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Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was "an enthusiastic exponent of evolution" and even "wrote about evolution before Darwin did." As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century." Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900; "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937. Spencer is best known for coining the concept "survival of the fittest", which he did in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism. Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on 27 April 1820, the son of William George Spencer (generally called George). Spencer’s father was a religious dissenter who drifted from Methodism to Quakerism, and who seems to have transmitted to his son an opposition to all forms of authority. He ran a school founded on the progressive teaching methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and also served as Secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, a scientific society which had been founded in the 1790s by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles. Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while the members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, particularly those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean - Baptiste Lamarck. His uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, vicar of Hinton Charterhouse near Bath, completed Spencer’s limited formal education by teaching him some mathematics and physics, and enough Latin to enable him to translate some easy texts. Thomas Spencer also imprinted on his nephew his own firm free trade and anti - statist political views. Otherwise, Spencer was an autodidact who acquired most of his knowledge from narrowly focused readings and conversations with his friends and acquaintances. As both an adolescent and a young man Spencer found it difficult to settle to any intellectual or professional discipline. He worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late 1830s, while also devoting much of his time to writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in their religion and radical in their politics. From 1848 to 1853 he served as sub-editor on the free trade journal The Economist, during which time he published his first book, Social Statics (1851), which predicted that humanity would eventually become completely adapted to the requirements of living in society with the consequential withering away of the state. Its publisher, John Chapman, introduced him to his salon which was attended by many of the leading radical and progressive thinkers of the capital, including John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), with whom he was briefly romantically linked. Spencer himself introduced the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who would later win fame as 'Darwin’s Bulldog' and who remained his lifelong friend. However it was the friendship of Evans and Lewes that acquainted him with John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic and with Auguste Comte’s positivism and which set him on the road to his life’s work. He strongly disagreed with Comte. The first fruit of his friendship with Evans and Lewes was Spencer's second book, Principles of Psychology, published in 1855, which explored a physiological basis for psychology. The book was founded on the fundamental assumption that the human mind was subject to natural laws and that these could be discovered within the framework of general biology. This permitted the adoption of a developmental perspective not merely in terms of the individual (as in traditional psychology), but also of the species and the race. Through this paradigm, Spencer aimed to reconcile the associationist psychology of Mill’s Logic, the notion that human mind was constructed from atomic sensations held together by the laws of the association of ideas, with the apparently more 'scientific' theory of phrenology, which located specific mental functions in specific parts of the brain. Spencer argued that both these theories were partial accounts of the truth: repeated associations of ideas were embodied in the formation of specific strands of brain tissue, and these could be passed from one generation to the next by means of the Lamarckian mechanism of use - inheritance. The Psychology, he believed, would do for the human mind what Isaac Newton had done for matter. However, the book was not initially successful and the last of the 251 copies of its first edition was not sold until June 1861. Spencer's interest in psychology derived from a more fundamental concern which was to establish the universality of natural law. In common with others of his generation, including the members of
Chapman's salon, he was possessed with the idea of demonstrating that
it was possible to show that everything in the universe — including human
culture, language, and morality — could be explained by laws of universal
validity. This was in contrast to the views of many theologians of the
time who insisted that some parts of creation, in particular the human
soul, were beyond the realm of scientific investigation. Comte's Systeme de Philosophie Positive had
been written with the ambition of demonstrating the universality of
natural law, and Spencer was to follow Comte in the scale of his
ambition. However, Spencer differed from Comte in believing it was
possible to discover a single law of universal application which he
identified with progressive development and was to call the principle
of evolution. In
1858 Spencer produced an outline of what was to become the System of
Synthetic Philosophy. This immense undertaking, which has few parallels
in the English language, aimed to demonstrate that the principle of
evolution applied in biology, psychology, sociology (Spencer
appropriated Comte's term for the new discipline) and morality. Spencer
envisaged that this work of ten volumes would take twenty years to
complete; in the end it took him twice as long and consumed almost all
the rest of his long life. Despite
Spencer's early struggles to establish himself as a writer, by the
1870s he had become the most famous philosopher of the age. His
works were widely read during his lifetime, and by 1869 he was able to
support himself solely on the profit of book sales and on income from
his regular contributions to Victorian periodicals which were collected
as three volumes of Essays.
His works were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French,
Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and into many other languages and he was
offered honors and awards all over Europe and North America. He also
became a member of the Athenaeum, an exclusive Gentleman's Club in London open only to those distinguished in the arts and sciences, and the X Club, a dining club of nine founded by T.H. Huxley that
met every month and included some of the most prominent thinkers of the
Victorian age (three of whom would become presidents of the Royal Society). Members included physicist - philosopher John Tyndall and Darwin's cousin, the banker and biologist Sir John Lubbock. There were also some quite significant satellites such as liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster; and guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were
entertained from time to time. Through such associations, Spencer had a
strong presence in the heart of the scientific community and was able
to secure an influential audience for his views. Despite his growing wealth and fame he never owned a house of his own. The
last decades of Spencer's life were characterized by growing
disillusionment and loneliness. He never married, and after 1855 was a
perpetual hypochondriac who complained endlessly of pains and maladies
that no physician could diagnose. By
the 1890s his readership had begun to desert him while many of his
closest friends died and he had come to doubt the confident faith in
progress that he had made the centerpiece of his philosophical system.
His later years were also ones in which his political views became
increasingly conservative. Whereas Social Statics had
been the work of a radical democrat who believed in votes for women
(and even for children) and in the nationalization of the land to break
the power of the aristocracy, by the 1880s he had become a staunch
opponent of female suffrage and made common cause with the landowners
of the Liberty and Property Defence League against what they saw as the drift towards 'socialism' of elements (such as Sir William Harcourt) within the administration of William Ewart Gladstone -
largely against the opinions of Gladstone himself. Spencer's political
views from this period were expressed in what has become his most
famous work, The Man versus the State. The exception to Spencer's growing conservativism was that he remained throughout his life an ardent opponent of imperialism and militarism. His critique of the Boer War was especially scathing, and it contributed to his declining popularity in Britain. Spencer
also invented a precursor to the modern paper clip, though it looked
more like a modern cotter pin. This "binding - pin" was distributed by
Ackermann & Company. Spencer shows drawings of the pin in Appendix
I (following Appendix H) of his autobiography along with published
descriptions of its uses. In 1902, shortly before his death, Spencer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature.
He continued writing all his life, in later years often by dictation,
until he succumbed to poor health at the age of 83. His ashes are
interred in the eastern side of London's Highgate Cemetery facing Karl Marx's grave. At Spencer's funeral the Indian nationalist leader Shyamji Krishnavarma announced a donation of £1,000 to establish a lectureship at Oxford University in tribute to Spencer and his work.
The
basis for Spencer's appeal to many of his generation was that he
appeared to offer a ready made system of belief which could substitute
for conventional religious faith at a time when orthodox creeds were
crumbling under the advances of modern science. Spencer's philosophical
system seemed to demonstrate that it was possible to believe in the
ultimate perfection of humanity on the basis of advanced scientific
conceptions such as the
first law of thermodynamics and biological evolution. In essence Spencer's philosophical vision was formed by a combination of deism and
positivism. On the one hand, he had imbibed something of eighteenth
century deism from his father and other members of the Derby
Philosophical Society and from books like George Combe's immensely popular The Constitution of Man (1828).
This treated the world as a cosmos of benevolent design, and the laws
of nature as the decrees of a 'Being transcendentally kind.' Natural
laws were thus the statutes of a well governed universe that had been
decreed by the Creator with the intention of promoting human happiness.
Although Spencer lost his Christian faith as a teenager and later
rejected any 'anthropomorphic' conception of the Deity, he nonetheless
held fast to this conception at an almost sub-conscious level. At the
same time, however, he owed far more than he would ever acknowledge to
positivism, in particular in its conception of a philosophical system
as the unification of the various branches of scientific knowledge. He
also followed positivism in his insistence that it was only possible to
have genuine knowledge of phenomena and hence that it was idle to
speculate about the nature of the ultimate reality. The tension between
positivism and his residual deism ran through the entire System of
Synthetic Philosophy. Spencer
followed Comte in aiming for the unification of scientific truth; it
was in this sense that his philosophy aimed to be 'synthetic.' Like
Comte, he was committed to the universality of natural law, the idea
that the laws of nature applied without exception, to the organic realm
as much as to the inorganic, and to the human mind as much as to the
rest of creation. The first objective of the Synthetic Philosophy was
thus to demonstrate that there were no exceptions to being able to
discover scientific explanations, in the form of natural laws, of all
the phenomena of the universe. Spencer’s volumes on biology,
psychology, and sociology were all intended to demonstrate the
existence of natural laws in these specific disciplines. Even in his
writings on ethics, he held that it was possible to discover ‘laws’ of
morality that had the status of laws of nature while still having
normative content, a conception which can be traced to Combe’s Constitution of Man. The
second objective of the Synthetic Philosophy was to show that these
same laws led inexorably to progress. In contrast to Comte, who
stressed only the unity of scientific method, Spencer sought the
unification of scientific knowledge in the form of the reduction of all
natural laws to one fundamental law, the law of evolution. In this
respect, he followed the model laid down by the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers in his anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Although often dismissed as a lightweight forerunner of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Chambers’ book was in reality a programme for the unification of science which aimed to show that Laplace’s nebular hypothesis for
the origin of the solar system and Lamarck’s theory of species
transformation were both instances (in Lewes' phrase) of 'one
magnificent generalization of progressive development.' Chambers was
associated with Chapman’s salon and his work served as the
unacknowledged template for the Synthetic Philosophy. The
first clear articulation of Spencer’s evolutionary perspective occurred
in his essay, 'Progress: Its Law and Cause', published in Chapman's Westminster Review in 1857, and which later formed the basis of the First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (1862). In it he expounded a theory of evolution which combined insights from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's essay 'The Theory of Life' — itself derivative from Friedrich von Schelling's Naturphilosophie — with a generalization of von Baer’s
law of embryological development. Spencer posited that all structures
in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to
a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity, while being accompanied by a
process of greater integration of the differentiated parts. This
evolutionary process could be found at work, Spencer believed,
throughout the cosmos. It was a universal law, applying to the stars
and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms, and to human
social organization as much as to the human mind. It differed from
other scientific laws only by its greater generality, and the laws of
the special sciences could be shown to be illustrations of this
principle. This attempt to explain the evolution of complexity was radically different from that to be found in Darwin’s Origin of Species which was published two years later. Spencer is often, quite erroneously,
believed to have merely appropriated and generalized Darwin’s work on natural selection. But although after reading Darwin's work he coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' as his own term for Darwin's concept, and
is often misrepresented as a thinker who merely applied the Darwinian
theory to society, he only grudgingly incorporated natural selection
into his preexisting overall system. The primary mechanism of species
transformation that he recognized was Lamarckian use - inheritance
which posited that organs are developed or are diminished by use or
disuse and that the resulting changes may be transmitted to future
generations. Spencer believed that this evolutionary mechanism was also
necessary to explain 'higher' evolution, especially the social
development of humanity. Moreover, in contrast to Darwin, he held that
evolution had a direction and an endpoint, the attainment of a final
state of equilibrium. He tried to apply the theory of biological
evolution to sociology. He proposed that society was the product of
change from lower to higher forms, just as in the theory of biological
evolution, the lowest forms of life are said to be evolving into higher
forms. Spencer claimed that man's mind had evolved in the same way from
the simple automatic responses of lower animals to the process of
reasoning in the thinking man. Spencer believed in two kinds of
knowledge: knowledge gained by the individual and knowledge gained by
the race. Intuition, or knowledge learned unconsciously, was the
inherited experience of the race. Spencer read with excitement the original positivist sociology of Auguste Comte. A philosopher of science, Comte had proposed a theory of sociocultural evolution that society progresses by a general law of three stages.
Writing after various developments in biology, however, Spencer
rejected what he regarded as the ideological aspects of Comte's
positivism, attempting to reformulate social science in terms of
evolutionary biology. One might broadly describe Spencer's sociology as socially Darwinistic (though strictly speaking he was a proponent of Lamarckism rather than Darwinism). The
evolutionary progression from simple, undifferentiated homogeneity to
complex, differentiated heterogeneity was exemplified, Spencer argued,
by the development of society. He developed a theory of two types of
society, the militant and the industrial, which corresponded to this
evolutionary progression. Militant society, structured around
relationships of hierarchy and obedience, was simple and
undifferentiated; industrial society, based on voluntary, contractually
assumed social obligations, was complex and differentiated. Society,
which Spencer conceptualized as a 'social organism'
evolved from the simpler state to the more complex according to the
universal law of evolution. Moreover, industrial society was the direct
descendant of the ideal society developed in Social Statics,
although Spencer now equivocated over whether the evolution of society
would result in anarchism (as he had first believed) or whether it
pointed to a continued role for the state, albeit one reduced to the
minimal functions of the enforcement of contracts and external defense. Though Spencer made some valuable contributions to early sociology, not least in his influence on structural functionalism,
his attempt to introduce Lamarckian or Darwinian ideas into the realm
of social science was unsuccessful. It was considered by many, furthermore, to be actively dangerous. Hermeneuticians of the period, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, would pioneer the distinction between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). In the 1890s, Émile Durkheim established formal academic sociology with a firm emphasis on practical social research. By the turn of the 20th century the first generation of German sociologists, most notably Max Weber, had presented methodological antipositivism. The
end point of the evolutionary process would be the creation of 'the
perfect man in the perfect society' with human beings becoming
completely adapted to social life, as predicted in Spencer’s first
book. The chief difference between Spencer’s earlier and later
conceptions of this process was the evolutionary timescale involved.
The psychological — and hence also the moral — constitution which had
been
bequeathed to the present generation by our ancestors, and which we in
turn would hand on to future generations, was in the process of gradual
adaptation to the requirements of living in society. For example,
aggression was a survival instinct which had been necessary in the
primitive conditions of life, but was maladaptive in advanced
societies. Because human instincts had a specific location in strands
of brain tissue, they were subject to the Lamarckian mechanism of
use - inheritance so that gradual modifications could be transmitted to
future generations. Over the course of many generations the
evolutionary process would ensure that human beings would become less
aggressive and increasingly altruistic, leading eventually to a perfect
society in which no one would cause another person pain. However,
for evolution to produce the perfect individual it was necessary for
present and future generations to experience the 'natural' consequences
of their conduct. Only in this way would individuals have the
incentives required to work on self - improvement and thus to hand an
improved moral constitution to their descendants. Hence anything that
interfered with the 'natural' relationship of conduct and consequence
was to be resisted and this included the use of the coercive power of
the state to relieve poverty, to provide public education, or to
require compulsory vaccination. Although charitable giving was to be
encouraged even it had to be limited by the consideration that
suffering was frequently the result of individuals receiving the
consequences of their actions. Hence too much individual benevolence
directed to the 'undeserving poor' would break the link between conduct
and consequence that Spencer considered fundamental to ensuring that
humanity continued to evolve to a higher level of development. Spencer adopted a utilitarian standard
of ultimate value — the greatest happiness of the greatest number — and
the
culmination of the evolutionary process would be the maximization of
utility. In the perfect society individuals would not only derive
pleasure from the exercise of altruism ('positive beneficence') but
would aim to avoid inflicting pain on others ('negative beneficence').
They would also instinctively respect the rights of others, leading to
the universal observance of the principle of justice – each person had
the right to a maximum amount of liberty that was compatible with a
like liberty in others. 'Liberty' was interpreted to mean the absence
of coercion, and was closely connected to the right to private
property. Spencer termed this code of conduct 'Absolute Ethics' which
provided a scientifically grounded moral system that could substitute
for the supernaturally based ethical systems of the past. However, he
recognized that our inherited moral constitution does not currently
permit us to behave in full compliance with the code of Absolute
Ethics, and for this reason we need a code of 'Relative Ethics' which
takes into account the distorting factors of our present imperfections. Spencer's
distinctive view of musicology was also related to his ethics. Spencer
thought that the origin of music is to be found in impassioned oratory.
Speakers have persuasive effect not only by the reasoning of their
words, but by their cadence and tone — the musical qualities of their
voice serve as "the commentary of the emotions upon the propositions of
the intellect," as Spencer put it. Music,
conceived as the heightened development of this characteristic of
speech, makes a contribution to the ethical education and progress of
the species. "The strange capacity which we have for being affected by
melody and harmony, may be taken to imply both that it is within the
possibilities of our nature to realize those intenser delights they
dimly suggest, and that they are in some way concerned in the
realization of them. If so the power and the meaning of music become
comprehensible; but otherwise they are a mystery." Spencer's
last years were characterized by a collapse of his initial optimism,
replaced instead by a pessimism regarding the future of mankind.
Nevertheless, he devoted much of his efforts in reinforcing his
arguments and preventing the misinterpretation of his monumental
theory of non - interference. Spencer's reputation among the Victorians owed a great deal to his agnosticism. He rejected theology as
representing the 'impiety of the pious.' He was to gain much notoriety
from his repudiation of traditional religion, and was frequently
condemned by religious thinkers for allegedly advocating atheism and
materialism. Nonetheless, unlike Huxley, whose agnosticism was a
militant creed directed at ‘the unpardonable sin of faith’ (in Adrian
Desmond’s phrase), Spencer insisted that he was not concerned to
undermine religion in the name of science, but to bring about a
reconciliation of the two. Starting
either from religious belief or from science, Spencer argued, we are
ultimately driven to accept certain indispensable but literally
inconceivable notions. Whether we are concerned with a Creator or the
substratum which underlies our experience of phenomena, we can frame no
conception of it. Therefore, Spencer concluded, religion and science
agree in the supreme truth that the human understanding is only capable
of 'relative' knowledge. This is the case since, owing to the inherent
limitations of the human mind, it is only possible to obtain knowledge
of phenomena, not of the reality ('the absolute') underlying phenomena.
Hence both science and religion must come to recognize as the 'most
certain of all facts that the Power which the Universe manifests to us
is utterly inscrutable.' He called this awareness of 'the Unknowable'
and he presented worship of the Unknowable as capable of being a
positive faith which could substitute for conventional religion.
Indeed, he thought that the Unknowable represented the ultimate stage
in the evolution of religion, the final elimination of its last
anthropomorphic vestiges. Spencerian
views in 21st century circulation derive from his political theories
and memorable attacks on the reform movements of the late 19th century.
He has been claimed as a precursor by libertarians and anarcho - capitalism. Economist Murray Rothbard called Social Statics "the greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written." Spencer
argued that the state was not an "essential" institution and that it
would "decay" as voluntary market organization would replace the
coercive aspects of the state. He also argued that the individual had a "right to ignore the state." As a result of this perspective, Spencer was harshly critical of patriotism. In response to being told that British troops were in danger during the Second Afghan War,
he replied: "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." Politics
in late Victorian Britain moved in directions that Spencer disliked,
and his arguments provided so much ammunition for conservatives and
individualists in Europe and America that they still are in use in the
21st century. The expression ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA), made famous by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, may be traced to its emphatic use by Spencer. By
the 1880s he was denouncing "the new Toryism" (that is, the "social
reformist wing" of the Liberal party - the wing to some extent hostile
to Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone,
this faction of the Liberal party Spencer compared to the
interventionist "Toryism" of such people as the former Conservative
party Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli). In The Man versus the State (1884), he
attacked Gladstone and the Liberal party for losing its proper mission
(they should be defending personal liberty, he said) and instead
promoting paternalist social legislation (what Gladstone himself called
"Construction" an element in the modern Liberal party that he opposed).
Spencer denounced Irish land reform, compulsory education, laws to
regulate safety at work, prohibition and temperance laws, tax funded
libraries, and welfare reforms. His main objections were threefold: the
use of the coercive powers of the government, the discouragement given
to voluntary self - improvement, and the disregard of the "laws of life."
The reforms, he said, were tantamount to "socialism", which he said was
about the same as "slavery" in terms of limiting human freedom. Spencer
vehemently attacked the widespread enthusiasm for annexation of
colonies and imperial expansion, which subverted all he had predicted
about evolutionary progress from ‘militant’ to ‘industrial’ societies
and states. Spencer anticipated many of the analytical standpoints of later libertarian theorists such as Friedrich Hayek,
especially in his "law of equal liberty", his insistence on the limits
to predictive knowledge, his model of a spontaneous social order, and
his warnings about the "unintended consequences" of collectivist social
reforms.
Spencer is sometimes credited for the
Social Darwinist model
that applied the law of the survival of the fittest to society.
Humanitarian impulses had to be resisted as nothing should be allowed
to interfere with nature's laws, including the social struggle for
existence. According to a review of the JSTOR English
language database, the term "social Darwinism" was first used in an
English language academic journal in a 1895 book review by the Harvard
economist Frank Taussig (It
had been used as early as 1877 in Europe). JSTOR data indicates that
term was only used 21 times before 1931. The first time Spencer was
associated with "social Darwinism" was in a 1937 book review by Leo Rogin. Spencer's reputation as a Social Darwinist can be largely traced to Richard Hofstadter's book Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860 - 1915,
"a hostile critique of Spencer's work, published in 1944, [which] sold
in large numbers and was very influential, especially in academic
circles. It claimed that Spencer had used evolution to justify economic
and social inequality, and to support a political stance of extreme
conservatism, which led, amongst other things, to the eugenics
movement. In simple terms, it is as if Spencer's phrase, 'the survival
of the fittest,' had been claimed by him as the basis of a political
doctrine." While Hofstadter is generally credited with popularizing the term in his book "Social Darwinism in American Life" it was Talcott Parsons who
paved the way for Hofstadter. In his hugely influential book "The
Structure of Social Action" (1937) Parsons wrote that "Spencer is dead"
and then went on to define social Darwinism. "Parsons's wide definition
of Social Darwinism, including anyone who applied biological ideas in
the social sciences, also helped to admit Spencer and (to a lesser
extent) Sumner [to the category of social Darwinist]...". Use
of the term skyrocketed after Hofstader's book was published in 1944,
and Hofstader is frequently cited in the secondary literature as an
authoritative account of the Synthetic Philosophy. Princeton University economist Tim Leonard (2009) has argued, in the article Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism, that Hofstadter's influential characterization of Spencer is flawed. According to Roderick Long,
Leonard argues that "Hofstadter is guilty of distorting Spencer's free
market views and smearing them with the taint of racist Darwinian
collectivism." Leonard
suggests that, through constant repetition, Hofstadter's Spencer has
taken on a life of its own, his views and arguments represented by the
same few passages, usually cited not directly from the source but from
Hofstadter's rather selective quotations. While Spencer did advocate
"survival of the fittest" in the competition among men, Leonard
emphasizes that it is inaccurate to call Spencer a Social Darwinist, because he actually held Lamarckian views: he believed that parents acquire traits through voluntary exertion and then pass on them to their progeny. The
claim that Spencer was a social darwinist might have its origin in a
flawed understanding of his support for competition. Whereas in biology
the competition of various organisms can result in the death of a
species or organism, the kind of competition Spencer advocated is
closer to the one used by economists, where competing individuals or
firms improve the well being of the rest of society. Furthermore,
Spencer viewed charity and altruism positively, as he believed in
voluntary association and informal care as opposed to using government
machinery.
While
most philosophers fail to achieve much of a following outside the
academy of their professional peers, by the 1870s and 1880s Spencer had
achieved an unparalleled popularity, as the sheer volume of his sales
indicate. He was probably the first, and possibly the only, philosopher
in history to sell over a million copies of his works during his own
lifetime. In the United States, where pirated editions were still
commonplace, his authorized publisher, Appleton, sold 368,755 copies
between 1860 and 1903. This figure did not differ much from his sales
in his native Britain, and once editions in the rest of the world are
added in the figure of a million copies seems like a conservative
estimate. As
William James remarked,
Spencer "enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative mind of
countless doctors, engineers, and lawyers, of many physicists and
chemists, and of thoughtful laymen generally." The aspect of his thought that emphasized individual self - improvement found a ready audience in the skilled working class. Spencer's
influence among leaders of thought was also immense, though it was most
often expressed in terms of their reaction to, and repudiation of, his
ideas. As his American follower John Fiske observed, Spencer's ideas were to be found "running like the weft through all the warp" of Victorian thought. Such varied thinkers as Henry Sidgwick, T.H. Green, G.E. Moore, William James, Henri Bergson, and Émile Durkheim defined their ideas in relation to his. Durkheim’s Division of Labour in Society is
to a very large extent an extended debate with Spencer, from whose
sociology, many commentators now agree, Durkheim borrowed extensively. In post 1863 Uprising Poland, many of Spencer's ideas became integral to the dominant fin - de - siècle ideology, "Polish Positivism". The leading Polish writer of the period, Bolesław Prus, hailed Spencer as "the Aristotle of the nineteenth century" and adopted Spencer's metaphor of society - as - organism, giving it a striking poetic presentation in his 1884 micro-story, "Mold of the Earth", and highlighting the concept in the introduction to his most universal novel, Pharaoh (1895). The
early 20th century was hostile to Spencer. Soon after his death, his
philosophical reputation went into a sharp decline. Half a century
after his death, his work was dismissed as a "parody of philosophy", and the historian Richard Hofstadter called him "the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual, and the prophet of the cracker barrel agnostic." Nonetheless, Spencer’s thought had penetrated so deeply into the Victorian age that his influence did not disappear entirely. In the late 20th century, however, much more positive estimates have appeared. In his 1955 book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, Hofstadter commented that Spencer's views inspired Andrew Carnegie's and Willam Graham Summers' conceptions of capitalism.
Despite
his reputation as a Social Darwinist, Spencer's political thought has
been open to multiple interpretations. His political philosophy could
both provide inspiration to those who believed that individuals were
masters of their fate, who should brook no interference from a meddling
state, and those who believed that social development required a strong
central authority. In
Lochner v. New York, conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court could
find inspiration in Spencer's writings for striking down a New York law
limiting the number of hours a baker could work during the week, on the
ground that this law restricted liberty of contract. Arguing against the majority's holding that a "right to free contract" is implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote:
"The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social
Statics." Spencer has also been described as a quasi - anarchist, as well as an outright anarchist. Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov, in his 1909 book Anarchism and Socialism, labeled Spencer a "conservative Anarchist." Spencer's ideas became very influential in China and Japan largely
because he appealed to the reformers' desire to establish a strong
nation - state with which to compete with the Western powers. His
thought
was introduced by the Chinese scholar Yen Fu, who saw his writings as a prescription for the reform of the Qing state. Spencer also influenced the Japanese Westernizer Tokutomi Soho,
who believed that Japan was on the verge of transitioning from a
"militant society" to an "industrial society," and needed to quickly
jettison all things Japanese and take up Western ethics and learning. He also corresponded with Kaneko Kentaro, warning him of the dangers of imperialism. Savarkar writes in his Inside the enemy camp, about reading all of Spencer's works, of his great interest in them, of their translation into Marathi, and their influence on the likes of Tilak and Agarkar, and the affectionate sobriquet given to him in Maharashtra - Harbhat Pendse.
Spencer also exerted a great influence on
literature and rhetoric. His 1852 essay, “The Philosophy of Style,” explored a growing trend of formalist approaches to writing. Highly focused on the proper placement and ordering of the parts of an English sentence, he created a guide for effective composition. Spencer’s aim was to free prose writing from as much "friction and inertia" as possible, so that the reader would not be slowed by strenuous
deliberations concerning the proper context and meaning of a sentence.
Spencer argued that it is the writer's ideal "To so present ideas that
they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort" by the reader. He argued that by making the meaning as readily accessible as possible, the writer would achieve the greatest possible communicative efficiency.
This was accomplished, according to Spencer, by placing all the
subordinate clauses, objects and phrases before the subject of a
sentence so that, when readers reached the subject, they had all the
information they needed to completely perceive its significance. While
the overall influence that “The Philosophy of Style” had on the field
of rhetoric was not as far reaching as his contribution to other
fields, Spencer’s voice lent authoritative support to formalist views of rhetoric. Spencer also had an influence on literature, as many novelists and short story authors came to address his ideas in their work. George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Bolesław Prus, Abraham Cahan, D.H. Lawrence, Machado de Assis, Richard Austin Freeman, and Jorge Luis Borges all referenced Spencer. Arnold Bennett greatly praised First Principles, and the influence it had on Bennett may be seen in his many novels. Jack London went so far as to create a character, Martin Eden, a staunch Spencerian. It has also been suggested that the character of "Vershinin" in Anton Chekhov's play The Three Sisters is a dedicated Spencerian. H.G. Wells used Spencer's ideas as a theme in his novella, The Time Machine, employing them to explain the evolution of man into two species. It is perhaps the best testimony to the influence of
Spencer’s beliefs and writings that his reach was so diverse. He
influenced not only the administrators who shaped their societies’
inner workings, but also the artists who helped shape those societies'
ideals and beliefs. |