Political Context of Scientific Thought

Abstract

Victorians developed two lines of response to challenges to Christianity and traditional authority by the new critical spirit and naturalism of their era. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer set out one line, which had important antecedents in Hobbesian thought. These Darwinians found values and laws in nature to guide man's social conduct. Despite Darwin's suggestion that evolution could be interpreted in terms of progress toward an altruistic, cooperative natural commonwealth, most social Darwinists believed the state of nature and the natural state of man to be deterministic, individualistic, selfish, and competitive. An opposing line, whose American representation George Santayana labeled the Genteel Tradition, sought to maintain the central articles of Protestantism-especially freedom of the will-by secularizing faith in idealism and intuitionalism. Dogmatic notions of free will emerged as voluntaristic ethical theory. As Robert Richards shows in Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (1987), Alfred Russell Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, and the influential utilitarian, Henry Sidgwick, endorsed this tactic. English philosopher G. E. Moore staked out the high ground for the Genteel Tradition in Principia Ethica (1903) by refuting the Spencerian application of naturalism to man's moral behavior as a conceptual mistake, which Moore called the fallacy. This Victorian concern transmitted itself to progressivism. In his magisterial reinterpretation of the intellectual origins of progressivism, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986), James Kloppenberg argues that European and American contributors to progressive social and political theory insisted on a theory of voluntary action. The conceptual deficiencies of naturalistic ethics did not diminish the interest of most social thinkers in finding support for their ethical programs in man's biological nature. Through its connection to neo-Lamarckism, naturalistic ethics remained a potent, if indirect, source of political conviction in