History of the Conservative Movement, Part 2: "Social Evolution and Conservatism"
Here is the introductory interview. It was recorded in 2010.
My lecture deals with a little-known aspect of the history of the conservative movement: social evolution. The idea of social evolution did not come from Darwinism. It came from eighteenth-century Scottish social theory, what I have called the Right wing of the Enlightenment. Adam Smith was the most influential theorist of social evolution, but the founder was Bernard Mandeville, a dentist from the Netherlands who moved to England in the late seventeenth century. F. A. Hayek wrote about this connection in a 1967 essay, "Dr Bernard Mandeville." Mandeville wrote a crucially important poem in 1705, The Grumbling Hive. It became famous because of his two-volume academic defense of the poem, The Fable of the Bees (1714). Hayek wrote:
How much Mandeville's contribution meant we recognize when we look at the further development of those conceptions which Hume was the first and greatest to take up an elaborate. This development includes, of course, the great Scottish moral philosophers of the second half of the century, above all Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, the latter of whom, with his phrase about the 'results of human action but not of human design,' has provided not only the best brief statement of Mandeville's central problem but also the best definition of the task of all social theory. . . . But the tradition which Mandeville started includes also Edmund Burke, and, largely through Burke, all of those historical schools which, chiefly on the Continent, and through men like Herder and Savigny, made the idea of evolution a commonplace in the social sciences of the nineteenth century long before Darwin. And it was in this atmosphere of evolutionary thought in the study of society, where 'Darwinians before Darwin' had long thought in terms of the prevailing of more effective habits and practices, that Charles Darwin at last applied the idea systematically to biological organisms.
Darwin applied the social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment to biological processes. Social theorists who have adopted Darwinian evolution as the basis of their theories seem unaware of the origin of the idea of social evolution.
For the series, week by week, go here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/21954.cfm