Even Marx and Engels adopted Darwinism as the biological counterpart to the class war, though Darwin respectfully declined the honour of having the English edition of Das Kapital dedicated to him. ‚The survival of the fittest‘ in a human context could be all things to all men. It even invaded academic sociology, in the work of Herbert Spencer and Walter Bagehot in England and Ludwig Gumplowicz in Austria, the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin, and William Graham Sumner in the United States. To Sumner ‚millionaires are the product of natural selection‘ – an argument which appealed to Andrew Carnegie. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest also recommended itself to Theodore Roosevelt and to the British imperialists of the late nineteenth century. The belief that war was ‚a biological necessity‘, as one of the Germany’s leading military thinkers put it, helped to shape that country’s military and political thinking before the First World War; filtered through innumerable hack popularizations, it formed a vital ingredient in the stew of racialism, nationalism and anti-Semitism swallowed by the young Hitler in the public reading rooms of Munich and Vienna. Racial doctrines entered European thought before Darwin, as an offshoot of developments in anatomy and philology, and Darwin himself did not endorse the application of his theory in social contexts – Huxley, indeed, explicitly repudiated it – but inevitably it proved a kind of crucible into which fears and hatreds of the age could be dipped and come out coated with an aura of scientific authority.
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