qtd. in

I subscribe to a number of different academic subrebbits, and this semester, I feel like I've seen a lot of questions on a number of the "Ask" ones (e.g., "AskAcademia," "AskLiteraryStudies," "AskProfessors") about whether it's okay for an academic writer to cite someone's citation of someone else, rather than dig back into that original source themself.

There are two ways to think about this question. The first is that can you do this? And the answer to this is pretty simple: yes. I don't know how it goes for other citation formats, but in MLA you do this by putting "qtd. in" in your parenthetical citation and then indicating where you found your quotation; the best practice is that the signal phrase should indicate who actually said it. Here's an example from own eternally in progress book:

In an 1872 letter to an unknown correspondent, Charles Kinglsey vented his frustration at the way many men of science excluded men of religion: “There are many men – I among them – who love physical science as dearly as Spencer and Tyndall can; who are ready to follow Darwin… without the least fear. But when it is said to us. No. You shall not be a scientific man and a Xtian… then, I think, an honest man has a right to lose his temper deliberately, and use a few hard words” (qtd. in Conlin 123).

The signal phrase makes it clear that Kingsley is who said this, but the parenthetical makes it clear that to find this quotation, you will need to go to Conlin. Then, if you go to the Works Cited (which I've included at the bottom of this post), you can see where I actually got the quotation from.

So this achieves the two goals of every citation: giving credit, and providing documentation.

But as a wise man once said, "Just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing" (Meyer and Martin qtd. in 137th Gebirg). There a couple problems that "qtd. in" is prone to, and a couple circumstances in which it is definitely warranted.

First, you are trusting that the source you read gets it right.

Charles Kingsley and his wife

This isn't always the case! Even among academics, sources can be misquoted, or even if quoted correctly, they can get the context wrong. For example, in his The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), Francis Darwin (Charles's son) quotes a letter from Charles Kingsley to Charles Darwin saying, "I have to thank you for the unexpected honour of your book [the Origin]. That the Naturalist whom, of all naturalists living, I most wish to know and to learn from, should have sent a scientist like me his book, encourages me at least to observe more carefully, and perhaps more slowly" (81). This is quoted all over the place. When I read this, I was surprised—would Kingsley really call himself a scientist, especially back in 1859 before the word really took off?

So I tracked down the letter in the Darwin Correspondence Project, where we find that Kinglsey actually says, "a sciolist like me" (emphasis mine). A sciolist is, as the OED tells us, a "person whose knowledge is only superficial, esp. one who makes much of it; a pretender to learning"; this is a far more likely thing for Kingsley to be calling himself. But searching "'charles kingsley' 'a scientist like me'" gets 1,490 hits on Google, whereas "'charles kingsley' 'a sciolist like me'" gets seven! That 1887 Francis Darwin misquotation has been endlessly reproduced and requoted by people who have not checked the original. (Both formulations get exactly three hits in Google Scholar, however, so professional academic have been more careful.)

Second, you may not be giving adequate intellectual credit (or not making an original contribution).

The most obvious form of plagiarism is, as everyone knows, taking someone else's language without credit. But it's also plagiarism (as, in my experience, many students do not know) to take someone else's ideas without proper credit. This actually recently happened to me; I was asked to peer review an article about a novel (let's call it "novel A") that I had published about myself. The paper I reviewed took another text (let's call it "essay B") and applied it to novel A—the exact same second text that I had been the first to apply to novel A. It cited me, but only in the sense that the citations didn't actually quote essay B themselves, they quoted my quotations (e.g., qtd. in Mollmann).

Now is this plagiarism in the sense of borrowing language without attribution? No. But I do think it was pretty fishy. One, it was my idea to bring these two texts together, and nothing in the article I peer reviewed made that clear, I was just cited as the source of quotations for essay B. There was a failure to adequately give credit for a comparison that only I had thought of, even if none of my language had been stolen. Furthermore, I did the work of picking out the relevant passages from both novel A and essay B, but received no credit for it. (The writer clearly had not read essay B themselves, because they quoted nothing from it that I hadn't.)

Second, even if adequate credit had been given... what's the point? If they don't go back to that original source themselves, they are entirely dependent on my interpretation, and thus cannot be making much of an original intellectual contribution—which is the whole point of academic writing. Even if I was credited, someone else had already had the idea of pairing novel A with essay B. Why do I want to read someone else making the exact same combination of texts, using the exact same selection of passages?

For me, this is the real issue with not going back to the original source. If one writer pulls a line that's important to them out of a source, I don't need a second writer to re-pull that same line. I want to know what the second writer thinks is important to their point.

So when is it a good idea to use "qtd. in"?

I searched my book manuscript for uses of "qtd. in" in order to write this post, and discovered that I use it thirteen times in 424 pages. My uses fall into two main categories:

First, when the original source isn't readily available. This is, I believe, the case with the Kingsley letter I quoted via Conlin above. (It has been a long time, so I'm not 100% sure, but I do feel sure I would have quoted the original if I could have.) Some sources just can't be easily accessed: they are letters that have never been reprinted or periodicals that have never been digitized and are only available in some archive in another country. This makes you entirely dependent on someone else... but what else can you do? In a quick skim of my "qtd. in"s, I would guess this accounts for more than half of them.

Second, when you are working with a secondary source, but you also want to provide some detail by quoting its quotation of a primary source. There must be a more elegant way of putting that, but let me provide some examples. For one, here's a passage where I'm discussing the work of my academic grandfather, George Levine:

Levine examines how self-abnegation figures into epistemology beginning in the 1830s, both within literature and within the work of actual scientists, drawing on the writing of scientists such as Tyndall who claimed “a self-renunciation that has something lofty in it… is often enacted in the private experience of the true votary of science” (qtd. in Levine 4). Levine does not examine any specific discipline, but examines both scientists and scientist-like figures during the Victorian period to see how self-abnegation functions as a narrative: how does science create a narrative of self-abnegation, and how do literary narratives incorporate self-abnegation?

Social Darwinism: "There's always a bigger fish" (Lucas qtd. in benjay2345).

Yes, I'm quoting Tyndall, but here I'm quoting Tyndall in order to elucidate something about the Levine passage where he quotes Tyndall. Thus, I think I'm doing a better job of giving Levine credit if I make it clear that this is his quotation of Tyndall that supports his point. Similarly, when discussing social Darwinism in the novel Zalma (1895), I draw on the ideas of Mike Hawkins:

But this is not purposeless violence; an important keystone of Darwinism was “that social conflict (at least in certain guises) could be presented… as the motor of progress” (Hawkins 146). Applying this kind of evolutionary vision to humankind leads Pahlen to anticipate some of the Darwinist writers who would come after Zalma. The German general Friedrich von Bernhardi would write in 1912, “Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war. War gives a biologically just decision” (qtd. in Hawkins 209), and the socialist writer La Monte argued in 1917, “Let us… assert the necessity and efficacy of cataclysmic revolution!” (113)

In this case, I think it's important to show that Bernhardi is Hawkins's own example of the idea he's discussing, though I also supplement them with my own example pulled from La Monte.

On the other hand, if you read a source that points you to another source, and you end up taking stuff from the second source that the first source did not, and don't use any of the ideas of the first source, I don't think there's any obligation to cite the first source. Yes, it was nice of that first source to lead you somewhere useful, but I would argue that it didn't make an intellectual contribution to your piece.

So... can you just depend on someone else's citation, and cite them? Well, sure, you can. But is it always the best choice? I don't think so. Like many aspects of writing, it's about context.

Works Cited

benjay2345. “Qui-Gon's quote 'There's always a bigger fish' in the first film of the Saga foreshadows the final film of the saga.” Reddit, 22 June 2020, www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsCantina/comments/hdzke3/quigons_quote_theres_always_a_bigger_fish_in_the.

Conlin, Jonathan. Evolution and the Victorians: Science, Culture and Politics in Darwin’s Britain. Bloomsbury, 2014. 

Darwin, Francis. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter. 1887. Vol. 2, D. Appleton, 1888.

Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kingsley, Charles. Letter to Charles Darwin. 18 Nov. 1859. Darwin Correspondence Project, U of Cambridge, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2534.xml.

La Monte, Robert Rives. “Science and Revolution.” The Social-Democrat, vol. 13, no. 3, 15 Mar. 1909, pp. 105-13. HathiTrust, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101067578953&view=1up&seq=115.

Levine, George. Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 2002.

137th Gebirg. “The President's Address at Khitomer - Star Trek VI: TUC.” The TrekBBS, 8 June 2007, www.trekbbs.com/threads/the-presidents-address-at-khitomer-star-trek-vi-tuc.33640.

“sciolist.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, doi: 10.1093/OED/3809113041.

Darwin and the Revolution

I am back to working on my book project, for the first time since January. (I wouldn't claim that under normal circumstances I produce copious academic work during the semester, but the exigencies of the pandemic have really cut my during-the-semester work down to nothing.) I'm revising a chapter from my dissertation about novels of political violence that feature biologists and use Darwinian rhetoric.

This chapter was a relative late add to the dissertation. In my proposal, I had a chapter that discussed three novels of political violence; this became seven novels of political violence later on. Eventually I split that up into two chapters each covering three novels, and shunted one of the novels into a different chapter. That meant the new chapter had no real framework. I think it cited a sentence apiece from two different sources in support of its claims about social Darwinism! Social Darwinism was, indeed, something I knew very little about. But, you know, a good dissertation is a done dissertation, and I marked this all down on my to-do list for revising it into a book.

Thus I have spent the past month learning about social Darwinism. It turns out that I did not know very much!

To understand social Darwinism, we don't begin with Darwin, but we actually begin in the 1950s. The term was popularized by Richard Hofstadter, a professor of history, in his book Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944). This book defined "social Darwinism" as a justification for laissez-faire ruthless capitalism, arguing that it was popular especially in America. Basically, Hofstadter's idea went, social Darwinism was the self-serving justification of people who either 1) crushed other people on their way to the top, or 2) wanted to remove all government rules preventing them from crushing people on their way to the top. These social Darwinists claimed any such crushing was the "survival of the fittest," and you couldn't say that was bad, that was how nature worked, and what it produced was, definitionally, the fittest!

A lot of people have criticized Hofstadter for a lot of reasons, but I don't know enough to assess most of of the criticisms. The one that seems particularly interesting to me is twofold. The first part is that there was no such thing as social Darwinism. What I mean by this is that the term "social Darwinism" indicates there is a difference between applying Darwinism to the biological arena and applying Darwinism to the social arena. The social arena was the biological arena. The British historian James Moore has done some strong work explaining what, in a historical sense, "Darwinism" means and how its originators meant the term. Some seek to defend Darwin by saying social Darwinism was a misapplication of his theory, but this neglects both how he devised it and how he himself used it.

For example, Moore points out in his article "Socializing Darwinism," that Darwinism was derived in part from Malthusianism, which was all about society: "Both Malthus and Darwin believed in the beneficent necessity of the laws of nature that give rise to a struggle for existence in human populations. Both believed the dictate of these laws was that individuals ought generally to enjoy the fruits of their foresight or suffer the pains of their improvidence. Both believed that the degrees of material success or failure in question are direct indications of moral worth and, as such, ought not to be mitigated" (Science as Politics, edited by Les Levidow, Free Association Books, 1986, p. 52). It was not a distinction drawn in the creation of his theory.

Diane B. Paul argues that social Darwinism "was a term that would have baffled Darwin. In Victorian England, scientists took for granted that biological facts mattered for social theory and policy" ("Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics," The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, 2nd ed., edited by Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, Cambridge UP, 2009, p. 229). Similarly, according to Moore, "The routine distinction made today between 'Darwinism' and 'Social Darwinism' would have been lost on the author of the Descent of Man, and probably on most of his defenders until the 1890s” (p. 62). For Darwin and his adherents-- and detractors!-- Darwinism was social Darwinism.

(Now, there are some critics who use this to argue no one should go around using the term "social Darwinism" at all, or that it should only be used to identify a very narrow group of people who self-identified as social Darwinists. This I don't think follows. It does seem useful to have a term that describes the concept of applying evolution by natural selection to social organization even if the original Darwinists wouldn't have made that distinction themselves.)

The second part of the criticism I want to highlight follows from the first: because Darwinism was social Darwinism, everybody who was engaging with Darwin's ideas was doing it. So it wasn't just right-wingers looking to grind down competitors in Progressive-Era America who were claiming Darwinian backing, it was everyone who was interesting in making a theory of society. So as Paul points out, Darwinism was used to justify laissez faire, to justify colonialism, to justify socialism, to justify eugenics (p. 240). It was used to justify anarchism, and some anarchists even made use of eugenics, as Richard Cleminson discusses in his book Anarchism and Eugenics: An Unlikely Convergence (Manchester UP, 2019). (Some people argue eugenics is a kind of social Darwinism; some people argue very vehemently that it is not.) How could anarchists-- people who reject state control-- allow arguable the ultimate form of state control of the individual? Paul Crook's Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War (Cambridge UP, 1994) discusses how Darwin was used to justify military conflicts and became a secular source of pacifism for the "peace biologists."

I like how J. W. Burrow puts it in his book The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (Yale UP, 2000): "What Social Darwinists chiefly argued about, without consciously putting it in those terms, which would have given the game away, was which form of competition was desirable and ensured progress or, if one adapted to it successfully, survival, and which types of competition should be suppressed; to have recognized them all as potentially operative, as a Darwinian would do in biology, would have removed the point" (p. 94). That is to say, even if you believed the government should stop your business from crushing other businesses-- survival of the fittest, after all-- you probably did believe that the government should prosecute people who tried to steal from your business-- even though surely that was survival of the fittest too!

Very few people disagreed on whether Darwin applied to social life, they just disagreed on what was "natural" and should be allowed, and what was supposedly stymieing evolution and thus should not be allowed. If you were a socialist, you thought capitalism an unnatural development holding back evolution. First decide who you want to be victors/survivors, then "endorse or condemn forms of competition depending on whether they seemed likely to ensure the desired result" (Burrow, p. 94). 

Most socialists who drew on Darwin seemed to skew toward the peaceful end; in his book Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) (1894), the Italian crimonologist Enrico Ferri argued that science showed violence was in fact not part of the revolution: "the processes of evolution and revolution—the only wholly social or collective processes—are the most efficacious, while partial rebellion and, still more, individual violence have only a very feeble power of social transformation" (p. 145). For Ferri, "revolution" meant "the concluding phase of an evolution" and was not to be used "in the current and incorrect sense of a stormy and violent revolt" (p. 141). Darwinism validate peaceful transition. But Ferri's book was translated into English by the "millionaire socialist" Robert Rives La Monte, who argued in his essay "Science and Revolution" (1909) that "a social cataclysm or revolution to be necessary to break the shell of capitalism within which the chick of the Society of Fellowship has been developing" (p. 105). He ended his essay by declaiming, "Let us be careful not to go to extremes and deny the fact and the fruitfulness of slow evolution, but let us with equal determination assert the necessity and efficacy of cataclysmic revolution! […] I find it difficult, I repeat, to see how any sane man […] can not believe a cataclysmic revolution not only inevitable, but a consummation devoutly to be desired" (p. 113). Even within the same ideology, you could apply Darwinism and get two completely contradictory results.

Paul admits it might all be rhetoric... but "rhetoric can be a potent resource" (p. 242). And it was a potent rhetoric too. If you were using Darwinism, Burrow argues that every struggle was magnified in importance: "Great-power status, imperialist expansion, the control of crime or disease, were spoken of [...] as matters of national life or death. Class and racial tensions too were projected onto the scale of world history, of continuing social evolution, as though the fate of nations or humanity, with alternatives of utopia or the extremity of grovelling degeneracy, of world domination or ultimate extinction or enslavement, hung poised in the balance" (pp. 95-6). Every little struggle became charged with cosmic significance.

Little wonder, then, that the writers of the early sf I look it drew on (social) Darwinism so much.

Review: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin

Trade paperback, 672 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1859)
Acquired and read October 2012

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
by Charles Darwin

Okay, not the world's most exciting read, but an important one, and let's be honest: someone with much worse prose than Charles Darwin could have ended up writing this one; indeed, there are a couple nice turns of phrase here and there. I like how he claims that science makes the world more beautiful in his closing lines: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved" (398).

Though Darwin is very cognizant of the limitations of his scientific sight, pointing out how little we actually see: "I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines" (288). An animal disappearing from our fossil record does not necessarily mean the animal disappeared from the Earth (277-78). In fact, he turns the sparse nature of the paleontological record into a virtue of his theory, because he comes to view the fossil record entirely differently because of his theory. A sneaky, adept move, I think.

My edition was the Broadview one, which is great because it reprints the first edition of the Origin before it got watered down and bloated, but with the second edition's necessary corrections, though not its substantial revisions.  Less great is Joseph Carroll's introduction, which spends a weird amount of space arguing against Thomas Kuhn for some reason. I must admit I'm kinda biased against the guy, though, because he's an advocate of evolutionary literary theory, which I've yet to see produce interesting results.

Review: The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

Mass market paperback, 524 pages
Published 1962 (originally 1839)
Acquired September 2012
Read October 2012

The Voyage of the Beagle
by Charles Darwin

The work of science is often shown as a form of vision, innate to the workings of science, and exploring the various ways in which that kind of vision manifests within the work of the scientist. Though vision is often invoked as a metaphor for the operation of science by scientists and non-scientists alike, it can be an odd one. John Berger opens his famous Ways of Seeing with the statement: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” (7). The metaphor of sight suggests something instantaneous and intrinsic, but much of the writing on scientific sight stresses the need for training, for time, and for judgment.

Charles Darwin returns to the concept of scientific sight several times in The Voyage of the Beagle, most interestingly when contemplating how one looks at a lagoon island: “We feel surprise when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals! This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason” (464). For Darwin, scientific sight is a direct contrast to visual sight—it requires reflection to see with it, as well as training. It does not come before words, but rather requires considerable knowledge in order to utilize.

There is not much of a resemblance between visual sight and scientific sight in this instance, except in one regard—its all-pervasiveness. Berger’s formulation that “Seeing comes before words” suggests that it is impossible to not see, that it suffuses every part of the human experience. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn employs the metaphor of sight for similar reasons, using it to explain his concept of the scientific paradigm: an orientation towards the world so innate that one is almost literally unable to see it differently. Scientific sight, as used by Darwin and others, suggests that the worldview of the scientist is so ingrained that once acquired, it cannot be gotten rid of.