Enrico Ferri’s Scientific Socialism: A Marxist Interpretation of Herbert Spencer’s Organic Analogy

Abstract

Spencer's evolutionary philosophy is usually identified with right-wing doctrines such as individualism, laissez-faire liberalism and even conservatism. Since he himself defended similar positions, it is perhaps not surprising that the study of the political interpretations of his ideas has drawn relatively little attention. In this article I propose to examine a rather atypical reading of Spencer's organic analogy, though definitely not a marginal one: Enrico Ferri's Marxist doctrine of Scientific Socialism. Ferri is not a figure unknown to scholars interested in the political aspects of the evolutionary debate. Nonetheless, the relation between his theory and Spencer's biosociology -notably the complex dialectic of themes such as ''the struggle for existence'' versus ''class struggle,'' or ''evolution'' versus ''revolution'' -has not yet received fulllength analysis. In my study I investigate the diffusion of Spencer's ideas in Italy and their impact on the new ''positivist'' sciences of psychology and sociology inasmuch as these questions are essential to understanding Ferri's position. Throughout, I stress the importance of the intellectual and political context in the process of appropriation of ideas that led to this unexpected shift in meaning.

Knowing the same things: mass examinations, credentials, and infrastructures of shared knowledge

“…In another case, the work of the evolutionist Herbert Spencer, usually depicted as the first ‘social Darwinist’, who championed libertarianism and free markets, could be taken as offering support for anarchism, socialism, and even Marxism. What interested these historians was not what the author intended, but how different audiences interpreted what was written (Beck 2005; Lightman 2015; Secord 2000; Winter 1997, 32). The same principle applies to elite scientists too.…”