David Ceccarelli
Università de Roma 2
Abstract
In the 1960s, historians introduced the expression “social Lamarckism” to better identify several forms of evolutionary social theories that had emerged between the XIX and the XX centuries. Notably, social Lamarckism became popular in the reformist atmosphere of the French Third Republic as well as in American social sciences. Within the same social and political contexts, however, advocates of social hierarchy also referred to the Lamarckian mechanisms of evolution. The paper aims to show that such different articulations of social Lamarckism depended on the way biologists and social scientists used the notion of “developmental constraint”.
Keywords
Social Lamarckism – Social Darwinism – Developmental Constraint – Le Bon – Reinsch
DOI: 10.13131/2611-9757/q5gy-wb25
