JOHN FISKE (1874)

Historian and philosopher who popularized European evolutionary theory in the United States and attempted to apply that theory to an optimistic theory of inevitable historical progress.

Fiske´s idea of the American segment of man´s larger history as the latest development in humanity´s progress provides one of the most optimistic post-Darwinian expressions of an American faith in God, progress and a moral society.

After graduation from Harvard Law School in 1865 Fiske briefly practiced law in Boston before turning to writing. In 1860 he had encountered the works of Herber Spencer, the British thinker who adapted the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin to aspects of philosophy. Deeply impressed by their ideas he attempted to incorporate them into his own writings. 

A visit to Europe (1873-74) provided him the opportunity to meet and talk at length with Darwin, Spencer and Thomas Henry Huxley, a distinguished biologist and writer on the theory of evolution. The result was the publication in 1874 of Fiske´s Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, an exposition of evolutionary doctrine well received both at home and abroad.

Around 1880 his interests turned to U.S. history as interpreted in the light of evolutionary theory and from 1885 to 1990 he lectured and published voluminous works on the U.S. colonial and revolutionary periods.

Although Fiske´s contemporaries viewed his ideas as suspiciously irreligious, his purpose in Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy was to spiritualize an evolutionary interpretation and to posit a transcendental direction and order in historical evolution, thus reconciling theology and science. The same belief in inevitable progress through evolutionary change prevailed in his interpretation of U.S. history.

One of his most important books on colonial history The Critical Period of American History 1783-1789 (1888) proposed that evolutionary progress in history, through the development of Anglo-Saxon political federalism, appears as the movement toward an increasingly complex social structure.