Abstract

AbstractWhen T.H. Huxley lectured on evolution and ethics in 1893, his critique of the amoral laws of the ‘cosmic process’ left his audience puzzled. While Huxley paid little attention to political and economic institutions, this article draws attention to the historical materialism of that era and its twentieth‐century legacies. Empirically, it analyses the rise and fall of a Hungarian state farm with reference to the comparative literature on twentieth‐century socialist societies. Theoretically, socialism is considered as the combination of a materialist philosophy of history with an axial ethical impulse. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Eurasian socialist order in the 1990s, we can see why Huxley was right to deplore the ‘fanatical individualism’ of his age. His humanism resembles that of the early Karl Marx and he stands closer to Émile Durkheim than to contemporary currents in the anthropology of ethics.

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