Social Darwinism Essay Example
Social Darwinism is stated as a social theory which hold to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection', but this statement can be proven slightly wrong because logically Herbert Spencer, the scientist who is said to have created this theory after reading Darwin's Origin of Species, actually published his book sighting his theories on social darwinism, Progress: Its Law and Cause, two years before Darwin's book was published. The belief of Social Darwinism became popular in the late Victorian era in England, America, France and Germany, the theory states that the strongest and fittest should survive and flourish in society while the weak and unfit should be allowed to die. The upper class society embraced the theory while other "less fortunate" societies didn't. This bought about social progression, if one society didn't want to be the weakest society they would try to progress' and become a stronger, more advanced society. Social Darwinism has been manipulated into different reasons behind certain objectives of leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Andrew Carnegie. For example, Hitler justified the killing of thousands of humans by aiming his version of social Darwinism by weeding out undesirable genes from the population of the World War II era. Joseph Stalin allowed the less fortunate class to work for the country of Russia and barely get any money for themselves while the richer class and the government taxed the lower class so much that they could barely survive, Stalin justified this by saying the lower class was unfit and weak. The American Eugenics movement was relatively popular between the years of 1910-1930, during which 24 states passed sterilization laws and congress passed a law restricting immigration from certain areas deemed unfit. Although there is a good side to the manipulation of social Darwinism, some major capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie combined philanthropy with social Darwinism; he used his vast fortune to set