Beside Social Darwinism, religion, and the argument by design, issues of economic ideology becloud the debate over Darwinism. Many who would consider themselves secularists seem convinced belief in Darwinian theory is connected to their economic viewpoints. But it isn't true. Adam Smith, much misunderstood, becomes an imaginary fixation of theorists, and his form of thinking starts to pervade social thought very early, often in concealed form, as in Hegel's 'cunning of reason'. Kant, by the skin of his teeth, bestrides the confusion. Marx is one of the first observers of this phenomenon. Smith is still in the age of the struggle for economic freedoms, in the halo of yankee doodle liberty, another generation starts to react to the consequences of a new world emerging. 

 In general, the field  is so vitiated by addlepated hybrids of economic sociology and the shotgun marriage of the views of Adam Smith and Darwin that the credibility of the subject has been lost. And the world of Social Darwinism has come and gone, perhaps not gone yet at all. One gets the suspicion social thinking selected out of all the emergent evolutionism of the late Enlightenment and early nineteenth century the one individual and version that suited its ideological purposes. For the crystallization of Darwinism is anomalous. An old charge, made over and over, to little avail. In the famous words of Karl Marx, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the Bourgeoisie.

 Issues of ideology are easily thrown about and often haunt the accuser as much as the accused, but the effect is basic, amidst the endless distracting denial. We are trained to forget. Now a leftist is instantly accused of ideology. That would surprise an earlier world. But the question of ideology is intrinsic.

The game is an old one. Start with Malthus and the point is clear, a science of population is founded by a rank reactionary impulse, and the debate over this, amidst the Ricardian extension of Adam Smith, takes up a whole generation, as the birth of social theory is stirred with an almost laughable and primitive mixture of conservative ideology and radical objections, as the very idea of evolution, with its leftist cast, is conservatized and housetrained for economic purposes.   Karl Marx, and his generation, are the first to grapple with the depth of the confusion created by the new economism, and he does so without rejecting the valid insights of these new sciences. One of the first creators of economic models, he follows Ricardo. Debunking Malthus is itself open to challenge and a bit old hat, but we can extract the point of his thinking, for the importance that it has without forgetting this ominous birth that precedes a similar effect in Darwinism, with its latest replay of this stinkpot mudslinging in the sociobiology scrapes. Into this atmosphere comes Darwin's theory, not so unsophisticated as this, but still with this odor of the response and conservative reaction to a period of revolution. In that context, Larmarck's (and Lamarck was unmentionably radical), not Darwin's, theory of evolution is rewritten by Darwin with an incompletely clear or proven mechanism of natural selection that is theory's gift from heaven to a classical liberal. We can rest our case just there. 

It is worth remembering that Smith was quite subtle, as a packager of gestating capitalist observations stretching back a century and more to William Petty or Hobbes, and also a sophisticated moralist, and is not really a scientific theorist at all, but a man recommending a policy, a consultant. Not Adam Smith, but the fantastic version of the man that animates market thinking, is the problem, for it is routinely used to justify extreme versions of economic depradation as historically inevitable. Smith never would have condoned much of this. And the economic systems coming into existence show also a strong character of being 'rigged in the favor' of certain parties to the action, even as they create an unprecedented new source of social dynamism. Conservative libertarian views make us forget that the question is not the freedom of the market, but the balance of freedoms in both the State and civil society. The individual against the State is one freedom, the individual within the State is another freedom.

 Thus, whatever the case, the claim on 'laws of a science of economy' are at the very least ambiguous, since they are open to change by fiat, voiding the 'newtonian law' analysis of so much social scientism. We can do to this what Karl Popper did with the 'historicisms' of the left, supposedly. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation makes this point beautifully clear, the market order of the nineteenth century is in part a unique system imposed against resistance. The creation of the great nineteenth century free market systems were experiments, not just economic inevitabilities, and by his reckoning the source of immeasurable disaster. We never compute the possible relation of this imposed economism, and, for example, its consequences seen in the The First World War. 

 This interaction of theorist of history with the present bedevils all attempts to apply science as universal generalization to history and is the source of instant ideology, which does a brisk business indeed, still in our own day. Whatever the merits of Smith's views,  they are not science. The Smith icon is someone else, a phantom stalking the economy. 

In general, Smith is not telling us how economies evolve, as as much how they should be arranged in his view, in the context of mercantilism and the collision throughout history of the state and its regulation of markets. Once we set the conditions they evolve one way, as opposed to another. The myth that markets are an omniscient talisman is false by any standard of evidence. It took a generation of heroic state regulators and factory inspectors to stamp out child labor of the worst sort, in England. These are themselves ideological assertions, but in the context of the rise of evolution this economic backdrop, in all its perspectives, is important to remember. For Darwin was much the man of his time. 

Maybe Smith is right, or not, but this is a value calculation in itself, and cannot be justified beyond its effects, nor taken as an excuse to preempt changing previous assumptions. A similar confusion occurs in Social Darwinism. What the theory says, as to how things happen, is reapplied to statements about how they should happen. We can debate those questions, but we must be wary at the point where thought becomes hypnotized, 'this is a science, and therefore, this is the way it must be'.  The influence on evolutionary thinking to come, confusing even leftist critics and Marxist socialists, is one of the basic facts of modernism, as we know. Here Malthus is especially transparent, and no doubt often misunderstood by being villainized. But in the time of Revolution men are realizing their poverty is a tranformable condition, and Malthus appears with a thesis to show that poverty is inevitable. 

• There are any number of good books on Malthus, as the founder of demography, but one might consider an old-fashioned leftish salvo and history of the part left out of most accounts,  Hungry Generations, The Nineteenth-Century Case Against Malthusianism, Harold Boner, King's Crown Press, New York, 1955 

We can challenge Darwinism, we can also challenge the economic interpretations of history that appear at this point. The critique of Marx has been so savaged by wild dogs, that we forget how obvious it is: men, to be free, must be masters of, and not mastered by their economic environment. The frequent association of evolution and the dynamic of  'free markets' is both highly questionable and an apparently incurable theoretical addiction. No model has ever really shown a direct connection, which doesn't mean there isn't one. And history is not the evolution of free markets, or the outcome of competition It is not! They are not the same thing. And species don't appear the same way markets self-organize. Balderdash.  Where's the proof? A deep strain, in the legacy of Adam Smith, of libertarian economics is often grafted onto the legacy of Darwin in a peculiar mix that is very attractive to many evolutionary adherents. 

These questions of ideology pervade all attempts at social theory arising in the nineteenth century.  Now the inventors of this critique are themselves pegged as ideologists. This issue of ideology appears at the beginning of macroeconomics, in case one should wonder that bias might be present in an advanced mathematical treatment of a subject.  In The Age of the Economist, Daniel Fusfeld, notes "The rise of socialism and its demand for social justice forced the supporters of the existing order to raise their defenses. A theoretical refutation was also needed, because Marx's critique of capitalism was based on the assumptions of classical economics itself--on the labor theory of value and the theory of capital accumulation. He used the weapons of the dominant ideology to attack the very system those weapons defended." Suddenly the labor theory of value is pinned on Marx, who gets it from Smith, and the socialists are on the theoretical defensive. The next generation's complex mathematical models of economy, dressed up in calculus, are not really sciences, and yet serve their purpose. Doesn't all this scientific mathematics show scientific objectivity? Can higher mathematics blow in the wind of social ideology? We can leave it to the reader to find a book on calculus, study his way to the subject, and decide for himself. The point is that two central theories that define modern society are easily shown to be flawed, ideological. That should buttress the courage of those forced to confront these establishments of scientific expertise, including those with such expertise. You are on your own. The experts aren't of any help.  

• Any study of evolution is well-accompanied by the study of the subtle Adam Smith, and the history of economic theory, the history of liberalism, the course of the idea of progress, the nineteenth century relation to the Enlightenment,  to say nothing of the history of 'evolutionism', and the general tenor of nineteenth century social beliefs. Cf. R. Ekelund & el., A History of Economic Theory and Method (NY: MacGraw-Hill,1990), A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (NY: Basil Blackwell, 1984). For a critique of mathematical hi-tech fantasies,  the application of the physics metaphor to economics, cf. Philip Mirowski, Against Mechanism (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988). 

• For Social Darwinism, cf. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1945), Robert Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Cf. Thought (Philadelphia: Temple, 1979), Edward Caudill, Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee, 1997), John Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View, (Berkeley: Univ. of Ca., 1981), Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard, 1985).

• Marx on Darwin is the source of a number of myths. Terence Ball in Reappraising Political Theory, Chapter 10, "Reapprasing Marx and Darwin" summarizes the research finding little evidence for the connection between Marx and Darwin, the issue of the famous letters. 

Darwin is often defended from Social Darwinism. The question is mostly sawdust, hopeless.

A new biography of Darwin, Darwin, Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (with a companion volume by the co-author Adrian Desmon, Huxley, From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest), gives a closer picture of the man behind the theory.

'Social Darwinism is often taken to be something extraneous, and ugly concretion to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin's image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality, were written into the equation from the start--'Darwinism' was always intended to explain human society. p. xxi

 

How Many People Can the Earth Support, by Joel Cohen, Norton, 1995, contains a good account of the 'science' appearing from Malthus and his time.