In the social sciences a close connection existed between the practical issues of the age and the achievements of the leading thinkers. The application of the theory of evolution to every aspect of human relations, the impact of industrialization on society— such topics were of intense concern to American economists, sociologists, and historians. An understanding of Darwin increased the already strong interest in studying the development of institutions and their interactions with one another. Controversies over trusts, slum conditions, and other problems drew scholars out of their towers and into practical affairs.
Social scientists were impressed by the progress being made in the physical and biological sciences. They eagerly applied the scientific method to their own specialties, hoping thereby to arrive at objective truths in fields that by nature were essentially subjective.
Among the economists something approaching a revolution took place in the 1880s. The classical school, which maintained that immutable natural laws governed all human behavior and which used the insights of Darwin only to justify unrestrained competition and laissez-faire, was challenged by a group of young economists who argued that as times changed, economic theories and laws must be modified in order to remain relevant. Richard T. Ely, another of the scholars who made Johns Hopkins a font of new ideas in the 1880s, summarized the thinking of this group in 1885. “The state [is] an educational and ethical agency whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress,” Ely proclaimed. Laissez-faire was outmoded and dangerous. Economic problems were basically moral problems; their solution required “the united efforts of Church, state and science.” The proper way to study these problems was by analyzing actual conditions, not by applying abstract laws or principles.
This approach produced the so-called institutionalist school of economics, whose members made detailed, on-the-spot investigations of labor unions, sweatshops, factories, and mines. The study of institutions would lead both to theoretical insights and to practical social reform, they believed. John R. Commons, one of Ely’s students at Johns Hopkins and later professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, was the outstanding member of this school. His ten-volume Documentary History of
American Industrial Society (1910-1911) reveals the institutionalist approach at its best.
A similar revolution struck sociology in the mid-1880s. Prevailing opinion up to that time rejected the idea of government interference with the organization of society. The influence of the English social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer, who objected even to public schools and the postal system, was immense. Spencer and his American disciples, among them Edward L. Youmans, editor of Popular Science Monthly, twisted the ideas of Darwin to mean that society could be changed only by the force of evolution, which moved with cosmic slowness. “You and I can do nothing at all,” Youmans told the reformer Henry George. “It’s all a matter of evolution. Perhaps in four or five thousand years evolution may have carried men beyond this state of things.”
•••-[Read the Document Herbert Spencer, Social Darwinism at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
