Malthus and Darwin

Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu
Mon Aug 17 14:43:54 PDT 1998


Well, I used several of the quotes you have just cited in my JEBO paper. Others have already noted that this tale of about the dedication of Capital Vol. 2 to Darwin is not accurate.

I would note another odd irony, this one involving the influence of Herbert Spencer again. He was, of course, a big fan of laissez-faire economics. However, his arguments along those lines were influential in some of the early defenses of conservation, applying laissez-faire to nature. The key figure was Frederic E. Clements, _Plant Succession: Analysis of the Development of Vegetation_, 1916, Carnegie Institute, Washington. Alfred Lotka was also influenced by this line of thought. An excellent reference on much of this is Donald Worster, _Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas_, 1977, Cambridge University Press. Barkley Rosser On Sat, 15 Aug 1998 19:35:21 -0400 Charles Brown <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:


> I wonder if Barkely has a critique of the
> following comments on the relationship
> between Marx, Engels and Darwin:
>
> In _Ever Since Darwin_, the essay "Darwin's Delay", Stephen Jay Gould
> says:
>
> "The most ardent materialists of the nineteenth century, Marx and
> Engels, were quick to recognize what Darwin had accomplished and to
> exploit its radical content. In 1869 Marx wrote to Engels about Darwin's
> _Origin_:
>
> 'Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book
> which contains the basis in natural history for our view.'
>
> Marx later offered to dedicate volume 2 o Das Kapital to Darwin, but
> Darwin gently declined, stating that he did not want to imply approval
> of a work he had not read. (I have seen Darwin's copy of volume 1 in his
> library at Down House. It is inscribed by Marx who calls himself a
> "sincere admirere" of Darwin. Its pages are uncut. Darwin was no devotee
> of the German language.)
>
> Darwin was indeed, a gentle revolutionary. Not only did he delay his
> work for so long, but he also assiduously avoided any public statement
> about the philosophical implication of his theory. In 1880, he wrote to
> Karl Marx:
>
> It seems to me(rightly or wrongly)that direct argument against
> Christianity and Theism hardly have any effect on the public; and that
> freedom of thought will best be promoted by that gradual enlightening of
> human understanding which follows the progress of science. I have
> therefore always avoided writing about religion and have confined myself
> to science. "
> (end quote of Gould)
>
> (Darwin was a gentle revolutionary indeed. He was an evolutionary, a
> gradualist, sort of like Kautsky. But at least he focussed on change. C.B)
>
> So, Engels wrote:
>
> "The proof which Darwin first developed in connected form, that the stock
> of organic products of nature surrounding us today, including mankind is
> the result of a long perriod of evolution of a few unicellular germs,
> and that these again have arisen from protoplasm or albumen which came
> into existence by chemical means...
>
> Nature is the test of dialectics... nature's process is dialectical and
> not metaphysical; that does not move in the eternal oneness of
> perpetually repeated cycle but goes through a real historical
> evolution..
>
> before all that, mention should be made of Darwin who dealt the
> metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest blow by his proof that
> the whole of organic nature today, plants,animals and therefore also
> man, is the product of a process of evolution which has gone through
> millions of years. But the scientists who have learned to think
> scientifically are still few and far between."
>
> (end of quote of Engels)
>
>
> Engels said somewhere (sorry) "Darwin did not know what a bitter satire
> he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed
> that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists
> celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of
> the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of social production, in
> which production and distibution are carried on in a planned way can
> lift mankind above the rest of the animal kingdom."
>
> Charles Brown: This passage suggests an interesting implication that might be derived
> from the idea that humans ("man") is the social animal or the social
> being. If sociality is eminently human than individualism, the opposite
> of sociality, is more animal and less human. The bourgeoisie's emphasis
> on individuality and individualism ("we hold the individual to be
> sacred" , as Ronald Reagan put it) is more animallike and less human
> like. Animals are more solitary than humans. This is the implication of
> the proposition that humans are more social than animals.
>
> A further implication of this thought is that to understand
> individualality requires more attention to natural or animal
> characterisics than one would think from the bourgeois glorification of
> the individualcentrism as the most human attitude.
>
> Also, in this vain an important nicety of neo-Darwinian biology is that
> evolutionary selection works on individuals not groups (Stephen Jay
> Gould)
>
> In _The Use and Abuse of Biology_ a polemic against socio-biology by
> Marshall Sahlins says
>
> "Since the seventeenth century we seem
> to have been caught up in this vicious cycle, alternately applying the
> model of capitalist society to the animal kingdom, then reapplying this
> bourgeoisified animal kingdom to the interpretation of human society. My
> intent in adopting the Macpherson reading of Hobbes was just to imply
> that most of the elements and stages of the biological theory of natural
> selection -from differential success to the competitive struggle to
> reproduce one's stock and the transfer of powers -already existed in
> _Leviatthn_. As a critic of this capitalist conception, it was left to
> Marx to discern its realization in Darwinian theory.
>
> In a letter to Engels, Marx wrote:
>
> "It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his
> English society with its division of labour (read, diversification),
> competition, opening up of new markets (niches), "inventions"
> (variations), and the Malthusian "struggle for existence". It is
> Hobbes's "bellum omnium conra omnes," and one of reminded of Hegel's
> Phenomenolgy where civil society is described as a "spiritual animal
> kingdom," while for Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society."
>
> In a letter to Lavrov, Engels described the ensuing dialectical return,
> the representation of culture to itself in the form of a capitalist
> nature:
>
> "The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a
> transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of
> "bellum omnium contra omnes" and o fthe bourgeois-economic doctrine of
> competition together with Malthus's theory of population. When this
> conjurer's trick has been performed ...the same theories are transferred
> back again from organic nature into history and now it is claimed that
> their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved."
> (end quote of Sahlins)
>
> Charles Brown:
> So, Marx and Engels had a full critique of social Darwinism. On the
> other hand they had great respect for Darwin.
>
>
> Charles Brown
> _______________________
>
>
> >>> "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb at jmu.edu> 08/15 3:44 PM >>>
> Since Mat has brought it up, the article in question
> is (by me, J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.) "The Dialogue Between
> the Economic and the Ecologic Theories of Evolution,"
> _Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization_, March
> 1992, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 195-215.
> I simply note here that Malthus may well have been the
> economist that Marx despised the most. But I would also
> agree with Brad De Long that there are "undigested lumps of
> Malthusianism" in Marx's writings.
> There is controversy about the degree of influence of
> Malthus on Darwin, as has been noted, but there certainly
> was influence. Darwin in turn influenced Marx and Engels
> because they saw evolution applying to society and they saw
> the gradualistic version of it contributing to a
> materialist assault on traditional idealist religion. They
> then had to resolve the contradiction as to how human
> evolution could proceed in a discontinuous dialectical
> fashion (see my article for further discussion on that).
> BTW, a major generally forgotten figure in all this is
> the execrable Herbert Spencer. It was he who coined the
> term "survival of the fittest" and who also was very
> influential in tying biological and economic concepts
> together in Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century.
> Barkley Rosser
>
>

-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu



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