07.04.09
Marx and Darwin, again
Birdnow comments on Soon to be fossil takes on Buchanan and misses
It is almost impossible to get Marx straight: marxists fail, liberals fail, and conservatives break the bat, and fail.
Marx’s historicism owes a lot to Hegel and is, technically, a brand of the (atheist) ‘historical design’ argument, stripped of Hegelianism. This way of thinking then got papered over with ‘historical materialism’ with which it doesn’t quite jel. One might read Alan Megill’s book on Marx for these points.
Marx’s first reaction to Darwin was suspicion, followed by what must have been the enthusiasm of Engels over Darwin carrying the day.
Marx was no fan of Malthus, and in fact Malthus started a debate that lasted for a whole generation, not unlike the Darwin debate.
Darwin was not so gross as Malthus, who was explicit in his ‘let them starve’ arguments about the poor, but Darwin the Whig was no liberal in our current sense.
One factor here is that the idea of evolution was a ‘leftist’ idea almost from the beginning, in the wake of the French Revolution. This was way before Darwin, and one reason evolutionism was delayed as a public philosophy.
So we can see that Darwinism influenced Marxism for the worse.
And there is no reason why a ‘design’ argument can’t be proposed by an atheist.