When in 1859 Charles Darwin published his book, On the Origin of Species – the culmination of years of research and earlier publications – he shook the moral foundations of Western civilization.  This occurred not because Darwin invented a new worldview out of thin air.  The ideas of progress through struggle were by this time rather widely accepted.  The British Whig party, in fact, was built on this idea: that Britain should be run by those proven strongest in life's competition and that no tears should be wept for the poor swept aside by life's struggles, because that would only hinder human progress.

No, it was not the newness of Darwin's ideas that made his works so spectacular, but it was because he gave such precise explanation – and justification – to these Whiggish ideas.  His great contribution to this debate of worldviews was that he built his Darwinist theory of life on a vast field of scientific evidence, something that had by that time become the absolute requirement for any claim to Truth.

Also, he was building his ideas on a well-established base of earlier works on this matter of evolution.

Since the publication in 1798 of the book An Essay on the Principle of Population by the English clergyman Robert Malthus, there was considerable discussion in England about the problems created by a rapidly expanding human population on the earth, the issues of hunger, disease and war that this would produce. Consequently, by the time of Darwin's 1859 publication, a number of leading political and intellectual figures in England had already taken the social position that the best thing to do about the rising number of English poor was – by a process of natural de-selection – simply to let them maintain a natural balance with their world by the thinning of their ranks through hunger and disease.  It was thus wise not to encourage their expansion through unnecessary charity.

Going at the issue of evolution from a different perspective, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lamarck had concluded in his 1809 Zoological Philosophy that through chemical influences acting on organisms to create new traits and by the environmental forces shaping these traits through necessary adaptation, organisms had progressed over time.  This included humans, in which human learning did not start out with a blank sheet (as per Locke's theory) but was built in part not only on the development of natural biological adaptation but also on the received aspects of learning derived by a person's ancestry. Thus learning could be understood as potentially progressive, evolving from one generation to the next, if carefully engineered with that understanding.

It is important to note that Lamarck was himself influenced by Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who in 1796 described in his publication Zoonomia how species had developed slowly over the generations by their abilities to pass on from generation to generation not only their basic traits, but also useful alterations in those traits.  Thus Erasmus's grandson Charles Darwin came from a family already securely located in the evolutionist camp!

Darwin himself. What Charles Darwin had achieved in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species was to show through actual scientific analysis how living creatures on this planet could have evolved slowly over an enormous expanse of time from a small number of simpler forms into a vast array of much more complex species. All of this could have been achieved entirely through a natural or mechanical process by which the very competitive nature of life rewarded the stronger offspring of any species the better chance for survival, and the privilege of birthing a new generation that retained that superiority.  Eventually this struggle for life – and its continuation from generation to generation – would, over time, bring into existence a distinctly new, more complex specie, one better adapted to the complexities of life.

Thus every living creature we saw around us was naturally evolved from a less complex ancestor by a process termed "natural selection."  In short, morally speaking, life was at its core simply a matter of the survival of the fittest.

Darwinism was further buttressed by the writings of other social philosophers of the day. Besides Darwin's pupil Huxley, who actually coined the term "survival of the fittest," there was Huxley's friend Herbert Spencer, who had been moving in the direction of Darwin's thinking even before Darwin published his first work in 1859.  Spencer had been working on both social theory (his 1851 Social Statistics) and personal development theory (his 1855 Principles of Psychology), his work heavily influenced not only by Malthus but also by the theories of Lamarck.  Then when Darwin's work was published in 1859 Spencer came out full force in his support of evolution as the basic doctrine of life, in every aspect of life on earth.

Soon Spencer would even outdistance Darwin as the most recognized philosopher of the late 1800s.  But the very names Darwin and Darwinism would still serve as the most powerful symbols able to raise strong debate, pro and con, not only well into the 20th century but still even today.

The German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche was not exactly a Darwinist, but certainly was – or would soon become – a voice of his times (the late 1800s), a period deeply steeped in the Darwinist mindset.  In his multi-volume series Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), he gave the German culture the ideal of the Übermensch – except that he was referring to the highly achieved individual – not some racial group, such as the Nazis would eventually use the term in reference to the German people as a whole, seeing themselves as a superior breed.  Nietzsche was referring to the highly self-cultivated individual who (reflective of Nietzsche's own personal struggles) had come to put aside all other values (wealth, sex, even happiness) in order to focus completely in meeting fully the high calling that fate had placed on that person.  Such a person strove to rise above the mere animal call to life – to rise above (über) mere common existence as a person (Mensch).

In fact, with respect to the ideal of the racial Übermensch, he was actually much opposed, getting himself in trouble with the German authorities for his strong anti-nationalism.  He even at one point renounced his Prussian citizenship.  No, Nietzsche was extolling the powerful individual that he claimed should be directing human life on this planet, not the group-think of the rising nationalist spirit that he saw developing around him – one which would eventually lead Europe into the disastrous national or tribal conflict known in its time as the Great War and to us today as World War One (as well as its continuation as World War Two a generation later).

He also was distinctly an atheist – informing the world that "God is dead."  He (like Marx) saw the Judeo-Christian religion as offering humanity only enslavement to earthly commonness by teaching people to aim not for greatness in this life – but instead to aim for some supposed afterlife that Judeo-Christianity claimed awaited the humble and faithful at death.  Nietzsche was very emphatic in stating that there was no evidence whatsoever that such a Heavenly life actually existed.

In any case, all of this debate rising in the late 1800s helped to shape the rising spirit of the times ... with Darwinism’s clear message to all: the past is dead and to be put behind us.  We need to move forward boldly into the future with all of its promising possibilities.  We must not become unnerved by the process of change itself.  We must not let our progress be handicapped by a clinging to old superstitions and cultural habits of the past.

Darwin's theory fit well with the interests of the evolving industrial class, the British Whigs, who dominated fast rising British industry ... and who also pushed for their entry into the British social status system that long held absolute control over British society.  This ancient status system had accorded social superiority or privilege only to those with long family pedigrees and a landed estate of some considerable acreage that had been passed down from generation to generation.  Breaking into the ranks of those highly privileged within the British class system was virtually impossible if you were not already a member of it by birth.  Those who tried to enter the realm of the British aristocracy through simply the demonstration of newly acquired wealth were considered by the aristocracy merely as vulgar upstarts unworthy of social recognition ... no matter how vast their newly acquired wealth.

What Darwin – or more precisely his followers, especially social-theorist Thomas Huxley (who actually coined the phrase "survival of the fittest") – put in the hands of the Whigs (or Liberals) was the demonstration that in fact life by its very nature was designed not to protect tradition but to reward those who demonstrated vastly superior life skills in the way that they secured success in the face of a very competitive environment.  These were the people, by nature itself, who were destined to lead ... not the leisured aristocrats who clung to social privileges merely brought forward from the past.  These inherited privileges served no useful social purpose ... and should be dismissed in this highly competitive world.  The strong should rule.

And government should not intervene in the process ... but instead step aside.  Society needed to be liberated from the restraints of custom ... and especially by the political and social habits of the State.  Thus English Liberalism was born as a distinct social doctrine of the Whigs ... eventually leading to the creation of the English Liberal Party itself.

Some of the Darwinists were even to take the position that the strong have the natural right to rule over the weak – the latter who in life’s natural competition should not only be allowed to fall by the wayside but in fact should not be supported at all by any special favors coming from the strong ... because this would impede the natural process of social progress, which England (and the entire West) was certain was well underway.

¹It is truly amazing the extent to which man can go in rationalizing about God and God's intentions.

At the same time that German (and other) social philosophers were seeing in the fast-changing dynamic of their days the fulfillment of history through the rise through struggle of the tribal nation (France, Germany, Italy, etc.), German expatriate philosopher (in exile in London) Karl Marx headed down an entirely different road in his explanation as to where history was headed.  He saw history fulfilled not in the struggle among nations but instead in the struggle among economic classes, principally between the owners of wealth and the subject classes (proletariat) that produced that wealth for the owners through their labors.  Marx was so insistent on this matter that he actually despised nationalism and all the discussion going on about nationalist struggles, seeing that as a distraction leading people away from the real struggle that lay before them, the industrial class struggle that was about to unfold – and lead the world into its final stage in history.

In 1848 Marx published his famous 30-page Communist Manifesto in the hope of capitalizing on the spirit of political rebellion that was rocking continental Europe at that time.

His Manifesto outlined history as a series of quite Hegelian dialectical struggles over time between those who legally owned the land, tools, machinery (what Marx summed up as social property or the "means of production") that produced the wealth that the people of society lived off of, and those (the proletariat²) who, though they owned none of those means of production, labored physically in using those means of production to bring forward the wealth that society lived off of. Typically in history, in the distribution of the wealth that a society jointly created for its survival and prosperity, most all of that wealth went to the class of property owners, with very little making its way to the hands of the proletarian workers. This would bring tremendous tension to society, which eventually would turn into physical conflict because of this social injustice.  Again, in Hegelian (and eventually Darwinian) dialectical fashion, such conflict or class struggle would then move history forward to a new, and better social system, shaped by the way the opposing classes synthesized their social positions into a new social structure.

In his analysis, he carefully described the situation around him in Europe where the feudal system, once dominated by landed aristocrats, had been challenged by a new social class of industrial and financial capitalists, thus creating the age of capitalism.  But he also saw how capitalism in turn had created its own opposing social force in the form of the industrial workers (the industrial proletariat) whose labors supported the capitalist system.  And he predicted that conditions were quickly rising that would cause the industrial proletariat in its turn to rise up against the capitalist class, and through the necessary historical conflict or revolution open the way to a new social system.

Time was on the side of the worker, because capitalism by its very nature is highly competitive even among the capitalists themselves – each capitalist trying to eliminate his competitors in order to gain greater control over the market.  This way they could increase their profits, even establish total or monopolistic control over the whole process.  But of course as they drove each other out of business, they were inadvertently thinning out their capitalist social ranks, making their numbers smaller at the same time that the ranks of the proletariat were growing. Thus simply the calculus of the few against the many meant that the days of capitalism were numbered.  At that point (which supposedly was now upon them) all the proletariat had to do was rise up and seize control of the means of production, thus destroying the power of the capitalist class, and the public government that had been protecting the capitalists.  Thus in rising up against their capitalist oppressors, they had "nothing to lose but their chains."

But, according to Marx, the resultant social system would be different, it would be utopia itself.  There would be no further class of dominators or exploiters of the proletariat, because the new society would be made up solely of industrial workers.  There would be no other class of people in the new society but this one single industrial class.  Everyone would now live as social equals – as comrades, rather than as a two-class system of gentlemen lording it over a servant class. Being equals, all would live communally, as in all land, tools and machines being owned jointly by all – and by nobody in particular.

Consequently, there would be no need for the political enforcing agency of the state or government.  It would simply wither away, because the sole purpose of the state was to protect the interests of the privileged class of property owners, whether feudal, capitalist or whatever.  In the communist society there would be no personal property, thus no state. Something like a Rousseauian bliss would then hold this happy world together.

Also, the new society would end the long historical dialectic of a ruling class and a proletariat class finding themselves once again in conflict.  With no division under communism between a propertied class and a proletarian class, there would be no cause for social conflict, no tension, no stress, only blissful peace.  Thus this last historical revolution would bring history to a completion, the kind of millennialist completion that everyone was expecting because of the unprecedented progress they had been observing coming forth at mind-boggling speed.  All history was supposedly about to fulfill itself, and Marx was showing how that was to be accomplished.

This was all pretty powerful stuff. And it appealed to the interests not only of European industrial workers, but also to intellectual Progressivists – not only in Europe but also in America.  Marx's theories seemed to be irrefutable because they were built on hard fact. Unlike the philosophical speculations of social philosophers before him, but quite like Darwin, Marx had thrown a lot of data into his analysis, supposedly hard economic data, thus qualifying his theory as "scientific socialism," making him – and those who followed his lead – "scientific socialists."

As all materialists or mechanists, Marx had no need of the concept of God, or some divine hand driving forward the economic process he had outlined. It all worked – similar to Darwin's theories – entirely mechanically.  Marx personally was an atheist. In fact he was quite opposed to the Christian religion, or any religion that saw history shaped and judged by a Supreme Being.  As for Christianity, he saw the religion simply as a cruel psychological tool used by Europe's ruling classes (most lately the capitalists) that savagely exploited their own servants or workers, by excusing their horrible treatment of the workers under the promise that if the oppressed workers all cooperated with the system and behaved themselves (not rebel against their oppressors) they would be rewarded in the next life with heaven.  To Marx, such religious theory was only a form of spiritual opium given to the masses to keep them docile.

Even though America was going through the same process of social industrialization as Europe, America really never connected with Marxism the way Europe did.  Marxism had virtually no place in the semi-feudal South, and even in the industrial North it gained only a marginal position among the American industrial workers. Intellectuals took an interest in it, largely because of its utopian features. But in general Americans developed their own versions of intellectual utopianism, quite apart from Marxism.  There would be some similarities, which would get these intellectuals in trouble, especially during the Red Scares that hit America from time to time.

But by and large, America did its own thing. From their very founding, the New England and mid-Atlantic colonies had been opened up, settled, and defended not by resident kings and feudal lords but by a huge class of commoner individuals and their families – giving American culture its individualistic character.  With America's expansion west across the Appalachian Mountains, the rural Midwest and the frontier West were settled by the same type of very individualistic Americans.  To these proud Americans the very idea of giving up their independence to some kind of hovering governmental institution was itself anathema.  Socialism – or government by a politically entitled set of enlightened supervisors – would not gain ground in America ... until the second half of the 20th century.  But we will have more – much more – to say about that in the next volume of this historical study.

Meanwhile, as Europe headed into the Twentieth Century, clearly a growing number of social and political philosophers were convinced that, through some kind of Darwinian process, Western civilization (and, via the West, also world civilization as well) was moving into a bright future in which utopian existence for all – even (and especially) the unwashed masses – seemed to loom into view.  Society just needed some adjustments here and there – led of course by these political philosophers or social scientists – in order to bring this process to completion. "Historical progress" and "democracy" – however conceived specifically (and the variation was indeed huge) were the bywords, the slogans, the shibboleths, of those who supposed that they possessed special intellectual insights into where the world was headed.

Within that group of Western social reformers was a large group of Marxist ideologues and political activists – forming the Social Democratic Party in a number of European countries – whose expectations were that Marx's Communist revolution would soon break out across Europe.  This supposedly would occur naturally first in a society experiencing the most advanced state of capitalism, probably Great Britain or Germany.  After all, Marx's scientific socialism would not work except under the historical circumstances he had so carefully described. Every stage of historical development had to be completed before history would be ready to move on to the next step or phase in its development.  The dialectical method demanded that kind of historical precision.

²A term drawn from Roman times in reference to the members of the Roman working class who held little or no property and thus few or no political rights.