Is the ‘Darwin-Marx correspondence’ authentic?

Feuer, Lewis S.

doi:10.1080/00033797500200531

Cited by 29 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…But as Marx and Bradlaugh personally disliked each other, it seemed implausible that anything Marx wrote to Darwin would have borne upon the Freethought movement. Darwin’s reference to ‘free thought’ therefore suggested that the addressee was not Marx but one of the Freethinkers, and of the three leaders of this group—Bradlaugh, Besant, and Aveling—it was Aveling who had written extensively on Darwinism (Feuer, 1975: 4–5). 29 This detail was what Feuer called his ‘detective “clue”’, the crucial thread leading to the resolution of other related problems.…”

Section: Competing Methods and Epistemologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Feuer’s research had begun a little earlier than Fay’s, in late 1973, and as will be seen had deeper roots in his scholarly career. His article, also submitted in December 1974, was promptly published in March 1975 in the London-based Annals of Science (Feuer, 1975; Colp, 1982: 479).…”

Section: Overview Of the Controversymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The second, on the grounds of Aveling’s reputation for forgery and personal unscrupulousness, was that Aveling might have forged the 1873 letter for his own purposes, in which case there would have been no evidence at all for contact between Marx and Darwin. Both arguments were circumstantial, the crucial evidence being absent, but the first, which Feuer considered ‘fairly convincing’, was on firmer ground (Feuer, 1975: 12); the latter was more conjectural.…”

Section: Overview Of the Controversymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Revisiting the ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’: Multiple discovery and the rhetoric of priority

Barnes

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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Between the 1930s and the mid 1970s, it was commonly believed that in 1880 Karl Marx had proposed to dedicate to Charles Darwin a volume or translation of Capital but that Darwin had refused. The detail was often interpreted by scholars as having larger significance for the question of the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary biology and Marxist political economy. In 1973–4, two scholars working independently—Lewis Feuer, professor of sociology at Toronto, and Margaret Fay, a graduate student at Berkeley—determined simultaneously that the traditional story of the proposed dedication was untrue, being based on a long-standing misinterpretation of the relevant correspondence. Between the two, and among several other scholars who became their respective allies, there developed a contest of authority and priority over the discovery. From 1975 to 1982, the controversy generated a considerable volume of spilled ink in both scholarly and popular publications. Drawing on previously unexamined archival resources, this article revisits the ‘case’ of the so-called ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’ as an instance of the phenomenon of ‘multiple discovery’. A familiar occurrence in the natural sciences, multiple discovery is rarer in the humanities and social sciences. The present case of a priority dispute in the history of ideas followed patterns familiar from such disputes in the natural sciences, while also diverging from them in ways that shed light on the significance of disciplinary norms and research infrastructures.

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Section: Competing Methods and Epistemologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Overview Of the Controversymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Overview Of the Controversymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Revisiting the ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’: Multiple discovery and the rhetoric of priority

Barnes

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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“…(Manser, 1965, p. 21) It was ‘no accident’, he suggested, that the struggle for existence was central to Darwin's theory, or that Darwin had studied the writings of Malthus, or that Marx wanted to dedicate the English edition of Capital to Darwin. (On the falsity of this last point, see Feuer, 1975, 1978.) Manser's main argument, however, was that Darwin's theory was unscientific.…”

Section: The ‘Tautology’ Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Fallacy in Constructivist Epistemology

Small¹

2003

J Philosophy of Education

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Constructivism comes in a number of forms. Some are models of learning which involve few, if any, startling epistemological claims. On the other hand, what has been promoted as ‘radical constructivism’ holds that our concepts cannot be related directly to an external reality, and that claims for the objectivity of knowledge are therefore unjustified. This standpoint is an anti‐realist version of evolutionary epistemology. I argue that it relies on a mistaken interpretation of the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, and that its application of this model to the relation between knowledge and the world is also mistaken.

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“…He withdrew his endorsement from the letterhead of a freethinking American journal, the Index, when its political line became discomforting to him. He refused Edward Aveling's request to dedicate Student's Darwin (1881) to him (Feuer 1975;Colp 1982).…”

Section: Public Appearancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Charles Darwin as a Celebrity

Browne

2003

Sci Context

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ArgumentSeveral recent works in sociology examine the manufacture of public identities through the notion of celebrity. This paper explores the imagery of Charles Darwin as a nineteenthcentury scientific celebrity by comparing the public character deliberately manufactured by Darwin and his friends with images constructed by the public as represented here by caricatures in humorous magazines of the era. It is argued that Darwin's outward persona drew on a subtle tension between public and private. The boundaries between public and private were blurred by the ritual of Darwin "showing" himself in the flesh, either at home to visitors or, more rarely, on public occasions. The reputation for privacy and illness that he built up added materially to this public face. By contrast, caricatures tended to depict him as an ape. These apish representations played a significant role in associating Darwin, rather than any other thinker, with the notion of evolution, and in creating an alternative public persona over which he had no direct control.

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Is the ‘Darwin-Marx correspondence’ authentic?

Cited by 29 publications

References 4 publications

Revisiting the ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’: Multiple discovery and the rhetoric of priority

Revisiting the ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’: Multiple discovery and the rhetoric of priority

A Fallacy in Constructivist Epistemology

Charles Darwin as a Celebrity

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