1: RACE AND THE ORIGINS DEBATE states:
“[It] threatened the liberal, Enlightenment-grounded assumptions behind Jewish integration in Central Europe. When combined in Vienna with the ability of the Governing Mayor, Karl Lueger, and his Christian Social cronies to harness the really not very modern resentment by the ‘little man’ of Jewish success, this ‘biological turn’ in the form of ‘scientific’ anti-Semitism, effectively destroyed the emancipatory assumptions of Jews (and their allies).”33
Darwin was a Social Darwinist
The story of ‘Social Darwinism’ is complicated a little by the fact that the man who was predominant in pushing the philosophy of struggle for improvement onto human society was Herbert Spencer. He was the one who actually coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’.34
Spencer was, strictly speaking, a Lamarckian35
evolutionist. That means that he believed that the struggle to survive caused improvements to arise, i.e. they were not from random variations. By way of aside, Darwin himself, in early editions of the Origin, embraced Lamarckianism—e.g. a giraffe’s neck getting longer through repeated stretching to reach the higher leaves—as the source of at least some of the variation. But there is no doubt that Darwin himself, tenderhearted or not, was a thoroughgoing Social Darwinist. He wrote:
“At some future point, not distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be
33. Edmonds, D., and Eidinow, J., Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001, p. 103. 34. Darwin adopted the term in later editions of The Origin. 35. Named after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), whose pre-Darwinian theory of evolution held that characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the organism—by the action of the environment, or through use and disuse—could be inherited.
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