Nazi Germany`s justification for its aggression was regularly promoted in Nazi propaganda films depicting scenes as insects fighting in a laboratory environment to demonstrate the principles of “survival of the fittest” as depicted in All Life is Struggle. Hitler often refused to intervene in the promotion of officers and staff members, preferring instead to let them fight among themselves to force the “strongest” person to win – “strength” referred to those social forces that were free of virtue or principle. [49] The important supporters were Alfred Rosenberg, who was later hanged in Nuremberg. These ideas also helped to promote euthanasia in Germany, especially the T4 action, which led to the murder of the mentally ill and disabled in Germany. [50] Socialism describes any political or economic theory that states that the community, not individuals, should own and manage property and natural resources. The term “socialism” has been applied throughout history to very different economic and political systems, including . Social Darwinism lost popularity as a supposedly scientific concept after World War I and was widely discredited at the end of World War II – partly because of its association with Nazism and partly because of a growing scientific consensus that eugenics and scientific racism were baseless. [3] [6] [7] Later references to Social Darwinism were generally pejorative. [7] [8] [9] The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection focuses exclusively on an explanation of the biological diversity of life. It is a scientific theory designed to explain observations about species. Nevertheless, some have used theory to justify a particular view of human, social, political or economic conditions.

All these ideas have a fundamental flaw: they use a purely scientific theory for a completely unscientific purpose. In doing so, they distort Darwin`s original ideas and hijack them. These agreements had no effect on what we mean by the word “property,” that is, on a man`s farm, but they referred exclusively to livestock, which we consider to be property. It seemed necessary to devote space to this subject as the usually astute writer Sir Henry Maine accepted the word “tenure” in his modern interpretation and constructed a theory that the Irish leader “developed into a feudal baron”. I find nothing in the Brehon laws that justifies this theory of Social Darwinism, and I believe that further study will show that the Cáin Saerrath and the Cáin Aigillne refer exclusively to what we now call movable property, and have in no way influenced what we have today land ownership, possession of land, name. As mentioned earlier, Social Darwinism has often been associated with nationalism and imperialism. [80] In the era of the new imperialism, the concepts of evolution justified the exploitation of the “lawless inferior races” by the “superior races.” [80] For the elitists, strong nations consisted of whites who managed to expand their empires, and as such, these strong nations would survive in the struggle for supremacy. [80] With this attitude, Europeans, with the exception of Christian missionaries, rarely adopted the customs and languages of the natives among their empires. [80] Darwin rarely commented on the social implications of his theories. But for those who followed Spencer and Malthus, Darwin`s theory seemed to confirm with science what they already believed to be human society – that adjustment inherited qualities such as diligence and the ability to accumulate wealth, while the unfit were inherently lazy and stupid. Spencer also rejected social welfare, believing that it led to a tyrannical and militant social order that occurred with natural selection and degraded the species. Another prominent social Darwinist was the American economist William Graham Sumner.

He was one of the first opponents of the welfare state. He saw individual competition for property and social status as a tool to eliminate the weak and immoral from the population. Social Darwinism was officially introduced to China by Yan Fu`s translation of Huxley`s Evolution and Ethics, during a vast series of translations of influential Western thought. [67] Yan`s translation had a strong impact on Chinese scholars because he added national elements that are not found in the original. Yan Fu criticized Huxley from the point of view of Spencer`s Social Darwinism in his own notes on translation. [68] He understood Spencer`s sociology as “not only analytical and descriptive, but also prescriptive” and saw how Spencer built himself on Darwin, which Yan summarized as follows: A kind of aristocratic turning point, the use of the struggle for life as the basis of social Darwinism sensu stricto appeared after 1900 with Alexander Tille`s 1895 work Development Ethics. who asked to move from Darwin to Nietzsche. Other interpretations shifted to ideologies that propagated a racist and hierarchical society, creating ground for later radical versions of Social Darwinism. [73] The term “Social Darwinism” first appeared in 1877 in Joseph Fisher`s article on the history of land ownership in Ireland, published in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. [23] Fisher commented on how a cattle borrowing system called “tenure” gave the false impression that the early Irish had already developed or developed land ownership; [24] Although the term has been applied to the claim that Darwin`s theory of evolution by natural selection can be used to understand the social endurance of a nation or country, Social Darwinism generally refers to the ideas that preceded Darwin`s publication of On the Origin of Species. Others whose ideas retain the label include the 18th-century clergyman Thomas Malthus and Darwin`s cousin Francis Galton, who founded eugenics in the late 19th century. Eugenics became a popular social movement in the United States, culminating in the 1920s and 1930s.

Books and films promoted eugenics, while local fairs and exhibitions across the country held competitions for “fitter family” and “best baby.” Halliday, R. J. (1971). Social Darwinism: A Definition. Victorian Studies, 14(4), 389-405. One of the first uses of the term “social Darwinism” was used by Eduard Oscar Schmidt of the University of Strasbourg when he reported to a scientific and medical conference in Munich in 1877. He noted how socialists, while rejecting Darwin`s theory, used it to give strength to their political arguments.