Science, Morality, and Inequality: Rethinking Social Darwinism in Gilded Age America

Abstract

Social Darwinism in the Gilded Age in America attempts to interpret social order through evolutionary science. Classical interpretations, most notably Hofstadter, have understood Social Darwinism as an ideology that justified capitalism and social inequality. Revisionist scholarship has complicated this view by questioning the coherence of social Darwinism as a category, and by showing that evolutionary language was politically flexible and not confined to conservative defense of capitalism. Building on those debates, this paper argues that the significance of social Darwinism lay not only in the sophisticated ideologies that it supported, but in the authority that evolutionary language acquired when applied to social life. By reviewing classical and revisionist scholarship alongside examples of Gilded Age evolutionary language, this paper shows how Social Darwinist reasoning naturalized inequalities, moralize competition, and limited arguments for collective responsibilities. Its contribution is to shift attention from what Social Darwinism justified to how scientific discourse made those justifications persuasive.