Herbert Spencer

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1937 the American sociologist Talcott Parsons asked a pointed question about Herbert Spencer: "Who now reads Spencer?" The question carried a sting. Spencer had once been called "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century." He was an Englishman who wrote on biology, psychology, sociology, ethics and religion. He tried to bring all of them under one law of evolution. After 1900 his reputation fell sharply. Yet judges, economists, novelists and reformers on several continents kept arguing with him. How did a man with almost no formal schooling become the thinker everyone had to answer? What did he really claim about evolution, and how much of it was borrowed from Darwin? And why does his name still surface whenever people argue about what a government should be allowed to do?

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• 2. The Making of a Philosopher

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  Derby, in Derbyshire, is where Herbert Spencer was born on the 27th of April 1820. His father, William George Spencer, whom everyone called George, was a religious dissenter who drifted from Methodism to Quakerism. George passed on to his son a deep opposition to authority of every kind. He also ran a school that followed the progressive teaching methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

  The Derby Philosophical Society, founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, supplied the rest of the household's intellectual life. George served as its secretary. Through its members the young Spencer met theories of biological evolution that came before Charles Darwin. The most important were those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His father meanwhile trained him in empirical science.

  An uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, vicar of Hinton Charterhouse near Bath, finished off Spencer's thin formal education. Thomas taught him some mathematics and physics, along with enough Latin to translate easy texts. He also stamped on his nephew a firm belief in free trade and a suspicion of the state. Beyond these lessons, Spencer taught himself, picking up knowledge from narrowly focused reading and from talk with friends.

  During the railway boom of the late 1830s he worked as a civil engineer. As an adolescent and young man he found it hard to settle into any one intellectual or professional discipline. He spent much of his time writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in religion and radical in politics.

  From 1848 to 1853 Spencer worked as sub-editor at The Economist, a free-trade journal. While there he published his first book, Social Statics, in 1851. Its publisher, John Chapman, brought him into a London salon that drew many leading radical and progressive thinkers. Among them were John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau and George Henry Lewes. Another was Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, with whom Spencer was briefly linked romantically.

  Spencer in turn introduced the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who would later win fame as 'Darwin's Bulldog' and who remained Spencer's friend for life. Evans and Lewes also pointed Spencer toward Mill's A System of Logic and Auguste Comte's positivism. Those books set him on the road to his life's work, although he strongly disagreed with Comte.

  His second book, Principles of Psychology, appeared in 1855 and grew out of that friendship with Evans and Lewes. It rested on the assumption that the human mind obeys natural laws that can be found within general biology. Spencer hoped to reconcile two rival theories. One held that the mind is built from sensations bound together by association. The other, phrenology, placed particular mental functions in particular parts of the brain. He argued that both were partial truths. Repeated associations, he said, become embodied in strands of brain tissue, and the Lamarckian mechanism of use-inheritance hands them down to the next generation.

  Spencer believed the book would do for the mind what Isaac Newton had done for matter. The public was less impressed. The first edition ran to only 251 copies, and the last of them did not sell until June 1861.

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• 3. One Law for Everything

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  In 1858 Spencer drew up an outline for the System of Synthetic Philosophy, a project with few parallels in the English language. It was meant to show that a single principle of evolution governs biology, psychology, sociology and morality. For sociology he borrowed Comte's term for the new discipline. Spencer planned ten volumes over twenty years. The work took twice as long and swallowed nearly all the rest of his long life.

  Behind the plan lay a conviction he shared with the members of Chapman's salon. They believed that everything in the universe, including culture, language and morality, could be explained by laws of universal validity. Many theologians of the day insisted that parts of creation, above all the human soul, lay outside scientific inquiry. Spencer wanted to prove them wrong. Comte had pursued the same ambition. Spencer parted from him by claiming that one single law applied everywhere. He identified it with progressive development and called it the principle of evolution.

  He first stated that principle in 'Progress: Its Law and Cause', an essay printed in Chapman's Westminster Review in 1857. It later became the basis of First Principles, published in 1862. The essay drew on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's essay 'The Theory of Life', itself derived from Friedrich von Schelling's Naturphilosophie. It also generalised von Baer's law of embryological development. Spencer held that every structure in the universe moves from simple uniformity to complex diversity, while its parts grow more tightly integrated. He saw this in stars and galaxies, in living organisms, in human societies and in the mind. It differed from other scientific laws, he said, only in being more general.

  Not everyone found the law convincing. In a letter to Beatrice Webb in 1923, Bertrand Russell wondered whether Spencer had ever grasped the second law of thermodynamics. That law says that everything drifts toward uniformity and a dead level, which is the opposite of growing diversity.

  Robert Chambers, an Edinburgh publisher, supplied a template. His anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, from 1844, is often dismissed as a lightweight forerunner of Darwin. In fact it was a programme for unifying science. It treated Laplace's nebular hypothesis for the origin of the Solar System as one case of progressive development. It treated Lamarck's theory of species transformation as another. Lewes called the two together 'one magnificent generalisation of progressive development'. Chambers moved in Chapman's circle, and his book served as the unacknowledged model for the Synthetic Philosophy.

  Charles Darwin's Origin of Species appeared two years after Spencer's essay, and Spencer's relation to it is often misunderstood. After reading it, he coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' in Principles of Biology in 1864 as his own label for Darwin's idea. From this he is often wrongly portrayed as a man who merely stretched Darwin's theory over society. In fact he took in natural selection only grudgingly, fitting it into a system he had already built.

  The main engine of change in his scheme was Lamarckian use-inheritance. This is the notion that organs grow or shrink through use or disuse and that these changes pass to offspring. He thought it was also needed to explain the higher, social development of humanity. Unlike Darwin, he believed evolution has a direction and an end-point, a final state of equilibrium. The same pattern covered the mind, which he said grew from the automatic responses of lower animals to the reasoning of thinking people. Intuition, in his view, was the inherited experience of the race, knowledge learned unconsciously.

  Principles of Biology also offered a theory of pangenesis, built on hypothetical 'physiological units' tied to specific body parts and carrying traits to offspring. These units resemble the gemmules that Darwin proposed.

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• 4. The Unknowable

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  Spencer dismissed theology as representing the "impiety of the pious", and the stance helped make him notorious. Religious thinkers often condemned him for supposedly advocating atheism and materialism. Thomas Henry Huxley's agnosticism was, in Adrian Desmond's phrase, a militant creed aimed at "the unpardonable sin of faith". Spencer's position was different. He insisted that he wanted to reconcile science and religion, not undermine one in the name of the other.

  Part 1 of First Principles, in its second edition of 1867, sets out his reasoning. Begin from religious belief or from science, he argued, and you end up accepting notions that are essential yet literally inconceivable. A Creator cannot be pictured, and neither can the substratum underlying everything we experience. Both religion and science therefore agree that human understanding reaches only 'relative' knowledge. We can know phenomena but never the absolute reality behind them. In his words, the 'most certain of all facts' is that 'the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.'

  He named this awareness the Unknowable. He proposed that worshipping it could be a positive faith to replace conventional religion. In his view it marked the final stage in the evolution of religion, shedding the last human-like traits from the idea of God.

  That proposal explains much of his appeal. Orthodox creeds were crumbling under the advances of modern science, and Spencer seemed to offer a ready-made system of belief. It claimed that humanity's eventual perfection could be believed on the strength of science, citing the first law of thermodynamics and biological evolution.

  Two older streams fed that vision, deism and positivism. The deism came from his father and from George Combe's hugely popular The Constitution of Man, published in 1828. Combe pictured the world as a cosmos of benevolent design. Nature's laws, in his telling, were the decrees of a 'Being transcendentally kind.' Spencer lost his Christian faith as a teenager and later rejected any human-like picture of the Deity. Even so, he held on to this benevolent vision almost subconsciously.

  Positivism gave him far more than he ever admitted. It supplied the idea of a philosophical system as the unification of the branches of science. It also insisted that genuine knowledge covers only phenomena, so that speculating about ultimate reality is idle. The tension between that austerity and his leftover deism ran through the entire System. Combe also handed him a notion he would carry into ethics. There are 'laws' of morality, Combe suggested, with the status of laws of nature yet still carrying moral force.

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• 5. The Perfect Society

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  'The perfect man in the perfect society' was the endpoint Spencer predicted for evolution in his first book. He foresaw human beings becoming completely adapted to social life. Later he stretched the timescale considerably. Each generation, he argued, inherits a psychological and moral constitution from its ancestors and passes it on, still adapting to the demands of living together. Aggression, a useful survival instinct in primitive conditions, becomes maladaptive in advanced societies. Because instincts sit in strands of brain tissue, gradual changes could be inherited through use-inheritance. Over many generations people would grow less aggressive and more altruistic, until no one caused another person pain.

  There was a catch, and it shaped his politics. People must feel the 'natural' consequences of their conduct, he held. Only then do they have a reason to improve themselves and pass on a better moral makeup. Spencer therefore opposed anything that interfered with that link. That included state action to relieve poverty, provide public education, or require compulsory vaccination. Charity was welcome but limited, because suffering often follows from a person's own actions. Too much generosity toward the 'undeserving poor' would break the link between conduct and consequence and stall humanity's advance.

  His ultimate standard of value was utilitarian: the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In the perfect society people would take pleasure in helping others, which he called 'positive beneficence'. They would also avoid inflicting pain, which he called 'negative beneficence'. They would instinctively respect the rights of others, giving universal justice. Each person would have the right to the maximum liberty compatible with a like liberty in others. Liberty meant the absence of coercion and was closely tied to private property.

  Spencer called this code 'Absolute Ethics', a scientific moral system meant to replace those resting on the supernatural. Because people were not yet capable of living by it, he added a code of 'Relative Ethics' that allowed for present imperfections.

  Even his theory of music served the moral project. Spencer traced the origin of music to impassioned oratory. There, tone and cadence act as "the commentary of the emotions upon the propositions of the intellect." Music, as heightened speech, contributed to the ethical education of the species. Our strange sensitivity to melody and harmony, he wrote, hints at the "intenser delights" that lie within the possibilities of human nature.

  Auguste Comte's positivist sociology had thrilled Spencer, who is generally credited as the first to use the term 'social structure'. He rejected what he saw as the ideological side of Comte's thought and recast social science around evolution. His sociology describes two types of society. Militant society, organised by hierarchy and obedience, is simple and undifferentiated. Industrial society, built on voluntary contractual obligations, is complex and differentiated. Society itself was a 'social organism' moving from the first toward the second under the universal law.

  He wavered over where this would end. At first he believed it pointed to anarchism. Later he allowed for a continuing state, reduced to enforcing contracts and defending against outsiders. People often describe his sociology as Social Darwinism with Lamarckism mixed in. That label fits his political and ethical writings better. His sociological works trace how growth and differentiation make social organisation more complex.

  In the United States, Lester Frank Ward, later the first president of the American Sociological Association, mounted a relentless attack on Spencer's theories of laissez-faire. Ward admired much of his work but thought Spencer's political biases had led him astray.

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• 6. The State and Its Enemies

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  The Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard called Social Statics "the greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written." In it Spencer argued that the state is not an "essential" institution. It would "decay", he said, as a voluntary market organisation took over its coercive functions. He claimed that an individual has a "right to ignore the state." This also made him a fierce critic of imperialism. News that British troops were in danger in the Second Afghan War of 1878-1880 drew a cold reply from him.

  "When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves."

  The early Spencer was more radical than his later image suggests. Social Statics came from a radical democrat. He supported votes for women, and even for children. He wanted land nationalised to break the aristocracy's power. He opposed private property in land, claiming that each person has a latent claim to use the earth, a view that influenced Georgism. He called himself "a radical feminist". He urged trade unions as a bulwark against "exploitation by bosses", and he favoured free worker co-operatives in place of wage labour.

  By the 1880s he had turned sharply. He opposed female suffrage. He made common cause with the landowners of the Liberty and Property Defence League, who feared a drift toward 'socialism' within William Ewart Gladstone's administration. His best-known work from this period is The Man Versus the State, published in 1884. In it he denounced the 'new Toryism' of the social reformist wing of the Liberal Party. He compared it to the interventionism of Benjamin Disraeli. He attacked Irish land reform, compulsory education, workplace safety laws, prohibition and temperance laws, tax-funded libraries and welfare reforms. His objections were threefold: government coercion, discouragement of voluntary self-improvement, and disregard of the 'laws of life'.

  Socialism, he said, was about the same as "slavery". He defined a slave as someone who "labours under coercion to satisfy another's desires." Under socialism or communism, he thought, a person would be enslaved to the whole community rather than to one master. One thing never changed. The craze for annexing colonies appalled him, because it overturned his predicted shift from militant to industrial societies. His scathing critique of the Boer War cost him still more popularity in Britain.

  The slogan "There is no alternative", made famous by Margaret Thatcher, may be traced to Spencer's emphatic use of it. Friedrich Hayek's later ideas echo several of Spencer's. These include his law of equal liberty, his insistence on the limits of predictive knowledge and his model of spontaneous order. They also include his warnings about the unintended consequences of collectivist reform. Robert Nozick and other libertarians read him too.

  In Lochner v. New York, conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court found inspiration in his writings. They struck down a New York law limiting the weekly hours of bakers, on the ground that it restricted liberty of contract. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. answered the majority with a famous line: "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics." The Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov, in 1909, labelled him a "conservative Anarchist".

  For many people, his name is nearly synonymous with Social Darwinism. This is the application of survival of the fittest to society, and it grew alongside nineteenth-century scientific racism. His own words give that reputation dark support. In Social Statics he argued that imperialism had served civilization by clearing inferior races from the earth. The forces working toward perfect happiness, he wrote, "exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way". In the same work he added that the side benefits of such barbarous practices do not justify them going forward.

  Defenders note a distinction. The competition Spencer advocated resembles the economists' kind, where rivals improve everyone's well-being. The biologist's kind may kill off a species. He also viewed private charity positively, encouraging voluntary association and informal care. He advised charities to avoid encouraging new dependent families among those unable to support themselves.

  A letter to the Japanese government on intermarriage with Westerners was blunter. Mixing two widely divergent varieties, he warned, produces "a constitution which will not work properly." America, he added, had failed to restrict Chinese immigration and contact with the presumed European stock. In his words, "if they mix they must form a bad hybrid." He closed with a blanket statement against all immigration, predicting "immense social mischief" and eventual social disorganization. Japan, as it happens, was one of the places where his ideas found eager readers.

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• 7. Reach Around the World

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  Appleton, his authorised American publisher, sold 368,755 copies of his books between 1860 and 1903. Pirated editions were still common in the United States, and British sales were not far different. Once other countries are counted, a million copies in his lifetime looks like a conservative figure. He was perhaps the only philosopher ever to reach that mark. By 1869 he lived solely on book sales and on income from his contributions to Victorian periodicals, later gathered as three volumes of Essays.

  His works were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, among other languages. Honours reached him across Europe and North America. He joined the Athenaeum, a London club open only to those distinguished in the arts and sciences. He also belonged to the X Club, a monthly dining club of nine founded by Huxley. Its members included John Tyndall and Sir John Lubbock, Darwin's cousin, and three of them would become presidents of the Royal Society. Guests included Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1883 Spencer was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

  William James said Spencer had "enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative mind of countless doctors, engineers, and lawyers." His message of individual self-improvement found a ready audience in the skilled working class. His American follower John Fiske saw Spencer's ideas "running like the weft through all the warp" of Victorian thought. Henry Sidgwick, T. H. Green, G. E. Moore, Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim all defined their own ideas in relation to him. Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society is largely an extended debate with Spencer. Many commentators think Durkheim borrowed extensively from him.

  In Poland after the 1863 Uprising, many of Spencer's ideas became part of Polish Positivism, the dominant ideology of the period. Bolesław Prus, the leading Polish writer of the time, hailed him as "the Aristotle of the nineteenth century". Prus adopted the metaphor of society as an organism. He gave it poetic form in a micro-story of 1884, "Mold of the Earth". He highlighted it again in the introduction to his novel Pharaoh, from 1895.

  In China and Japan the appeal was practical. Reformers wanted a strong nation-state able to compete with the Western powers. The Chinese scholar Yen Fu introduced Spencer as a prescription for reforming the Qing state. Spencerism became so influential that it was woven into the Chinese translation of Origin of Species. There, Darwin's branching view of evolution turned into a linear march of progress.

  In Japan, Tokutomi Soho believed his country was moving from a 'militant society' to an 'industrial society'. He argued that it should quickly discard all things Japanese for Western ethics and learning. Spencer also corresponded with Kaneko Kentaro, warning him of the dangers of imperialism. In India, Savarkar wrote in Inside the Enemy Camp that he had read all of Spencer's works. They were translated into Marathi and influenced Tilak and Agarkar. In Maharashtra Spencer earned the affectionate nickname Harbhat Pendse.

  His 1852 essay 'The Philosophy of Style' made a case for easy reading. Writers should aim, he said, "To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort." He wanted to free prose from "friction and inertia". His method was to place subordinate clauses, objects and phrases before the subject of a sentence. By the time readers reach the subject, they then hold everything needed to grasp it.

  Novelists took up his ideas too. George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Machado de Assis, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Abraham Cahan and D. H. Lawrence all referred to him, as did Jorge Luis Borges. Jack London created Martin Eden, a staunch Spencerian. H. G. Wells used Spencer's ideas in The Time Machine to explain the evolution of humanity into two species. In Rudyard Kipling's Kim, the Bengali spy Hurree Babu quotes him to comic effect. Hurree Babu thanks "all the Gods of Hindustan, and Herbert Spencer" that some valuables remained to steal.

  Upton Sinclair, in One Clear Call in 1948, repeated a barb credited to Huxley. Spencer's idea of a tragedy, the barb ran, was "a generalization killed by a fact".

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• 8. Loneliness and Legacy

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  A game of billiards was enough to cost Spencer a night's sleep. He once gave up a meeting he had been looking forward to with Huxley. They disagreed on a scientific question, and he feared an argument his nerves could not bear. He never married. From 1855 he was a lifelong hypochondriac who complained endlessly of pains that no physician of the day could diagnose.

  By the 1890s his readers had begun to leave him, and many close friends had died. He doubted the confident faith in progress that he had placed at the centre of his system. His early optimism gave way to pessimism about the future of humankind. Still, he worked to reinforce his arguments and to prevent misreadings of his theory of non-interference.

  He was also an inventor of sorts. Spencer devised a precursor to the paper clip, a 'binding-pin' that looked more like a modern cotter pin. It was distributed by Ackermann & Company. Drawings and descriptions of its uses appear in Appendix I of his autobiography.

  In 1902, shortly before his death, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which went to the German Theodor Mommsen. He kept writing all his life, often by dictation in his later years, until poor health overcame him. He died on the 8th of December 1903, at the age of 83. His autobiography appeared in two volumes in 1904.

  His ashes lie on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery in London, facing the grave of Karl Marx. At the funeral, the Indian nationalist leader Shyamji Krishna Varma announced a donation of £1,000. It would found a lectureship at Oxford University in tribute to Spencer and his work.

  Half a century after his death, his work was dismissed as a "parody of philosophy". The historian Richard Hofstadter called him "the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual, and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic." Still, his thought had sunk so deeply into the Victorian age that his influence never fully vanished. Later estimates have been kinder, though one remains highly negative. One writer has recently argued that Spencer matters for a sociology that must learn to take energy in society seriously.

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