Benjamin Kidd

Benjamin Kidd (1858 to 1916) was a British sociologist who rose from a clerkship in the civil service to international fame through self-education and his book Social Evolution (1894). Born in County Clare, Ireland, he worked from 1878 as a clerk at the Board of Inland Revenue at Somerset House in London while preparing, by reading and evening classes, to become a social thinker in the line of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Social Evolution argued that the evolution of society and of modern civilization is caused not by reason or science but by the force of religious beliefs, above all the altruism that the Christian religion generated in Western civilization, and it drew analogies between the evolution of human society and of the biological organism. The book was translated into many languages and was both fiercely attacked and fiercely supported. Kidd also wrote Principles of Western Civilisation (1902) and The Science of Power (1918). The atlas holds him as an early sociological theorist whose work later became mainly of historical interest.