Darwin's understanding of evolution as involving his original concept of natural selection involves discussions of development, progress, human pride, the construct o `primitivism,' and slavery. These discussions have to a remarkable extent been ignored by political theorists. This omission is all the more surprising in that these same discussions also call to mind Rousseau's often misunderstood concept of perfectibility.
J.W. Burrow, "Editor's Introduction" to Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics, 1985), 46, 16. (The "Editor's Introduction" is unchanged from the earlier, 1968, edition.)
2.
Burrow, "Editor's Introduction," 42-43.
3.
Oliver Sacks , "Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers," New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008, 67.
4.
Burrow, "Editor's Introduction," 43.
5.
See Terence Ball, "Marx and Darwin," Political Theory7, no. 4 (November 1979): 472-74
6.
Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838-59 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 2-3.
7.
Ibid., 28; cf. 29-30.
8.
Ibid., 37-38.
9.
Ibid., 83, 61, 62-63, 68. Cf. Maurice Mandelbaum, "The Scientific Background of Evolutionary Theory in Biology," Journal of the History of Ideas 18 (1857): 342-61. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, edition in one volume with an introduction by T.H. Hollingsworth, London, Dent, 1973, Vol 4, ch 14, p. 260-1.
10.
Maurice Mandelbaum , History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 82-83.
11.
Elliott Sober, Philosophy of Biology (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 7-9. Cf. Sober, The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 15; Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution and Influence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 5.
12.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 84; cf. Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory, 85.
13.
James R.Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study in the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 128-30. Cf. Sober, Philosophy, 36.
14.
Morse Peckham, ed., The Origin of Species of Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania, 1959 ), 75.
15.
Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-82, with Original Omissions Restored (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 87; cf. Darwin to Gray, December 11, 1861, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), II, 382.
16.
Darwin to Hyatt, February 13, 1873, in More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin and A. C. Steward (London: John Murray, 1903), I, 338-48.
17.
Elliot Sober, "It Had to Happen," review of Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution, in New York Times Book Review, November, 30, 2003, 18. Cf. Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory, 212-13.
18.
Nora Barlow, ed., Charles Darwin's Diaries of the Voyages of the HMS Beagle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 428 (September 1836); cf. "A Letter Containing Remarks on the Moral State of Tahiti, New Zealand, etc.," in The Collected Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), I, 20-21; Barlow, Charles Darwin's Diaries, (September 1833), 171; (January 1834), 375-79; (February 1836), 388-89; (December 1832), 118-19.
19.
Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 336; cf. Sandra Herbert, "The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin's Theory of Transmutation," Part I (to July 1837) , Journal of the History of Biology10 (1977): 217-56.
20.
Gavin de Beer, ed., "Darwin's Notebooks on the Transmutation of Species," Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Historical Series, 2, 1950-1951, Part II, Second Notebook (February-July 1838), 91.
21.
De Beer , "Darwin's Notebooks," II, 100; cf. I, 69, 71; Moore, Post-Darwinist Controversies, 317.
22.
Cf. Howard E. Gruber and Paul H. Barrett, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (London : Wildwood House, 1974), 65-68.
23.
De Beer , "Darwin's Notebooks," III, 134; cf. II, 106.
24.
Ibid., IV, 163-64.
25.
Ibid., III, 105; cf. I, 69; II, 111.
26.
Darwin to Lyell, August 2, 1861, in Darwin and Steward, More Letters, I, 192; cf. Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, 292; de Beer, "Darwin's Notebooks," II, 111; Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 319-20.
27.
Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 320.
28.
Franco Moretti , The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso , 1987), 7.
29.
Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: John Murray, 1874), 140-42, 158; Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 158-59.
30.
Christopher Frayling and Robert Wokler, "From the Orang-utan to the Vampire: Towards an Anthropology of Rousseau," in Rousseau after Two Hundred Years: Proceedings of the Cambridge Bicentennial Colloquium , ed. R.A. Leigh ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 111.
31.
Robert L. Wokler, "Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau's Anthropology Revisited," Daedalus (Summer 1978): 124. This remarkable essay deserves to be far better known.
32.
Allan Bloom, trans. and introduction, Emile, or on Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 37; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, Pléiade ed., IV, 245.
33.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. and trans. Roger D. Masters (New York: St Martin's Press, 1964), 37; Oeuvres complètes, III, 202 (note ix to the Second Discourse).
34.
Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 609.
35.
Timothy O'Hagan , Rousseau (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 125.
36.
"La liberté consiste moins à faire sa volonté qu'à n'être pas soumis à celle d'autrui; elle consiste encore à ne pas soumettre le volonté d'autrui à la notre. Quiconque est maître ne peut être libre, et regner c'est obéir." Lettres écrites de la montagne, viii. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, III, 841-42.
37.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, ed. and trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin , 1968), 55; Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, III, 356.
38.
Rousseau, Emile, 85; Oeuvres complètes, IV, 311.
39.
Rousseau, Discourses, 103; Oeuvres complètes, III, 132.
40.
Robert L. Wokler, "Rousseau's Perfectibilian Libertarianism," in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 237.
41.
Ibid., 235, n. 2; Wokler, "Perfectible Apes," 127. The latter article, 134, n. 93, puts to rights John Passmore's The Perfectibility of Man (London: Duckworth, 1970) on this point.
42.
See Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man's Soul (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 103-12.
43.
See István Mezáros, Marx's Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 89.
44.
Rousseau, Discourses, 141-42; Oeuvres complètes, III, 164.
45.
Wokler, "Perfectible Apes ," 115.
46.
For fuller documentation around this point, see Wokler, "Perfectible Apes."
47.
Ibid., 115.
48.
See Paul Thomas, Marxism and Scientific Socialism (Milton Park, UK and New York: Routledge, 2008), esp. chap. 2, 35-49.
49.
This is suggested by Terrell Carver, Marx's Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 36-37.
