Spencer's theory of social evolution pre-dates Darwin's publication; Spencer was anti-communist and really proposes an inevitable evolutionary struggle toward a capitalist utopia in which all are freed upon attaining bourgeois status. In vision you could say Marx is a collective utopist (though he reads like a pessimist--realist that is) and Spencer an individualist utopist. Spencer is one beginning in a long line of giving 'scientific' status to 'liberal' theories of social, political and economic evolution.
Comte, another on the right, wishes to proclaim the existence of a positivist science of society that goes beyond its historical roots in metaphysics and theology. He also said that his sociology would be the science that unifies all sciences.
Feuerbach very influentially 'materializes' Hegel.
Vico very early on calls his outline of society and its historical course a 'science'.
Here is a bit of internet bricolage, make of it as you will:
From: http://www1.uni-bremen.de/~kr538/comte.html
Too long to quote entirely, so here is a bit of it.
Lettre d'Auguste Comte a M. Valat, Professeur de Mathematiques, Ancien Recteur de l'Academie de Rhodez (1815-1844).
Celle qui porte sur l'incertitude des connaissances humaines, et qui est la plus essentielle, me parait, je te l'avoue franchement, porter tout a fait a faux. On peut dire certainement de fort belles choses qui seront meme vraies en grande partie, sur l'incertitude de nos connaissances, et depuis Pascal, et avant, on n'y a pas manque. Mais tout cela n'est pas la question. Il ne s'agit pas de savoir, en general, si les methodes d'investigation de l'homme ne sont pas necessairement entachees d'une tres-grande imperfection ; on sait bien que nous ne pouvons jamais raisonner avec la surete et la nettete que nous donnerait sans doute une meilleure organisation, pour laquelle il y aurait meme encore de nouvelles choses a desirer, car tout etre est fait necessairement de maniere a concevoir au dela de ce qu'il peut executer, et cela est meme indispensable pour assurer les progres de l'espece. En un mot, l'absolu, dans quelque sens que ce soit, non seulement n'existe pas, mais ne peut pas meme etre imagine par nous, et tel a ete jusqu'ici le vice fondamental de la philosophie. Mais en rentrant dans la condition reelle des choses et des hommes, il est question, lorsqu'on parle de methode, non de savoir si la meilleure que les hommes puissent employer n'est pas necessairement tres-imparfaite, mais uniquement de decider laquelle de toutes celles que l'esprit humain peut concevoir est la plus avantageuse a ses recherches, ou, si l'on veut, la moins mauvaise. Toute discussion qui ne porte pas la-dessus est nulle. et chimerique de sa nature. Pour preciser mon idee, on pourra crier tant qu'on voudra contre la methode employee dans les sciences positives, on pourra faire un tableau tres-sombre (ou exagere, ou meme vrai) de leur faiblesse; mais quand on aura fini, il restera toujours a examiner si la methode positive n'est pas, a tout prendre, preferable encore a la methode theologique et a la methode metaphysique, les seules que l'esprit humain puisse employer necessairement dans ses investigations quand il ne se sert pas de la premiere. Or, posee ainsi, la question ne peut pas etre d'une bien longue discussion; et la predominance relative de la methode positive sur les methodes theologique et metaphysique est aujourd'hui un fait que personne ne peut contester ni ne conteste. Voila ma reponse essentielle a ta grande objection. Je te dirai d'ailleurs, quoique cela ne soit pas indispensable pour ma justification, que tu as, a ce qu'il me semble, singulierement exagere l'imperfection actuelle des connaissances positives. Pour moi, je t'avoue que je suis beaucoup plus en admiration des pas immenses qui ont ete faits dans toutes les directions speciales depuis moins de deux siecles que le germe de la philosophie positive a commence a se developper, qu'etonne de ce qu'il n'a pas ete fait encore de plus grands progres. Je vois, en chimie par exemple (qui ne date reellement que de cinquante ans), un beaucoup plus grand nombre de resultats positifs et hors de toute contestation que tu n'en trouves; le reste me parait tenir a l'enfance de la science. Les incertitudes qui te tourmentent en physique me paraissent beaucoup plutot porter sur les formes que sur le fond, car les systemes sur la lumiere, la chaleur, etc., ne doivent etre envisages que comme des methodes d'investigation, et jamais, meme quand ils seront plus perfectionnes, comme ayant aucune realite intrinseque; et de ce point de vue il est evident que les changements de systeme dans les sciences physiques n'empechent pas et meme servent puissamment le developpement reel de la connaissance, car on ne quitte un systeme pour un autre que lorsque celuici permet de concevoir d'une maniere plus etendue les faits generaux qui sont l'essentiel de la science, et dont il est tres-clair qu'a travers toutes les incertitudes dont tu te plains, le nombre a considerablement augmente dans ces derniers temps, et augmente de jour en jour. Je comprends beaucoup moins encore ce que tu me dis relativement a la physiologie. Je ne dis pas et n'ai point dit que cette science fut tres-avancee, car elle est evidemment dans l'enfance, vu sa difficulte et le peu de temps depuis lequel on lui applique la methode positive ; il est meme clair que je la represente dans mon ouvrage comme moins avancee que les autres par cette double raison. Mais j'ai enonce un fait que je continue a croire exact pour tous ceux qui sont au courant de cette science, qu'aujourd'hui tous les phenomenes physiologiques proprement dits (c'est-a-dire ceux qui se rapportent a l'individu ou au couple considere isolement) sont soumis a des considerations positives qui certainement ont infiniment besoin d'etre perfectionnees, mais qui n'en sont pas moins des aujourd'hui positives, c'esta-dire entierement degagees de theologie et de metaphysique
Next, From: http://cadre.sjsu.edu/switch/sound/articles/wendt/folder6/ng6212v.htm
Vico's new science therefore is based in the conception of consciousness as a process of abstraction, which separates by forgetfulness, human thought from actual physical perceptions. It eventually places all human discourse adrift in a sea of ironic images, that are constantly and automatically refining and recompartmentalizing themselves into exhaustion as they approach the entropic heat death of a recorso -- in this instance a kind of cancer of the imagination.
And from: http://www.its.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Vico%20and%20Marx.htm
Note on Vico and Marx
In the translators' Introduction to The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, the Marxist tradition is referred to as "one movement of international proportions in which [Vico's] name and ideas have constantly recurred, and which may, more than others, have his future reputation in its hands."(1) This assessment, made in 1944, was inaccurate. Within the Marxist tradition Vichian scholarship continues. However, wholly outside of this tradition, it presently flourishes.(2)
I believe there are only three known written reference by Marx to Vico.
1.) In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx writes:
It surprises me that you seem not to have read Vico's New Science - not for anything you would have found in it for your special purpose, but for its philosophic conception of the spirit of Roman law in opposition to the legal Philistines. . . . Vico contains in the germ Wolf (on Homer), Niebuhr (on Roman history in the 'regal' period), the foundations of comparative philology (not without caprice), and a great deal else that is original.(3)
2.) In a letter to Engels, Marx writes:
Vico says in his New Science that Germany is the only country in Europe where 'an heroic language' is still spoken. If he had ever had the pleasure of acquainting himself with the Vienna Presse or the Berlin Nationalzeitung, the old Neapolitan would have changed his mind.(4)
3.) Finally, in a footnote to Capital, Marx writes:
Before [John Watt's] time, spinning machines, although very imperfect ones, had already been used, and Italy was probably the country of their first appearance. A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter?(5)
Why, with these limited references, would the Marxist tradition seemingly embrace Vico? It is perhaps not due so much to Vico's influence on Marx,(6) but the affinity of their theories.
The philosophical ideas of Vico and Marx have a comparable general setting, represented by the synthesis of philosophy and philology in Vico and the synthesis of theory and practice in Marx. They also have an analogous dominant focus on man in his concrete historical situation, and a similar encyclopaedic range. Furthermore, both Vico and Marx conceive human nature as changeable in the course of history, while maintaining that this does not obviate the need for the search and discovery of the law regulating change. Both hold that this law is dictated by the efforts of men to satisfy their material needs.(7)
To this estimation should be added the importance of class struggle to both Marx's and Vico's conception of historical development.(8)
Carl Mickelsen carlmick at moscow.com
1. Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico 104 ( M.H. Fisch and T.G. Bergin trans., Cornell U. Press 1944) (1725 & 1731). As far as the recurrence of Vico's name, see, as simply a sampling of many examples, Trotsky's reference in the third paragraph of The Russian Revolution and Gramsci's references in "The Modern Prince" and The Prison Notebooks. 2. As of 1944, only small parts of Vico's works had been translated into English. Now, in 1999, virtually all of his works are readily available in translation. (In this regard, see the highly commercialized Giambattista Vico Home Page.) "The bibliography of writings concerning Vico, or quoting him, that are available in English, now contains approximately five hundred authors, including such thinkers as Derrida, Eco, Foucalt, Deleuze, Frye, Gadamer, Habermas, Hayden White." http://www.connix.com/~gapinton/pasandpres.html
3. Quoted from Introduction to Autobiography 104, citing Lassalle: Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, ed. G. Mayer, III, 387 f.
4. Quoted from Introduction to Autobiography 104, which cites Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, 3 Abt., III, 63.
5. Marx, Capital, vol. I, 372 n. 3 (1867). This plays on ideas central to both Vico and Marx. For Vico, it is a central epistemic thesis that the true (verum) is identical with the made (factum). See Vico's On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, Ch. One, I (1710). Compare to Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, II (1845): "The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth . . . ."
6. Fisch and Bergin state that "Marx and Engels seem to have taken from Vico . . . the formula that 'men make their own history,' from which their historical materialism was developed." Introduction to Autobiography 105. This, however, seems highly improbable in light of the fact that the notion that 'men make their own history' is implicitly, at least, already to be found in Feuerbach, Marx's immediate intellectual predecessor. Feuerbach was largely reacting to Hegel who, for Feuerbach, represented the "culmination of modern philosophy." Principles of the Philosophy of the Future ァ 19 (1843). According to Hegel, history was the self-development of God/Reason/Idea. Feuerbach's transformational criticism demonstrates, however, that "the secret of theology is anthropology; that the absolute mind is the so-called finite subjective mind." Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity Ch. XXVII (1843).
7. Preface, Vico and Marx: Affinities and Contrasts (Giorgio Tagliacozzo ed., Humanities Press 1983). http://www.connix.com/~gapinton/marx.html
8. Awareness of the importance of class struggle to historical development can be traced at least as far back as Aristotle's The Athenian Constitution (350 B.C.). However, prior to Marx, Vico's New Science (1725) gives this idea its most comprehensive treatment.