History of the United States II / Unit 4 USH2 0479 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Two Ideas of Society
The idea
Social Darwinism and pragmatism both borrowed from science, and both are sometimes filed under the same heading of Gilded Age thought, but they pointed in opposite directions. Social Darwinism held that the social order was what the struggle for survival had produced, so interference with it was useless and harmful. Pragmatism held that ideas are tools to be tested and changed, so society could be studied, experimented on and improved.
In practice
One thinker telling government to keep its hands off the economy, and another telling it to act on poverty.
Where people slip
The confusion to avoid is treating any late nineteenth-century use of Darwin as one idea. Ask what each thinker concluded government should do. Sumner's answer justified the fortunes of unit three; Dewey's fed the Progressive reforms of unit six. The same scientific prestige served both.
Your place on the trail
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