Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx)Ferri, Enrico
Philosophy
Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx)
Ferri, Enrico
Evolution; Socialism; Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903
It is, indeed, astonishing that the anti-socialist prejudice of M.
Garofalo should have been strong enough to cause him to forget that
truth which is nevertheless a legitimate induction of criminal biology
and sociology, the truth that besides the congenital criminal there are
other types of criminals who are more numerous and more directly
produced by the vitiated social environment. And, finally, if the
congenital criminal is not himself the direct product of the
environment, he is indirectly its product through the degeneration begun
in his ancestors, by some acute disease in some cases, but by
debilitating poverty in the majority of cases, and afterward
hereditarily transmitted and aggravated in accordance with the
inexorable laws discovered by modern science.
* * * * *
M. Garofalo's book, which was announced as an assault of science upon
socialism, has been, even from this point of view, a complete
disappointment, as even the Italian anti-socialists have confessed in
several of the most orthodox Reviews.
It now remains for me to reply briefly to his observations--and they are
few and far between--on the relations which exist between contemporary
socialism and the general trend and tendency of thought in the exact
sciences.
Disregarding the arguments which I had developed on this subject by
pointing out that there is an essential connection between economic and
social transmutation (Marx) and the theories of biological transmutation
(Darwin) and of universal transmutation (Spencer), M. Garofalo has
thought it prudent to take up for consideration only "the struggle for
existence" and the relations between "evolution and revolution."
As to the first, five pages (96-100) are enough to enable him to
declare, without supporting his declaration by any positive argument
which is not merely a different verbal expression of the same idea, that
the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence has not undergone and
can not undergo any transformation except that which will change the
violent struggle into competition (the struggle of skill and
intelligence) and that this law is irreconcilable with socialism; for it
necessarily requires the sacrifice of the conquered, while socialism
"would guarantee to all men their material existence, so they would have
no cause for anxiety."
But my friend, the Baron Garofalo, quietly and completely ignores the
fundamental argument that the socialists oppose to the individualist
interpretation that has hitherto been given of the struggle for life and
which still affects the minds of some socialists so far as to make them
think that the law of the struggle for life is not true and that
Darwinism is irreconcilable with socialism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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