Social Darwinism

Carmen Real Pascual

Social Darwinism is typically defined as a set of theories that apply the concepts of evolution from biology (primarily, though not exclusively, from Darwinism) to demography, sociology, political economy and law. In this way, ideas such as “natural selection,” “survival of the fittest,” or “evolution” are applied to human populations, forming various theories of social evolution, with variations in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that will not be addressed here. All of this is based on the implicit premise of a differential ontology of nature: the idea that nature exists as a distinct and separated reality from “the human” (culture, society, etc.); thus, it justifies a praxis that seeks to have the social order sanction the natural order, assuming that the latter is expressed through competition. In short, to understand the impact of social Darwinism, it is necessary to examine its historical relationship with economic liberalism, its interaction with Darwinism, and its theoretical and political consequences, as well as its role in the current eco-social crisis.

Social Darwinism has served as the ideological ground of capitalism, closely linked to economic liberalism from its very beginning. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the United Kingdom was consolidating a colonial and extractivist economy that accelerated the industrialization of cities. The Industrial Revolution, occurring in parallel with the “Enclosure Acts,” which allowed for the privatization of communal lands (see commons), caused profound social upheavals. Thus, the peasantry migrated and was rapidly transformed into an urban proletariat in cities where industry could not absorb the influx of workers: it was a period marked by low wages, unsanitary conditions, poverty, and dependence on State aid, known as the “Poor Laws” (Polanyi, 1989). In this context, in 1798 Robert Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population (1846), a text that sought to explain the poverty ravaging the United Kingdom through what would come to be known as “Malthus’s Law.” In short, he asserted that the population grows at a geometric rate, tracing an exponential curve, while food production grows arithmetically, in a linear fashion (1846): that is, the scenario of scarcity was due, according to Malthus, to the fact that the poor reproduce faster than they produce food. This theory, masquerading as a law of nature, sought to justify anti-poor birth control policies and promote the repeal of the welfare-oriented “Poor Laws,” which hindered natural selection, thereby taking a first step toward the normalization of socioeconomic inequalities.

Although Malthus’s ideas laid the groundwork for social Darwinism, it was Herbert Spencer who actually shaped this ideology. Spencer was familiar with both pre-Darwinian Lamarckian ideas (see Darwinism) and classical political and economic liberalism, and was an avid reader of Auguste Comte’s early sociology, which shaped his obsession with discovering a natural law that would explain not only the evolution of animals, but also that of human individuals and civilizations. Reading The Origin of Species led him to formulate the idea of “survival of the fittest,” which he articulated in his 1864 work Principles of Biology: Darwin did not hesitate to include in his 1869 edition of The Origin of Species (Foster, 2000; Sandín, 2000). As a result, Darwin’s relationship to social Darwinism has raised numerous questions, such as how much of it can be found in his work or whether Darwinism is itself social and ideological; however, these issues will not be addressed here (for further discussion, see Sandín, 2000). In any case, reading Darwin led Spencer to consolidate his ideas on the evolution of human society (which were rather Lamarckian) in The Principles of Sociology (1876). He asserted that societies resemble organisms that evolve teleologically from simple, homogeneous organizations into complex, differentiated systems. The theory, in principle organicist (see organicism), was a form of biological mechanism (see mechanism) that justified social inequalities as the natural result of the process of selection of the fittest. From this he concluded, like Malthus, that the State should promote free trade and intervene as little as possible to mitigate inequalities, since this could hinder the evolutionary process resulting from competition. The relationship between biology and economics was meticulously mapped out: the market was the arena in which societies had to compete for limited resources; the bourgeoisie had found an ideology that naturalized its economic privileges. When applied to the colonial process, imperialism was ideologically justified as the “natural” expansion of the European powers, which were considered more advanced both individually (the citizen of the modern State) and socially (States themselves as social structures).

Regarding this racist aspect, the biopolitical consequences of the consolidation of social Darwinism are well known: in the late 19th century, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (and later Karl Pearson, both statisticians) coined the term “eugenics” (etymologically: good birth or good lineage) to refer to the study of natural selection within the “human race”, which sought to artificially accelerate the process by encouraging the reproduction of the fittest individuals (those with superior hereditary traits) and discouraging the rest. This resulted in a classist ideology that deemed the upper classes superior and strongly criticized welfare policies which, by protecting the lower social strata, hindered the natural selection of “the best.” Under this scientific umbrella, throughout the 20th century eugenics became a political practice with devastating consequences: the category of “race”—an ideological concept with no scientific basis—was invoked to justify promoting the birth rate of populations deemed superior (typically white, bourgeois, and sexually normative) and the elimination of those deemed inferior. Although the Nazi eugenics program is the best known, these practices actually began earlier in England and the United States and were prevalent among the middle and upper classes in most countries (Álvarez Peláez, 1999). It is the high-profile case of Inuit birth control in Greenland, for which Denmark apologized only after a group of affected women filed a complaint in 2024 (Gelis Pons, 2024). In many of these examples, negative eugenic practices were carried out, including sterilization, the administration of contraceptives often without consent, racial segregation, and the prohibition of interracial marriages, among other measures.

Where eugenic social Darwinism had found a scapegoat in the concept of “race,” the reformed Malthusianism of the 20th century discovered an ally in anarchism and feminism, establishing itself as “neo-Malthusianism.” The thesis that poverty was a consequence of proletarian overpopulation had taken such hold that Spanish anarchists at the turn of the century accepted it as valid and promoted a series of magazines (mainly in Catalonia, with authors such as Gregorio Marañón or Luis Bulffi de Quintana) that sought to promote birth control among the proletariat: if workers suffered from unsanitary conditions due to population growth, it was a matter of class to promote “conscious procreation” and knowledge of contraceptive methods as a means to curb poverty (Molero-Mesa et al., 2018). With this aim, the Universal Federation of the League for Human Regeneration was founded in Paris in 1900 (at the home of Francisco Ferrer Guardia, a Catalan anarchist), a neo-Malthusian association with academic publications and presence in Spain, Portugal, Italy, the United States, Argentina, Chile, and other countries. Beyond anarchism, many feminists, such as Nelly Roussel and Madeleine Pelletier, found in neo-Malthusianism a path to women’s emancipation, including “conscious motherhood,” birth control to end poverty, contraceptive methods, and even abortion and non-reproductive sexual education (Cova, 2015). From these perspectives, neo-Malthusianism was politically ambiguous and potentially emancipatory: in fact, within contemporary ecofeminism some authors hold views close to feminist neo-Malthusianism, such as Donna Haraway with her famous slogan “Make kin, not babies!” (2016, p. 103), understanding “kin” as a multispecies relationship.

Throughout the 20th century, in addition to certain anarchist and feminist movements, economic elites also continued to promote the ideology of social Darwinism through neo-Malthusianism, fostering the belief that overpopulation is a global security issue (Arcos, 2025). The concern of these elites had nothing to do with the emancipation of the proletariat, nor of proletarian women, but rather with the high birth rates in the countries of the Global South, which they viewed as a potential threat (something that today resembles the conspiracy theories of the Great Replacement). Notable among these actors are the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, which funded numerous research projects and organizations dedicated to studying demographic growth and containing population growth in Latin America (such as the “Population Council”), many of which were affiliated with the UN (Arcos, 2025). The result was the creation of a research network that disseminated neo-Malthusian ideas and contraceptive technologies from the Global North to the Global South, with a notable example being the intervention and funding of family planning programs in Chile during the 1960s (Arcos, 2025).

Ecologism has not been immune to the debate over the issue of overpopulation, a topic that has taken on particular relevance given the growing awareness of the planet’s biophysical limits. Numerous authors addressed the issue in the 1950s and 1960s, notably Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which predicted a widespread famine in the 1970s or 1980s that never occurred, and Garret Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons, published the same year. The latter is a key text (and one strongly criticized, for example, by Elinor Ostrom) in the literature on the commons, but it is also a product of social Darwinism, arguing that “the problem of pollution is a consequence of population” (2004, p. 15) and its geometric growth—a postulate drawn directly from Malthus (p. 11). While the concern is legitimate, the author quickly slips down the racist and classist slope that characterizes most of his work: the issue, says Hardin, is that the hegemony of the Welfare States leads States to take responsibility for the care of the children of those parents who lack the resources take care of them on their own. As a result, they are not “punished” in a natural way (an euphemism used by the author to mean that they do not die), leading to overpopulation, since under normal conditions most of the offspring of the poor (referring primarily to populations in the Global South) would be subject to natural selection (p. 16). Proposals such as these from certain sectors of ecologism have evolved and eventually come to be grouped under the label of “ecofascism” or “eco-authoritarianism,” which are, ultimately, “ecological” applications of social Darwinism.

There is widespread and sharp criticism of social Darwinism and Malthusianism within debates of ecologism. Notable among these is the biologist Lynn Margulis, whose endosymbiotic theory challenged traditional notions of “competition” and “survival of the fittest” in both neo-Darwinism and social Darwinism, highlighting the role of cooperation in the evolutionary process (see Gaia). John Bellamy Foster also points to the ideological and racist nature of social Darwinism: the problem of scarcity is not a direct consequence of the demographic situation, but rather of the distribution of resources (2000). Therefore, the solution lies in transforming the productive system to account for the planet’s biophysical limits (see agroecology, ecosocialism, and degrowth). Data on growing socioeconomic inequality and global population growth—which does not follow an exponential but rather a logistic function (that is, a gradual stabilization estimated, in the worst-case scenario, at no more than 11 billion people)—seem to support this position: population is not a problem in itself, but rather relative to the productive system (Population Explorer, 2025; United Nations, 2024). Ultimately, the critique points to theories of social Darwinism as speculative and aimed at naturalizing a capitalist economic order and its racist and classist policies.

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