The National Efficiency Crisis

By the beginning of the twentieth century Fabian socialists had been advocating collectivist social legislation for well over a decade, on grounds of functional efficiency, national defense and, increasingly, congruence with the lessons of evolutionary science. In this respect their analysis and aims coincided to a considerable extent with those of the eugenicist and biometrician Karl Pearson. Both shared a nationalist interpretation of evolutionary theory: “social Darwinism” as it has come to be termed. The specific form of social Darwinism espoused by the Fabians and by the biometricians would be more accurately termed “nationalist Darwinism,” since there were so many other social Darwinisms.

Sidney Webb and Karl Pearson had both come to the conclusion quite separately that, among humans, national populations were the fundamental unit of evolution, to whom the unavoidable laws of survival of the fittest applied in all their rigor. The collective protection—or even positive enhancement—of the health of the domestic, national population was therefore deemed to be an appropriate task for the state to take upon itself. Evolutionary logic dictated that the goal of national physical efficiency was the prerequisite for national survival against the competition represented by other nations. Such responsibilities required the state to undertake a prudential policy of rational and scientific regulation of the economic system's motor force of capitalism in order to prevent its individualistic, internally competitive forces from outrunning their overall national, social utility.