Interpretation of the concept «social Darwinism» in Western and Russian historiography of the late XIX - early XXI century

The article discusses various meanings of «social Darwinism» from the late XIX century, when the term began to be used by scientists, to the twentieth - early twenty-first centuries. The author explores the historiography of the question about the influence of Charles Darwin’s work «Origin of species» on the emergence and development of the social Darwinism ideology. The author also discusses the question of Herbert Spenser’s contribution to the formation and development of this concept and the social-Darwinian ideology in general. The paper contains a comparative analysis of the term «social Darwinism» usage in the Russian and English languages. Several periods of social Darwinism phenomenon research are distinguished: pre-revolutionary, Soviet and Russian. Each of them has a number of features that directly affect image and understanding of social Darwinism. The author considers the interpretation of «social Darwinism» concept in the context of large-scale political changes, scientific discoveries, cultural changes in the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The article shows an attempt to interpret the essence of such an ambivalent phenomenon in the history of social thought as social-Darwinist ideology through the research of the evolution of the scholars’ interpretation of «social Darwinism».