Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (born April 27, 1820, Derby, Derbyshire, England—died December 8, 1903, Brighton, Sussex) was an English sociologist and philosopher, an early advocate of the theory of evolution, who achieved an influential synthesis of knowledge, advocating the preeminence of the individual over society and of science over religion. His magnum opus, The Synthetic Philosophy (1896), was a comprehensive work containing volumes on the principles of biology, psychology, morality, and sociology. He is best remembered for his doctrine of social Darwinism, according to which the principles of evolution, including natural selection, apply to human societies, social classes, and individuals as well as to biological species developing over geologic time. In Spencer’s day social Darwinism was invoked to justify laissez-faire economics and the minimal state, which were thought to best promote unfettered competition between individuals and the gradual improvement of society through the “survival of the fittest,” a term that Spencer himself introduced.

Life and works

Spencer’s father, William George Spencer, was a schoolmaster, and his parents’ dissenting religious convictions inspired in him a nonconformity that continued active even after he had abandoned the Christian faith. Spencer declined an offer from his uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, to send him to the University of Cambridge, and in consequence his higher education was largely the result of his own reading, which was chiefly in the natural sciences. He was, for a few months, a schoolteacher and from 1837 to 1841 a railway civil engineer.

In 1842 he contributed some letters (republished later as a pamphlet, The Proper Sphere of Government [1843]) to The Nonconformist, in which he argued that it is the business of governments to uphold natural rights and that they do more harm than good when they go beyond that. After some association with progressive journalism through such papers as The Zoist (devoted to mesmerism, or hypnosis, and phrenology) and The Pilot (the organ of the Complete Suffrage Union), Spencer became in 1848 a subeditor of The Economist. In 1851 he published Social Statics, which contained in embryo most of his later views, including his argument in favour of an extreme form of economic and social laissez-faire. About 1850 Spencer became acquainted with the novelist George Eliot, and his philosophical conversations with her led some of their friends to expect that they would marry, but in his Autobiography (1904) Spencer denies any such desire, much as he admired Eliot’s intellectual powers. Other friends were the writer George Henry Lewes, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, and the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. In 1853 Spencer, having received a legacy from his uncle, resigned his position with The Economist.

Spencer published the first part of The Principles of Psychology in 1855. Between 1854 and 1859 he published a series of essays on education, which were collected in Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861). Spencer rejected some traditional elements of the curriculum and emphasized the importance of self-development, sympathetic attention from instructors, observation and problem solving, physical exercise and free play, and discipline derived from experiencing the natural consequences of one’s actions rather than from punishments imposed by teachers and parents. Education was eventually adopted as a textbook in nearly all teacher-training colleges in England. In 1860 Spencer issued a prospectus and accepted subscriptions for a comprehensive work, The Synthetic Philosophy, which was to include, besides the already-published Principles of Psychology, volumes on first principles and on biology, sociology, and morality. First Principles was published in 1862, and between then and 1896, when the third volume of The Principles of Sociology appeared, the task was completed. In order to prepare the ground for The Principles of Sociology, Spencer started in 1873 a series of works called Descriptive Sociology, in which information was provided about the social institutions of various societies, both “primitive” and “civilized.” The series was interrupted in 1881 because of a lack of public support. Spencer was a friend and adviser of the social reformer Beatrice Potter, later Beatrice Webb, who frequently visited Spencer during his last illness and left a sympathetic and sad record of his last years in My Apprenticeship (1926). Spencer died in 1903, at Brighton, leaving a will by which trustees were set up to complete the publication of the Descriptive Sociology. The series comprised 19 parts (1873–1934).

Spencer was one of the most-argumentative and most-discussed English thinkers of the Victorian era. His strongly scientific orientation led him to urge the importance of examining social phenomena in a scientific way. He believed that all aspects of his thought formed a coherent and closely ordered system. Science and philosophy, he held, gave support to and enhanced individualism and progress. Although it is natural to cite him as the great exponent of Victorian optimism, it is notable that he was by no means unaffected by the pessimism that from time to time clouded the Victorian confidence. Evolution, he taught, would be followed by dissolution, and individualism would come into its own only after an era of socialism and war.

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