Darwinism After Darwin

In the forty-plus years, from the time of the Descent in 1871 to the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, people influenced by or responding to Darwin’s thinking wrote extensively on the nature of war. Often, religious upbringing—as for Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace—infused discussions showing how really the whole debate was as much religious as scientific. Thomas Henry Huxley showed his innate Calvinism and Prince Petr Kropotkin equally showed his Russian roots. American thinkers tended to worry about the eugenical effects of war, and William James proposed a kind of proto Peace Corps to harness the violent tendencies of the young. Across in Germany, Friedrich von Bernhardi was hymning the necessity of war, although in major respects his ideas owed more to Germanic philosophy, especially Hegel, than to anything coming out of England, a country he feared and despised.