'An animal still': Moral and political philosophy and evolutionary thought in Victorian Britain

The study of the history of political thought in the Victorian period has traditionally given little attention to the relationship between evolutionary thought on the one hand, and moral and political theory on the other. The dissertation argues that this is a significant oversight in the history of political thought, and one which gives a distorted view of the nature of moral and political theory during this period. The primary objective of the dissertation, therefore, is to inquire into the nature of this relationship, with a particular concern to trace the transformations and continuities within moral and political philosophy, while exhibiting at the same time the extent to which moral and political philosophy of the period were informed by evolutionary theory. It is concerned, in other words, with the issue of how theories of evolution impacted on and changed political and ethical theories during the Victorian era, and how traditional ideas concerning the 'good', the 'right', and the proper organization of society were apprehended when viewed through the lens of evolutionary theory. It seeks to demonstrate the continuity between arguments propounded during this time and much earlier modes of doing political philosophy, such as those of Plato and Aristotle (concerned as they were with deriving ethical and political principles from the 'facts' of human existence and human nature) and the Stoics (with their belief in natural law and the need to live in harmony with it), and will seek explanations for departures from other approaches, such as the 'social contract' tradition. The first half of the dissertation is concerned with the ways in which evolutionary theory was used to comprehend the moral sense, and was similarly used to derive moral prescriptions. The latter half focuses on political theory, firstly in terms of the nature of the body politic, and then with regard to the issue of how best to order the political world given the facts of evolution. In addition to drawing together the key ideas of the dissertation, the conclusion offers some limited remarks on evolutionary theory and its relationship to contemporary moral and political theory.