‘There is one cause in action over the whole field of knowledge which has a powerful tendency to reduce man's dimensions’, wrote William Gladstone to Henry Acland in 1883. ‘I mean that we are all coming to be specialists.’ Scholars of Victorian evolutionary thought and politics are in some senses spoiled. The published and unpublished writings of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and other key figures are a mouse click away. There is scarce a scientific thinker or institution without its monograph, or two. Lazy positivism has been eradicated, and we have all made the linguistic and cultural turns. But the works of synthesis that connect these dots have not been produced with anything like the same energy. A scholar seeking to relate these episodes one to another, or a student looking for an accessible survey, is obliged to turn to works thirty years old, by Robert M. Young, George Stocking, Peter J. Bowler, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Michael Ruse.

A book's vintage has little to do with its quality, of course. It would be foolish to ignore Walter Houghton's Victorian Frame of Mind (1957) because it was published during the Eisenhower administration. The failure of the current generation of scholars to write works of synthesis may not ‘reduce man's dimensions’, to borrow Gladstone's phrase. But there can be little doubt that it impoverishes the history of science, as well as Victorian studies. Piers J. Hale is to be commended, therefore, for the chronological and intellectual reach of his book, which spans all of what we are beginning to refer to as the long nineteenth century, from David Hume, Adam Smith and Robert Malthus through Charles Darwin and T.H. Huxley and on to Karl Pearson, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. It is refreshing and exciting to have all these thinkers on the board at once, as it were. Hale sketches out the shape of the board, briefly picks up and describes each piece and then leads us through a series of intellectual gambits.

The contest is between

The first two chapters introduce Malthus's pessimistic vision of a human society bounded by hard laws of competition for finite resources, itself a counter to William Godwin's vision of the boundless physical and mental resources contained within our environment and within human nature itself.

The rest of the book considers how these traditions did battle over, around and within concepts such as Herbert Spencer's social organism, Darwin's natural selection and Friedrich Weismann's germ plasm. Hale is particularly interested in the High Victorian socialist revival, in the implications of these debates for the project of ‘making socialists’ (in Stephen Yeo's phrase). Where others might have focused on Wallace, Hale considers a broader range of thinkers, some of whom, like Prince Peter Kropotkin, have arguably failed to get the attention they deserve. It is salutary, too, to be reminded of Karl Pearson's early phase as ‘utopian visionary.’

The book's overarching thesis of the ‘two traditions’ is not without its problems. Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer are regularly cited, yet neither fits the model being proposed. Hale recognizes Darwin's debt to Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as his Wealth of Nations, but Hale's analysis does not serve either well. To cite ‘a number of scholars’ in support of the view that Smith's views on ‘the motivation for sociability’ differed between his two books is to polish that venerable historiographical chestnut known as the ‘Adam Smith problem’ (p. 123). It is unclear who these ‘scholars’ are (none are cited), but they have overlooked a raft of literature that has led to a new consensus emphasizing the continuity of Smithian thought, an ethics founded on sympathy, not selfishness. Hale states that Smith saw a distinction between sympathy and affection. The Theory states, ‘What is called affection, is in reality nothing but habitual sympathy’ (VII.ii.1.7).

Smith's ethics and political economy offered a way of transcending the apparent conflict between Malthusian individualism and ‘anti-Malthusian’ collectivism. It is not surprising, therefore, that Spencer read Smith so attentively, or that Malthus was, as Hale correctly notes, ‘largely irrelevant’ for Spencer (p. 336). Spencer is the other key thinker whom it is difficult to locate within Hale's ‘two-traditions’ model. The discussion of Spencer in Hale's conclusion suggests that the latter is aware of the ways in which Spencer espoused ‘survival of the fittest’ without leaving the ‘anti-Malthusian’ tradition of radical Lamarckianism behind.

There are a few minor infelicities. Just as every tourist guide promises us ‘a land of contrasts’, here we get a measure of similar bromides. Spencer grew up in ‘a world of change’, for example (p. 70). While such generalizations might be excusable in an introduction, it is worrying to be informed fifty pages into Chapter 4 that the second half of the nineteenth century was ‘a tumultuous time in English politics’ (p. 202). The first half of the century was pretty tumultuous too, and we need a more nuanced reading of the high-political background than this. And can we still claim in 2015, a quarter-century after Adrian Desmond's Politics of Evolution (1989), that we are ‘radical’ when we consider how evolutionary ideas were employed in non-scientific realms (p. 335)? If so, we are all radicals now. Where Political Descent truly is radical is in its synthesis. Some may critique the overarching lines of development Hale has sketched out. Others will be fully persuaded. But all will be the stronger for having wrestled with all the big beasts of Victorian ideas in the way Hale invites us to. Scholarly writing of this kind is a tradition all of us should want to be part of.