Pacifism, Empire, and Social Evolution

Abstract

Chapter Three examines Alfred Fried’s “scientific pacifism” and poses evolutionism as the solution to a set of seeming dichotomies therein. Assuming Europe’s civilizational superiority, Fried argued that European unity was a necessary precondition for the continent’s stewardship of global integration. Such chauvinism seems at odds with Fried’s antiracist and progressive reformist worldview. The gradualist framework of evolution resolves this tension: if a hierarchy of civilizational or even racial difference could be acknowledged to exist in the present, an egalitarian world state could comfortably remain a long-term goal. In order to draw out the particular form of social evolutionary thought at work in Fried’s proposals, the chapter considers his evolutionism alongside that of two Austrian contemporaries, the anthropologist Felix von Luschan and the Zionist Alfred Nossig.