"Social Darwinism"

[nyuanshin]

I'm big on intellectual history, so it was kinda neat to find this paper by Thomas Leonard on the dubious origin of a much-abused epithet. Richard Hofstadter's careful distinction between individualist and collectivist strands of "Darwinian" social theory has mostly been forgotten, even as the term coined in his book's title gained a wide currency, and the result is a confusion of nomenclature that smears together completely opposed political tendencies that each had only the most tenuous of links to Darwinian thinking. It's also kind of amazing to me how the people most likely to throw this term around almost always have no clue about the socialist progressive origins of coercive eugenics, which the book that originally coined the term described at great length! Spencer and Sumner were the *good* guys compared to those fellas.

(Via David Bernstein.)