Darwin and Marx
After the French Revolution, the second half of the nineteenth century was dominated by science and industrialization. New ideas began to form in the progressively secular culture. "Realism, positivism, Darwinism, Marxism, and liberalism all reacted against romantic, religious, and metaphysical interpretations of nature and society and focused on the empirical world (Perry, pg. 585)." Darwinism and Marxism were the main points discussed during this time.Darwinism, named after Charles Darwin (1809-1882), was one of the most important advances in our scientific view of the world. "Darwin did for biology what Newton had done for physics: he made it an objective science based on general principles (Perry, pg. 592)." He formulated most of his ideas during a five-year expedition to the South Pacific. His theories on evolution were taken from similarities he observed between extinct and living species. His evolutionary
Because Marx believed that capitalism needed to be overthrown so that socialism could reign, he thought that a socialist revolution should take place and portrayed these ideas in Capital. ideas were placed into two of his books, the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man. " Even though Marxism was somewhat similar to liberalism, the main difference was that Liberalists believed that patience was the key to overcoming economic problems, whereas Marxists believed that people needed to struggle and fight for a quick change in the economic system for a conversion to take place. Charles Darwin and Karl Marx's ideas were similar only in the fact that they were both very controversial and that these radical ideas gave rise to other ideas that sprang up later in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Darwin's ideas were about evolution, which eventually merged with ideas about economic survival, whereas Marx's ideas were directly about the economy. Another one of his key ideas was adopted from the Malthusian idea that reproduction by a species is quicker than the food that particular species consumes. In February 1848, he published his ideas of Marxism in the Communist Manifesto with the help of fellow believer Friedrich Engels. They worked long hours for low wages, suffered from periodic unemployment, and lived in squalid, overcrowded dwellings (Perry, pg. His ultimate form of government proved to be inadequate as well, as evidenced by the collapse of the communist Soviet Union. The Western capitalist society prospered with the industrial revolution and eventually fixed its problems with labor laws and labor unions. These and many other theories shaped the world and propelled mankind into the industrial revolution and into the twentieth century. Finally, all of his ideas formed one main concept, explained in four simple words: survival of the fittest. " Darwinism changed people's way of looking at religion as a form of reason and transformed it into the faith that it is today. Also, they both spoke of humans having to struggle for survival.
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