s principle of natural selection, as Darwin’s biographers commonly claim; but Malthus also, and perhaps more fundamentally, provided Darwin with a new solution to an old problem: How does the organic world adjust to change so that the harmony of nature is not disturbed?4 Darwin in 1838 still believed in the harmony of nature; nothing he read in Malthus would have shaken this conviction.

This means that if we are to accept the invitation Engels proffers, and ponder Darwin on law, teleology, development and progress, we must probe more deeply into his development as a scientist. Maurice Mandelbaum is of great help here. In his words,

one might have expected that Darwin would have regarded it as a law of nature … that all things should progress toward higher forms. However, this is a step he refused to take. While he did believe that progress was a necessary consequence of nature’s laws, he explicitly rejected the view that the phenomena of life were to be examined by means of a law of progressive development … [A]daptations follow from a long series of adaptive changes, not from an inherent developmental tendency.5

Indeed, the idea of an inherent developmental tendency, an idea that could and did receive Lamarckian or theological sanction, was an idea Darwin set out to guard his principle of natural selection against.

What then of natural selection itself? How is its place within Darwin’s overall theory to be understood? Darwin’s Origin of Species, according to Elliott Sober, contains two “big ideas”. The first is the tree of life. The various species of animal and plant that now populate the planet have common ancestors. There must, therefore, be lineages connecting descendants with ancestors. This tells us that evolution, so understood, must have taken place. It does not explain how or why specific species or characteristics of species emerged within these lineages. If a new species comes into existence or an old one becomes extinct, we need to ask questions about the process of evolutionary change, and it is Darwin’s answers to these questions that involves his second big idea, natural selection. Darwin’s innovation was not that of having been the first to formulate either of these two big ideas. It was to have combined them. Only on the basis of their combination could Darwin proceed to claim that natural selection is the principal explanation of why evolutionary change has produced the observable variety of life-forms that surrounds us. In Sober’s formulation, if the tree of life represents the pattern of evolution, what it looks like from afar, then natural selection is the main process explaining why this pattern takes the form it does.6

Most accounts of natural selection personify it, and argue as though natural selection had work to do or tasks to perform. We commonly read in accounts of Darwin that natural selection does not just make modest modifications in the traits of existing species (such as finches in the Galapogos); it also explains the origins of species themselves, origins that are not observable in the same way that finches are. While Darwin did indeed think of natural selection as the key to explaining species’ origins, it is we who do the explaining, using natural selection as the key. To personify natural selection is to award it an agency it does not in fact possess. Natural selection is in no sense a demiurge working its way through the natural realm, compelling species to adapt or die. We can say of Darwin’s natural selection what Marx, in The Holy Family, said of history; natural selection fights no battles, wins no victories. It is not an actor, nor yet an agent. It is the main principle of investigation that helps us explain why changes in the natural world take the form they take. But it is we who do the explaining.

Personification of natural selection is a convenience and a temptation, into which even Darwin himself sometimes fell – as when he tells us that natural selection is “daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation”; and that it is “silently and invisibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being, in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life”.7 One of Darwin’s best-known analogies is that between artificial and natural selection. Plant and animal breeders

deliberately modify the characteristics of organisms by means of artificial selection. If the process of artificial selection can and commonly does produce small changes in given species over a comparatively short period of time, it is reasonable (in Darwin’s opinion) to suppose that natural selection will produce much larger changes over much more protracted periods. But in the case of artificial selection someone is doing the selecting. Human aims and intentionalities are involved. In the case of natural selection, which by its very nature is a much more extended and much more unpredictable process, no such intentionality is involved or needs to be involved. This helps explain why Darwin proceeded not directly to dispute or challenge the venerable argument from design, but simply to dispense with it. Both the argument from design and the various non-

Darwinian arguments against it can readily enough be made compatible with a notion of progress that is providential as well as teleological in its bearing – the argument from design because it presupposes the working-out of divine will, opposition to the argument from design because, for its part, it privileges our progressive emancipation from the stranglehold of such outmoded, tutelary superstition. It is important to a sensitive understanding of Darwin to acknowledge how suspicious he was of either of these approaches. Darwin’s principle of natural selection does not subsume evolution within a pre-existing pattern of opposition to the argument from design. It proffers an alternative to both lines of argument. Once variation among natural species arises, some variants exhibit more staying power than others. Natural selection accounts for the fitness of the traits or characteristics that are displayed by members of a species; organisms will retain characteristics that reveal their ancestry. The argument from design entails optimal design, but natural selection has no need of this. Leibniz and Paley, to name but two of the most intelligent proponents of the argument from design, had supposed adaptation to be perfect. Darwin argued for the relativity of adaptation; adaptation was almost always imperfect, but good enough.

All this helps us see that Darwin’s principle of natural selection was lawlike only to a limited degree. The main constituent features of natural selection are variation, fitness and inheritance. (Variation is variation among the natural objects under consideration, objects on which natural selection – if I may after all personify it – can act; variation must entail variation in fitness if a species is to survive or die out; and the characteristics of such fitness must be biologically inheritable, if any organism is to survive.) But “our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound”, according to every edition of The Origin of Species published during Darwin’s lifetime; “that the process of variation should be indefinitely prolonged is an assumption the truth of which must be judged by how far the hypothesis accords with the phenomena of nature”; and as to inheritance, it too, like variation, was to Darwin an enigma. Its laws were “quite unknown”.8

Darwin, having isolated and defined natural selection as the leitmotif of evolutionary change, did not for this or any other reason make it the be-all and end-all of such change. He “looked to other change-producing factors”, though “only in those instances where he could not see [natural] selection as a possible means”. In every such case, “these factors were subordinate to, or co-ordinate with the dominant action of natural selection, a principle he never significantly amended”. In The Descent of Man, Darwin (in words that recall Malthus) tells us, for example, “how subordinate in importance is the direct action of conditions of life, in comparison with the accumulation through selection of indefinite variations”; his definitive summary statement may be the sentence with which he concludes the introduction to each edition of The Origin of Species: “I am convinced that natural selection has been the most important, but not the only means of modification.”9

Darwin’s use of law appears to stop well short of Engels’s distraught but only too influential characterization of it, which is beginning to look over-asserted and misleading. Darwin’s Autobiography tells us that “[e]verything in nature is the result of fixed laws”, but only after telling us, in the immediately preceding sentence, that “[t]here seems to be no more design in the action of natural selection than in the course the wind blows”.10 The adjacency of these sentences should remind us that Darwin’s emphasis on laws was in large measure employed to take issue with the inexorable determinism of other accounts, not to add to their inexorability. He set forth natural selection not as a theory for which absolute proof had been obtained (his argument is not an inductive-Baconian one, but a hypothetical-deductive one), but merely as the most probable explanation of the greatest number of known facts about his subject-matter, the origin of species. His theory tells us nothing about the formation of the solar system, the derivation of the chemical elements, or the origin of life as such (so much for “the law of development of organic life”); he resists cosmic generalizations of any kind, and was severely critical, publicly or privately, of systems-builders whose ambitions took their arguments beyond the available evidence. While there was no shortage of contenders, Lamarck and his disciple Herbert Spencer were particularly apposite cases in point.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) taught that life as such has an inherent tendency to develop in complexity and “perfection” through a pre-ordained sequence of stages; that there is, in other words, an innate power (pouvoir de la vie), conferred on nature by God, which, in the case of the animal line, eventuates and culminates in mankind. Darwin, who greatly resented being compared to Lamarck, found no merit in the latter’s evident providentialism. Darwin’s

principle of natural selection was designed, as we have seen, to explain why lineages change over time and why they diverge as each responds to different environments. Evolution in Darwin’s view has no pre-established sequence of stages, and needs none. Lineages evolve not according to the supposed logic of some inner principle or other, but in response to circumstances that might be accidental. “[N]o innate tendency to progressive development exists.”11 There is no inevitability about our presence as observing subjects, or indeed about our presence as a species. Natural history is a series, not a sequence – an accumulation of unique events that do not repeat themselves, not a stately process leading inevitably to the present. It may well be that the outcome of evolutionary transitions so understood can be established as having been highly probable, but a chain of probable outcomes does not inevitability make – no matter what latterday Lamarckians like Spencer might suppose. The principle of natural selection suffices to discover “tiny islands of adaptability in a vast ocean of biological possibility”,12 and suffices to explain why these tiny islands arose; further than this we need not go. As far as Darwin (though not Engels) is concerned, the outcome of systematic thinking need not itself be systematic in the same way; to suppose otherwise is to argue providentially, not scientifically.

Darwin’s opposition to, and distaste for providential thinking is deeplyrooted – far more deeply-rooted than the influence even of Malthus. The two notebooks on man, mind and materialism he composed on the HMS Beagle are of considerable interest in this regard. Darwin describes the seafarers’ reception by the native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego as “the most curious and interesting spectacle” he had ever beheld. The difference between Darwin and his shipmates, on the one hand, and these native inhabitants, on the other, seemed greater than that between wild and domesticated animals. Yet the behaviour of “civilised” people towards indigenous ones caught Darwin short all over again. “Who would believe in this age in a Christian and civilised country that such atrocities [as massacres and exploitation] were committed?” Argentina, Darwin surmised, “will be in the hands of white gaucho savages instead of coppercollared Indians. The former being a little superior in civilization, as they are inferior in every moral virtue.” Perhaps, Darwin supposed, “primitive” people were not so primitive. After all, had not the three Anglicized Fuegians aboard the Beagle completed in a single generation the circuit from “savage” to European and back, resettling happily among their “miserable and backward” tribes? “One’s mind hurries back over past centuries, & then asks, could our progenitors be such as these?” Darwin mused on the homeward voyage:

Men, – whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of domesticated animals, who do not possess the instinct of these

animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason.13

The key word here may be the word “boast”. The lowliness, the finitude of human reason, its development “over past centuries” from something less than the instinct of domestic animals, shook Darwin’s confidence, not so much in humanity or human nature as in what James T. Moore calls “the eminently rational conclusions of orthodox naturalists and natural theologians”.14 These conclusions, to which Darwin himself had subscribed as a younger man, were, he could now see, dependent for their validity on a lofty estimate of mankind’s intellectual powers, an estimation based in its turn on an elevated notion of mankind’s origin that was the product of the study and the library, if not the cloister, and not the outcome of first-hand observation.

[L]et man visit orang-utan in domestication, hear expressive whine, see its intelligence when spoken [to], as if it understood every word said – see its affection to those it knows – see its passion and rage, sulkiness and very extreme of despair; let him [then] look at savage, roasting his parent, naked, artless, not improving, yet improvable and then let him dare to boast of his proud pre-eminence.15

Boasting is this time linked with “pride”, to striking effect. Those who boast of the “proud pre-eminence” of the more “civilized” themselves partake of overweening pride.

Has not the white man, who has debased his nature by making slave of his fellow-Black, often wished to consider him as [an]other animal, – it is the way of mankind & I believe those who soar above such prejudices yet have justly exalted nature of man, like to think his origin godlike.16

Syntax aside, this is an extraordinary passage. Here Darwin, who for the record

was the scion of a family deeply opposed to slavery,17 is at his most subtle and profound. The belief in mankind’s exalted status is akin in its presumptuousness to the practice of slavery, which awards exalted status to one kind of human being over another. Even high-minded opponents of slavery are not immune to the same kind of presumption: those opposed to slavery place themselves (as the saying goes) “on the side of the angels”. They see themselves as being more human than those who drive slaves, not to say the slaves themselves who await their high-minded deliverance from bondage. Darwin’s invocation of the superhuman and godlike, as opposed to the all-too-human, recalls the idiom of much Western political theory from Aristotle even unto Nietzsche. The uncivilized man, the man who does not live in a polis, said Aristotle, is either a beast or a god. Resonant echoes of Aristotle’s distinctions may be encountered in Machiavelli and Rousseau. Even the (arguably) irreligious Hobbes had spoken of “that most excellent work of nature, Man”; Rousseau had punctured such “excellence” by observing that members of “lesser” species than mankind tend not to enslave one another. Darwin’s strictures on the besetting sin of pride do not stop short of indicting high-minded, philanthropic opponents of slavery. They too are not immune to what Hobbes had called vaingloriousness.

Darwin confided in later notebooks that “[m]an in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy of the interposition of the deity” whereas it would be “more humble & I believe truer to consider him created from animals”.18 Darwin here was adopting the idiom of Christian warnings about the sin of pride and the virtues of humility as pride’s corrective. In so doing he was as adamant as he was hard-headed. That “man is one great object for which the world was brought into [its] present state … few will dispute … That it was the sole object, I will dispute”.19 “Why,” Darwin had asked himself in an earlier notebook, “is thought[,] being but a secretion of the brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter?” He answers his own question: “It is our arrogance … our admiration of ourselves.”20

The belief in mankind’s exalted status, and by extension of the belief that natural selection, as Darwin later formulated it, stops short at the human species, implies that we have (somehow) been singled out for special treatment. The appeal of “special creation”, that is of the idea that humanity alone is exempt from natural selection, lies not in any “scientific” credentials but in the pretensions that underlie such appeals, pretensions that have nothing of science about them. Special creation flatters human pride, forgetting that humility had long been considered pride’s corrective. In developing this line of argument, Darwin could have counted on ample theological precedent, and up to a point he actually did so; but only up to a point. When Darwin first read Auguste Comte, in 1838,

he was quick to conclude that human pride and arrogance were if anything obsolete. That “the fixed laws of nature should be universally thought to be the will of a superior being”, whose own nature is akin to ours, not only shows that science is yet in its “theological” state; it even makes one suspect that “our will may arise from … fixed laws of organization”. The concept of a regnant, but contriving, wilful God, that is to say, may be the product (or reflex) of mankind’s biological structure, and not of its intellectual wherewithal. The philosopher errs, says Darwin,

who says the innate knowledge of a creator … has been implanted in us … by a separate act of god, & not as a necessary integrant part of his … laws, which we profane in thinking not capable to produce [sic] every effect of every kind which surrounds us.21

In laying stress on “chance and unfavourable circumstances”, and on the “fortuitous”, the “accidental”, the contingent and the aleatory, all as having a part to play in its design, Darwin may well have believed, as Moore thought he believed, that his idea of creation – while he still subscribed to it – was far grander than the conventional one.22 The point remains that it is both the arrogance and the lowliness of human reason that are the principal handicaps of most theological speculation. It is presumptuous to believe or assume that the creator works by intellectual powers and volition like our own.

All Darwin’s strictures against overweening pride proceeded, we should remember, from a thinker who had ample cause for pride, pride of the kind that stops short of presumption, hubris and vainglory. Darwin’s own example can still show what unfettered human reason is capable of accomplishing, and this is enough to make his own searching honesty, honesty that was in large measure about himself, all the more striking. What brings all his beliefs together is a steadfast, unrelenting opposition to every form of providentialist thinking he could identify, in a world where there was no shortage of contenders. If his readers feel able to assign meaning to the world around them, this is because the world around them is the only world they could possibly be living in. This does not mean that the search for meaning is worthless or insignificant. Darwin himself pursued it, in the face of considerable risk and considerable personal anguish. What its pursuit puts into jeopardy is not meaning but complacency, our tendency to settle for easy answers. As Franco Moretti has indicated, “Meaning is the result not of a fulfilled teleology, but rather … for Darwin, of the total rejection of such a solution.”23 Even with respect to progress, history, in

the words of Darwin’s Autobiography, rebukes the inclination “to look at progress as normal in human society … Progress seems to depend on many concurrent favourable conditions, too complex to be followed out.” With the advent of civilized society, neither natural selection nor the inherent effects of environment and habit can ensure the inevitability of social development; progress “is no invariable rule”. The “assumption, so often made with respect to corporeal structures, that there is some innate tendency towards continued development in mind and body”, was wholly unacceptable to Darwin. “Development of all kinds”, he cautions a few pages later, “depends on many concurrent favourable circumstances. Natural selection acts only tentatively.”24

Darwin, Marx, Engels

Marx praised Darwin for having dealt a death-blow to teleological explanation in the natural sciences. He spoke admiringly of Darwin’s materialism and rational argumentation, though he bridled at Darwin’s use of Malthus’s theory of population pressure to illustrate the principle of natural selection. In the first flush of reading The Origin of Species, Marx remarked in letters to Lassalle and Engels that it “serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle” (naturwissenschaftliche Unterlagen des Klassenkampfs), and, in a letter to Engels, that it served as a basis for “our view”.25 These cryptic claims remained undeveloped, at least by Marx. Even on re-reading The Origin in 1862, Marx says of Darwin (to Engels):

It is remarkable [earlier, “amusing”] how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, inventions, and the Malthusian “struggle for existence.” His [nature] is Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes, and one is reminded of Hegel’s Phenomenology, where civil society is described as a “spiritual animal kingdom” (geistiges Tierreich), while in Darwin the animal kingdom features as civil society.26

This oft-quoted but evidently unguarded remark is exactly what it seems to be at first glance, an inconsequential aside leading nowhere in particular. Nowhere in the Phenomenology (and nowhere in the Philosophy of Right) does Hegel refer to civil society as a “spiritual animal kingdom”; and nowhere in Capital, volume

I, does Marx connect Darwin with Malthus (though each is mentioned separately).

There are two passing references to Darwin in Capital, volume I, the first, which describes The Origin of Species as “epoch-making”, quotes from it to illustrate, rather than back up, an argument of Marx’s; the second, similarly, advances an argument about the difference between tools and machines that is Marx’s and Marx’s alone, then proceeds to ask whether the productive organs of mankind would not merit “equal attention” “to Darwin’s account of the formation of the organs of plants and animals”. Marx adds to this rhetorical question another: “would not such a history [of mankind’s productive organs] be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter?” Both Capital’s references to Darwin contrast human history with that of organic nature, and conspicuously stop short of arguing from one realm to the other;27 the second regards Vico as being more to the point – more, that is, to Marx’s point – than Darwin is. There is no mention in Capital of any “natural basis” – Darwin’s or anyone else’s – of human society or of Marx’s arguments about it.

Marx, indeed, was subsequently to be highly critical of others’ attempts to apply “Darwinian” arguments, however loosely understood, across the board to society. He does not exempt arguments that were not designed to show or “prove” that competition was “natural” or progress “inevitable”. Friedrich Lange’s Die Arbeiterfragen (1865) attempted to apply “Darwinism” to the class struggle, but did not escape Marx’s scornful dismissal.28

In June 1873 Marx sent Darwin an inscribed copy of a German edition of Capital, and in October of the same year Darwin wrote Marx a polite but distant letter thanking him for it. This letter was in no sense an “endorsement” of Capital; there is no reason to suppose that Marx was fishing for one. Marx, pace Edward Aveling, Engels and other perpetrators of “the Marx-Darwin myth”, was simply saluting a fellow-scholar whose work he admired.29 Far too much was to be made of this inconclusive “encounter” between Marx and Darwin by later perpetrators of “the Marx-Darwin myth”, particularly the odious Aveling, who himself approached Darwin concerning a dedication of a book that he, not Marx, was writing, then fraudulently concocted the story that Marx wished to dedicate the second volume of Capital (which at that point was unfinished) to Darwin.30 All such exaggerations – they became legion as the “Marx-Darwin myth” ran its

course – conceal what is the most obvious fact about their (real, but limited) exchange.

Marx and Darwin lived (and died, a year apart) in Southern England. More exactly, Marx lived as a refugee, as one of a group of German political exiles, quarante-huitards and others, in London, whereas Darwin was in and of England. His intellectual landscape and formation was English to the core (though his reading and reputation were international in scope). Darwin was far and away the better-known and thus more controversial figure. Marx, who was marginal by comparison, knew of and read Darwin; Darwin had no knowledge of Marx prior to their exchange and not much more after it. Darwin, jostled about among the prelates and the primates, was accustomed to controversy, but to controversy with theologians and fellow-scientists. He claimed no special knowledge of political economy, which he took to be the subject of Marx’s Capital; most of the pages of the copy Marx sent him – including those that mentioned him – remained uncut.31

This raises a more substantive point. It is a matter of record that Marx and Darwin were to be misrepresented by their followers. Darwin was as suspicious of Darwinists as Marx of Marxists, if not more so. He was a diffident, rather reclusive figure who disliked public confrontation. His acolytes – we need think only of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) – showed no such reticence, and there were podiums aplenty from which they could thunder forth. And thunder forth they did, often to Darwin’s displeasure. Marx’s misrepresentation was by contrast mainly posthumous – though even he, on one celebrated occasion, denied that he was a Marxist (“Moi, je ne suis pas marxiste”). Even so, their respective protestations have something significant in common. Neither wished to have his name awarded adjectival status; each had ample cause for concern about what “Marxism” and “Darwinism”, as movements, might bring to bear.

I claimed some time ago that the word “Marxian” needs as a matter of urgency to be distinguished from the word “Marxist”. “A Marxian belief or tenet is one that can safely be attributed to Marx himself,” I wrote. There is a limited number of these.

A Marxist belief may also be a Marxian one, but not necessarily. A Marxist belief is one held by anyone, academician or political stalwart, who thinks or can persuade others that the belief in question is in accordance with Marx’s intellectual or political legacy. It would be tempting to overdraw and simplify this relationship by saying that all Marxian beliefs are Marxist ones but that not all Marxist ones are Marxian. This temptation should be resisted with all the power at one’s command. It is indeed the case that not all Marxist beliefs are Marxian; there are far too many of them for this to be

possible. But it is definitely not the case that all Marxian beliefs are Marxist, for the good and simple reason that when Marxism developed, knowledge of what Marx wrote was inadequate. We might wish to bemoan this fact for any number of reasons, but the point remains that there is no Marxism that can be regarded as a straightforward exposition (let alone extension) of Marx’s views. At the heart of Marx’s reception there is instead a paradox. We have today a galaxy of different Marxisms, within which the place of Marx’s own thought is ambiguous.32

It is noteworthy in this connection that Morse Peckham, the editor of the 1959 variorum edition of The Origin of Species, makes very much the same kind of distinction between the “Darwinian” and the “Darwinist”. He calls only those propositions and applied assumptions which may properly be ascribed to Darwin “Darwinian”; the others – over which Darwin, as we have seen, had limited control even during his lifetime – Peckham calls “Darwinist”. (Moore’s PostDarwinian Controversies has recourse to the term “Darwinisticism”, which, while not meaningless, might be taking matters a bit far.)

The difference between Darwinism and Marxism is not that the MarxianMarxist distinction is “political”, while the Darwinian-Darwinist is not. Nor yet is it that Marxism developed prior to the publication of some of Marx’s most important writings (such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts), even though Marxism demonstrably did “develop” in the absence of these. (Darwin’s notebooks from the HMS Beagle, with their reflections on exploitation, the animal and the human, which would bear comparison with Marx’s reflections on exploitation, the animal and the human in the Manuscripts, were first published at almost exactly the same time.) The real difference goes deeper. It stems from the fact that Darwinism came to carry the pendant “Social” with remarkable dispatch, despite Darwin’s private and public reservations. “What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection,” Darwin exclaimed in 1879.33 His words fell on deaf ears, outside Germany as within it. Despite Darwin’s misgivings, Darwinism carried over into social and political speculation in short order, and did so, far more rapidly and readily than Marxism, say, carried over or could have carried over into natural science. Socialist Darwinism was always to be somewhat of a one-way street for Marxists, though this did little, it seems, to deter them from jumping on the bandwagon. In compounds like “Social(ist) Darwinism”, it is often instructive to note which element gets the noun, which the adjective.34

Worse still, some of those who importunately carried over Darwinism into the social and political realm did so as Marxists, and did so in the more or less sincere conviction that textual warrant for such latitude had been laid down in advance by Marxism’s founding fathers. But since these fathers would demonstrably exclude Marx himself, our distinction between the Marxian and the Marxist comes to the fore all over again. Engels proved to be a far more useful source, once he had seen to it and put it about that his words about Darwin in particular, and about natural science in general, were an adumbration of what Marx believed, and not what they really were – an addition to what Marx wrote and wrote about. Engels, as we have seen, may be the most important figure in the history of Marxism. After all, he invented it.

All these developments need to be assessed with some care. At one level, the adjectival status that is awarded a theorist’s name when terms like Marxist or Darwinist gain currency is a sign to index of that theorist’s strength as a theorist. It happens but rarely. No-one speaks of “Engelsism” or “Spencerism” or “Huxleyism.” Even the adjective “Leninist” is often prefixed by the adjective “Marxist-”. Yet adjectival status can also provide a mantle that others can assume at will, and mantles, once adopted, can display adherence to a cause as they conceal misrepresentation of that cause’s inspiration. Examples, sad to say, abound in the histories of the reception of Marx and Darwin alike,35 and these histories, to make confusion worse confounded, were encouraged to intersect by Marxist (though not by Darwinist) stalwarts.

Marx’s reaction in print to Darwin is a matter of record. It was inconclusive at best. It remains unhelpful to an understanding of Darwin, though taken in itself it is in no way positively detrimental to this task. Marx’s observations about Darwin, that is to say, might do little damage if left on their own; but Engels and others duly saw to it that they were not to be left on their own. Engels, in saying more about Darwin than Marx had, and in taking care to do so in Marx’s name, advanced claims about Darwin out of a desire “to put communist conclusions on what he believed was a proper scientific footing”, just as Terrell Carver says. But Engels’s idea of what a “proper scientific footing” would look like owes little (if anything at all) to Marx, and is, in any case, in crucial respects at variance with Darwin’s own procedures. Engels, that is to say, is guilty of double misrepresentation: his “proper scientific footing” leaves both Darwin and Marx high and dry. It is by no means too reductive to claim that Engels turned to Darwin for the sake of comprehensiveness rather than accuracy. He appropriated Darwin, without appearing to have read him, or to have pondered his meaning, very carefully, for the sake of shoring up a position déjà prise. This position déjà prise in turn had to do with Engels’s odd notion of

the essential unity of (all) scientific method, a blanket uniformity that Darwin’s own, hypothetico-deductive procedures call into question. Yet Darwin was the leading natural scientist of his generation. His omission from what was supposed to be an all-encompassing view of science would have been glaring. In this sense Engels could scarcely have avoided harnessing Darwin’s name and reputation. The trouble is, however, that while Engels might have been hospitable (in his fashion) to Darwin, Darwin for his part is mightily inconvenient to Engels’s compendious conception of scientific method – an omnium gatherum to which Darwin might still offer a salutary corrective.

Engels is, of course, not alone in having misrepresented Darwin, who was, after all, a complex, not to say daunting figure. Getting the measure of Darwin is a challenging task on anybody’s reckoning. Yet Engels is not likely to be exonerated for this or any other reason. He is not merely to be numbered among those who garbled the message, since his misrepresentation of Darwin was particularly destructive in its effects, the more so for having been advanced in Marx’s name. Engels was instrumental in confecting a link between Marx and Darwin that did an injustice to both of them. He did so, not out of mendacity or perfidy (though the same could not be said of Aveling) but in large measure out of a desire to promote a set of beliefs about what “science” comported, beliefs that were not Darwin’s, nor yet Marx’s, but all his own (at least at first). It bears reiteration that there is no warrant in any of Marx’s writings, let alone Darwin’s, for Engels’s central conviction – the conviction that was to become a leitmotif of twentieth-century “dialectical materialism” – that laws of nature, laws of social development and laws of thought all follow the same, “dialectical” procedure.

As Terrell Carver puts the matter, “while Engels was sceptical of a Darwinian approach to human history in general … he attributed to Marx and Darwin a common methodology coincident with his own positivist view of science.” Engels’s 1883 eulogy “reveals very clearly how he aimed to link Marx with Darwinian biology and the physics of matter-in-motion.” For Marx, Engels assures us, had discovered “a special law of motion” governing the capitalist mode of production – the law of surplus value. (Engels specifies no comparable “law of motion” in Darwin, which should not surprise us: there are none to be found.) Engels’s model of science was inductive (the “facts” provide and provide for the “view”), causal, and law-directed in ways that are altogether insufficient, if not actually alien, to Darwin himself. Engels even believed that in the “Marxist conception of history”, “interconnections” were to be discovered “in the facts”, and that, altogether similarly, “the accumulating facts of natural science compel us to recognition of the dialectical conception of nature.”36 One wonders what Darwin would have made of such a claim.

In reality, both

Darwin on Engels’s view of him is to be applauded for providing “further confirmation for his [Engels’s] views on the way that science and philosophy were to be reconciled”; Darwin, that is, is to be regarded as having confirmed the grand reconciliation of philosophy and science in which Engels had already located political economy (or Marx’s critique of it), cell biology, and recently discovered laws of physics.38 In the Prefaces to Anti-Dühring that were to be written after Marx’s death, Engels assures the reader that, in preparing the book, he had covered “a fairly comprehensive range of subjects”, from “the concepts of time and space to Bimetallism; from the eternity of matter and motion to the perishable nature of moral ideas; from Darwin’s natural selection to the education of youth in a future society”. Engels claimed to have given Marx’s views on these subjects “a more connected form”.39 That Marx’s views on all these subjects (except political economy) were never written down or otherwise preserved does not deter Engels, whose inventories look eclectic, breathless and unfocussed – not to say staggering in their comprehensiveness.

Darwin by comparison seems modest. “Biological phenomena”, as Moore quite accurately paraphrases Darwin’s thinking, “were altogether ample for many lifetimes of investigation, without adding to them the phenomena of physical, chemical or bio-chemical nature”.40 Engels showed no such restraint. The question for Engels is always “How is science to be regarded?” or “What is to be our ‘outlook’ (a favourite word) on science?” and not “How is science to be done?”41 Engels at times proclaims his modesty, but only in relation to Marx – as when, in the later editions of Anti-Dühring, Engels tells us that “the mode of outlook expounded in this book was founded and developed in far greater measure by Marx and only in an insignificant degree by myself”. “For Engels,

Marx was a giant of modern science capable of the most abstract theoretical work”,42 though it is highly doubtful that Marx thought of himself in anything like the same way. By now, Carver’s verdict has stood the test of time.

The Marx-Darwin relationship has been obscured by misinterpretations of what Marx actually said about [Darwin], by what is now known to be a false view of their personal relationship, and by a willingness of commentators to accept at face value what Engels said about the views of Marx and Darwin and the relationship between them.43

That these commentators have been both Marxist and anti-Marxist raises a problem to be turned to later.

Footnotes

1 Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory. Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838–59, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 2–3.

2 Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory, p. 28; cf. pp. 29–30.

3 Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory, pp. 37–8.

4 Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory, pp. 83, 61, 62–3, 68. Cf. Maurice Mandelbaum, ‘The Scientific Background of Evolutionary Theory in Biology’, Journal of the History of Ideas (henceforward, JHI), 18, 1857: pp. 342–61.

5 Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason, A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971, pp. 82–3.

6 Elliott Sober, Philosophy of Biology, Boulder, Westview Press, 1993, pp. 7–9. Cf. Elliott Sober, The Nature of Selection. Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1984, p. 15; Elliott Sober, Reconstructing the Past. Parsimony, Evolution and Influence, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1988, p. 5.

7 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, London, John Murray, 1859, p. 84; cf. Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory, p. 85.

8 James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies. A Study in the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and the United States, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 128–30. Cf. Sober, Philosophy, p. 36.

9 Morse Peckham, ed., The Origin of Species of Charles Darwin. A Variorum Text, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, 1959, p. 75.

10 Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82, with Original Omissions Restored, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1958, p. 87; cf. Darwin to Gray, 11 December 1861, in Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, London, John Murray, 1987, vol. II, p. 382.

11 Darwin to Hyatt, 13 February 1873, in Francis Darwin and A.C. Steward, eds, More Letters of Charles Darwin, London, John Murray, 1903, vol. I, pp. 338–48.

12 Elliot Sober, “It had to Happen”, review of Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, New York Times Book Review, 30 November 2003, p. 18; cf. Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory, pp. 212–13.

13 Nora Barlow, ed., Charles Darwin’s Diaries of the Voyages of the HMS Beagle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1933, p. 428 (September 1836); cf. Nora Barlow, “A Letter Containing Remarks on the Moral State of Tahiti, New Zealand, etc.”, in Paul H. Barrett, ed., The Collected Letters of Charles Darwin, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1977, vol. I. pp. 20–1; Barlow, Charles Darwin’s Diaries, p. 171 (September 1833); pp. 375–9 (January 1834); pp. 388–9 (February 1836); pp. 118–19 (December 1832).

14 Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, p. 336; cf. Sandra Herbert, “The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin’s Theory of Transmutation”, Part I (to July 1837), Journal of the History of Biology(henceforward JHB), 10, 1977: pp. 217–56.

15 Gavin de Beer, ed., “Darwin’s Notebooks on the Transmutation of Species”, Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Historical Series, 2, 1953–7, Part II, (1954) Second Notebook (February–July 1838), p. 91.

16 De Beer, II, (1954) p. 100; cf. De Beer, I, (1953) pp. 69, 71; Moore, Post-Darwinist Controversies, p. 317.

17 Cf. Howard E. Gruber and Paul H. Barrett, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, London, Wildwood House, 1974, pp. 65–8.

18 De Beer, III, (1955) p. 134; cf. De Beer, II, p. 106.

19 De Beer, IV, (1957) pp. 163–4.

20 De Beer, III, p. 105; cf. De Beer, I, p. 69; II, p. 111.

21 Darwin to Lyell, 2 Aug, 1861, in Darwin and Steward, More Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. I, p. 192; cf. Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, p. 292; De Beer, II, p. 111; Moore, The PostDarwinian Controversies, pp. 319–20.

22 Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, p. 320.

23 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture, London, Verso, 1987, p. 7.

24 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, London, John Murray, 1874, pp. 140–2, 158; Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, pp. 158–9.

25 Marx to Engels, 19 December 1860, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (henceforward MEW), Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1965, xxx, pp. 131; Marx to Lassalle, 16 January 1861, MEW xxx, pp. 578; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence (henceforward MESC), Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1965, p. 115.

26 Marx to Engels, 18 June 1862, MEW xxxix, p. 249; MESC, p. 120; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, eds Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, New York, International Publishers, 1967, pp. 331, 341 n. 2.

27 Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason, p. 395.

28 Friedrich Albert Lange, Die Arbeiterfragen in ihrer Bedeutung für Gegenwart und Zukunft, Duisberg, Vollmer and Vollmer, 1865, passim. Marx to Kugelmann, 27 June 1870, MEW xxxii, pp. 685–6, MESC, p. 225; cf. Marx to Engels, 14 November 1868, MEW xxxii, pp. 202–3.

29 Terry Ball, “Marx and Darwin: A Re-assessment”, Political Theory, 7: pp. 469–84, 1979; Ralph J. Colp, “The Contacts between Karl Marx and Charles Darwin”, JHI, 35, April–June 1874: pp. 333–4.

30 Ball, “Marx and Darwin”, passim; Shlomo Avineri, “From Hoax to Dogma. A Footnote on Marx and Darwin”, Encounter, March 1967, pp. 30–2; Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels. The Intellectual Relationship, Brighton, Wheatsheaf/Harvester, 1983, p. 136.

31 Ball, “Marx and Darwin”, passim; Colp, “The Contacts between Karl Marx and Charles Darwin”, passim.

32 Terrell Carver, ed., “Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now”, The Cambridge Companion to Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 25–6.

33 Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, New York, n.d., vol. II, p. 413.

34 Cf. My ‘Socialism’, in the Elsevier Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, Amsterdam, 2001, vol. 21, pp. 14485–8.

35 Carver, “Critical Reception”, passim; J.A. Rogers, “Darwin and Social Darwinism”, JHI, 33, 1972: pp. 265–80. Cf. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, p. 161; Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present, London, Williams and Norgate, 1915, p. 133; S. Herbert, “The Place of Man in Darwin’s Theory of Transmutation, Part II”, JHB, 19, 1979: pp. 195–6.

36 Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1969, p. 19; Friedrich Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy”, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels eds, Selected Works (henceforward MESW), London, International Publishers, 1962, vol. II, pp. 400–1; Carver, Friedrich Engels, London, Macmillan, 1989, p. 346; MESW, p. 136.

37 Carver, Marx and Engels, p. 136; cf. Terrell Carver, Marx’s Social Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Opus Books, 1982, pp. 36, 55, 62, 66.

38 MECW, 40, p. 551; Carver, Friedrich Engels, p. 238.

39 Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 10, 13; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1968, p. 94.

40 Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, p. 155.

41 MESW, I, pp. 371–2; Carver, Marx and Engels, p. 102.

42 Carver, Friedrich Engels, p. 246.

43 Carver, Marx and Engels, p. 135.