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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
In their major book devoted to the Herbert Spencer ‘affair’, Daniel Becquemont and Laurent Mucchielli profess themselves to be quite ready to share the opinion of Georges Guille-Escuret: the 19th-century British thinker would appear to dominate ‘discreetly our spontaneous perceptions‘. The forgotten philosopher in France appears to colour the moral atmosphere of the West. He appears to be, without our knowing it, our major contemporary. The surprising lapse of memory in which his name has found itself stuck fast appears to guarantee the triumph of his ideas. To unearth his name and resubmit his work to scrutiny takes on a certain urgent character when seen from this perspective: it would mean putting the so-called ideological evidence of our time to the test of the history of ideas. To render unto Spencer that which is Spencer's would be to remove from this so-called evidence the ‘immediate and unquestionable character’ with which it invests itself.
1. See Diogenes No.180, edited by Georges Guille-Escuret: Le gène est-il l'avenir de l'homme? Pour un dialogue renové (Is the gene man's future? Towards a renewed dialogue), Paris, Gallimard, October-December 1997.
2. Daniel Becquemont and Laurent Mucchielli, Le cas Spencer (The Spencer affair), Paris, PUF 1998.
3. Very often, the expression ‘social Darwinism' therefore seems as formidable as it is confused. It is most certainly problematical insofar as it has been coined in a polemical context. It is almost the same for that ideology as for the numerous pictorial movements which were christened by hostile critics. The fact remains that these enemies of ‘social Darwinism' had a more accurate idea of it than our contemporaries. His harshest and most specific formulation was doubtless not penned by Spencer but by a French ideologue: Clémence Royer. It is equally clear that Spencer's prolix and complex work could not be condensed into a few propositions. But Spencer was still the first to develop a doctrine which did not consist solely of his work.
4. Célestin Bouglé, La démocratie devant la Science. Études critiques sur l'hérédité, la concurrence et la différentiation (Democracy before Science. Critical studies on heredity, competition and differentiation), Paris, Félix Alcan 1909, p.230. The part of this book which deals with competition constitutes one of the most interesting attempts to reply to social Darwinism.
5. Herbert Spencer, De l'éducation intellectuelle, morale et physique [On intellectual, moral and physical education, London 1861], Paris, Félix Alcan 1930, p.230.
6. On this slippage from a belief in the inevitable and spontaneous survival of the fittest to the imperative to fight against the proliferation of the unfit, see Daniel Becquemont, ‘Les effets pervers de la protection sociale' (‘The pernicious effects of social protection’), in Claude Blanckaert (ed), Des sciences contre l'homme. Vol.II. Au nom du Bien (Sciences against man. Vol.II. In the name of the Good), Paris, Autrement 1993.
7. P.-A. Taguieff, La Couleur et le Sang. Doctrines racistes a la française (Colour and Blood. French-style racist doctrines), Paris, Ed. Mille et une nuits 1998, pp.109-110.
8. André Siegfried, Les États-Unis aujourd'hui (The United States today), [1st. ed.: 1927] Paris, Librairie Armand Colin 1947, p.110.
9. Lucas Delattre, ‘Biologistes et philosophes, un débat tendu' (‘Biologists and philosophers, a tense debate’), Le Monde des Livres (The world of Books), 16 March 2001, p.XI.
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