Visions of Evolutionary Theory in the Political Thought of British Socialists, 1880-1901

Abstract

This thesis examines the fissiparity of Socialist groups in the last two decades of nineteenth-century Britain. I reject the predominant view in scholarship that their inability to coalesce was caused by inter-personal conflict and posit instead that the failure was rooted in disparate interpretations of human nature, which emerged through a Darwinian rhetoric. The writings of four Socialist groups; the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, the Socialist League, and the Anarchists connected to Peter Kropotkin; form the basis of my research. Though the knowledge of Darwin’s scientific argument was variable among Socialists, the language of Darwinian evolution was adopted by each group as a means of expressing differences between groups and increasing the intellectual legitimacy of their cause. The digitisation of archives for the weekly or monthly journals produced by each group allows this thesis to examine a wider breadth of primary source material from these periodicals than has been achieved in previous scholarship. The centrality of a Darwinian language of evolution to the conflict between these groups, and the methodologies of reform which they propose, has not been explored adequately before now. This thesis seeks to supply a gap in the foundational understanding of these Socialist groups which will support scholarship on their work in the twentieth century, both focused on Britain and on her imperial interests, in understanding the motivation for their methodology of reform or revolution.