Revolutions in the head: Darwin, Malthus and Robert M. Young

Abstract

The late 1960s witnessed a key conjunction between political activism and the history of science. Science, whether seen as a touchstone of rationality or of oppression, was fundamental to all sides in the era of the Vietnam War. This essay examines Robert Maxwell Young’s turn to Marxism and radical politics, including his early loss of faith in evangelical Christianity, his support for the German dissident Rudi Dutschke, and his involvement in communal life. The most significant outcome was Young’s widely cited account of the ‘common context’ of nineteenth-century biological and social theorizing, which demonstrated the centrality of Thomas Robert Malthus’s writings on population for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The aim was to provide a basis for political action – the ‘head revolution’ that would accompany radical social change.