SOURCE: Hartman, Matthew. “Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Pierce.” Utopian Studies: Journal for the Society for Utopian Studies 10, no. 1 (1999): 26-41.

[In the following essay, Hartman traces the evolutionary views of Charles S. Peirce and Edward Bellamy through their various publications and declares that both shared the idea that love is the great agent in evolutionary progress.]

Writing in 1893, the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce characterized the nineteenth century as “the Economical Century,” because of the way capitalist economic theory dominated all branches of thought. The effects of this dominance, in Peirce's view, were disastrous: “What I say, then, is that the great attention paid to economical questions during our century has induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe” (Collected Papers 6.290).¹ Economic theory even influenced Charles Darwin, whose Origin of the Species, according to Peirce, “merely extends politico-economical views of progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life” (6.293). In the essay “Evolutionary Love” (CP [Collected Papers] 6.287-317) from which the above passages are taken, Peirce critiques the greed philosophy and defends sentimentalism, which he defines as “the doctrine that great respect should be paid to the natural judgments of the sensible heart” (6.292). In this essay, Peirce seeks to construct an alternative theory of cosmic evolution, one unmarred by “economical theory.” In Peirce's theory, which he calls agapasm, the positive agent of change is not greed but creative love.

Peirce's elevation of sentiment over greed recalls the utopian thought of Edward Bellamy. Like Peirce, Bellamy critiqued the Darwinist social ethics of industrial capitalism and substituted his own agapistic ethics, which he outlined in his essay “The Religion of Solidarity” (1874). Here he describes the human impulse to embrace the universe as an inclusive whole, an impulse which requires that unselfishness and self-sacrifice become “the essence of morality” (22). Bellamy envisions the realization of solidarity in his utopian novel Looking Backward (1888), in which social equality and cooperation replace the stark inequality and struggle for survival that characterized America's Gilded Age. Under Bellamy's Nationalist system, in which the entire economy is placed under the control of the nation, greed has lost its central, motivating role. Instead, workers are motivated by “patriotism, passion for humanity” (Looking Backward 89). Bellamy and Peirce both reject the primacy of narrow self interest in social relationships, arguing that love and cooperation, not greed and competition, are the engines that drive social evolution.

In late nineteenth-century America, ideas about social evolution were often conflated with theories of biological evolution. For instance, conservatives such as William Graham Sumner and Andrew Carnegie used Darwin's theory of natural selection as an ideological prop for unrestrained capitalism. The conservative social Darwinists argued that competition was natural and beneficial, and that any attempts at social reform were counterproductive since they only aided the “unfit” at the expense of the “fit.” Today, we would accuse the social Darwinists of misusing a scientific theory to answer nonscientific questions of politics and morality. However, at the time, social Darwinists and their liberal critics both made the error of interpreting natural selection as a theory of social progress. Thus, liberal reformers who took natural selection seriously could not simply dismiss social Darwinism as nonsense. As Howard Kaye notes in The Social Meaning of Modern Biology, many of those who opposed this brutal ideology found themselves forced to alter Darwin's central thesis. Kaye argues that “the chaos, brutality, and indifference to human concerns seemingly implied by natural selection had somehow to be denied” (22). Bellamy and Peirce, as critics of social Darwinism, deny this chaos by proposing models of evolution that place love at its center. Their reconstructed theories of evolution lead to utopias of equality and cooperation.

Bellamy and Peirce exemplify the utopian critique of social Darwinism, as they both attempt to imagine positive alternatives to the Darwinian struggle for survival and the capitalist ethics of greed. Bellamy's alternative takes the form of a utopian novel, wherein he imagines a future America in which evolutionary love operates unhindered by material struggle. Such products of the utopian imagination were ridiculed by the social Darwinists, as when William Graham Sumner wrote in regard to Bellamy that “it is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world” (105). Peirce answers this charge indirectly in his own reconstruction of the evolutionary model of change. Peirce's theory of “evolutionary love” downplays competitive struggle by granting cooperative human culture a positive role in evolutionary development. Thus, while Bellamy constructs a better world, Peirce describes the kind of universe in which such utopian construction is not only possible but necessary.

BELLAMY'S LOOKING BACKWARD

In Looking Backward, Bellamy imagines a future world, Boston in the year 2000 A.D., in which poverty and inequality have been eliminated. In short, Bellamy solves the leading problem of his era, the “labor question,” by replacing competitive market capitalism with state socialism—which he terms Nationalism. Bellamy always refers to the “nation” and not to the “state” in Looking Backward, perhaps because the former has an emotional component that the latter lacks. Nationalism plays the important role of motivating and unifying the citizens of Bellamy's utopia. Thus, Bellamy imagines a caring and responsive nation rather than a coercive and powerful state. In the following passage, Doctor Leete describes the formation of a national party for the purpose of reorganizing the industrial system “on a higher ethical basis”:

Then the national party arose to carry it out by political methods. It probably took that name because its aim was to nationalize the functions of production and distribution. Indeed, it could not well have had any other name, for its purpose was to realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur and completeness never before conceived, not as an association of men for certain merely political functions affecting their happiness only remotely and superficially, but as a family, a vital union, a common life, a mighty heaven-touching tree whose leaves are its people, fed from its veins, and feeding it in turn. The most patriotic of all possible parties, it sought to justify patriotism and raise it from an instinct to a rational devotion, by making the native land truly a father-land, a father who kept the people alive and was not merely an idol for which they were expected to die.

(183)

Bellamy here chooses natural organic metaphors—family, tree—to describe the nation, attributing to it a kind of organic unity. He rejects the Enlightenment definition of nation as a political association of free individuals, a government founded on a social contract that promises to ensure liberty and security to its members. Bellamy eschews politics, transforming the founding fathers' “more perfect union” into “a vital union, a common life” (183). Thus, Bellamy exchanges the metaphor of social contract for a metaphor of organic incorporation. It is worth noting that Bellamy chooses a plant rather than an animal metaphor. In contrast to the Darwinian picture of nature “red in tooth and claw,” Bellamy portrays nature as a place of growth and stability. If people are like the leaves of a tree, they have no reason to compete with each other for nature's resources. They all depend alike on the health of a common trunk. The effect of this metaphor is to eliminate conflict, to replace discord with harmony.

The industrial army represents more to Bellamy than the machinery of an ideal social organization. The military structure provides motive. It animates. Any utopian writer who imagines a world of equality must confront the objection that anyone who is guaranteed a living would inevitably grow lazy and refuse to work. With no necessity, no money motive—why labor? In Looking Backward Bellamy answers this objection by replacing self-interest with patriotic devotion. Again, Doctor Leete describes the change:

The coarser motives, which no longer move us, have been replaced by higher motives wholly unknown to the mere wage earners of your age. Now that industry, of whatever sort, is no longer self-service, but service of the nation, patriotism, passion for humanity, impel the worker as in your day they did the soldier. The army of industry is an army, not alone by virtue of its perfect organization, but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion which animates its members.

(89)

Bellamy uses the industrial army as an instrument for reorganizing society around higher ethical principles. For Bellamy, the army fuses the two principles of rational organization (efficiency) and universal brotherhood (equality and fraternity) into one coherent symbol, allowing him to imagine a world based on cooperation and love. Bellamy suppresses the more ominous implications of militarism, as Doctor Leete flatly denies any suggestion that the industrial army tyrannizes the people. He claims that Boston in 2000 A.D. values liberty as dearly as equality and fraternity and states that “our officials are in fact, and not merely in name, the agents and servants of the people” (141).

Although Bellamy's proposed utopia entails nothing less than a complete transformation of society, he shies away from revolutionary rhetoric. Instead, he preaches a gospel of gradual evolutionary change. In December, 1889, Bellamy wrote in the Nationalist, “Evolution, not revolution, orderly and progressive development, not precipitate and hazardous experiment, is our true policy” (“Looking Forward” 4). Instead of advocating direct resistance to capitalist elites, Bellamy finds potential for utopian change in the corporate structure of industrial monopolies. In Looking Backward, Bellamy advocates an expansion rather than an overthrow of corporate power as the road to utopia. Bellamy recognized the trend in nineteenth-century America toward what Alan Trachtenberg has called the “incorporation of America.” Trachtenberg notes that during the 1880s big business interests attempted to do away with competition. The corporate structure, which placed all levels of production and distribution under the control of a single entity, proved to be more effectively organized than older forms of capital, allowing a small number of economic competitors to dominate markets. Aside from controlling competition, corporations were also able to facilitate greater access to capital, which became increasingly necessary as “more and more of economic life came under the rule of the marketplace” (82). Bellamy, however, saw corporations as liberating rather than dominating economic life. His utopia requires corporations to function as only one stage, “a link, a transition phase,” in the incorporation of the nation as a whole (66). The nation, functioning as the only economic entity, would then eliminate the marketplace and conduct business in the interest of all citizens.

In Looking Backward, nationalization arises as part of a naturally unfolding evolutionary process. It occurs through the slow accumulation of changes by which people awaken to the realization that the business of industry and commerce is properly the public's business and belongs under public control. Thus, Bellamy advocates embracing the evolutionary trend toward the formation of great trusts and monopolies: “The movement toward the conduct of business by larger and larger aggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which had been so desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its true significance, as a process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to open a golden future to humanity” (65). Reliance on the idea of progress allows Bellamy to dispel conservative resistance or entrenchment. Doctor Leete says of the change, “There was absolutely no violence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was behind it” (66). In Looking Backward, society collectively converts to Nationalism, exchanging the capitalist paradigm for Bellamy's version of socialism.²

Bellamy has often been described as a technological utopian, one who equates technological advancement with social progress (see, for example, Segal). However, progress within Bellamy's utopia owes less to the prospect of technological advance than it does to biological evolution. In Looking Backward, Bellamy equates social progress with biological evolution, so that the economic advance of society corresponds with a process of “race purification” (191). In the late nineteenth century, theories of progress and evolution were bound up with popularly held beliefs about race and class. For example, Herbert Spencer, who argued that evolution consisted in development from the simple to the complex, offered as proof of this thesis the greater complexity to be found in the physical characteristics of the civilized man when compared to the “savage.” In his essay “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857), Spencer notes that the European type has longer legs than the Papuan. The European also possesses more heterogeneity in the “vertebral column, and more especially in the vertebrae constituting the skull” (Spencer 40). Another example of complexity can be found in the evolution of mankind as a whole, whereby the species diversifies into separate and distinct races: “Every work on Ethnology, by its divisions and subdivisions of races, bears testimony to it” (41). The principle of increasing complexity (what Spencer calls “heterogeneity”) applies to social evolution as well as to biological evolution. Spencer sees an increasing differentiation of society, “that, namely, by which the mass of the community has been segregated into distinct classes and orders of workers” (44).

By racializing the doctrine of progress, Spencer is led to some rather grim conclusions. Spencer describes history as advancement through a series of progressively “higher” stages, from barbarism toward civilization. In The Study of Sociology (1873), he claims that war is instrumental in the early stages of progress, benefiting mankind by killing off “inferior races and inferior individuals” (Spencer 173). In the more advanced industrial societies, this “purifying process” is carried on in the form of industrial war: “a competition of societies during which the best, physically, emotionally, and intellectually, spread most, and leave the least capable to disappear gradually, from failing to leave a sufficiently numerous posterity” (174). Social Darwinists in America derived from this Malthusian strain in Spencer's thought a doctrine that justified the stark inequality and human misery produced by industrial capitalism. Bellamy himself recognized that the intellectual debate over the nature of progress concealed profound class anxiety, what he calls in Looking Backward “the nervous tension of the public mind” (44).

Oddly enough, while Bellamy rejected Social Darwinism and its celebration of the competitive struggle for survival, he admired Spencer, whom he felt had forecast the future perfection of man. Spencer had shown man's “gradual development by the influence of his environment upon his faculties, the co-working of the external with internal forces” (Bowman 81). Bellamy was also greatly influenced by Darwin, and he was a strong advocate of natural selection. However, he was only able to accommodate a revised version of Darwinism to his utopian paradigm, a revision which required him to replace the law of necessity with the law of love. In Darwinian terms, the nineteenth century is characterized by the struggle for existence. However, in Looking Backward Bellamy contends that this struggle is by no means natural, suggesting instead a social arrangement founded on cooperation:

It was the sincere belief of even the best men at that epoch that the only stable elements in human nature, on which a social system could be safely founded, were its worst propensities. They had been taught and believed that greed and self-seeking were all that held mankind together, and that all human associations would fall to pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives or curb their operation. In a word, they believed—the exact reverse of what seems to us self-evident: they believed that is, that the antisocial qualities of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the cohesive force of society.

(200)

Spencerian warfare and Darwinian natural selection become unnatural in Bellamy's world, since the struggle for survival threatens the social stability upon which progress depends.

In Looking Backward, the unfettered operation of evolution depends upon the emancipation of women from economic dependency upon marriage to men. Women in the new Boston participate in the world of work as members of their own industrial army. In this “imperium in imperio” (186), headed by female officers, women work at tasks to which they are physiologically suited. Bellamy does not describe women's work, except to stress that it does not include housework, which he describes as “wasteful, in the extreme” (184). (Edith Leete, it should be noted, is seen doing little else beside shopping and comforting West.) Women work shorter hours than men with more vacation time and time off for bearing children. Despite these allowances, women do earn as much credit as men, since economic support is an entitlement based on citizenship and is unaffected by one's social status. While women's independence has improved their own happiness, “their power of giving happiness to men has been of course increased in proportion” (187). Bellamy was not unaware of the benefits accruing to men from women's liberation. Men in the future Boston are freed from bondage to a marriage system that forces them into labor in order to support a wife and family. They are also freed from competing with women in the workplace, since the female industrial army is completely separate from the male army. Although Bellamy grants women economic independence, he does so in order to preserve their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Doctor Leete implies that authentic womanhood requires motherhood when he tells West that “the higher positions in the feminine army of industry are entrusted only to women who have been both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex” (187).

The feminine role of motherhood is central to the working of evolution in Bellamy's utopia. Since marriage has no economic basis in the year 2000, there are “nothing but matches of pure love” (191). Thus, women can lay down the instruments of artifice, coquetry and affectation, which they previously employed in the competition to win a mate. In contrast to the conventional view of natural selection, Bellamy proposes a view of evolution that is propelled by love. Doctor Leete instructs West:

But the fact you celebrate, that there are nothing but love matches, means even more, perhaps, than you probably at first realize. It means that for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation. The necessities of poverty, the need of having a home, no longer tempt women to accept as the fathers of their children men whom they neither can love nor respect.

(191)

Bellamy here refers to sexual selection, Darwin's secondary mechanism of biological evolution. Whereas natural selection involves the competition of individuals for survival, sexual selection involves the competition of individuals of one sex for the ability to mate with the most desirable members of the opposite sex. According to Bellamy's interpretation, natural selection hinders sexual selection because the economic contract of marriage prevents matches of true love. In utopia, the wastefulness and cruelty of natural selection is eliminated as sexual selection becomes the sole mechanism of biological evolution. In Victorian Boston, biological evolution was thwarted because it was perverted by competition under capitalism. Only in Bellamy's utopian Boston is evolution successful as a means of social progress, perpetually refining and purifying “the race” without fundamentally altering the system at large.

The predominance of sexual selection over natural selection ensures the predominance of sexual morality. A strong moral sentiment comes to the support of evolution, as women assume their positions as “judges of the race” (192).³ Women no longer choose husbands who will be good providers. Instead, they choose husbands based on “personal qualities … beauty, wit, eloquence, kindness, generosity, geniality, courage,” thus ensuring that the “attributes that human nature admires are preserved, those that repel it are left behind” (191). Evolution based upon sexual selection becomes a kind of moral evolution, since Bellamy assumes the inheritability of character traits. Here, Bellamy's conservatism is most apparent. For in one of his more radical moments, the reconstruction of the marriage relation, Bellamy reaffirms traditionally distinct roles for the sexes. Men are active contestants in the game of love whereas women are the guardians of morality, “wardens of the world” (192). Unperverted by the values of capitalism, marriage can assume its natural form in utopia.

For Bellamy, progress is movement toward a state of harmony and solidarity. It is a process of refinement, of gradual and continuous improvement. Progress does not introduce anything really new to the world, since genuine novelty is unsettling. Thus, in Looking Backward, gradual progress, or evolution, can occur only after the Great Change to Nationalism. For Bellamy, progress is only possible within utopia. Since evolution serves primarily as a stabilizing force for Bellamy, his doctrine of “evolution, not revolution” betrays a fear of change and a desire for stability. The idea of progressive evolution thus functions as both anodyne and critique in Looking Backward. On the one hand, the idea of progress allays class-based fears of social unrest with the promise of bloodless development toward a better world, while on the other hand, it provides Bellamy with a discourse for subverting and replacing market values with the ethics of love.

PEIRCE'S “EVOLUTIONARY LOVE”

Bellamy's utopian reconstruction of evolutionary theory bears a remarkable similarity to Charles Peirce's response to social Darwinism in his essay, “Evolutionary Love,” where he attempts to explain evolutionary change in terms of his own metaphysical theory. However, while Looking Backward was widely read and debated in the years after its publication, Peirce's “Evolutionary Love,” was little known outside a small philosophic circle. Even today, when Peirce is generally recognized as one of America's most original and brilliant philosophers, “Evolutionary Love” remains one of his least studied essays. Many scholars have simply considered its blend of cultural criticism and metaphysical speculation inconsistent with Peirce's other, more technically precise writings on logic and semiotics. However, it is because the essay is unique that it warrants attention here. “Evolutionary Love,” read as an expression of utopian desire, connects Peirce to the cultural conversation ignited by Bellamy's ideas. Bellamy's concerns in Looking Backward resonate in “Evolutionary Love” and provoke consideration of Peirce as a utopian thinker.

“Evolutionary Love” was the last of a series of five essays published in The Monist between 1891 and 1893.⁴ These essays constitute Peirce's most sustained attempt to work out a systematic metaphysical theory, one whose major themes are continuity, chance, and love. Each essay explains a different aspect of Peirce's cosmology, and in the final essay, “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce attempts to explain the role of love in the process of cosmic evolution. Peirce's reconstruction of evolutionary theory in this essay, like Bellamy's, begins as a moral critique. His attack on capitalism's greed philosophy sounds like a sermon straight out of Looking Backward:

The nineteenth century is now fast sinking into the grave, and we all begin to review its doings and to think what character it is destined to bear as compared with other centuries in the minds of future historians. It will be called, I guess, the Economical Century; for political economy has more direct relations with all the branches of its activity than has any other science. … What I say, then, is that the great attention paid to economical questions during our century has induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe.

(CP 6.290)

Similar to Bellamy, Peirce here adopts the critical perspective of a future historian. Looking backward, Peirce concludes that the nineteenth century has exaggerated the benefits of greed by making it the motivator of all social progress.

Peirce, like Bellamy, rejects the notion that social progress depends upon anti-social behavior. Bellamy and Peirce share the radical vision that sentiment, or love, is the great agent in evolutionary progress. Like Bellamy, Peirce rejects competitive struggle, what he calls the Gospel of Greed, in favor of cooperative progress, the Gospel of Christ:

Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbours. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every individual's striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbour under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of Greed.

(CP 6.294)

According to Peirce, “growth comes only from love” (CP 6.289), from the desire to fulfill another's impulse. Bellamy and Peirce both reject the notion that competition and individual selfishness motivate human progress, instead making love and cooperation the motives of advancement.

Although Peirce's criticism of competition is compatible with his religious sensibility,⁵ it emerges primarily from his habits as a scientist and logician. Whereas Bellamy turns to the military for his model of community, Peirce turns toward the scientific community. This community operates by specific social values (cooperation, imagination, fallibilism) that Peirce contrasts favorably with the values of big business (greed, competition) and established religion (authority, absolute certainty). Peirce worked for over thirty years as a scientist for the United States Coast Survey, conducting experiments in gravimetrics, and much of his most original philosophic writing concerns his attempt to construct a theory of scientific inquiry. He once wrote, “I am saturated, through and through, with the spirit of the physical sciences” (CP 1.3). Peirce's vision of an ideal community is the scientific community, a community of inquirers sharing knowledge and working cooperatively in pursuit of truth. For Peirce, all knowledge and all language is social and, therefore, public.

In “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce claims that greed is incompatible with inquiry: “Suppose, for example, that I have an idea that interests me. It is my creation. It is my creature … it is a little person. I love it; and I will sink myself in perfecting it. It is not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden” (CP 6.289). Peirce presents us with a unique view of the scientist-philosopher. In contrast to the conventional view of the coldly dispassionate positivist, Peirce gives us a scientist who loves, a person who cherishes his ideas, and in so doing causes them to grow. In his elevation of sentiment over greed, Peirce admits that he has allowed his own feelings to guide his thinking: “Such a confession will probably shock my scientific brethren. Yet the strong feeling is in itself, I think, an argument of some weight in favor of the agapastic theory of evolution—so far as it may be presumed to bespeak the normal judgment of the Sensible Heart” (CP 6.295). Despite his somewhat circular reasoning here, Peirce's candid admission that he feels an emotional attraction to his own theory supports a valid point, that emotion plays a part in inquiry. According to Peirce, all inquiry starts with a feeling of doubt. It makes sense then that belief has its own emotional resonance. Although a feeling is not in itself evidence, Peirce suggests that we may as well admit to these emotions, since they are crucial to the formation and evaluation of our theories.

In “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce advances a theory of evolution that he calls agapasm. Agapasm is the theory that all growth and diversity are the results of evolutionary love. Love is the driving force behind agapasm. It is that which sparks spontaneous creation and that which domesticates novelties by drawing them within the circle of the familiar. As Peirce puts it, “The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony” (CP 6.191). Love as agape is a “cherishing-love” (CP 6.287), a force of sympathetic attraction.

The term agape appears only in “Evolutionary Love,” but Peirce anticipates his theory of agapasm in an earlier essay in the Monist series, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” In this essay, Peirce attacks philosophical determinism, “the common belief that every single fact in the universe is precisely determined by law” (CP 6.36). According to determinism, the state of things at any given time plus a set of universal laws would determine the state of things at every other time in history. If this were true, Peirce muses, a sufficiently powerful mind, if given enough information about the initial state of the universe and armed with the laws of mechanics, “could deduce from these data the precise form of every curlicue of every letter I am now writing” (6.37). Such a view obviously poses a threat to anyone who wants to affirm the existence of chance or human will. However, while Peirce faults determinism on ethical grounds, he also accuses it of logical overreaching. Peirce readily acknowledges that there is “an element of regularity in nature”; however, he argues that it requires a leap of faith to conclude that this regularity is “exact and universal” (CP 6.46). In practice, close scientific observation tends to contradict the exactness of law: “Try to verify any law of nature, and you will find that the more precise your observations, the more certain they will be to show irregular departure from law” (CP 6.46). Scientific law, as pragmatists use the term, is an instrument used for the purpose of predicting and regulating events in the natural world. Laws are made, not found.

In contradiction to the determinists, Peirce asserts that there is “an element of real chance in the universe” (CP 6.47), which he defines in the Aristotelian sense as “irregularity without definite cause” (CP 6.36). The existence of chance means that some events will occur in nature which no law can predict. Chance does not imply chaos for Peirce, since regularity is also real. If it were not, all laws would be useless. The universe, rather, evolves through the interplay of regularity and chance. While regularity influences all events, chance variation is responsible for “the diversification, specificalness, and irregularity of things” (6.53). Peirce thus refutes the mechanical universe described by Spencer, who attributes diversification to a universal law of progress. In contrast, Peirce maintains that evolution proceeds without a predetermined final goal. Since there is real novelty in the universe, the ends of evolution are continually being revised. This affirmation of an unfinished universe allows Peirce to write that the creation of the universe “did not take place during a certain busy week in the year 4004 B.C., but is going on today and never will be done” (CP 1.615).

One of Peirce's main criticisms of determinism is that it allows no room for human consciousness and feeling. By loosening the bonds of necessity, Peirce makes room “to insert mind into our scheme” (CP 6.61), and with mind comes human purpose. Peirce rejects the notion that the human mind is a passive instrument, absorbing impressions from nature and assembling them into ideas. Peirce, rather, conceives of human beings as active inquirers and experimenters with designs upon nature. As a way to consider the importance of human purpose, Peirce introduces the idea of love to evolutionary theory. His theory of agapasm, he says, is distinguished by its “purposive character” (CP 6.315). Peirce considered agape to be a necessary component of any viable alternative to determinism.

In “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce distinguishes agapasm from two other well-known evolutionary theories, defining agapasm as one of three modes of evolutionary change. The other two modes are evolution by chance (tychasm) and evolution by mechanical necessity (anancasm). Evolution by mechanical necessity is a form of determinism, since it attributes all change to “an inward necessary principle” (CP 6.298). Mechanical necessity is, of the three modes, the most teleological. It develops through a series of stages toward a “foreordained perfection” (6.305). Mechanical necessity is represented by the philosophy of Hegel, which nearly eliminates human freedom from its scheme. In Hegel's philosophy, the movement of historical change is like “that of a vast engine, impelled by a vis a tergo, with a blind and mysterious fate of arriving at a lofty goal” (CP 6.305).

Evolution by chance, the polar opposite of evolution by mechanical necessity, is represented by Darwin's theory of natural selection. In Darwin's theory, chance, or “fortuitous variation,” is the only positive agent of change in nature. To assure that evolution advances in an orderly direction, Darwin adds to variation a second mechanism, the struggle for survival, what Peirce calls “the crowding out of the weak” (CP 6.295). The struggle for survival assures that positive variations are adopted while negative variations are not. Thus, according to Peirce's understanding of Darwin's model, chance plus greed equals progress. Peirce, like Bellamy an admirer of Darwin, attributes the warm reception that greeted his theory to the “encouragement it gave to the greed philosophy” (CP 6.297). He also notes that few people are able to remain strict Darwinists, since they have a tendency to sneak some form of necessity into their schemes. Evolution by chance has no foreordained goal and thus does not necessarily lead toward perfection.

Peirce rejects these first two modes of evolution—evolution by mechanical necessity and evolution by absolute chance—as inadequate, since neither accounts for human agency. The third mode, agapasm, mediates between necessity and chance by adding the element of human purpose. Agapasm is best represented by the evolutionary theory of Lamarck, who asserted the inheritability of acquired characteristics. Lamarck, for example, explained the long neck of the giraffe by arguing that giraffes had elongated their necks by straining for leaves above their heads. Succeeding generations of giraffes would each inherit a slightly longer neck until the present form had been attained. Lamarckism, although it has now been discredited by genetic theory, was attractive as an alternative to Darwinism because it gave effort a role to play in evolution. As Peirce states, the chief factors that produce change in Lamarckism are “the straining of endeavor and the overgrowth superinduced by exercise” (CP 6.299). Peirce further states that Lamarckian evolution is “evolution by the force of habit” (CP 6.300). By this he means that the repetition of habitual action gives structure to the positive efforts that produce an evolutionary change.

Peirce does not deny absolutely the first two modes of evolution; rather, he argues that evolution by chance and evolution by mechanical necessity are “degenerate forms of agapasm” (CP 6.303). He claims that although all three modes of evolution are composed of the same general elements (spontaneous energy and a general purpose), “agapasm exhibits them most clearly” (CP 6.303). For instance, since Darwinian evolution depends upon sexual reproduction, attraction and creation, as well as competition, are elements of Darwinism: Evolution by chance, or tychasm, then, is a form of agapasm, even if it is only a degenerate form:

… in the tychastic evolution, progress is solely owing to the distribution of the napkin-hidden talent of the rejected servant among those not rejected, just as ruined gamesters leave their money on the table to make those not yet ruined so much the richer. It makes the felicity of the lambs just the damnation of the goats, transposed to the other side of the equation. In genuine agapasm, on the other hand, advance takes place by virtue of a positive sympathy among the created springing from continuity of mind. This is the idea which tychasticism knows not how to manage.

(CP 6.304)

Thus, because it foregrounds positive sympathy, agapasm is a higher mode of change than evolution by absolute chance. It is higher in the moral sense but also in the sense of being more complete. Evolution by chance, according to Peirce, is an incomplete theory because it does not account for all the relevant phenomena.

The same is true of evolution by mechanical necessity, which Peirce also describes as a degenerate form of agapasm. This mode is similar to agapasm in that both develop through certain phases and both tend toward good results. However, evolution by mechanical necessity is inadequate because it eliminates human freedom. Peirce offers agapasm as something of a synthesis of evolution by chance and by mechanical necessity, combining the spontaneous energy of the former with the guiding purpose of the latter. In agapasm, that energy and purpose comes from the power of love. Love furnishes the motive and the telos of evolution. Furthermore, it supplies the elements missing from the other two evolutionary modes, the elements of sympathy, creativity, and freedom.

Peirce, like Bellamy, critiques social Darwinism by revising the theory of natural selection in order to suppress its suggestions of nature's brutality. Furthermore, there is a utopian element in Peirce's theory of evolutionary love, for despite its openness and revisability, agapasm remains a theory of progress with a tenor of optimism. Evolution remains for Peirce, as it did for many in the nineteenth century (and for many still today), a synonym for progress. The focus of Peirce's argument in “Evolutionary Love” is a critique of the mechanisms thought to drive progress. He does not question the possibility or even the necessity of progress itself. By assuming the fact of progress and by making love its primary agent, Peirce has described a universe that can, in at least one respect, be considered utopian. For is not a universe ruled by love a utopian dream?

UTOPIA, LOVE, AND CHANCE

Bellamy and Peirce both engage in utopian work by reconstructing the myth of progress. These reconstructions are shaped by definitions of human nature that consider social sympathy a basic feature of human experience. In contrast to the ruling ideologies of capitalism and social Darwinism, Bellamy and Peirce both give a positive account of the social nature of human beings. For Bellamy, our social nature, our sympathy and attractions for others, explains social cohesion and furnishes the possibility for his utopian society. Bellamy stresses several times in Looking Backward that human nature has not changed in the twenty-first century; only the conditions have changed, thus allowing the better aspects of human nature to surface. For Peirce, sympathetic attraction explains evolutionary progress because it creates purposeful action. Peirce directly contradicts the common assumption that only egoistic behavior is purposeful. For Peirce, this assumption is not only morally questionable, it is inaccurate. Bellamy and Peirce, then, both claim that progress depends upon love.

In “The Three Faces of Utopianism Reconsidered,” Lyman Tower Sargent distinguishes between three types of utopianism: literary utopias, intentional societies, and utopian social theory. Of the latter, Sargent says that “the roots of utopian social theory can be found in the idea of progress” (21). Thus, according to Sargent's taxonomy, Bellamy is the author of a literary utopia, while Peirce can be considered a utopian social theorist concerned with reconstructing the idea of progress. This difference in form leads to some significant differences in the way that Bellamy and Peirce each account for change in their utopian models. Specifically, each attributes a different role to chance and purpose in their accounts of evolution. Bellamy makes no room for chance in his theory of evolution; for him, evolution means gradual and peaceful development—nonrandom change toward stability. In fact, one could say that his utopian impulse expresses itself as a desire to escape the contingency of experience. Thus, in Looking Backward, West describes Boston in the year 2000 as “a paradise of order, equity, and felicity” (166). Peirce, as we have seen, sees chance as crucial, because it yields novelty and diversity (two qualities lacking from Bellamy's future Boston). For Peirce, the existence of chance is a necessary precondition for the possibility of human purpose. For in a world in which everything is predetermined by necessity, there is no need to make choices.

One possible explanation for this difference between Bellamy and Peirce may be, as I suggest above, the constraints of literary form. In Looking Backward, the evolutionary process that Bellamy describes leads toward a predetermined goal, the utopian future of the year 2000. Since Bellamy provides a utopian telos, there is inevitably an element of necessity in his fictional future history. To leave the future open would be to suggest that other, better alternatives to his utopia might be possible. Such a suggestion would undermine his rhetorical strategy of telling his story from the perspective of a more perfect future. Peirce, as a theorist, is under no obligation to provide the details of a future utopian society. He focuses more on the process of change than on its end result. For Peirce, there is no end to evolution, which is an ongoing process. His theory looks forward.

Although Bellamy does not allow for chance in his utopia, he does grant it a pivotal role in the plot of his novel. West's travel to the future depends upon a fluke: his house burns down while he “hibernates” in a mesmerically induced sleep in his underground sleeping chamber. Since his neighbors presume he has died in the fire, no one wakes West until he is discovered a century later by Doctor Leete. When Doctor Leete explains this incredible series of events, West is struck by “the circumstantiality of this narrative” and finds it hard to believe (54). Chance brings West to utopia. Chance also unites West with Edith Bartlett, Doctor Leete's daughter, who just happens to be the great-granddaughter of West's fiancée, the woman he left behind in the Boston of 1887. Chance, then, is an important element in the fantastic and romantic narrative that structures Looking Backward. Bellamy recognizes the importance of chance when telling a story (since stories, especially sentimental narratives, depend on the unexpected happening), but he suppresses the role of chance in his account of the social evolution that produces the Great Change. Here Bellamy leaves nothing to chance, for social evolution appears to be a natural process governed by necessity. Bellamy thus attempts to naturalize progress.

Peirce likewise naturalizes progress, although he does so by eliminating the mechanism of mechanical necessity. Progress for Peirce responds to the natural impulses of love and chance. Although Peirce does not tell us what form the ideal society will take, he does suggest, in a general way, that we can move toward our ideals. Peirce posits a universe that makes room for a utopian such as Bellamy, a universe wherein human effort can produce novelty. We might consider the writing of utopias itself an act of evolutionary love, “at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony” (CP 6.191). As Bellamy tells us, he began writing Looking Backward in order to describe the kind of society in which he would have liked to live. In Peircian terms, Bellamy began with an idea that interested him and sank himself into perfecting it. Publishing the book and sending it out to readers, Bellamy projected his creation into “independency,” where it catalyzed a national phenomenon of utopian and anti-utopian thought and action. Looking Backward was drawn back into a state of harmony as the novel's readers—feminists, Populists, liberals, and others—assimilated the book's ideas to their own agendas. Although the book did not create the massive Nationalist movement that it describes, it did contribute in its own way to the social evolution of American history.

Perhaps this brief account is itself too utopian. My point is that agapasm provides a way of understanding the utopian impulse by associating it with the love of ideas and a sympathetic attraction toward other people. For Peirce, love supplies its own ends. Utopianism, then, can be understood as a kind of purposeful imagining that proposes ends worth striving for. Social progress requires a continual projection and revision of social ideals. The loving work of utopianism, taken in this Peircian sense, is going on today and never will be done.

Notes

1. I follow the convention of citing references to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce by volume and paragraph number. Further references will be abbreviated CP.

2. John L. Thomas proposes a similar reading. He describes Looking Backward as a “religious fable” (237), whose principal theme is conversion.

3. Patrick Parrinder describes Bellamy's account of evolution here as a “system of natural eugenics” (6). He compares Bellamy's views to those of Grant Allen, who also argued that Victorian morality thwarted the improvement of the species.

4. The other essays in the series are “The Architecture of Theories” (CP 6.7-34), “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (CP 6.35-65), “The Law of Mind” (CP 6.102-163), and “Man's Glassy Essence” (CP 6.238-288).

5. According to Peirce's biographer, Joseph Brent, “Peirce had strong, though unorthodox, religious convictions. Although he was a communicant in the Episcopal church for most of his life, he expressed contempt for the theologies, metaphysics, and practices of established religions” (18).

Works Cited

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. 1888. Ed. Cecilia Tichi. NY: Penguin, 1986.

———. “Looking Forward.” Dec. 1889. The Nationalist. Vol. 2. NY: Greenwood, 1968. 1-4.

———. “The Religion of Solidarity.” Edward Bellamy, Selected Writings on Religion and Society. Ed. Joseph Schiffman. NY: Liberal Arts P, 1955. 3-27.

Bowman, Sylvia E. Edward Bellamy. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Brent, Joseph. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Kaye, Howard L. The Social Meaning of Modern Biology: From Social Darwinism to Sociobiology. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.

Parrinder, Patrick. “Eugenics and Utopia: Sexual Selection from Galton to Morris.” Utopian Studies 8.2 (1997): 1-12.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. 6 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931-35.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37.

Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Spencer, Herbert. On Social Evolution: Selected Writings. Ed. J.D.Y. Peel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972.

Sumner, William Graham. Essays of William Graham Sumner. Ed. Albert G. Keller and Maurice R. Davie. Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale UP, 1934.

Thomas, John L. Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard-Belknap UP, 1983.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. NY: Hill and Wang, 1982.