I had vaguely heard of Herbert Spencer, in passing mention in a text I was reading for college political science, so I decided to search up books by him, knowing that he was among the earliest classical liberals.
Whatever little I knew, it was that he took together both the natural rights theories of John Locke with the utilitarian economics of Adam Smith.
So it was surprising that much of the searches in Google Books put him in the category of Social Darwinism. This is where I stopped and ventured no further.
But it still put me in a little confusion.
As far as I knew, Social Darwinism in the western world was something espoused rather by the notorious Fabian socialists, who wanted to establish a welfare state ironically out of their hatred for the poor, and that it was always progressives and non-liberals like American eugenicists and racist Southern Democrats like Woodrow Wilson, who had such “The strong will and must survive” notions.
Though it turns out that Social Darwinism was there among liberals as well.
So just curiously, how and why did Social Darwinism become such a strong part of 19th and early 20th century politics?
There is a psychological basis for the success of the collectivist “latecomer ethic”. Part of it is due to people being genuinely being well-intentioned, yet ignorant of politicians’ blatant economic fallacies. Part of it feeds off of natural human jealousy. I really don’t know what his issue with the existence of natural elites is. Here is a part from Hoppe on the subject: (and it is lame to say whatever it was about colonialism then retreat from it)
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Also, Mises talks about social Darwinism in this chapter of Human action, but I reccommend to read from 2 before if you haven’t.
Spencer was not a Darwinist from what I have read, let alone what Mises is talking about before where I quoted above (and this is talking about actual biology, which he studied, not sociological comparisons). I’ve read a bit of his book on education before and thought it was excellent. Some google categorization is no reason to write him off.
Perhaps back than people actually started to think outside the religious paradigm. Of course, there will always be demagogues who’ll take sound concepts and advocate their “realization” into the exact opposite. But generally, I find social Darwinism to be a very sound concept, although politically incorrect nowadays.
I dunno man, this sounds eerily similar to the KKK hearkening back to the superiority of the plantation culture to me. A nauseating romanticization, no better than pining for the worker’s paradise of the USSR, or the Volk’s glory days of the First, Second, or Third Reich.
Apparently he also has a healthy disdain for entrepreneurs relative to the ancien regime. I bet he goes to a lot of Renaissance fairs.
Good Mises quote, but I’m not entirely sure that I interpreted the term Social Darwinism quite the same way as he did. I took it to mean the biological justification of one group of men over another.
To further that, that is why I consider the concept of social Darwinism useful when justifying brutal actions to oneself, or to society. Things like colonialism, or the Holocaust, or the large disparities in living standards between rich and poor.
I dunno, this kinda sounds like someone who doesn’t even know what he is talking about concocting something completely absurd. Get back to me when you actually read more Hoppe than what I quoted and can back your opinions with facts.
This is a recklessly irresponsible characterization. Hoppe’s view (in my words) is that the natural elites have been suppressed by the warrior-elite, the State. The State is war and the flourishing of the State directly corresponds with the flourishing of the elites of war: the royalty, nobility and, nowadays, the political class.
Wealth disparity is a state of being not an action, therefore, it requires no justification.
It is a poor execution of sociology. It is an artificial hierarchy that uses biased wordplay to subsidize ones preferences. It is “science for the sake of conservative libertarianism” instead of sociology for the sake of sociology.
That being said, there are hundreds left wing sociologists who are even worse, more in control of academic discourse, and more irresponsible than Hoppe.
If you like a more “right wing” approach in your sociology, Spencer and Mises are more academicaly interesting. Hoppe is a bit too much of a polemic sociologist for my tastes.
When Hoppe is talking about conservative libertarianism, social Darwinism, and natural elites, he’s not really advocating anything. He merely says that those things are the natural outcome of a free society.
No one can question that, in a free society, it is the best and brightest that tend to come out on top; that the “alternative culture” people would likely be excluded from many people’s private property; and that some people are naturally distinguished in their wisdom, ability, and integrity.
Honestly my experience with sociology has been a bitter experience so far. It seems mostly like arm chair political apologetics. While I criticize Hoppe; he is at least interesting, different, and politicaly/academicaly “un-hip” which is better than most sociologists.
I think you can get more out of sociology from economists like Hayek and Mises (or even if you completely disagree with him: Marx), anthropology, good historians, and social psychology than most sociologists that I am aware of. In fact I think social psych and economics is a firm base for sociology, and a firm 101 grasp of those two subjects mixed with a semi decent history/anthropology background is better than any sociology text. If anyone knows of a very good methodoical sociologist please let me know. Thus far, the best I can find is the dated Herbert Spencer. Hopefully I am wrong, but sociology seems to me like a missed academic opportunity and a botched field of study.
For Mises you can pull things out of almost anything but I was specifically thinking of these, the second article is Salerno about Mises as a social rationalist: