Biological Political Thought from
Aristotle to Adam Smith
Aristotle was a biologist whose
biological studies influenced his political thought. He argued that human beings were by nature
political animals, and they could be compared with other political animals,
such as ants, bees, wasps, and some birds.
He also saw that human beings were most similar to chimpanzees. He explained social cooperation among animals
as ultimately rooted in parental care of offspring, so that the most political
animals were those whose offspring needed extended parental care, and this
familial bonding could then be extended to wider groups. He thought that human politics was unique
because human beings use reason and speech to argue about the justice of
political rule. But he also thought that
human social and political life is shaped by some of the same natural
inclinations that one sees in other political animals, such as the natural
biological inclinations to self-preservation, sexual mating, parental care of
offspring, and social cooperation under the leadership of political
rulers. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
continued this Aristotelian tradition in arguing that law and politics could be
guided by a natural law rooted in these natural inclinations.
In
contrast to Aristotle’s political biology, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) denied
that human beings were political animals by nature, because he saw many
differences between human political life and the communities of natural
political animals like the social insects.
Unlike the social insects, Hobbes thought, human beings are naturally
inclined to selfish competition that impedes social cooperation, and
consequently human political order must be created artificially when human
beings exercise rational choice to agree to be ruled by a sovereign power that
will take them out of their natural state of war. Although John Locke (1632-1704) seemed to
agree with Hobbes that human beings were too naturally selfish to be political
animals by nature, Locke recognized that human beings were like other social
animals in that offspring were naturally dependent on prolonged parental care,
and therefore family life depended on natural social inclinations that could be
extended to embrace larger social groups.
David
Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790) thought that while human beings are
naturally selfish, as Hobbes and Locke saw, human beings are also naturally
social like other naturally social animals.
Hume and Smith argued that the moral and political life of human beings
depends on the moral emotions or sentiments that arise from natural sympathy or
fellow-feeling—the capacity to imaginatively share the emotions of others, and
to approve of what helps them and disapprove of what harms them. This reasoning from Hume and Smith about the
biological nature of human morality and politics influenced Darwin’s thinking
about human social evolution.
Darwin and Social Darwinism
Although Darwin said nothing about human
morality or politics in The Origin of
Species, one of the first reviews of the book in 1860 was by Thomas Huxley,
who declared that Darwin’s book would be a powerful weapon for liberalism. In 1860, liberalism meant classical liberalism—the
moral and political tradition of individual liberty understood as the right of
individuals to be free from coercion so long as they respected the equal
liberty of others. According to the
liberals, the primary aim of government was to secure individual rights from
force and fraud, which included enforcing laws of contract and private
property. They thought the moral and
intellectual character of human beings was properly formed not by governmental
coercion, but in the natural and voluntary associations of private life.
While
Darwin in his scientific writing was not as explicit as the British philosopher
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) in affirming the evolutionary argument for
liberalism, those like Huxley saw Darwin’s science as supporting liberalism. Darwin himself was a fervent supporter of the
British Liberal Party and its liberal policies.
Darwin
was active in the international campaign to abolish slavery, one of the leading
liberal causes of the day. His hatred of
slavery was one motivation for his writing The
Descent of Man, in which he affirmed the universality of humanity as
belonging to one species, against the pro-slavery racial science of those who
argued that some human beings belonged to a separate species of natural slaves.
Darwin’s
theory of social order in The Descent of
Man is implicit in his biological account of the human moral sense. Social order arises as the product of three
kinds of order: natural desires, customary traditions, and deliberate
judgments. As naturally social animals,
human beings are endowed innately with social desires, which originated as an
extension of the parental or filial affections, so that they feel a concern for
others and are affected by social praise and blame. As animals capable of learning by habit and
imitation, human beings develop habits and customs that enforce the social
norms of their community. And as
intellectual animals, human beings can deliberately formulate abstract rules of
conduct. Darwin concluded: “Ultimately a
highly complex sentiment, having its first origin in the social instincts,
largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason,
self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, confirmed by
instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense or conscience.” This allows for moral progress through
history, which eventually leads to the formulation of moral principles such as
the Golden Rule. “To do good unto others—to do unto others as
ye would they should do unto you—is the foundation-stone of morality” (Darwin
1871: vol. 1, 165-66).
Darwin’s
moral teaching in The Descent of Man is
very different from the morally repugnant doctrines usually identified as
“Social Darwinism,” which is thought to teach “survival of the fittest” understood
as the rule of the strong over the weak.
Such Social Darwinism is generally assumed to have promoted racism,
imperialism, coercive eugenics, and Nazism.
This
view of Social Darwinism was largely originated by Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought,
which was first published in 1944. Prior
to the 1930s, the term “Social Darwinism” was rarely used, and when it was
used, it was a label for something that the author was criticizing. Furthermore, it was not until Hofstadter’s
book appeared, that people like Spencer were generally identified as Social
Darwinists. So the idea of Social
Darwinism as Hofstadter constructed it seems now to be a distortion of
historical reality.
Moreover,
Social Darwinism has almost nothing to do with the writings of Darwin,
particularly The Descent of Man. In fact, Hofstadter in his book never proves
that Darwin himself was a Social Darwinist.
Hofstadter almost admits this when he says that “Darwin himself was not
an unequivocal social Darwinist” (1955: 238).
Hofstadter offers direct quotations from Darwin’s Descent on only two pages of his book (1955: 91-92). These quotations suggest that Darwin could
not have been a Social Darwinist of the sort portrayed by Hofstadter, because
they show Darwin stressing the natural sociality of human beings and their
natural moral sense based on sympathy for the needs of their fellow human
beings. “Selfish and contentious people
will not cohere,” Darwin declared, “and without coherence nothing can be
effected” (Darwin 1871: vol. 1, 162). If
Darwinism should have some clear connection to the teachings of Darwin, then
Social Darwinism is not Darwinism.
From
the 1860s to the 1930s, an amazingly diverse range of political thinkers
identified themselves as Darwinians. Classical
liberals like Spencer and William Graham Sumner argued that the Darwinian
“survival of the fittest” required that individuals be free to live as they
please, provided that they do not infringe on the equal freedom of all other
individuals, and that the coercive power of the state should be limited mostly
to protecting individuals from force or fraud.
But there was also a long line of Darwinian socialists, including Alfred
Russel Wallace, Annie Besant, Peter Kropotkin, and Ramsay MacDonald, who saw
the evolutionary process as a progressive movement towards ever greater
cooperation, so that the competitive individualism of capitalism was only a
temporary stage on the road to the cooperative society of socialism.
The
scorn for the disreputable ideas associated with Social Darwinism by Hofstadter
and others caused a decline in Darwinian social thought after the Second World
War. In recent decades, however, there
has been a revival of Darwinian thinking in the social sciences that began
around 1975.
Contemporary Biopolitical Theory
The renewal of Darwinian social thought
began in 1975 with the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology. An
evolutionary biologist at Harvard University specializing in the study of ants,
Wilson defined sociobiology as “the systematic study of the biological basis of
all social behavior,” which would use biological concepts to unite the natural
sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities in the scientific study of
the social life of all animals, including human beings (Wilson 1975: 3-6).
Wilson’s
book was condemned by many people who feared that he was advancing a new form
of Social Darwinism that would promote a morally repugnant biological
determinism. Marxists and others on the
political left charged that sociobiology would try to justify racism, sexism,
militarism, and capitalism as grounded in evolved human nature. Against Wilson’s biological determinism, his
critics on the left insisted that human social behavior is not innately
determined but socially learned, and therefore it can be changed by social
policies of progressive reform.
At
the same time, Wilson’s critics on the political right argued that he was
promoting an atheistic and reductionist materialism that denied the free will
and transcendent spirituality of the human soul. Renewing a criticism that had been directed against Darwin,
religious believers worried that the very idea that human life was naturally
evolved from lower forms of life denied the moral dignity of human beings as
created in God’s image.
Despite
this controversy over Wilson’s sociobiology, Darwinian social thought has had
growing influence in the social sciences in recent decades, although it is most
often identified as “evolutionary psychology,” “evolutionary game theory,” or
“biopolitics,” to avoid the distasteful connotations of “sociobiology.”
The basic question in
this Darwinian social research is the basic question of all social theory: If human beings are naturally inclined to
selfish competition, how is social cooperation possible? Aristotle identified the political animals
as those naturally capable of working together for some shared purpose. But he also saw that even the most political
animals are inclined to fall into factional fighting because they are divided
by conflicting interests. To explain how
human beings and other political animals sustain cooperation against the
tendency to conflict, Darwinian social theorists have identified five
mechanisms of cooperation: kin
selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, spatial selection, and
group selection. The reasoning for these
five principles has been summarized by Martin Nowak (2011).
Kin selection is the
evolutionary mechanism favoring cooperation within a family and among those
closely related by common ancestry. We
are more inclined to cooperate with those we recognize as kin than with
strangers. “Blood is thicker than
water.”
Direct reciprocity is
the principle of fair exchange—tit for tat.
I will do a good deed for you, because I expect that you will return the
favor. “I’ll scratch your back, and you
scratch mine.”
Indirect reciprocity is
based on the idea that individuals benefit from having a good reputation for
cooperation. We cooperate with those whom
we believe to be trustworthy. “I scratch
your back, and someone else will scratch mine.”
Among human beings, language is important for communicating the
reputation of individuals, and that’s why so much of our communication is
gossip about who has done what with whom.
Spatial selection is
the idea that our cooperation is organized into social networks in which some
individuals form clusters and interact with one another more than with
others. This means that the structure of
a population can affect its social evolution.
Group selection is the
idea that evolutionary selection works not only on individuals but also on
groups. In the competition between
groups, those groups with members willing to sacrifice for the common good are
likely to prevail over those groups whose members are too selfish to sacrifice
for the good of the group. As a result
of this, we have evolved for tribalism, because we are inclined to help our
friends and hurt our enemies.
Our evolved human
nature inclines us to enforce these mechanisms of cooperation through moral
emotions. We feel love and care for our
family and friends. We feel gratitude
toward those who cooperate with us. We
feel indignation toward those who cheat us or otherwise harm us. We feel guilt or shame when we have betrayed
our family, our friends, or our community.
We feel pride in our reputation for good character. We feel fear in losing our good reputation
with others. We feel honor in serving
our country and fighting its enemies.
These five mechanisms
for the evolution of cooperation—and the moral emotions that enforce them--can
all be found in Darwin’s writings. They
can also be found in the tradition of moral and political thought that includes
Aristotle, Hume, and Smith.
Although Darwinism has
been criticized both by some people on the political left and by some people on
the political right, the recent achievements of Darwinian social thought have
led a few individuals to argue for a Darwinian left and a few others to argue
for a Darwinian right.
In A Darwinian Left, Peter Singer tries to persuade his friends on the
left to accept a Darwinian view of human nature. Those on the left want to promote an
egalitarian society in which the powerful cannot exploit the weak. In pursuit of this goal, Singer argues,
leftists need to be realistic about the limits of human nature as revealed in
Darwinian science.
The left has
traditionally believed that human nature is so malleable, so perfectible, that
it can be shaped in almost any direction, and therefore social problems can be
solved through utopian programs that would make human nature conform to
rational norms of social harmony.
Although Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels accepted Darwinism in explaining
the animal world, they thought that human history manifested the uniquely human
freedom to transcend nature. Marxist
biologists like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould continued this tradition
by insisting on human freedom from the constraints of biological nature.
Rejecting this utopian
tradition of the left, Singer argues that a Darwinian left would accept “that
there is such a thing as human nature, and seek to find out more about it, so
that policies can be grounded on the best available evidence of what human
beings are like.” Such a left would have
to realize that natural tendencies (such as social ranking, male dominance, sex
roles, and attachment to one’s kin) cannot be immediately abolished. He concedes that that this will be hard to
accept: “In some ways, this is a sharply deflated vision of the left, its
utopian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be achieved. That is, I think, the best we can do today”
(Singer 1999: 60-62).
In response to Singer,
Larry Arnhart has defended “Darwinian conservatism,” which he explains as a
fusion of traditionalist conservatism and classical liberalism based upon a
Darwinian understanding of human nature.
He argues that Singer’s “sharply deflated vision of the left” might be
largely acceptable to conservatives, who have long assumed that conformity to
human nature is a fundamental standard for good social policy. For example, Singer agrees with Adam Smith
about the benefits of a market economy in channeling the selfish motivations of
human nature in ways that serve the public good. Thus, Singer’s attempt to justify a Darwinian
left actually helps us to see the justification for a Darwinian right. Arnhart claims that a Darwinian science of
human nature supports traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals in
their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to
ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and
prudential judgments.
Even those Darwinian
social theorists who might reject most of Arnhart’s Darwinian conservatism
might accept the idea of the imperfectability of human nature as revealed by
Darwinian science. After all, one of the
fundamental conclusions of Darwinian social theory seems to be that our moral
and political life will always be torn by tragic conflicts of interest. Because of the multileveled character of
evolutionary selection, human beings experience moral ambivalence arising from
the conflicting pressures of different units of natural selection. What is good for the individual can conflict
with what is good for the family. What
is good for the family can conflict with what is good for the tribe. And what is good for one tribe can conflict
with what is good for another tribe. We
feel the conflict between our natural selfishness and our natural sociality,
and even in our sociality, we feel the conflict between competing social
groups.
Darwinian social
thought can illuminate but it cannot resolve these tragic conflicts of our
social life.
References and Suggested Readings
Arnhart, Larry
(1998) Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Arnhart, Larry
(2009) Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.
Darwin, Charles
(1859) On The Origin of Species.
London: John Murray.
Darwin, Charles
(1871) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2 vols. London: John Murray.
Hofstadter, Richard
(1955) Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston: Beacon Press.
Nowak, Martin A.
(2011) SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to
Succeed. New York: Free Press.
Singer, Peter
(1999) A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Wilson, Edward O.
(1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, Edward O.
(1998) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Stack, David
(2003) The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism 1859-1914. Cheltenham, UK: New Clarion Press.
Wilson, James Q.
(1993) The Moral Sense. New York:
Free Press.
