Herbert Spencer

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Western Philosophy 19th-century philosophy
Herbert Spencer
Name:	Herbert Spencer
Birth:	27 April, 1820
Death:	8 December, 1903
School/tradition:	Classical liberalism, Evolutionism
Main interests:	Evolution, Laissez-faire, philosophical anarchism
Notable ideas:	survival of the fittest, sociocultural evolution
Influences:	Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Thomas Huxley
Influenced:	Charles Darwin, William Graham Sumner, Thorstein Veblen, Emile Durkheim, Alfred Marshall, Nikolay Mikhaylovsky

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher and prominent classic-liberal political theorist.

Spencer analyzed human societies as evolving systems, and coined the term "survival of the fittest."^[1] The lifelong bachelor contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, metaphysics, religion, politics, rhetoric, biology, sociology, and psychology.

Contents 1 Life 2 Influence 2.1 General 2.2 "Survival of the fittest" 2.3 Politics 2.4 Anti-Imperialism 2.5 Literature 2.6 Holmes' dissent 3 Primary sources 4 Philosophers' critiques 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Life

Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820, the son of William George Spencer (he was called George), an officious but respected educator. Coming from a family of teachers (including his grandfather and uncle) he was encouraged to learn at an early age. During his childhood he was exposed to and enjoyed the many academic books and journals his father made use of. When he was 13 his father sent him to the Hinton Charterhouse near Bath, where his uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, could provide him a more formal education. He did not get along with his uncle at first, finding him to be a bore and resisting his lessons in Latin and Greek and even going so far as to run away back to his father’s home. However, he eventually came to co-exist with his uncle, developing his earliest political and economic ideas in response to Thomas’s radical reformist views. In 1836 his uncle obtained for him a job as a civil engineer on a railway, an experience that deterred him from pursuing a future in professions where he felt bosses exploited the labour of overworked staff. More notably, Spencer began committing his thoughts to paper during this period and upon visiting his uncle some years later at the age of 22, he was encouraged to send a number of letters on politics to a radical newspaper called The Nonconformist. This was the beginning of his involvement in both journalistic media and socio-political rhetoric and the letters would later be published at Spencer’s expense as "On The Proper Sphere of Government".

These early works demonstrated a liberal view of workers' rights and governmental responsibility. He continued in this vein by developing a rationalist philosophy concerning the natural laws of progress. These views would mature into his 1851 manuscript, Social Statics, a document that stressed the importance of looking at the long-term effects of social policy with respect to the nature of man. Spencer is often quoted out of context, making him seem uncompassionate toward the poor and working-class. In actuality he stressed "positive beneficence" and man's evolving "moral faculty," and was ahead of his time in promoting the rights of women and children. It was here that Spencer began developing his view of civilization, not as an artificial construct of man, but as a natural and organic product of social evolution. Interestingly, this predates the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. After a five-year stint as sub-editor of the London financial paper, The Economist, that ended in 1853, Spencer began investing all his time toward writing professionally. In the following years, he would produce works concerning education, science, the railway industry, population explosion, and many other philosophical and sociological topics.

In 1855 Spencer wrote the Principles of Psychology, which explored a theory of the mind as a biological counterpart of the body, rather than as an estranged opposite. In this model, human intelligence was something that had slowly developed as a response to its physical environment. Such an evolutionary view of the origin of man alienated conservative publishers, once again leaving Spencer to publish his work at his own expense. During the writing of Principles of Psychology Spencer traveled about Wales and France, and it was during one of these trips that his health underwent a decline from which it never fully recovered. Although it is unclear exactly what was wrong with him, Spencer suffered from a constant fatigue that made his sleep short and erratic and made long periods of work impossible. While he blamed stress and possibly underdeveloped lungs, the continued deterioration of his health in later years was likely due to a growing dependence on morphine and opium. It is often commented on as ironic that one who felt so passionately about the dominance of the strong and healthy should suffer from such problems.

Despite growing fatigue, Spencer continued writing and in 1858 began work on a large project that would cover his entire philosophy of evolution and the laws of progress. He wished to publish the work incrementally so that he could maintain a prolonged livelihood from its composition, but again he was unable to secure a publisher in any of the regular press. Fortunately, by this time Spencer had endeared himself to the intellectual community of England and a list of private subscriptions to his theory funded his living expenses and his work. Among these intellectuals was Thomas Henry Huxley, another prominent English biologist-philosopher who would remain a close peer of Spencer throughout his life. It was Huxley who included Spencer in the X Club, a dinner club group that met regularly and included some of the most prominent thinkers of their society (a number of whom would become presidents of the Royal Society). Members included physicist-philosopher John Tyndall and banker/archaeologist Sir John Lubbock, and often entertained guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz. 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.

In 1862 Spencer was able to publish First Principles, an exposition of his evolutionary theory of the underlying principles of all domains of reality, which had acted as the foundational beliefs of his previous works. His definition of evolution explained it as the ongoing process by which matter is refined into an increasingly complex and coherent form. This was the main canon of Spencer’s philosophy, a developed and coherently structured explanation of social evolution (that predated Darwin’s major works). By this time Spencer was achieving an international reputation of great respect. His views on man's place in nature were very influential and broadly accepted. While he had an interest in all the sciences, Spencer never committed his time to a single field of study and was not an experimentalist. Perhaps this broad range of knowledge and lack of specialization made his views and writing so accessible and popular. His X Club name was Xhaustive Spencer, denoting the depth to which he would explore a given topic once committed to it. He was, however, always shifting between eclectic projects, making the influence of his work diverse and far-reaching.

In his sixties, Spencer’s health continued to decline and he became increasingly an invalid. In 1882 he attended the funeral of Charles Darwin, breaking a rule of his never to enter a church. In 1884, his work, Man versus the State, was published, outlining his political philosophy. In 1902, shortly before his death, he 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. He is buried in the eastern side of London's Highgate Cemetery.

[edit] Influence

[edit] General

Spencer’s works were widely read in his lifetime, and by 1869 he was able to support himself solely on the profit of book sales. His works were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and he was offered honors and awards all over Europe and North America.

His philosophy proved most useful for conservatism and capitalism, for its conception of social justice, which emphasized the responsibility of individuals for their nature and actions. Spencer supported the “law of equal liberty,” a basic tenet of libertarianism which holds that each individual should be allowed to do as he wills, so long as it does not infringe on the rights of another. American Supreme Court Justices applied his theories in their rulings concerning the restriction of corporate labor practices by government (in favor of the corporations).

However, not only conservatives used Spencer’s theories to promote their views. Many socialists cited his notion of "survival of the fittest" to incite class warfare, and anarchists applied his "autonomy of the individual" to their own beliefs. Spencer has been described as a quasi-anarchist, as well as an outright anarchist. Georgi Plekhanov, in his 1909 Anarchism and Socialism, labeled Spencer a "conservative Anarchist." David Hart, in Radical Liberalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, describes Spencer's political philosophy as "liberal anarchism."

In Right to Ignore the State, Spencer says: "If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state — to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying toward its support." [1] However, anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin have been critical of Spencer: "modern Individualism initiated by Herbert Spencer is, like the critical theory of Proudhon, a powerful indictment against the dangers and wrongs of government, but its practical solution of the social problem is miserable -- so miserable as to lead us to inquire if the talk of 'No force' be merely an excuse for supporting landlord and capitalist domination." ^[2]

In post-1863-Uprising Poland, many of Spencer's views became integral to the dominant ideology, "Polish Positivism." The leading Polish writer of the period, Bolesław Prus, 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).

In the 1890s, Spencer became very influential in China and Japan. He was translated by the Chinese scholar Yen Fu, who saw his writings as a prescription for the reform of the Qing state. ^[3]. 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. ^[4]

Spencer also exerted a substantial influence on Shyamji Krishnavarma, who at Spencer's funeral announced a donation of £1,000 to establish a lectureship at Oxford University in tribute to Spencer and his work

[edit] "Survival of the fittest"

Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," to describe changes in society. London School of Economics professor Rodney Barker writes:

“

Like Darwin, Spencer employed a selective principle to explain social evolution, but he complemented natural selection with the Lamarckian notion of adaptation, and of the inheritability of a predisposition to successful adaptation. His familiar phrase, 'the survival of the fittest', can thus be misleading, in so far as it suggests an arbitrary process depending on the absence or presence of qualities over which the individual or society has no control. The fittest were those who adapted, and there was in principle no limit to the number who might make this accommodation. The struggle for survival was thus not of man against man, but of man against a changing environment.[5]

”

[edit] Politics

Spencer's influence across a broad range of political opposites might seem to point to the presence, in his writings, of contradictory ideas. However, most of the difference is best understood in terms of how various ideologies have applied various aspects of Spencer's broad influence to defending their respective beliefs. This is further complicated by the changing general perception of Spencer from a respected authority to one who has often been criticized as an alleged precursor of the Eugenics movement.

Spencer's two main areas of influence were the scientific evolutionary ideas of survival of the fittest, and his political ideas of radical classic liberalism. To Spencer, these ideas were not contradictory. Survival of the fittest was understood as explaining the perceived human progress from the Industrial Revolution to his day. Further, Spencer viewed the success of liberalism in reducing the power of the state as progress, and as evidence of evolution within human culture. He considered natural rights as a concept through which survival of the fittest acted most effectively in human culture:

“

What, then, do they [Humans] want a government for? Not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion; not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man—to protect person and property—to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak—in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not to be allowed to do more.[6]

”

However, during Spencer's lifetime, liberalism itself was changing from its classic laissez-faire version, aiming at a diminution of state power, to a modern liberalism that proceeded to increase the power and scope of the state. Spencer's belief in natural rights, natural law, and classic liberalism came to be at odds with his view of the "survival of the fittest" as a force that shapes civilization. At this point, too, his followers took diverging paths. Those who supported his view of linear progress and "survival of the fittest" looked, unlike Spencer himself, with favor upon the growing power of government. They included those who rejected his concepts of natural rights and strictly limited government, such as the progressive and eugenics-supporting Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who did not believe in a natural-law limitation to the application of "survival of the fittest" to civilization.

Supporters of Spencer's political writings, classic liberalism, or natural rights philosophy, such as H.L. Mencken, opposed the eugenics movement even when it was politically popular. Most of Spencer's current supporters or defenders, including classic liberals, anarchists, libertarians, and perhaps some conservatives, espouse him for his political philosophy. While some subscribe to Spencer's "survival of the fittest" within the confines of a natural-rights philosophy, others have rejected his ideas of linear progress in favor of Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shift."

[edit] Anti-Imperialism

Like many classical liberals of the period, including William Graham Sumner in the United States, Spencer was an ardent opponent of imperialism and militarism. His critique of the Boer War was especially scathing. He lamented that

“in the Church-services held on the occasion of the departure of troops for South Africa, certain hymns are used in a manner which substitutes for the spiritual enemy the human enemy. Thus for a generation past, under cover of the forms of a religion which preaches peace, love, and forgiveness; there has been a perpetual shouting of the words: 'blood' and 'war', 'fire' and 'battle', and a continual exercise of the antagonistic feelings.” (Facts and Comments, ch. 25.)

[edit] Literature

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" (§3)by the reader. His logic was 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 came to address his ideas in their work. George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Bolesław Prus, Abraham Cahan and D. H. Lawrence 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. 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.

[edit] Holmes' dissent

Spencer is famously referenced in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' dissenting opinion in the landmark United States Supreme Court case of Lochner v. New York, in which the Court struck 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, Holmes wrote: "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics."

[edit] Primary sources

• Most of Spencer's books are available online
• "On The Proper Sphere of Government" (1842)
• Social Statics (1851) abridged version
• "A Theory of Population" (1852)
• The Philosophy of Style (1852)
• Principles of Psychology (1855)
• System of Synthetic Philosophy (1860)
• Education (1861)
• First Principles ISBN 0-89875-795-9 (1862)
• The Data of Ethics (1879)
• The Man Versus the State (1884)
• The Study of Sociology (1896)
• The Principles of Ethical Ideals (1897)
• Autobiography (1904)
• v1 Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer by David Duncan (1908)
• v2 Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer by David Duncan (1908)

[edit] Philosophers' critiques

• Herbert Spencer: An Estimate and Review by Josiah Royce (1904)
• Lectures on the Ethics of T.H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau by Henry Sidgwick (1902)
• A Few Words with Mr Herbert Spencer by Paul Lafargue (1884)

[edit] See also

• Auberon Herbert
• Cultural evolution
• Liberalism
• Contributions to liberal theory
• Libertarianism
• Mold of the Earth (a story by Bolesław Prus, inspired by a concept of Spencer's)
• Scientism and positivism
• Etherscope

[edit] References

• Elliot, Hugh. Herbert Spencer. London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1917
• Kennedy, James G. Herbert Spencer. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1978
• Edwards, Ruth D. The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts ISBN 0-87584-608-4

1. ^ Spencer, Herbert (1864). Principles of Biology. London: Williams and Norgate. 
2. ^ Kropotkin, Peter Act For Yourselves (Freedom Press, London, 1988) [p. 98]
3. ^ Schwartz, Benjamin In Search of Wealth and Power (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1964)
4. ^ Pyle, Kenneth The New Generation in Meiji Japan (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1969)
5. ^ Barker, Rodney (1997). Political Ideas in Modern Britain. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-07121-6. 
6. ^ Spencer, Herbert (1842). The Proper Sphere of Government.

• Elwick, James. 'Herbert Spencer and the Disunity of the Social Organism.' History of Science 41, 2003, pp. 35-72.[2]

[edit] External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Herbert Spencer by David Weinstein.
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Herbert Spencer by William Sweet.
• Works by Herbert Spencer at Project Gutenberg
• "First principles" Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.
• The Right to Ignore the State by Herbert Spencer.
• Extensive biography and overview of works
• Review materials for studying Herbert Spencer
• An article by Roderick Long intending to vindicate Spencer.

Persondata
NAME	Spencer, Herbert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Спенсер, Герберт (Russian)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	English philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	27 April 1820
PLACE OF BIRTH	Derby
DATE OF DEATH	8 December 1903
PLACE OF DEATH