From Anarchism to Free-Thought: an approach to the process of appropriation of Darwinism in the late nineteenth Catalonia

Abstract

In recent decades, contemporary historiography has made it clear that the representation of late Nineteenth Century Darwinism as a sort of application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to different domains was both naïve and simplistic. Rather than being a fixed entity, Darwinism is better understood as a historical artefact whose meaning has been continuously renegotiated. Ironically, those works devoted to the process of circulation/appropriation of Darwinism within working-class organisations and the political left usually neglected the fact that trade unions and political parties were far from being fixed, self-contained entities. This was especially true in Catalonia, where Republicans, anarchists and socialists shared a common ideological substratum inherited from liberal rationalism, joining forces in an impressive array of activities in different working-class institutions. This article is a formal proposal to go one step further. It is claimed that a proper understanding of how Darwinism was appropriated by the Catalan working-class should take into account religious dissent and the widespread influence of Freemasonry and Free-Thought.