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"In a very fundamental sense, the Origin is a work of economics, of nature-as-economy; and our recent history, embracing the rise of free-market neo-liberalism in the 1980s and, after the collapse of Soviet state communism, the apparently widespread acceptance of capitalist economic relations, can dispose us to read the text as if it were a confirmation that this particular socio-economic order is more `natural' than others. Without suggesting that the language of the Origin has been the language of the modern boardroom, it seems undeniable that the tropes of new Right managerialism --- the streamlining and rationalising, in order to create leaner and fitter organisations capable of competing in a ruthless business world in which the strongest survive and the weakest go to the wall --- have taken their colouring from a natural selection which `will always succeed in the long run in reducing and saving every part of the organisation, as soon as it is rendered superfluous' (115). What might not any business give for a touch of what Darwin called `the most wonderful of all known instincts', that of the hive-bee? ..."

Excerpted from Jeff Wallace's (University of Glamorgan) INTRODUCTION in The Origin of Species (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, Paperback), p. XVII, Wordsworth Editions Limited (1998).