B. Ricardo Brown. 2016. BOOK REVIEW: Political Descent: Malthus,
Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England, by
Piers J. Hale. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014.
[[*Unedited/uncorrected Draft*]]
Vol. 51, No. 2, pp. 367–369; Published online: July 21, 2016
BOOK
REVIEW: Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the
Politics of Evolution in Victorian England, by Piers J. Hale.
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014. 465 pp. $45.00 US (hard
cover).
Piers
Hale has written an engrossing and well argued work on the complex
milieu of Darwin’s early evolutionary theory and its
subsequent interpreters. In so doing, he places the current disputes
on evolutionary theory, particularly those between proponents of
individual versus group selection, into a proper social, historical,
and intellectual context. The
assumptions regarding the social relations of competition and
cooperation were no less obvious in Darwin’s day than in our own.
Political Descent argues
that Malthus, Lamarck, and especially Darwin himself, were well aware
of the political, moral,and social implications of evolutionary
theory. Likewise, the assumptions grounding our present debates can
be seen in these “distant” debates if we take Hale’s invitation
to suspend our usual disdainful sense that the arguments have
“progressed” since then, or that it was ever simply an argument
between Darwinists and anti-Darwinists.
Hale
begins with a discussion of Malthus and the politics of evolutionary
theory before and after Darwin focused on the role of competition and
cooperation in human evolution The question of whether natural
selection can account for the existence of altruism and social
cohesion produced two ideological formations, one that embraced the
social stasis invoked by Malthus, and the other a radical,
progressive, anti-Malthusian politics that originates in Lamarck and
Darwin’s own Lamarckianism. The opposition is between between
those who would interpret Darwin through the lens of Malthus, and
those who would have Darwin without Malthus.
Hales
shifts the figure of Darwin from its usual role as the organizing
center of attention to show Darwin in dialogue with Malthus, Spencer,
and Wallace. Hale describes how Darwin’s rejection of Lamarck,
and with it the radical politics often attached to the theory of
acquired characteristics, facilitated the acceptance of the Origin
by placing it within the mainstream of Whig politics. However, this
invited Malthusian interpretations of natural selection that Darwin
flatly rejected. Darwin insisted noted that his use of Malthus was
always metaphorical. Darwin’s use of Malthus certainly influenced
the reception of the Origin of Species,
but Darwin’s Origin
reinterprets Malthus theory in support of an ever changing nature.
This, Hale shows, contributed to the diverse politics and social
theories that continue to spring from Darwin’s engagement with the
species question.
Hale
provides a nice account of Wallace’s often overlooked address to
London’s Anthropological Society that attempted to reconcile its
avowed polygenism with the monogenism espoused in Darwin and Huxley’s
Ethnological Society. Despite Darwin’s enthusiasm for Wallace’s
paper, he held firmly to his views on the centrality of natural and
sexual selection in human evolution while embracing the portion of
Wallace’s paper that showed the importance of social relations in
the development of moral sentiment and altruism in humans. Darwin
praised Wallace’s paper, perhaps a little back-handedly, as the
best he had read in the journal of the Anthropological Society.
Darwin’s
natural selection faced increasing criticism in the years between the
writing of the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man.
Wallace’s spiritualism left Darwin without an important ally, and
he turned to the work of other liberals during the writing of the
Descent. Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, Adam Smith, David
Hume, J. S. Mill, Harriett Martineau all appear as influences on
Darwin’s monogenic account of how natural and sexual selection
could by themselves account for the moral and social evolution of
humans. Hale reminds us that the Descent of Man was partly
motivated by Darwin’s insistence that “evolution did not endorse
the moral standards of every cheating tradesman” nor does “the
most noble part of our nature, moral conscience” originate in “the
base principle of selfishness” (p. 111).
In
chapter four, Hale leaves behind these disputes to consider how
important English liberals and socialists responded to their rapidly
changing social context. Moving from the debate between Spencer and
Huxley over the role of government in the progress of society, Hale
describes the radical responses to the Social Darwinism, the most
well known of these being the geographer and anarcho-communist Peter
Kropotkin. Hale reestablishes the place of Kropotkin and radical
geography in the history of evolutionary theory. The social and
political stakes in the debates between the various interpreters of
Malthus and Darwin in the United Kingdom were great. From laissez
faire to anarchism,
utopian socialism and Fabianism, devotees of Malthus such as H. G.
Wells, Henry Hyndman, and G. B Shaw promoted the view that society is
itself an organism that evolves. Socialist and non-socialist
politics were equally girded by their engagement with Malthusian
arguments and Spencerian utopianism.
This
theme is continued in the discussion of Weissman, Pearson, and others
whose thought fit well with notions of degeneracy and decline that
were ubiquitous in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Hale concludes by bringing the discussion back to the
present day to remind us that these fundamental disputes have never
been resolved, and that they continue to animate our conflicting
approaches to the place of human society in evolutionary theory.
Hale’s
excellent essay shows the social and biological sciences to be deeply
intertwined from their moment of origin. Political Descent
is a valuable corrective to simplistic accounts of the politics of
evolutionary theory.
B.
Ricardo Brown, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, N. Y.
