Teoría de las pasiones y lucha por la existencia: una mirada renovada a la influencia de Malthus en Darwin
Theory of the Passions and the Struggle for Existence: A Renewed Perspective on Malthus’s Influence on Darwin
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2026.i61.06Keywords:
Darwin, Malthus, struggle for existence, metaphor, political economy, biologyAbstract
This article offers a new approach to studying Malthus’s influence on Darwin. Many philosophers and historians have argued that Darwin’s so-called Malthusian insight amounted to the mere application of the principle of population to the natural world. However, this article contends that, in adopting this principle, Darwin also incorporated other elements of Malthus’s thought, specifically, anthropological and psychological components rooted in the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. These components, essential to the coherence of Malthus’s thesis, were reworked by Darwin in biological terms as part of a more profound conceptual operation. In this process, the notion of the “struggle for existence” becomes a complex and polysemic metaphor that articulates key dimensions of his evolutionary theory. The article thus offers an innovative reading of the intellectual transfer between political economy and biology.
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