SPENCER, HERBERT (1820–1903)

SPENCER, HERBERT (1820–1903)

The Victorian polymath, Herbert Spencer, is commonly esteemed for his contribution to the development of nineteenth-century sociology. Also famous for coining the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’ (1864) and supporting an ultra-individualist liberalism in politics, Spencer saw himself as the author of a complete world-view (his ‘synthetic Philosophy’) that universalized a theory of progress through evolution. This purported to describe the interconnections of physics, biology, philosophy, psychology and sociology, as well as all the other natural and social sciences, by making extended use of the philosophical intuition of SCHELLING (later adopted by COLERIDGE) that all existing things tend to distinguish themselves from their environment—‘individuation’ or ‘differentiation’. Although Spencer’s system has frequently been interpreted as a mere apology for the social order of Victorian Britain, his relationship with ‘the establishment’ was ambiguous, given his relatively humble social origins and his views on issues such as evolution, religion, land ownership and imperialism: his final public action was a denunciation of the Boer War.

Born into a lower middle-class Derbyshire family in 1820 and privately educated by his schoolmaster father and his uncles, Spencer was raised in the English tradition of individualistic and evangelical Christianity. Despite a well-recorded liaison with Mary Ann Evans (a.k.a. George Eliot) in the early 1850s, and a wide-ranging social life, he was

a life-long bachelor. He worked as a railway engineer from 1837 to 1848, with only occasional forays into journalism, although recent historical scholarship has revived interest in an early political publication, a series of letters on The Proper Sphere of Government (also issued as a pamphlet) in 1843. Spencer’s workplace experiences stimulated a life-long interest in both mathematics and the natural sciences, but, in the mid-1840s, various attempts to make his fortune through industrial and medical inventions all failed. In 1848 he became a full-time professional writer in London. From 1864 to 1893, he was a member of the elite scientific association, ‘The X Club’, whose other members were Busk, Frankland, Hirst, Hooker, HUXLEY, Lubbock, Spotiswoode and Tyndall: DARWIN and GALTON were occasional guests. It was from this association that he acquired the entirely appropriate nickname of ‘Xhaustive’ Spencer!

The first of Spencer’s works to receive significant attention from his contemporaries was a heterodox book on individualistic ethics and politics (Social Statics, 1850/1) in which he sought to apply his ‘equal freedom principle’ to a variety of practical issues, while in 1855 he published the less well-received Principles of Psychology that attempted to explain human intelligence in terms of the Lamarckian evolution of the species. This relative failure encouraged Spencer to undertake the grand project of a 10-volume ‘system of synthetic Philosophy’ in order to disseminate his general conception of evolution and rebut his critics. The ‘system’ took up most of the rest of his adult life, partly because several volumes were amended and republished several times before his death in 1903, although the final volume (part of the enlarged Principles of Sociology) was completed in 1896. The major components of the ‘system’ were First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (1862; with five subsequent editions), The Principles of Biology (1864–7; with a revised edition in 1898–9), The Principles of Psychology (1855; with three subsequent editions), The Principles of Sociology (1876; with two subsequent

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and enlarged editions) and The Principles of Ethics (1879; with two subsequent, enlarged editions). Other major works were Education: Intellectual, Moral, Physical (1860), Descriptive Sociology (1867–81; and posthumously 1910–34), The Study of Sociology (1873; with twenty (!) subsequent editions), The Man Versus the State (1883), Various Fragments (1897; with a subsequent edition) and Facts and Comments (1902; with a subsequent edition), and the posthumous An Autobiography (1904)—which was largely written in the 1880s.

Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy was open to (and often received) the charge of atheistic materialism for, despite seeking to appear agnostic rather than deliberately irreligious, it set aside the question of the ultimate causes of things (in themselves) as ‘The Unknowable’. The initial assumption of the ‘synthetic Philosophy’ was that force is universally persistent and matter is indestructible, although motion and matter are periodically absorbed and dissipated (‘dissolution’) into simpler forms when systems become overcomplex and unsustainable. Nevertheless, the ‘multiplication of effects’ over time favours the development of complex bodies in both the inorganic and the organic portions of the universe. The most famous expression of this ‘induction’ as a ‘rational generalization’ was Spencer’s 1857 statement that ‘Every active force produces more than one change—every cause produces more than one effect’ and his further observation from the same year that (as ‘an inevitable corollary’ of the former) ‘throughout creation there must have gone on, and must still go on, a never-ceasing transformation of the homogenous into the heterogeneous’.

At much the same time, he concluded that (at least in principle) it should be possible to order the whole of human knowledge on the basis of the concepts just outlined, the last of which had originally formulated by the German embryologist, Karl Ernst Von Baer (1792–1876).

In his Autobiography, Spencer claimed that studying Lyell’s Principles of Geology led him to reject the Lyellian critique of Lamarck in 1840, and to accept that ‘all organic forms’ had ‘arisen by progressive modifications, physically caused and inherited’. This idea later appeared in Spencer’s early publications and by the 1860s (when writing The Principles of Biology ) he concluded that simple forms of life were inherently unstable and prone to modification, because they were unequally exposed to the primeval forces posited by his philosophy as a whole. As well as noting the effects of heat and light, Spencer speculated that ‘[c]ontinued pressure on living tissue, by modifying the processes going on…[within] it…gradually diminishes and finally destroys its power of resuming the outline it had at first’ (1864) and that, as a consequence, all organisms sought to re-establish equilibrium with their environment through adaptation, which led to the observable phenomenon of organic evolution. Furthermore, complex beings could

be said to be ‘superior’ to (or more ‘efficient’ than) their primitive ancestors because they embodied more completely the principle of ‘the physiological division of labour’ as expounded by a French zoologist, Henri Milne-Edwards (1800–65)—a principle that Spencer himself came to agree with during the 1850s.

Spencer’s mature theory described the Lamarckian form of adaptation as ‘direct equilibration’, but he acknowledged that this could not explain all known examples of biological development and he drew upon the recently published Darwinian concept of ‘natural selection’ to complete the argument. Where only part of a species survived exposure to a selective environmental pressure, an inherited (but static) characteristic that

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allowed the remnant to continue and procreate could be preserved and become dominant. Here, Spencer spoke of the ‘indirect equilibration’ of a species and its environment. Moreover, when a whole species failed to adapt successfully and became extinct— thereby failing the test of ‘fitness’ provided by its environment—the biosphere as a whole could be said to have returned to equilibrium, despite the temporary loss of diversity. In the latter years of his life, Spencer wrote several articles defending this theory against the neo-Darwinian ideas of Auguste Weismann (1834–1914).

In the early part of his career, Spencer was a believer in phrenology and, in 1852, he attempted to synthesize phrenological and associationist ideas in a literary essay on ‘The Philosophy of Style’. However, when it came to developing his ‘synthetic Philosophy’, Spencer did not seek to defend phrenology. Instead, he contended that human consciousness had evolved as a result of general physical evolution, rather than arising from the state of one particular organ (i.e. the skull). Spencer argued that the sophistication of human consciousness reflected, and corresponded to, the sophistication of the structure and functions of the human nervous system, even if the ‘substance of Mind’ itself could not be known. All of the higher animals (and not just humans) made use of mental processes to adjust to their environments and the nervous system changed slowly over time, so that both the physical adaptation and the corresponding association of ideas could be transmitted across the generations. Instinct, emotion, will and reason were all, in effect, Lamarckian adaptations. For example, the association of pleasure with experiences that were useful in the struggle for survival was a ‘naturalization’ of the psychological theories of Locke, Hartley and JAMES MILL, although Spencer believed that the psychological and instinctual inheritance of each individual prevented children from being ‘tabula rasa’.

Another important consequence of Spencer’s presupposition that individual human psychologies (and consequently the social life of human groups) were determined by a combination of their evolutionary origins and the physiological qualities of the species was the further assumption that the bodily differences between the sexes were sociologically important. In Social Statics, Spencer had argued that ‘differences of bodily organization’ and ‘trifling mental variations’ between the sexes should not disqualify women from enjoying equal political and civil rights, but in The Principles of Sociology

he abandoned this position and took a more conservative view. There, he argued that women’s intellectual and emotional growth was retarded by the physiological process of child-bearing, and that the traditional combination of male aggression and female submission had been socially selected in the earliest stages of human evolution. Hence, Spencer became a firm opponent of female emancipation and argued that modern women retained a sufficient measure of ‘social power’ to defend their own interests and to contribute to the education of all children within the family. The latter function was particularly important because it ensured the maintenance and development of the ethic of ‘private beneficence’ necessary for the effective operation of Spencer’s laissez-faire utopia (see below).

Spencer’s ethical theory was certainly characterized by a stronger measure of continuity than his views on psychology and gender, for he consistently defended the equal-freedom principle that he first expounded in Social Statics: ‘Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man’ (1850/1). Moreover, his later works clarified the benefits of utilitarian and liberal

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actions on the same grounds established by his evolutionary psychology, at least to his own satisfaction. Pleasure improves function while negative freedom, as opposed to paternalistic dependence, establishes the necessary adaptive connection between actions and consequences, even if the interdependence associated with voluntary co-operation and restraint based on contract is an inevitable feature of ‘higher’ societies. Good conduct was defined as action that maximized ‘rational’ utility (for everyone) in a society arranged in accordance with the ‘law of equal freedom’. At the same time, Spencer was eventually forced to admit that his evolutionary principles could not act as a substitute for moral judgement and calculation of a more traditional kind: ‘The Doctrine of Evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent I had hoped. Most of the conclusions drawn empirically, are such as right feelings, enlightened by cultivated intelligence, have already sufficed to establish’ (1893).

A similar criticism might be directed at Spencer’s sociological system as well, given the tension between the positivist assumption of the possibility of an objective, evolutionary science of society and a periodic recognition that social action must be interpreted sympathetically, with reference to the subjective beliefs of individual human agents. Nevertheless, Spencer’s more typical approach to the subject was objectivist, materialist and functionalist. The physical, biological and economic conditions of a society’s existence and the interdependent arrangement of its parts (each of which was assumed to have self-regulated functions) were far more important to Spencerian social analysis than the ‘independent’ role of social ideologies or personal beliefs. ‘public Opinion’, while important to the theory of social evolution as a whole, was conditioned by social and economic factors, which operated in a reasonably regular and ‘law-like’ fashion. It was therefore possible for Spencer to present his sociological theory as one of ‘superorganic Evolution’, consistent with both the overarching themes of the ‘synthetic Philosophy’ and the encyclopedic tables of ‘sociological Facts’ (collated on both contemporary and historical subjects) found in the Descriptive Sociology.

Herbert Spencer frequently described human society as an ‘organism’ and drew attention to common features shared with biological entities, such as regulative systems (e.g. governments and nerve systems), sustaining systems (e.g. productive industries and nutritional organs) and distributive systems (e.g. roads, railways, veins and arteries). Yet, while an animal organism had a single consciousness that ordered its whole being, a ‘social organism’ enjoyed a heterogeneous and plural consciousness in each and every ‘cell’. Hence, according to Spencer, society had no moral personality that could justify claims against the interests of its members; it could only progress when enough of those members agreed upon the justice of certain practices in a coalition known as ‘Public Opinion’. Such changes, moreover, were deemed to parallel the zoological process of evolution, which—as we have seen—Spencer understood primarily, but not exclusively, as one of Lamarckian ‘functional adaptation’. Thus, according to the principles of Spencerian philosophy, liberal politics and utilitarian ethics could be seen as ‘acquired characteristics’ that benefited the whole ‘social organism’. Yet, in practice, these theories were contested by conservative and socialist thinkers of a variety of hues, whose ideas Spencer felt obliged to rebut in more polemical works, such as The Man versus the State.

In Spencerian sociology, the two great epochs of human history were ‘militant society’ (feudalism) and ‘industrial society’ (capitalism), following as they did upon the original evolution of the organizing structure of our individual lives from family to tribe to nation.

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Thanks to its systematic emphasis upon warfare, ‘militant society’ had been superseded because it was unable to allow civilization to progress by ‘individuation’, that is, by the more and more complex versions of the division of labour that characterized ‘industrial society’. In keeping with the general concept of the ‘social organism’, this liberal, market community was presented as a complex, heterogeneous and individuated system whose development paralleled that of the ‘higher’ animal organisms, because its regulative system—the state—played a restrictive and specialized role.

However, Spencer did not simply describe the ‘night-watchman state’ metaphorically;

he also recommended it in no uncertain terms. As early as 1852, in the essay ‘A Theory of Population’, he had concluded that the Malthusian trap was illusory and that the minimal state was best adapted to preside over a scenario where ‘population pressure’ would generate the reduced species fertility, the increased economic productivity and the co-operative culture of ‘social sentiments’ that would sustain and develop liberalism and capitalism into ever more desirable and eventually even ‘anarchistic’ forms. In later life,

he remained attached to these ideals, but became increasingly disenchanted with the populist element of Gladstonian liberalism—although, as late as 1881, he was a supporter of the ‘Anti-Aggression League’—and with the collectivism of Chamberlain and the ‘New Liberals’. Instead, Spencer became closely associated with the conservatism of the socalled ‘late-Victorian Individualists’, notably through his contribution to the volume of essays A Plea For Liberty (1891), as edited by Thomas Mackay of ‘The Liberty and Property Defence League’, an anti-collectivist pressure group.

At the same time, it should be noted that Spencer seemed more conservative as he grew older, partly because his critics had moved ‘to the left’ and partly because the apparently utopian argument of his most famous early work, Social Statics, was actually qualified in a number of respects. For example, a chapter on ‘The Right to Ignore the State’ acknowledged the right of civil disobedience to unjust laws in principle—as a corollary of the equal-freedom principle—but insisted that its applicability varied ‘directly as the social morality’ was ‘vicious’ (the present) or ‘virtuous’ (the future). Moreover, while a chapter on the land question—‘The Right to the Use of the Earth’— contended that in the ideal ‘industrial society’ everyone would have an equal right to use of the earth’s resources, which could be ensured through common ownership of land, important conditions were applied to this normative recommendation. In particular, Spencer argued that the expropriation of much the greater part of privately owned land (when it was honestly acquired and improved by good management) would involve significant, and probably unaffordable, measures of financial compensation. Hence, questions of practicality and the distinction between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ (that is ideal) ethical principles, as made explicit in Spencer’s later works on Ethics, seem to explain the apparent contradiction between Spencer’s early and late politics, plus the recognition on his part that a ‘land nationalization’ argument could be used to justify other socialistic measures that were quite incompatible with his lionization of the private entrepreneur. Nevertheless, Spencer’s original formulations were indicative of an iconoclastic tendency, given the centrality of land to certain Victorian ideals of ‘home’ and ‘nobility’, and there was indubitably an element of inconsistency over time in his attitudes.

After the First World War, Spencer’s reputation went into a long decline but later, in the 1970s, interest revived. A major dispute arose among scholars when David Wiltshire

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argued that Spencer’s evolutionism, organicism and functionalism were not compatible with his advocacy of laissez-faire and methodological individualism, and John Peel contended that they were. Wiltshire’s critical observation was that liberalism ‘posits the harmonization of the interests of free individuals’ while ‘[s]ocial evolution tends inexorably towards the hegemony of the centralized state, and perpetuates aggression’ and that in ‘this irreconcilable contradiction lies the main flaw of Spencerian social and political theory’ (Wiltshire 1978:256.). On the other hand, another objection might be made to the effect that the slightly later ‘new biology’ of KROPOTKIN (and others) suggested that human social evolution can also be understood in terms of decentralization and peaceful mutual aid. On this second view, Spencer’s fault would not be that of seeking a model for human behaviour in the non-human world, but in positing a capitalist ‘natural order’ (or ‘naturalizing’ capitalism). Nevertheless, Spencer’s ideas seem to have become part of the warp and weft of liberal debate during his lifetime; his work had a significant impact on a number of other nineteenth-century social theorists such as BENJAMIN KIDD, BEATRICE POTTER (WEBB), Lester Frank Ward, SIDNEY WEBB and Edward Youmans, and some of his ideas influenced important figures in the arts, such as the composer Hubert Parry and the novelist Jack London.