Abstract

In recent years, the question of national styles in science has received increasing attention. The different forms of Darwinism that emerged in the nineteenth century provide an impressive example of the role of non-scientific factors in the development of scientific ideas. Although the reception of Darwinian theory has been acknowledged to differ according to distinct national traditions even in Darwin's time, there have been few systematic efforts to understand the underlying causal factors. Usually these explanations have conceived of the relationship of science to its social and political context as a distortion of science by ideology. In contrast to this picture, I attempt to demonstrate here how a scientific research program was situated in a concrete historical context. The German tradition of Darwinism in the nineteenth century will be described as a coalition of political liberalism, materialism, and morphology. Whereas the liberals used Darwinism to give their anti-religious and progressive program a naturalistic foundation, the morphologists appreciated that Darwinian theory allowed them to dispense with the idealistic origins of their research program, and the materialists were provided with a naturalistic explanation of the origin of organic form