ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, when I was a graduate student, I, like others of my intellectual formation, spent a good deal of my time in reading groups devoted to Marx and Freud. The context for these groups was what was often referred to as the crisis of the human sciences, for which Marx and Freud were authoritative forebears. Today, the location of some of the crises has moved into the realm of nonhuman nature, and into the natural sciences. If students asked me today, in the mid-1990s, all things being equal, how they might profit from a similar pursuit, I think I would suggest that they form a Darwin reading group. For, in many ways, it is the legacy of ideas about evolutionary science that is increasingly occupying the forefront of our social and political environment. If the authority of nature and biology has been kept at bay for much of this century, it has made a remarkable return in recent years, and is once again the ground of appeals to social policy and cultural righteousness. The contest over Darwinism, in one form or another, may turn out to be one of the more crucial debates of the next decade, and it is a debate that cultural critics and social theorists should be part of. In this essay, I will look at just a few of the symptoms of this revival.
