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Hawkins, Mike.  _Social Darwinism in European and American 
Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat_. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.  x + 344 pp. 
$55.96 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-57400-5; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 
0-521-57434-X. 
 
Reviewed for H-NEXA by Richard Weikart, California State Univ., 
Stanislaus 
 
Hawkins provides a keen analysis of Social Darwinism in an important and 
thought-provoking work that will surely become the standard work on the 
subject for some time to come.  It is a superb corrective to the fairly 
popular revisionist interpretation of Social Darwinism propagated by 
Robert Bannister and others.  However, his interpretation is not simply a 
reiteration of the classic Hofstadter thesis. 
 
Unlike Hofstadter, who boiled down Social Darwinism to laissez-faire 
economics, racism, militarism, and imperialism, much recent scholarship 
on Social Darwinism has emphasized the varieties of Social Darwinism, 
since thinkers often applied Darwinism to social and political thought in 
contradictory ways-- socialists and pacifists appealed to Darwinism for 
support as much as laissez faire proponents and militarists.  The beauty 
of Hawkins' analysis is that he takes account of the diversity of 
political and social views espoused by Darwinists, while bringing out the 
underlying commonalities.  He does this by distinguishing between Social 
Darwinism as a fundamental world view and the political and social 
ideologies built on that world view.  He defines Social Darwinism as a 
world view containing the following five beliefs: 1) Biological laws 
govern all of nature, including humans.  2) Malthusian population pressure 
produces a struggle for existence.  3) Physical and mental traits 
providing an advantage to individuals or species would spread.  4) 
Selection and inheritance would produce new species and eliminate others. 
5) Natural laws (including the four above) extend to human social 
existence, including morality and religion.  Anyone embracing these 
fundamental points were Social Darwinists, whether they were militarists 
or pacifists, laissez-faire proponents or socialists. 
 
Hawkins admits in his introduction that his work is not a comprehensive 
history of Social Darwinism.  Instead he provides in-depth analysis of 
key Social Darwinists, such as John Fisk and William Graham Sumner in the 
US, Herbert Spencer and Benjamin Kidd in England, Clemence Royer in 
France, Ernst Haeckel in Germany, and Cesare Lombroso in Italy.  He also 
covers the relationship of socialists, racists, and militarists to Social 
Darwinism.  His chapter on eugenics is conceptually rich and suggestive, 
but not so strong historically, since he doesn't even mention many of the 
most important figures in the eugenics movement.  The few eugenicists he 
analyzes, though, do provide a good representation of the movement as a 
whole.  In his final chapter comparing the Nazis' and Italian Fascists' 
relationship to Social Darwinism, Hawkins argues that the Nazis were 
thoroughly committed to Social Darwinism, while the Fascists, with a few 
exceptions, were not. 
 
I expect that Hawkins' interpretation of Spencer as a Darwinist rather 
than a Lamarckian will stir some controversy, for most scholars consider 
Spencer a committed Lamarckian. Hawkins produces sufficient evidence to 
show that Spencer did embrace natural selection after 1859, though he 
continued to emphasize the inheritance of acquired characteristics to a 
greater extent than did Darwin.  In his chapter on Spencer and elsewhere 
Hawkins is clear-sighted enough to recognize that in the late nineteenth 
century Darwinian selection was not antithetical to Lamarckian inheritance 
of acquired characteristics (as some scholars anachronistically assume). 
Many Darwinists--including Darwin--synthesized natural selection and the 
inheritance of acquired characteristics.  Unfortunately, Hawkins did not 
discuss Spencer's pre-Darwinian views, so the question remains: Was 
Spencer a Darwinian of sorts before Darwin published his theory, or was 
there a shift in his thought after Darwin's theory appeared?  We need 
further explication of this. 
 
Because he covers an immense amount of territory in his book, specialists 
in some of the areas he covers (eugenics, Nazism, Fascism, Spencer, etc.) 
may quibble with his selectivity and some may want greater depth in their 
area of expertise.  But hopefully this will not distract from the overall 
merits of the book.  One reason I find this book so exciting is that 
Hawkins has provided a useful definition and analysis of Social Darwinism 
on which future scholarship can build.  Even if one disagrees with some of 
the examples he provides (I question a few of them), or thinks he ignored 
some important thinkers, his work is still useful and can serve as a 
springboard for further study.  It will also serve as a useful text in a 
variety of courses in the history of science and intellectual history. 
 
 
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