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Spencer, Herbert

He was representative of an important aspect of the Victorian period in his faith in evolutionary theory and his trust in scientific progress. He is most notably associated with the phrase `Social Darwinism', which can be roughly glossed as extreme laissez-faire economics endowed with a supposed biological sanction. Basing his ideas on the evolutionary theories of the French scientist Lamarck (1744-1829), a forerunner of Darwin, Spencer concluded that everything was in the process of development, interaction, change, growth and progress. In this way, the laws of science, nature and evolution could only be beneficial. Spencer regarded society as an organism which was evolving from a simple primitive state to a complex heterogeneous form according to the designs of an unknown and unknowable absolute force. The same theory was applied to the development of knowledge from an undifferentiated mass into the various separate sciences. Spencer's scientific determinism was extremely popular in the latter half of the 19th century. He formulated his ideas independently of Darwin and was responsible for coining the phrase `survival of the fittest' which he used as early as 1852. In that year Spencer heard Thomas Huxley's paper on oceanic hydrozoa and used some facts from it in his `Theory of Population deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility'. He also helped to put the word `evolution' into common parlance in the 1850s. Some of his more influential books were Social Statics (1850), in which he developed his idea of progress as inevitable rather than accidental, and Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical (1861) in which he claimed that science (including social science, psychology, economics, sociology and political theory) was the only discipline worth studying. The best-selling The Man Versus the State (1884) proclaimed the popular notion that individual freedom depended on the absence of all forms of interference including government intervention. In 1857 Spencer decided on a massive system of philosophy, beginning with the humble biological origins and ending with the highest ethical principles, that was to be his life's work. The ten volumes of his System of Synthetic Philosophy took him nearly forty years to produce and included First Principles (1862), and volumes on biology, psychology, morality and sociology. It was completed in 1896. At the height of his popularity he influenced George Eliot (with whom he was romantically linked for a time) who applied his Principles of Psychology to the detailed creation of her characters. The character of Casaubon in Middlemarch is based on Spencer. Others he influenced included T. H. Huxley, John Stuart Mill, and Beatrice Webb.

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Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature, © Bloomsbury 1997

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REFERENCES

Duncan, David, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, London: Methuen, 1908.

Francis, Mark, “Herbert Spencer and the Mid-Victorian Scientists”, in Metascience, 1986.

Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944, London: Oxford University Press, 1945; revised edition, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Lightman, Bernard, The Origins of Agnosticism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Moore, James, “Herbert Spencer's Henchmen”, in Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief, edited by Durant, John, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.

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Peel, J. D.Y., Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist, London: Heinemann, and New York: Basic Books, 1971.

Richards, R. J., Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Spencer, Herbert, Autobiography, 2 vols, London: Williams and Norgate, 1904.

Taylor, M. W., Men versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Wiltshire, David, The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Young, Robert M., Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.

Brinton, Crane, “Spencer” in his English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, London: Benn, 1933; 2nd edition, London: Benn, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1949.

Duncan, David, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, London: Methuen, 1908; 2 vols, New York: Appleton, 1908.

Gray, Tim S., The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer: Individualism and Organicism, Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Avebury, 1996.

Kennedy, James G., Herbert Spencer, Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Paxton, Nancy, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Peel, J D.Y., Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist, London: Heinemann, and New York: Basic Books, 1971.

Perrin, Robert G., Herbert Spencer: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, New York and London: Garland, 1993.

Riley, Jonathan, “Mill's Utilitarianism” in his Liberal Utilitarianism: Social Choice Theory and J.S. Mill's Philosophy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Taylor, M W., Men versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Weinstein, D, Equal Freedom and Utility: Herbert Spencer's Liberal Utilitarianism, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Wiltshire, David, The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Spencer’s main work is his ten-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy, published by Williams & Norgate of London, and appearing in the following order: .