Includes bibliographical references and index.

Social Darwinism is not a monolithic concept, as might be inferred from such comments. What it is, however, has been obscured by the uses to which it has been put in the past hundred years. After the Civil War, so the story goes, a misapplied Darwinism rationalized cut-throat competition, callous individualism, and laissez-faire. But in his reinterpretation of this major historical current, Professor Bannister challenges this view. He argues that Darwinism provided a doubly fatal blow to the theories of Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sunmer, and the American Spencerians. As science, Darwinism transformed popular conceptions of the "laws of nature", inspiring the hope of transcending nature's brutality rather than submitting to it. As myth, the phrase "social Darwinism" provided a weapon that reformers used to caricature their opponents from the 1880s onward. An Anti-utopian image of a world guided solely by "scientific" considerations, the myth of social Darwinism played a critical role in the work of an entire generation of American and British thinkers, including among others, Henry George, Lester Ward, Benjamin Kidd, the eugenicists, defenders of Jim Crow, H L Mencken, and the literary naturalist. Later use of the concept of social Darwinism by historians was a direct legacy of these debates. A work of mature judgment, this book makes intelligent use of European and American sources to clarify and redefine a significant concept in intellectual history.

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