Social Darwinism Research Articles

Africans in China, Western/White Supremacy and the Ambivalence of Chinese Racial Identity

Abstract This article seeks to provide further insights into understanding the construction of Chinese identity by bringing the West/white into the picture of Afro-Sino racial relationships. It contends that the Chinese have internalized Western/white superiority through a long historical process, starting with the Western invasion in the 19th century and continuing with the construction of the contemporary historical narrative of the “century of humiliation.” This internalization and its ramifications can be observed in Chinese public discourses as well as diplomatic practices. Together with Western/white superiority, the Chinese also adopted a social Darwinist, competitive world view, using Western modernity as the yardstick by which to rank different peoples and societies in a racial hierarchy. Chinese racism against Africans is thus a projection of a harsh self-judgement. Unlike white supremacy in Western racial thinking, “Chinese supremacy” is often coupled with an inferiority complex.

Benevolence or Pretext: An Exploration of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward China in the Early 20th Century from the Perspective of Social Darwinism

Applying Darwin’s principles of natural selection and survival of the fittest to human society, social Darwinists in the late nineteenth century proposed the Manifest Destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. Based on the social Darwinism theory, this paper looks into the United States overseas expansion, especially its foreign policy toward China in the early 20th century. It further argues that the alleged American “protection” for China in military, diplomatic and cultural domain was just an embodiment of racial superiority in U.S. foreign policy, which was a justification for the United States to invade and enslave other countries and establish world hegemony.

Conceiving an Alternative: The Ideological Underpinnings and Political Blueprints of Chinese Federalism

Abstract This article contributes to the hitherto limited scholarship on the Chinese federalist movement in the 1910s and 1920s by conducting a thorough investigation of its ideological underpinnings and political blueprints. It compares the federalist ideas, plans, and activism of three thinkers—Zhang Taiyan, Zhang Shizhao, and Chen Jiongming—who stood firmly against the centralist trajectory of state-building in China after 1911 and advocated the formation of a Chinese federation. It argues that Chinese federalists, instead of emulating Western models, critically engaged with a broad spectrum of ideologies—Daoism, Buddhism, social Darwinism, parliamentarianism, guild socialism, anarchism etc.—when formulating their federalist agendas. Emphasizing the Chinese tradition of self-government, which underwent reinterpretations during the late Qing and early Republican periods, this article examines the extent to which Chinese federalism presented an alternative to Western political modernity.

Revisiting Emil Kraepelin's eugenic arguments.

It is widely recognized that Emil Kraepelin explicitly advocated for eugenic ideas in his academic works. Given the renewed interest in related concepts such as self-domestication and neo-Lamarckism in different contexts, this article revisits his eugenic arguments by scrutinizing a section of his seminal work, the 8th edition of his textbook published in 1909. Our analysis reveals that Kraepelin's arguments consisted of multiple theories and ideas prevalent at the time (i.e. self-domestication hypothesis, neo-Lamarckism, degeneration theory, social Darwinism, racism and ethnic nationalism), each of which presented individual fundamental claims. Nevertheless, Kraepelin amalgamated them into one combined narrative, which crystallized into an anti-humanistic psychiatry in the next generation. This paper cautions that a similar 'packaging of ideas' might be emerging now.

Representations of Social Darwinism in Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and Guy De Maupassant’s Ball of Fat

Representations of Social Darwinism in Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and Guy De Maupassant’s Ball of Fat

Solidarism and the Struggle Against Environmental Racism

Margaret Kohn has argued that fin-de-siècle French Solidarists such as Alfred Fouillée developed a “third way” between capitalism and socialism which still provides a powerful justification for “welfare state” institutions and public-goods provision. But how does Solidarism respond to the demands for environmental justice, and against environmental racism, which have emerged in the past 50 years, mostly in Women of Color-led social movements. Distinguishing three elements of environmental justice, and also pinpointing the logic of expendability at the core of environmental racism, the current article shows that Solidarism has more resources than liberal egalitarianism to challenge environmental injustice, but that, in the white supremacist state, environmental racism in particular poses an especially difficult challenge. After discussing the Solidarists’ divergent responses to feminism and Social Darwinism, the paper shows that, provided Solidarists are also in solidarity with social movements of the oppressed, their doctrine can aid the struggle for equal status.

From God’s Image and Homo Sapiens to Homo Dei: Struggling with People with Intellectual Disabilities

This paper aims to examine the position of people with intellectual disabilities in two areas of study: the theological discourse of the image of God and the scientific study on the evolutionary theory of human origin, exclusively in social Darwinism and Homo sapiens. In Christian interpretations of God’s image, this paper succinctly presents and revisits two parts: ancient Christian (Augustine and Irenaeus) interpretations of God’s image and several different directions (substantial, relational, functional, and ethical approaches), providing the understanding of the image of God in the modern era. In evolutionary theory, this paper focuses on two parts: the idea of social Darwinism and Homo sapiens. In addition, this paper revisits both ideas in constructing an inclusive paradigm of God’s image. The main argument of this paper is that the image of God liberates people with intellectual disabilities from the confines of the exclusive ideas of God’s image and Homo sapiens to a concept of Homo Dei. In conclusion, this paper proposes the idea of Homo Dei to portray an abstract concept of God’s image vis-à-vis the evolutionary theory.

An Assessment of the Influence of Special Needs Education Resources on Management of Inclusive Education in Public Primary Schools in Nakuru East Sub-County, Kenya

Inclusive education has become a worldwide practice because it boosts child rights, especially the right to basic education. Management of inclusive education in primary schools is critical if the education sector is to realize set objectives. The purpose of the study was to examine the influence of special needs education (SNE) resources on the management of inclusive education in public primary schools in Nakuru East Sub-County, Kenya. The specific objectives included establishing the influence of available teaching and learning resources for SNE and SNE teachers' competence in the management of inclusive education in public primary schools in Nakuru East Sub-County. The study was supported by two theories, namely Classical Liberal Theory of Equal Opportunity and Social Darwinism and Systems Theory. The research used a mixed-methods approach. This study used a descriptive, explanatory research design. The target population was 520 respondents, including 437 pupils with disabilities, one quality assurance officer, 4 guidance and counselling teachers, and 4 head teachers. A sample of 170 respondents was selected. Questionnaires for Headteachers, Guidance and counselling Teachers, and Pupils with disabilities and interview schedules for Quality assurance officers were adopted to collect primary data. After cleaning this data by looking for errors in the entries, different descriptive statistics like the variation of coefficient, frequencies, standard deviation, mean score and percentages were assessed for all the quantitative information and variables presented using tables. Inferential statistics such as regression analysis were computed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 27. On the other hand, qualitative information was analyzed through the use of content analysis. Regarding the availability of teaching and learning resources for SNE, the study found that the schools had adequately adapted textbooks and hearing aids for SNE. Further, regarding the SNE teachers' competence, the study established that it was uncertain whether many of the teachers at their schools had received special education training. The study concluded that SNE teachers' competence (β=0.737, p-value=0.006<0.05) had the greatest influence on the management of inclusive education in public primary schools in Nakuru East Sub-County, while available teaching and learning resources for SNE (β=0.541, p-value=0.003<0.05) had the least influence on the management of inclusive education in public primary schools in Nakuru East Sub-County. The study recommended that head teachers and teachers should be taken for some SNE management training by the government through seminars organized by the Ministry of Education in order to be able to cater to the learners with special needs in regular schools. The findings might be used by the Ministry of Education and education stakeholders to enhance the quality of inclusive education in public primary schools in Nakuru East Sub-County, Kenya.

Shaped by the pantheistic ideology of the founders, Türkiye has used its national education curriculum as an instrument of social engineering

Despite centuries of conservative ideology inspired by Islam, the rapid economic development and consecutive millitary victories of the West had caused within the ranks of the Ottoman elite an inferiority complex generating a wave of admiration resulting in the emulation of European values. Emerging with reinforced positivist doctrines after being deeply influenced by the French revolution, this admiration turned into an irreligious political ideology creating a decentralizing effect on the ruling sultanate of the Ottoman state. After the Republic was founded in 1923, the Kemalist state ideology was imposed onto Turkish society in the form of an aggregation of materialism, social Darwinism, positivism, secularism, and Turkish nationalism. To socially engineer a modern, secular, temporal and materially prosperous nation, this ideology would in most ways carry manifestations of the very character and lifestyles of the Republic’s founders. To maintain this ideology, assertive secularism was adopted as a security measure to prevent both the re-emergence of Islamic conservatism and any other nationalist or political ideology. While the visual aspects of Islamic society were transformed into a uniform Western society through mandatory reforms, the intellectual shift from East to West was realised by means of social engineering and religious inculturation through the education curriculum. This article will portray how the founders’ belligerent belief towards Eastern-Islamic tradition motivated them towards a new Western looking secular order and how these ideas have been imposed through school textbooks.

The Margaret Wrong Memorial Fund, Late Colonial Development, and the Prizing of African Literatures, 1950–62

ABSTRACT: As scholars such as Caroline Ritter have recently demonstrated, late colonial development policy exercised significant influence on the print culture infrastructures of decolonizing African nations. The history of the Margaret Wrong Memorial Fund (MWMF) and its literary prize (1950–62) renders visible the influence of the ideology of late colonial development on this emergent field: while the positioning of language in the field was bound up in the metropolitan conferral of literary legitimacy on European languages (and, conversely, in African struggles to confer the same legitimacy on African vernaculars), the positioning of language in the surrounding field of power formed the site of a different kind of struggle regarding late colonial development in British Africa. Those members of the MWMF administrative committee who advocated after 1949 and through the 1950s for the inclusion of African vernaculars were appealing to the early twentieth-century ideology of Phelps-Stokeism, a theory of differentiated education for Africans that was based on a Social Darwinist assumption of racial inferiority. Associated with Wrong’s interwar and wartime work for the International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa and particularly with the late colonial development impulses of this work, the Phelps-Stokeist rationale for legitimizing African languages does not always line up neatly with African nationalist and anticolonial motivations for supporting vernaculars. The influence of late colonial development on the emergence of the postcolonial field of cultural production matters: the history of this field must be tracked via the metropolitan (British) welfare state and the emergent postwar development paradigm, both of which shaped debates about language, for instance, that have long been attributed to the influence of metropolitan publishers and the African nationalisms of figures such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, among other forces.

Minarchism as a Philosophical Basis for the Convergence of the Right and Liberal Segments of the Non-Systemic Opposition in Russia

The article examines the question of the convergence factors for the right and liberal segments of the non-systemic opposition in Russia on the basis of minarchism as the philosophical fundament. The methodology of the work is built on a combination of structural and comparative analysis. The authors reveal the relation between the classical variant of the minarchism philosophy and its form transformed by the public opinion leaders within the non-systemic opposition. The authors come to conclusion that minarchism plays the role of the basis for the ideological unification of the right and liberal segments of the non-systemic opposition now. At the same time the oppositionists mainly adopted not the orthodox form of minarchism, but its vulgarized version, within which the original concept was reworked in the key of elitism and social Darwinism. This variation of minarchism is actually a political myth, the functions of which is to stigmatize the loyalists and strengthen in-group favoritism of the current government’s opponents. The features of this myth make it possible to dehumanize supporters of the existing system and at the same time construct a positive image of the future which is based on consumer values and achieving false justice according to the principles of market agonism.

The Providential Genocides: Racial Survival and Acts of God in Fin-de-Siècle Apocalyptic Fiction

This paper focuses on three narratives from the popular press during the boom in apocalyptic literature at the turn of the twentieth century: George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1894), Robert Barr’s “Within an Ace of the End of the World” (1900), and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). In all three texts, a catastrophic event causes the near extinction of humanity, and the event is inscribed in a religious narrative wherein humanity’s moral failings justify the cataclysm. In these texts, the survivors are European or descended from Europeans, such that post-apocalyptic humanity is exclusively White; all racial Others are depicted as unworthy of divine protection, or even as worthy of divine destruction. The survivors of these disasters fuse social Darwinism and theology to present themselves as racially superior and thus divinely favoured, compared to the deceased. The providential genocide significantly alters ethical ramifications by ensuring that racial elimination does not occur because of deliberate actions on the part of characters, sparing them from any culpability; instead, racial cleansing is presented as God’s will. This sets up a White exclusivist racial utopia free of moral stain, although the persistence of racial ideology into the apocalypse can undermine the utopian sentiment.

Utopia, Religion and Dissent in Robert Williams Buchanan’s The Rev. Annabel Lee: A Tale of to-Morrow

The article analyzes the novel The Rev. Annabel Lee: a Tale of to-Morrow (1898) by Robert Williams Buchanan, focusing on the conflict between a secular utopian society of the future, built on the principles of Comtean Positivism, Owenite Socialism and Social Darwinism, and a Christian revivalist movement led by a female preacher. While exploring the connections between gender, social engineering and faith, the article also interrogates ambiguities implicit in two conflicting worldviews which are dependent, respectively, on science and a revealed religion.

In search of a "criminal person": Changing scientific views on the role of biological determinants in the etiology of crime

Aim to analyze the transformation of criminologists' approach to the biology of a criminal, to highlight the achievements of physiological, genetic, endocrinological, neurobiological, biochemical, ethological research in this area, to study the dynamics of the scientific views on the role of biological factors in the etiology of criminal behavior, to give a dialectic assessment of the development of the described scientific paradigm.
 Results. The article provides an overview of research in the field of biological criminology. The results of physiological, psychological, genetic, neurobiological, biochemical, endocrinological, ethological studies are described. The role of the positivist school of criminology is evaluated as negative for the harmful consequences of their activities. It is shown that its provisions became the starting point for the development of social Darwinism, eugenics, the ideology of fascism, racial theory, the organization of national, racial and ethnic genocide.
 Conclusion. The most promising and most effective is a comprehensive, multifactorial approach to the problem of criminal behavior with mathematical modelling and artificial intelligence technologies.

Folklore, Nonhuman Animals and Social Darwinism

Folklore, Nonhuman Animals and Social Darwinism

Gazing into the Eclipse: A Review of The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

Abstract: In The Evolutions of Modernist Epic , Václav Paris "reread[s] literary modernism through a comparative perspective that includes the history of science" (9). Specifically, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jaroslav Hašek, Mário de Andrade, and Virginia Woolf "experimented with national epic precisely as a space for problematizing and reimagining social Darwinism" (9). The texts and writers covered are uniquely positioned in their historical moment to challenge social Darwinism, via the modernist epic. They do so through "non-normative sexuality" (32), challenges to "patriarchal history" (44), "Atavism" (70), "survival of the unfittest" (13), and by offering a revisionist genealogy, among other methods.

Child Labor Laws Are under Attack: Efforts to weaken labor protections are linked to the social Darwinist notion that people are inherently unequal.

Child Labor Laws Are under Attack: Efforts to weaken labor protections are linked to the social Darwinist notion that people are inherently unequal.

Paolo Marzolo and Cesare Lombroso: a semiotic-medical inheritance between word, sounds, and face

Abstract Within the interdisciplinary context of the nineteenth century, the paper scrutinizes the relation between Paolo Marzolo’s theory of signs and Cesare Lombroso’s anthropological-criminal approach. Best known for his unfinished work Monumenti storici (1847–1866), Marzolo (of whom Lombroso calls himself a disciple) investigates, in his last Saggio sui segni (1866), the origin and development of languages by combining the positivist approach with an eighteenth-century encyclopedic Enlightenment perspective, as well as the earlier anatomist tradition. In his view, the human production, learning, and use of signs, resting upon sensory experiences and mnemonic activity, involves the process of imitation with a pivotal role of the speakers’ phonic, gestural, and facial expressions (i.e., physiognomy), related to geographical, linguistic, and anthropological differences among human individuals, as well as the cultural element of civilization. Conceived as case(s) of semiotic ideology rooted between linguistics and medicine, the Marzolo–Lombroso filiation shows an increasing correlation between race, language, and climate in the wake of social Darwinism and akin to other coeval physiognomic theories. In Lombroso’s perspective, a radical translation from a linguistic and phonic-semiotic field to an anthropological and somatic-semiotic plane seems inevitable, emphasizing the (para) scientific flavor and widening the gap between anthropometric and ethnoanthropological approaches.

Eugen Sandow and eugenics

ABSTRACT Eugen Sandow gained renown in fin de siecle Britain as a strongman and bodybuilder and in the early twentieth century as a publicist, entrepreneur, and crusader for physical fitness on the international scene. Much less is known about his underlying zeal for eugenics, a movement that coincided with Social Darwinism as an evolutionary theory and practice that culminated during his most productive years. A pioneer in the burgeoning field of physical culture, Sandow sought to use his celebrity status to propagate his universal health doctrine as a means to address widespread public concerns about degeneration or suicide of the race. What made Sandow’s system unique was his neo-Lamarckian belief that acquired characteristics of health and fitness could be transmitted to the next generation of humanity by physical training. Fuelled by ongoing recruitment crises in the South African War and World War I, it was an ulterior agenda of environmental eugenics that Sandow promoted not only through public and official channels but to the four corners of the earth. Ultimately his utopian vision could not be sustained by the 1920s either through science, public opinion, or by political efforts to reconstruct a society fit for heroes.

Attitude of Romanian Medical Students and Doctors toward Business Ethics: Analyzing the Influence of Sex, Age, and Ethics Education.

This study investigated the attitude of Romanian medical students and doctors toward business ethics by measuring the preference for a particular ethical philosophy, namely, the preference for Machiavellianism, moral objectivism, social Darwinism, ethical relativism, and legalism. At the same time, this study aimed to explore the influence of sex, age, and ethics education on the attitude toward business ethics. The data collection was performed using a voluntary self-administered online survey including the Attitudes Toward Business Ethics Questionnaire (ATBEQ) instrument. Our findings show that the values based on which Romanian medical students and doctors make business decisions belong predominantly to the moral objectivism philosophy, which is grounded on rational actions based on a set of objective moral standards.