Subject:  Book announcement: Socialist Darwinism
From:  Richard Weikart <[log in to unmask]>

> Richard Weikart, _Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein_.  San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999.  ISBN 1573092908.
>
> This work explores the reception of Darwinism by German socialist leaders--Marx, Engels, August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Ludwig Buechner, and F. A. Lange.  The German socialists were enthusiastic about the anti-religious materialist implications of Darwinism, but were troubled by the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection through the struggle for existence, especially when this was applied to humans and human society.  They often opted for non-Darwinian forms of evolution, such as neo-Lamarckism or environmental explanations.  One chapter explores how Ernst Haeckel and other leading Darwinists in Germany tried to use Darwinism as a weapon against socialism.  This work is a revised dissertation that won the Forum for the History of Human Science's 1996 bienniel prize for the best recent dissertation on the history of human science.
>
> --
> Richard Weikart
> Department of History
> California State University, Stanislaus
> Turlock, CA  95382
>
> phone: (209) 667-3522 or 667-3238
> e-mail: [log in to unmask]
> fax: (209) 667-3132
> WWW homepage: www.csustan.edu/History/Weikart/index.htm