Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx)   By: Enrico Ferri (1859-1929)

(DARWIN, SPENCER, MARX)

BY ENRICO FERRI

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE

THIRD EDITION

CHICAGO CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 1917

Copyright, 1900

by The International Library Publishing Co.

Table of Contents.

PAGE. Preface 5 Introduction 9

I.

THE THREE ALLEGED CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN DARWINISM AND SOCIALISM

Virchow And Haeckel at the Congress of Munich 13 a ) The equality of individuals 19 b ) The struggle for life and its victims 35 c ) The survival of the fittest 49

SOCIALISM AS A CONSEQUENCE OF DARWINISM.

Socialism and religious beliefs 59 The individual and the species 67 The struggle for life and the class struggle 74

II.

EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM.

The orthodox thesis and the socialist thesis confronted by the theory of evolution 92 The law of apparent retrogression and collective ownership 100 The social evolution and individual liberty 110 Evolution. Revolution. Rebellion. Violence 129

III.

SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM.

Sterility of sociology 156 Marx completes Darwin And Spencer. Conservatives and socialists 159 Appendix I. Reply to Spencer 173 Appendix II. Socialist superstition and individualist myopia 177

Author's Preface.

( For the French Edition. )

This volume which it has been desired to make known to the great public in the French language in entering upon a question so complex and so vast as socialism, has but a single and definite aim.

My intention has been to point out, and in nearly all cases by rapid and concise observations, the general relations existing between contemporary socialism and the whole trend of modern scientific thought.

The opponents of contemporary socialism see in it, or wish to see in it, merely a reproduction of the sentimental socialism of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. They contend that socialism is in conflict with the fundamental facts and inductions of the physical, biological and social sciences, whose marvelous development and fruitful applications are the glory of our dying century.

To oppose socialism, recourse has been had to the individual interpretations and exaggerations of such or such a partisan of Darwinism, or to the opinions of such or such a sociologist opinions and interpretations in obvious conflict with the premises of their theories on universal and inevitable evolution.

It has also been said under the pressure of acute or chronic hunger that "if science was against socialism, so much the worse for science." And those who thus spoke were right if they meant by "science" even with a capital S the whole mass of observations and conclusions ad usum delphini that orthodox science, academic and official often in good faith, but sometimes also through interested motives has always placed at the disposal of the ruling minorities.