Darwinistische vrees en hoop in de sociologie, 1880-1914. Over sociaal-pathologen en sociale heelmeesters

Samenvatting

Darwinian Fear and Hope in Sociology, 1880-1914. On Social Pathologists and Social Engineers. The sociological concept of "social selection," although derived from Charles Darwin's "natural selection," has a distinct meaning. For some sociologists, selection became the precondition of social regeneration, while the absence of selection in modern industrialized mass society, in which the weak and unhealthy were no longer eliminated, was seen as the cause of a whole range of social pathologies. The discipline of "social pathology" diagnosed the actual social conditions in organismic, biologistic, and medical terms. Social pathology was linked to the evolutionary pessimism that manifested itself after 1880: such thinkers as Thomas H. Huxley and Edwin Ray Lankester feared that degeneration would result from the fact that natural selection did not work properly in modern, cultured society, as a result of which "the unfit" could reproduce prolifically. August Weismann's neo-Darwinism, with its panselectionism fiercely denying the inheritance of acquired characteristics, enhanced the pessimistic tendency in sociology, as can be seen in the work of such thinkers as George Chatterton-Hill and Benjamin Kidd. Weismann's concept of panmixia -- meaning that nonselective intermixture would inevitably lead to degeneration -- was at the heart of several social pathological analyses. The social and economic parasitism in modern capitalistic society, its extreme individualism, and its social disintegration (leading to increases in crime, alcoholism, syphilis, mental disease, and suicides), were all seen as the result of panmixia and the ensuing racial degeneration. However, these pessimistic diagnoses were combined with a scientific optimism that was meant to demonstrate the importance of sociology as a politically useful science. The scientific policies that were suggested often amounted to eugenics. The social Darwinism emerging from these sociopathological writings is quite different from the traditional picture of this disputed phenomenon: it is a sociological Darwinism, clearly critical of the disintegrating tendencies of individualism and the fierce competition for money in modern capitalism, stressing the importance of social integration. Nevertheless, because of its social biological and eugenic content, it can be described as an "unsociological sociology.". Adapted from the source document.