12.17.05
Hofstadter vs. Bannister
I hadn’t noticed a new introduction to Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought, by Eric Foner, who comments on Bannister’s later critique of Hofstadter.
From Foner’s Introduction:
Social Darwinism has had an impact matched by few books of its generation. Hofstadter did not invent the term social Darwinism, which originated in Europe in the 1880’s and crossed the Atlantic in the early twentieth century. But before he wrote, it was used only on rare occasions; he made it a standard shorthand for a complex of late-nineteenth-century ideas, a familiar part of the lexicon of social thought. The, book demonstrates Hofstadter’s ability, even in a dissertation, to move beyond the academic readership to address a broad general public. Since its appearance in a revised paperback” edition in 1955 (Hofstadter left the argument unchanged but added an author’s note and made several hundred “purely stylistic” alterations), it has sold more than 200,000 copies.
Although, thanks to Hofstadter, social Darwinism has earned a permanent place in the vocabulary of intellectual history, his analysis has not escaped criticism. While few scholars have challenged Hofstadter’s account of the main currents of late-nineteenth-century American thought, some have cast doubt on the extent of Darwin’s influence on both laissez-faire conservatives and their liberal and radical critics. Soon after Hofstadter’s revised edition appeared, Irvin G. Wyllie published an influential essay disputing Darwin’s impact on American businessmen. Entrepreneurs, he found, justified the accumulation of wealth not by appealing to a vision of ruthless competition in which the success of some meant the ruin of others but by reference to hard work, Christian philanthropy, and the conviction that the creation of wealth benefited society as a whole.
Since Hofstadter had devoted little attention to businessmen, apart from Andrew Carnegie, Wyllie’s findings did not significantly affect the book’s main argument. More damaging was the criticism advanced by Robert C. Bannister [Social Darwinism: Science And Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought], who argued that Hofstadter had greatly exaggerated Darwin’s influence on social thinkers themselves. Remarkably few late-nineteenth-century writers, Bannister found, either invoked Darwin’s authority, referred directly to biological evolution, or used Darwinian terminology such as survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence. The roots of their thought lay elsewhere, in classical economics and a preoccupation with defending property rights and limiting the power of the state. They were more likely to appeal to the’ authority of Adam Smith than Darwin, more likely to be influenced by contemporary events such as the 1877 railroad strike than by analogies to biological evolution. In fact, Bannister concluded, social Darwinism existed mainly as an “epithet,” a label devised by advocates of a reforming state to stigmatize laissez-faire conservatism.
Hofstadter, to be sure, never claimed that Darwin created Gilded Age individualism; rather, he wrote, Darwinian categories supplemented an existing vocabulary derived from laissez-faire economics. Moreover, Bannister’s definition of social Darwinism, requiring explicit use of Darwinian language, ignores less direct influences on social thought and more subtle adaptations of scientific reasoning. Toward the end of his life, Hofstadter praised his critic for careful reading of sources, but went on to suggest that “intellectual history, even as made by men who try to be rational and who try to regard distinctions, proceeds by more gross distinctions than you are aware of.” This was a fairly devastating critique of Bannister’s approach (which, to his credit, Bannister included in the introduction to his own book). Nonetheless, Bannister’s basic point struck home. Today, writers who ex- amine Gilded Age conservatism are likely to locate its primary sources in realms other than Darwinism. Spencer’s influence, it is true, still looms large; some have even suggested that the body of thought Hofstadter described ought to be called social Spencerism, not social Darwinism.
This, however, would be a mistake, for if Hofstadter perhaps exaggerated Darwin’s influence, he was certainly correct in identifying the idea that a science of society could be developed as all but ubiquitous among late-nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century intellectuals. Darwin’s writings helped to catalyze this belief, which became a major point of self-definition and self-justification for intellectuals at a time when, through the rise of social science, their role in American society was becoming institutionalized. Hofstadter’s central insight-that analogies with science helped to shape the way Americans perceived and interpreted issues from the differences between races and classes to the implications of state intervention in the economy-remains the starting point for serious investigations of American thought during the Gilded Age.