ABSTRACT
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), one of the founders of pragmatism, created a philosophy and cosmology of evolutionary complexity in the 1890s. He used this vision of complexity to fashion a critique of nineteenthcentury political economy and Simon Newcomb’s Principles of Political Economy (1886). That critique is found in Peirce’s 1893 article, “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce argues that a political economy based on utilitarianism and Darwinian competition confines the discipline to lower levels of motivation, action, and struggle more characteristic of animals and plants than human beings. As an alternative vision, Peirce proposes an expansion of conceptions of evolution to include altruistic purpose. Peirce believes that human individuals can recognize the highest purposes and aims of other individuals and can choose to act in support of those high aims and purposes. He called this aspect of evolution “agapastic evolution”. The logic of agapastic evolution is what characterizes the higher social processes of science, art, education, culture, history, and institutions.
