Benjamin Kidd (1858-1916) was a British sociologist. He entered the British civil service and did not become generally known until the publication of an essay, Social Evolution, in 1894. This work passed through several editions and was translated into German (1895), Swedish (1895), French (1896), Russian (1897), Italian (1898), Chinese (1899), Czech (1900), Danish (1900), and Arabic (1913).
Kidd's major theme, set out in Social Evolution and con...
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Benjamin Kidd (1858-1916) was a British sociologist. He entered the British civil service and did not become generally known until the publication of an essay, Social Evolution, in 1894. This work passed through several editions and was translated into German (1895), Swedish (1895), French (1896), Russian (1897), Italian (1898), Chinese (1899), Czech (1900), Danish (1900), and Arabic (1913).
Kidd's major theme, set out in Social Evolution and continued in his later works, is that religion makes sense when seen as what he calls a 'supra-rational sanction' for our behaviour, which acts in the interest of survival of the group, and the yet-to-be-born members of the group, and is necessarily in conflict with our basic human instincts which act in favour of the individual in his lifetime, and also with our reason, which we tend to apply short-sightedly. Thus, while he is an evolutionist, Kidd proposed that religion, a feature of so many past and present societies, is probably essential to...
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