SOURCE: Hartman, Matthew. “Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Pierce.” Utopian Studies: Journal for the Society for Utopian Studies 10, no. 1 (1999): 26-41.

In the following essay, Hartman traces the evolutionary views of Charles S. Peirce and Edward Bellamy through their various publications and declares that both shared the idea that love is the great agent in evolutionary progress.

Writing in 1893, the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce characterized the nineteenth century as “the Economical Century,” because of the way capitalist economic theory dominated all branches of thought. The effects of this dominance, in Peirce's view, were disastrous: “What I say, then, is that the great attention paid to economical questions during our century has induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the...