We accept and welcome, therefore…great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of the few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.”Ī less strident version of this creed – but with very similar implications - is still with us today. However, it was the steel baron Andrew Carnegie, never a man to mince words, who penned the most inflammatory expression of the Social Darwinist credo in an 1889 essay known as “The Gospel of Wealth.” “While the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” This is not an evil tendency in business.
Rockefeller, in a Sunday school address, assured his audience that “The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest…. Tylor: “The institutions which can best hold their own in the world gradually supersede the less fit ones, and… this incessant conflict determines the general resultant course of culture.” Likewise, the oil magnate John D.
Darwin himself soon started using the expression, but it was also embraced by what came to be known as the “Social Darwinists” – various apologists for the free-wheeling, laissez-faire capitalism of that era that featured ruthless economic competition, the brutal exploitation of workers, and extreme inequalities of wealth and poverty.įairly typical was this pronouncement by the American social theorist E.B. The term “survival of the fittest” was coined by the famed 19th century British social theorist Herbert Spencer as a way of characterizing Darwin’s natural selection theory.
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