progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

More documents

Recommendations

Info

The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL well educated in Spencer as well as in Darwin. This shrill tone of the author's style continues to resonate throughout the book. 3.2.3 Darwinian The next interesting comment by Francis frankly refutes the entire basis of the Hofstadter diatribe on Social Darwinists. In Hofstadter SDAT, he accuses Spencer of being a pure Darwinian and as such lacking in any human emotions. However Francis states 41 : "…First there was Graham Wallas….to him Spencer was merely an early and hasty generalize on the subject of evolution….secondly, there was Richard Leakey…he possessed the same information as Wallas except …he was praising not condemning Spencer….After Darwin had explained his theory…Spencer quipped that it might as well be called "survival of the fittest"….if either Wallas or Leakey had read Spencer…(he) was unsympathetic to Darwin's theory…" Thus Spencer was not a pure Darwinian. As Leonard states: "Darwinian defenses of laissez-faire among scholars, who were more likely to have read Darwin, are not much easier to find. Bannister and other revisionists point out that even Hofstadter’s social Darwinist exemplars, Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, were not especially Darwinist. Spencer certainly invoked the evolutionary advantages of competition among men. And, Spencer’s extraordinary intellectual prominence in the last third of the 19 th century also made him a large target for reform scholars. But Spencer would have rejected the label of “Darwinist,” in part because his own theory of evolution differed from and was published before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The catchphrase “survival of the fittest” was Spencer’s and Darwin did not adopt it as a synonym for “natural selection” until Alfred Russell Wallace convinced him to do so in the fifth edition of the Origin (1869). Importantly, Spencer was a Lamarckian with respect to human inheritance. He imagined that competition induced human beings to actively adapt themselves to their environments, improving their mental and physical skills – improved traits that would then be inherited by their descendants. Spencer’s view was that, in the struggle for existence, self-improvement came from conscious, planned exertion, not from the chance variation and natural selection that are the heart of Darwinism. As a result, evolution is progressive in Spencer, whereas, for Darwin, at least the early Darwin, evolution means only non-teleological change. Spencer’s fundamental belief in human progress via Lamarckian bootstrapping was at odds with Darwinian natural selection’s randomness and its openness to non-progressive change. 41 See Francis p 3 Page 54
The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL Spencer, in fact, was not just a Lamarckian, he was a leading Lamarckian, taking up cudgels against the neo-Darwinians such as biologist August Weismann, whose watershed finding in 1889—that mice with their tails cut off do not bear short-tailed progeny—was seen by many as a crucial-experiment refutation of Lamarckism. Spencer’s status as a defender of Lamarckism in the 1890s was such that that progressive Lamarckians, such as Lester Frank Ward, often found themselves in the awkward position defending Spencer, a man whose individualism and laissez-faire economics they loathed, and dedicated their lives to opposing." Thus the fundamental basis of the Hofstadter argument against Spencer has no merit. Francis begins by throwing the cudgel down early on in the biography as to his apparent dislike of free markets and then continues to pound the cause home. 3.2.4 Spencer the Man and the Individualist Francis begins to position Spencer as a non-individualist, by redefining what he believed Spencer meant by his individualism 42 . The author commences what appears to be his personal repositioning of Spencer as not the one lauded by many 21st century libertarians but as a mainstream 21st century liberal. Although he defines "individualist" as the "natural antonym" of the term "state" the author commences the rehabilitation of Spencer from his point of view. The most published work of Spencer, his small but compelling book, "The Man Versus the State", is a well read treatise which clearly and unambiguously states the position of the individual against the state. Unfortunately the positioning by the author at this stage to marginalize this work of Spencer presages his attempt to reconstruct Spencer as a man who may not even have written that book. Chapter 3 depicts Spencer and the problems he allegedly had with women. One of his alleged lovers was the writer George Eliot with whom he had an affair which lasted a brief while. The chapter is less a discussion of Spencer's problems with women than it is a presentation of conflicted Victorians in England. Chapter 6 discuses Spencer's rather common eccentricities starting with his hypochondria. The author states: "Spencer combined hypochondria with radical political opinions." It appears that this was a common British trait not unique to Spencer. For if one looks at Lord Russell one see that he suffered from exactly the same set of problems. One may conjecture that such a set of common characteristics were both common to the Victorian British as well as those holding extreme views. 42 Francis p 13. Page 55
Page 1 and 2:
+++ The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM
Page 3 and 4: The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, IN
Page 7 and 8: The Telmarc Group Preface PROGRESSI
Page 53: The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, IN
Page 63 and 64: The Telmarc Group 4.1.3 Hobbes and
Page 93 and 94: The Telmarc Group 4.5.2 The New Fre
Page 105 and 106:
The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, IN
Page 107 and 108:
Page 109 and 110:
Page 111 and 112:
Page 113 and 114:
Page 115 and 116:
Page 117 and 118:
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Page 139 and 140:
Page 141 and 142:
Page 143 and 144:
Page 145 and 146:
Page 147 and 148:
The Telmarc Group Hofstadter contin
Page 149 and 150:
Page 151 and 152:
Page 153 and 154:
Page 155 and 156:
Page 157 and 158:
Page 159 and 160:
Page 161 and 162:
Page 163 and 164:
Page 165 and 166:
Page 167 and 168:
Page 169 and 170:
Page 171 and 172:
Page 173 and 174:
Page 175 and 176:
Page 177 and 178:
Page 179 and 180:
Page 181 and 182:
Page 183 and 184:
Page 185 and 186:
Page 187 and 188:
Page 189 and 190:
Page 191 and 192:
Page 193 and 194:
Page 195 and 196:
Page 197 and 198:
Page 199 and 200:
Page 201 and 202:
Page 203 and 204:
Page 205 and 206:
Page 207 and 208:
Page 209 and 210:
Page 211 and 212:
Page 213 and 214:
Page 215 and 216:
Page 217 and 218:
Page 219 and 220:
Page 221 and 222:
Page 223:
The Telmarc Group and the Progressi
show all

progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?