Anti-Malthussian Mutual Aid Tradition Within Post-Darwinistic Thought
Discussion
From a review by Dennis G. Hodgson :
"Hale’s major thesis in Political Descent is that two “rival traditions of evolutionary politics” were evident in the work of Victorian writers, one “deeply Malthusian” that considered evolutionary change to be the result of individuals responding to severe competition for subsistence and the other “predominantly Lamarckian and anti-Malthusian” that considered evolution to be the result of cohesive groups adapting to changed conditions largely through cooperation and mutual aid (pp. 2–3). An assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma, Hale offers a close textual analysis of a broad range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writings. In addition to those of Charles Darwin, he discusses in some detail the works of Erasmus Darwin, William Godwin, Malthus, Harriet Martineau, Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Russell Wallace, Walter Bagehot, W. R. Greg, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, Benjamin Kidd, Karl Pearson, Friedrich Weismann, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Peter A. Kropotkin, and others."