Social Thought
Science also played an important part in social thought as the work of Charles Darwin became popular. Following Darwin’s idea of natural selection, English philosopher Herbert Spencer proposed the idea of social Darwinism. This new concept justified the stratification of the wealthy and poor and coined the term “survival of the fittest”. Joining Spencer was Yale University professor William Graham Sumner whose book What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1884) argued that assistance to the poor actually weakens their ability to survive in society. Sumner argued for a laissez-faire and free-market economy. Few people agreed with the social Darwinists, because they ridiculed religion and denounced philanthropy. Henry George proposed a “single tax” in his book Progress and Poverty. The tax would be leveled on the rich and poor alike, with the excess money collected used to equalize wealth and level out society. Norwegian American economist Thorstein Veblen argued in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) that the “conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure" of the wealthy had become the basis of social status in America. In Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1887), reformer Edward Bellamy envisioned a future America set in the year 2000 in which a socialist paradise has been established. The works of authors such as George and Bellamy became popular, and soon clubs were created across America to discuss their ideas, although these organizations rarely made any real social change.
Read more about this topic: Gilded Age
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or thought:
“Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)