Alfred Machin

Who is Alfred Machin?

Alfred George Fysh Machin was an early twentieth-century British writer on the evolution of societies. Writing at the time when Darwin's theory of evolution was being reappraised in the light of the discovery of Gregor Mendel's work and advances in our knowledge of genetics, he tries to make sense of society in evolutionary terms.

In The Ascent of Man, he compares the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer in particular, with reference to Benjamin Kidd. The book is notable for his theory that the ills of society, and in particular mental illness, are caused by the increasing demands of society on the human organism which is adapted for life in small, unpoliced, communities of equals, rather than the constraining power structures of modern societies which leave man anything but free. This line of thought would later be expressed by Boris Sigis and Wilfred Trotter, and by Sigmund Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents