Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Kidd, Benjamin
KIDD, BENJAMIN (1858–1916), sociologist, born 9 September 1858, was the eldest son of Benjamin Kidd, sometime of the Royal Irish Constabulary. He had few early advantages of education or social position. In 1877, at the age of nineteen, he obtained a post in the civil service, and entered the Inland Revenue department at Somerset House. Here he worked in obscurity for seventeen years till the publication of his Social Evolution in 1894 made him famous; but during all that time he had been striving incessantly to extend his knowledge and improve his material position. The success of Social Evolution was so great that Kidd was able to resign his official post and devote himself entirely to writing. Between 1894 and 1902, when his Principles of Western Civilization appeared, he travelled extensively in the United States and Canada (1898), and in South Africa (1902), and also became acquainted with many important people in London in the circles of politics, science, and literature. While in America he wrote for The Times the series of articles afterwards published in 1898 under the title The Control of the Tropics. The last twelve years of his life he spent in ever increasing seclusion. In 1903 he left the neighbourhood of London and lived, first at Tonbridge, and later at Ditchling, Sussex. In 1908 he delivered the annual Herbert Spencer lecture before the university of Oxford, entitled Individualism and After; in 1911 he wrote the article Sociology for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1910 he began to work upon his last book, The Science of Power, which his son, Franklin Kidd, published in 1918, two years after his father's death. It was finished in its earlier form in 1914; but the outbreak of the European War necessitated a complete revision, which was not finished till the very close of the author's life. After a short period of ill-health Kidd died of heart disease at South Croydon 2 October 1916.
The remarkable success of Social Evolution, which was translated all over the world, needs some explanation at the present day. Its main idea is that religion is the central feature of human history. Moral progress consists in compelling individual selfishness to subordinate itself to the common good. Reason gives no help in this struggle; all our help comes from religion. It is religion which has been the chief agency in promoting philanthropy and the political enfranchisement of the masses. Reason is always selfish and short-sighted. Superior intelligence is not really a quality conducing either to virtue in the individual or to survival in the race. The book also contains a violent attack on socialism, and achieved a large measure of success by commending itself to some powerful but reactionary sections of public opinion. Kidd certainly was not wanting in the gifts of the popular philosopher: a sense of the great issues involved in social and political history, a power of emphasizing and reiterating his points, and a boundless self-confidence and conviction of the importance of his message. Some of his views are interesting and a few of them are true, especially his insistence on the importance of the emotional element in man, which was less of a commonplace thirty years ago than it is to-day. But he had no power of forming his ideas into a coherent system. His literary style was bad, and became worse as he went on writing; it is full of pretentious rhetoric, more suitable to sensational journalism than to the exposition of philosophic ideas. No wonder that academic circles always refused to take his books seriously.
The Principles of Western Civilization, which was announced as the ‘first volume of a system of evolutionary philosophy’, is very long, verbose, and obscure, and was much less successful than Social Evolution. It does not add much to the content of the earlier book. There is the same glorification of religion and attack upon reason. Kidd surveys an immense field of history to support his arguments, but is nowhere convincing. The Science of Power has more novelty and repeated his earlier success. Power, he says, consists in ‘the enthusiasm of the ideal’. The great agent in creating and diffusing this enthusiasm is woman. Woman is naturally anti-pagan, i.e. unselfish, and devoted to the interests of the race, which is in accordance with the spirit of Christianity. Thus does Kidd appeal simultaneously to devout churchmen and to the supporters of feminism.
Kidd was an enthusiastic naturalist, and his son, Franklin, published in 1921 a volume of his father's papers on natural history, entitled A Philosopher with Nature.
Kidd married in 1887 Maud Emma Isabel, daughter of John Perry, of Weston-super-Mare, and had three sons.
[The Times, 3 October 1916; Who's Who, 1916; private information.]