Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory and the notable battle waged among thinkers over the implications of evolutionary theory for social thought and political action. Theorists such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner adopted the idea of the struggle for existence as justification for the evils as well as the benefits of laissez-faire modern industrial society. Others such as William James and John Dewey argued that human planning was needed to direct social development and improve upon the natural order. Hofstadter's classic study of the ramifications of Darwinism is a major analysis of the social philosophies that animated intellectual movements of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

Social Darwinism in American Thought examines the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory and the notable battle waged among thinkers over the implications of evolutionary theory for social thought and political action. Theorists such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner adopted the idea of the struggle for existence as justification for the evils—as well as the benefits—of laissez-faire modern industrial society. Others, such as William James and John Dewey, argued that human planning was needed to direct social development and improve on the natural order. Hofstadter's classic study of the ramifications of Darwinism is a major analysis of the social philosophies that animated intellectual movements of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

The term social Darwinism owes its currency and its association with free markets to an unresolved tension in Richard Hofstadter's (1944) influential Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (SDAT). Hofstadter's New Deal sensibility condemned both free markets and the use of biological ideas in social science; he championed economic reform and a social science purged of biology. But the Progressive Era reformers Hofstadter celebrated in SDAT - men like Lester F. Ward, Edward A. Ross, Thorstein Veblen, Charles Horton Cooley, and John R. Commons - were enthusiastic biologizers who often justified economic reform on biological grounds. Because Hofstadter's reform-good-biology-bad schema does not map upon Progressive Era reform, there are two different Hofstadters in SDAT. The first Hofstadter disparaged as social Darwinism biological justification of free markets, for this was, in his view, doubly wrong. The second Hofstadter acknowledged the biological underside of what he called Darwinian collectivism: racism, eugenics and imperialism. This essay documents and explains Hofstadter's ambivalence in SDAT, including its connection with the Left's longstanding mistrust of Darwinism as apology for Malthusian political economy.

An analysis of the ideological influence of Social Darwinists in Europe and America.

American legal thought has progressed remarkably quickly from premodernism to modernism and into postmodernism in little over 200 years. This text tells the story of this mercurial journey of jurisprudence by showing the development of legal thought through these three intellectual periods.

Traces the history of American immigration from 1607 to the 1920s and looks at how groups of immigrants have adapted to the United States.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and preeminent historian comes a landmark in American political thought that examines the passion for progress and reform during 1890 to 1940. The Age of Reform searches out the moral and emotional motives of the reformers the myths and dreams in which they believed, and the realities with which they had to compromise.

Scientific management: Technology spawned it, Frederick Winslow Taylor championed it, Thorstein Veblen dissected it, Henry Ford implemented it. By the turn of the century, practical visionaries prided themselves on having arrived at "the one best way" both to increase industrial productivity and to regulate the vagaries of human behavior. Nothing escaped the efficiency craze, and in this vivid, wide-ranging book, Martha Banta explores its effect on the culture at large. To the Taylorists, everthing needed tidying up: government, business, warfare, households, and, most of all, the workplace, with its unruly influx of strangers into the native scenes. Taylored Lives gives us a striking sense of what it was like to live, work, love, and die when time, motion, and emotions were checked off on worksheets and management charts. Canvasing the culture, Banta shows how the cause of efficiency was taken up in narratives, of every sort - in mail-order catalogs, popular romances, newspaper stories, and personal testimonials "from below", as well as in the canonical works of writers from Henry Adams and William James, to Sinclair Lewis, Nathanael West, and William Faulkner. The strategies of impassioned theorists and hands-on practitioners affected the kinds-of narratives produced in the controversy over the pros and cons of the management culture; they bear an eerie resemblance to the means by which we today, storytellers all, keep trying to make sense of our own chaotic times. This interdisciplinary work charts the development of a managerial culture from its start in the steel mills of Pennsylvania through its spread across the American experience in an interlocking series of social systems andeveryday practices. Banta scrutinizes narrative strategies employed by "inscribers" as diverse as Josephine Goldmark, Theodore Roosevelt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anzia Yezierska, Richard Harding Davis, Booker T. Washington, and Theodore Dreiser; by Taylor himself, as well as Veblen and Ford; by women who toiled on the factory floor; by writers of dream-copy for ready-made houses; and by Buster Keaton in his silent treatment of the dysfuntional honeymoon home. With its historical scope and its provocative readings of assorted narratives, this richly illustrated book offers a complex and disturbing picture of a period, as well as invaluable insights into the way theory-making continually makes and breaks cultures. A remarkable work, Taylored Lives confirms Martha Banta's place as one of our leading cultural and literary critics.