Social Darwinism, the British Labour Party, and the First World War

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates whether the doctrine of social Darwinism had any bearing on the Labour Party’s decision to support Britain’s participation in the First World War. Many socialist intellectuals were wedded to social Darwinist conceptions of the world. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) published a number of tracts on the interrelationship between Darwinism or science and politics. The article looks for evidence of biological thinking in the Labour Party and the ILP prior to the First World War. It finds only small traces, vastly outweighed by environmental remedies to problems that were regarded as biological by social Darwinists. The labour movement also stood for pacifism as a signature policy. Yet when the war erupted, there was a sudden shift among Labour MPs towards supporting belligerent action. Did social Darwinism finally begin affecting them? Since there was only a slight connection between the doctrine and a few MPs, the article concludes that it was hardly an influence. Pragmatic reasons such as rallying to one’s own nation, supporting working-class communities and resisting atrocities predominated. Social Darwinism was in fact more likely to be utilized by neutralists who argued that Germany was more “civilized” than Russia and therefore deserved to win the war.