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Mark Bevir - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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sidney webb utilitarianism positivism and social democracy
The Journal of Modern History, 2002Co-Authors: Mark BevirAbstract:Sidney Webb is often represented as a descendent of the utilitarians. Social democracy and the welfare state thus stand as the continuing development of Enlightenment rationalism. Alternatively, Webb appears as the representative of a new managerial and administrative class. Social democracy and the welfare state here stand as the elitist and bureaucratic expressions of the power of this class. In contrast to these conventional views, this paper locates Webb in the context of a radicalism, peculiar to the 1870s, composed of ethical positivism and Evolutionary Sociology. He became a socialist because of his positivist ethic. He defined his socialism in relation to an Evolutionary philosophy. And he later adopted collectivism as a result of turning to positivist Sociology. Webb’s collectivism, however, provided little assistance in dealing with the dilemmas of the inter-war years. His ethical positivism and Evolutionary Sociology led him to turn to solutions apparently offered by the Soviet Union. This reinterpretation of Webb suggests a new view of social democracy and the welfare state. We should see them as the changing products of particular ideational and political contexts such as those of the 1870s and 1930s.
Johnson, Eric M. - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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The struggle for coexistence : Peter Kropotkin and the social ecology of science in Russia, Europe, and England, 1859-1922
University of British Columbia, 2019Co-Authors: Johnson, Eric M.Abstract:This dissertation critically examines the transnational history of Evolutionary Sociology during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing the efforts of natural philosophers and political theorists, this dissertation explores competing frameworks at the intersection between the natural and human sciences – Social Darwinism at one pole and Socialist Darwinism at the other, the latter best articulated by Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin’s Darwinian theory of mutual aid. These frameworks were conceptualized within different scientific cultures during a contentious period both in the life sciences as well as the sociopolitical environments of Russia, Europe, and England. This cross-pollination of scientific and sociopolitical discourse contributed to competing frameworks of knowledge construction in both the natural and human sciences. I argue that the dominant theoretical framework that emerged in Evolutionary Sociology – what would become known as Social Darwinism – was an outcome in opposition to Socialist Darwinism rather than one that emerged through empirical evidence. The widespread rejection of Kropotkin’s Darwinian theory of mutual aid in England should be understood within this larger discursive context. As such, my project offers a reconceptualization of scientific knowledge construction by emphasizing the sociopolitical networks upon which consensus is achieved in the public sphere. This dissertation is divided into five chapters beginning with the macroscopic lens of anthropology in the context of Empire before progressing forwards in time but inwards in scope to examine the European socialists’ articulation of Darwinian science as a theory of social change, to the conflict between Social Darwinism and Socialist Darwinism, to the Evolutionary mechanisms of cooperation in nature, and finally to the debate over the modes of biological inheritance.Arts, Faculty ofHistory, Department ofGraduat
