“The Philosophy of Social Darwinism...It has not Become Obsolete”: A Conservative Critique of Liberal “Social Darwnism”

Abstract

This article looks into the conceptual and rhetorical repertoire of conservative critique directed against social Darwinism. Having borrowed the ideologically and emotionally charged concept of social Darwinism from the vocabulary of Soviet propaganda, Russian conservatives actively used it in order to conceptualize the political and economic reforms of the 1990s and their consequences. According to the author, the idea of a Malthusian substrate of classical social-darwinism, which was adopted from the Marxist tradtion by conservatives and allowed to bring social Darwinism closer to the ideology of the free market, was placed into new contexts around the turn of the 1990s and 2000s. These contexts were, on the one hand, conditioned by the fall of the USSR and, on the other hand, by the processes of globalization. The article shows how the critique of contemporary social Darwinism becomes the language for discussing global and local inequality, also influencing the traumatic mode of the conservative narrative about the “1990s disaster” on the one hand and the populist conservative rhetoric of the 2000s and the 2010s on the other.