Competition and Evolution: The Marshallian Conciliation Enterprise

For some evolutionary social scientists of the second half of the nineteenth-century, competition and biological evolution were depicted as harmonious concepts. Competition in this literature tended to be defined in terms of the struggle for survival of the firm in the world of business enterprise. Thus Hearn (1864: 345-6) described competition as the process through which ‘the principle of natural selection is applied to industry’. Hearn continued: As in nature various existences struggle together and as it were compete either with each other or with the circumstances of their position, until none but the strongest and healthiest of them survive and continue their race; so in society a similar process is constantly in operation. If the weaker grasses be killed by the stronger ones, so the feeble or unskillful tradesman falls before his superior competitor. It is not more certain that one species of rats or of cockroaches has frequently expelled another such species, or that in Yorkshire the longhorns displaced the old black cattle, and were themselves exterminated by the short-horns than it is that the hand-loom weavers are disappearing before the power-looms, or that the old stage coachman has given way to the stoker. Competition in like measure prevents the rise or rather the continued existence of unsuitable projects … It is the function of competition to ascertain these facts, and to enforce attention to them. (Hearn 1864: 346).