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The Russian Populists' Response to Darwin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

James Allen Rogers
James Allen Rogers*
Affiliation:
Claremont Men's College
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Extract

Contemporary Soviet historians of biology have attempted to add historical prestige to Trofim Lysenko's controversial theory of evolution by reinterpreting past Russian social thought on evolution. One Soviet historian has not hesitated to go back as far as the eighteenth century to find Russian antecedents of various aspects of Lysenko's theory, although the relevance of this rewriting of history to the scientific merits of Lysenkoism remains at best obscure.

But the attempt does raise several significant questions: What were the major interpretations by pre-Marxist Russian social thinkers of evolution and particularly of Darwinism? What implicit assumptions about the process of evolution and the nature of man do these interpretations contain? What influence did they have on the development of a Russian Marxist interpretation of Darwinism?

It is obviously impossible to answer all these questions in a single article.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , September 1963 , pp. 456 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1963

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References

1 (Moscow, 1952-54).

2 The phrase “pre-Marxist Russian social thinkers” means here those members of the Russian intelligentsia during the 1860's and 1870's who may have read Marx (since he is mentioned in the Russian press as early as 1865) but who did not consider themselves in any way his disciples.

3 (Moscow, 1955), p. 124.

4 . (St. Petersburg, 1897), III, 316.

5 (Moscow, 1934), I, 228-34.

6 , No. 12, 1865, as given in op. cit., I, 499 ff.

7 op. cit., V, 143 ff. Pisarev did not, however, subscribe to any type of Social Darwinism. “The situation is this,” he explained, “slavery weakens the mind and erodes the character also of that white race which owns slaves and which lives in a slaveowning state.“

8 , op. cit., I, 228.

9 Ibid., pp. 428-42.

10 , No. 8, 1865.

11 , No. 7, 1866.

12 (St. Petersburg, 1900), I, 44.

13 Spencer, Herbert, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Westminster Review, XI (1857), 445–85.Google Scholar

14 (2nd ed.; St. Petersburg, 1888), IV, 187.

15 The only important exception at that time may have been Chernyshevsky. He did not, however, publish his objections until 1888. His particular viewpoint is discussed below.

16 The lack of apparent purpose in Darwin's theory of evolution proved a stumbling block to its complete acceptance by a number of Russian social thinkers and scientists. Under the influence of Schelling's Naturalphilosophie and Spencer's idea of progress, they had come to associate evolution with purpose. Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876), who in his work at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences had anticipated certain aspects of Darwin's theory of evolution, was one of the more influential disseminators of a theory of purposive evolution. He found increasing fault with Darwin's theory of natural selection and wrote in 1864 that Darwin's theory, properly speaking, could be called only a hypothesis. (Leningrad, 1924), p. 93.

17 Chernyshevsky, N. G., Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow, 1953), p. 111.Google Scholar

18 op. cit., III, 383-84 and 360.

19 (Moscow, 1953), p. 277. According to this source, Chernyshevsky read the Russian translation by Rachinsky published in Moscow in 1859. Unless the other sources such as Pisarev are incorrect, this Russian edition did not appear until 1864.

20 Ibid., pp. 401, 413, 448, 530, and 560.

21 (St. Petersburg, 1906), X, Part II, 16-48.

22 Ibid., pp. 43-46. Whether Chernyshevsky had read Nozhin's articles on Darwinism is unknown. In any case he differed from Nozhin in two respects: (1) Chernyshevsky did not agree that the idea of the struggle for existence was only one aspect of Darwin's theory of natural selection; and (2) he did not accept the idea of a struggle for existence even among different species.

23 Ibid., p. 39.

24 Ibid., p. 44. Chernyshevsky's praise of Malthus and condemnation of Darwin has raised difficulties for Soviet commentators on Darwinism. B. E. Raikov states on p. 200 of his (Leningrad, 1956) that Chernyshevsky is not criticizing Darwinism as a scientific theory, but only the Malthusian implications of Darwin's theory. Chernyshevsky's article makes it clear that just the opposite is true.

25 “What is natural selection, good or evil?” Chernyshevsky asked near the conclusion of his article against Darwinism. “One does not have to consider it profoundly to answer —it is evil” (p. 45). But Chernyshevsky, like the other radical materialists, was a firm believer in a materialistic evolution as the necessary scientific base of any consistent philosophy of radical materialism. It is for this reason that he signed his article against Darwin, “The Old Transformist,” implying that he still believed in a process of materialistic evolution but not in evolution by the process of natural selection.

26 These ideas were developed in their most elaborate form by Kropotkin, Peter in his Mutual-Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London, 1902).Google Scholar

27 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Gesamtausgabe (Berlin, 1932)Google Scholar, Part III, Vol. II, p. 447.

28 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895, trans. Torr, Dona (New York, 1942), p. 125 Google Scholar (letter of Jan. 16, 1861).

29 Marx obviously was not equating the class struggle in history with the Darwinian struggle for existence in nature. Such an equation was later formulated by the Social Darwinists and completely opposed by Marx. In Capital, Marx made a comparison between the division of labor in society and the struggle for existence in nature which sheds some light on his statement above, but by no means explains it: “The division of labor within the society brings into contact independent commodity-producers, who acknowledge no other authority but that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests; just as in the animal kingdom, the helium omnium contra omnes more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species“; Marx, Karl, Capital, trans. Moore, S. and Aveling, E. (Chicago, 1919), I, 391 Google Scholar. Engels was more explicit in his Dialectics of Nature: “We must show that the Darwinian theory is the practical proof of the Hegelian conception of the inner connection between necessity and accident“; Engels, Friedrich, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow, 1954), p. 402.Google Scholar

30 Marx and Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Part III, Vol. Ill, pp. 77-78 (letter of June 18, 1862).

31 Trémaux, Pierre, Origine et transformation de I'homme et des autres êtres (Paris, 1865)Google Scholar.

32 Marx and Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Part III, Vol. III , pp. 355-56.

33 Ibid., p. 360.

34 Ibid., pp. 355-63. See the letters of August 7 to October 5, 1866, for the entire con- troversy over Trémaux's theory.

35 Marx, Capital, I, 391.

36 (Moscow, 1950), p. 238 (letter of Oct. 1, 1873).

37 Ibid., p. 275. The passage above is a translation by the author, who has been unable to secure a copy of the English original.

38 Pronounced on Mar. 17, 1883, as quoted in Mehring, Franz, Karl Marx (New York, 1935), p. 555.Google Scholar

39 Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 403.

40 Ibid., pp. 46-48 and 404-5.

41 Ibid., p. 49.

42 (St. Petersburg, 1906).

43 Sept., 1875, No. 17.

44 (Moscow, 1947), pp. 170-71.

45 Ibid., p. 171.

46 Ibid., p. 173 (letter of Nov. 22, 1875).

47 (Moscow, 1922-37), I, 70.

48 Ibid., III, 69-70, 78, and 90.

49 (Moscow, 1956), I, 69 ff. Plekhanov developed his ideas on Darwinism also in The Development of the Monist View of History (Moscow, 1956), pp. 158-62, 217, and 271.

50 op. cit., I, 69.

51 Ibid., V, 302.

52 Ibid., II, 112-13.

53 Ibid., II, 114.

54 Ibid., 1, 282.