7 Key excerpts on "Herbert Spencer"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology

  An Encyclopedia

  • R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Edmund Neill Edmund Neill

  Spencer, Herbert Spencer, Herbert

  798 802

  Spencer, Herbert

  Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), British philosopher, sociologist, social theorist, and anthropologist, was one of the most prominent and influential propagators of evolutionary theory in the 19th century.

  Biography and Major Works

  Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, the eldest and only surviving son of a headmaster. Clearly influenced both by his father and, more generally, by the stimulating nonconformist culture of Derby in the early 19th century, with its emphasis on the importance of radical reform, free trade, technical skill, scientific exploration, and a rational approach to religion, he also reacted against both of these influences. In particular, despite a clear and continuing interest in what he called “the Unknowable” throughout his life, Spencer rejected his father’s more conventional belief in God and was only partially influenced by Derby’s experimental culture, preferring theorizing over practical experiment. This was a preference to which he constantly adhered, despite a wide-ranging education under the tutelage of his uncle the Rev. Thomas Spencer, which included studying Latin, Greek, French, algebra, chemistry, physics, and political economy, and the practical experience of working as a civil engineer for various rail companies. Although he possessed considerably more genuine practical experience than many of the London intellectuals with whom he became associated, including John Stuart Mill, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Harriet Martineau, Spencer, from early on, tended to use information to confirm his initial hypotheses, rather than being genuinely open to empirical correction.

  After refusing a permanent post on the Birmingham-Gloucester railway in 1841, Spencer drifted for several years, interesting himself in everything from phrenology to political economy, although his ambition was increasingly to become a journalist and an influential commentator. This he began to achieve after his appointment as subeditor of The Economist after 1848, and especially after he published “The Development Hypothesis” and “A Theory of Population” in 1852. The former article in particular, allegedly produced in reaction to Charles Lyell’s claim in The Principles of Geology (1830–1833) that species were essentially fixed, and praised by Charles Darwin, marked an important moment in Spencer’s career, since it was the first influential statement of Spencer’s belief in evolution. Important, too, was his second book, The Principles of Psychology (1855), which argued that the workings of the mind could all be explained by fixed material laws associated with evolution, and which caused considerable controversy among the London intelligentsia, even before the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859. But it was only in 1860 that Spencer was able to settle down to developing the implications of what he called his “synthetic philosophy” on a full-time basis—namely, the attempt to explain systematically how materialist laws could explain not only the nature of evolution and the workings of the mind but also how societies developed, how morality operated, and even how political life should be organized. Before he could do so, however, Spencer had to recover from a shattering nervous breakdown in 1855, which meant that he could only ever work for 3 hours a day at most. Spencer’s breakdown might have resulted in considerable financial difficulties, but he was fortunately saved by the intervention of an American admirer, Edward Youmans, who successfully marketed Spencer’s writings in the United States and hence secured him a regular income for the rest of his life. An important popularizer, Youmans not only encouraged the reading of Spencer’s existing works but also commissioned him to write more than 90 articles for his magazine, Popular Science Monthly.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Fifty Major Political Thinkers

  • Ian Adams, R.W. Dyson(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Principles of Ethics (1892–3). He seems to have been prone to bouts of depression, and in his later years became embroiled in a number of acrimonious controversies that undermined his failing health.

  The founding principle of Spencer’s philosophy, considered both generally and with regard to his political and social doctrines, is the idea of evolution: the ‘principle of continuity’, as he called it. The presence of fossil remains in railway cuttings first stimulated his interest in evolution. It was he and not Darwin who coined the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’. Spencer was resistant to Darwin’s idea of natural selection, preferring instead the Lamarckian hypothesis that organisms acquire from their environment adaptive characteristics that are then inherited by successive generations. It is, Spencer believes, the nature of all organisms to move from a condition of homogeneity or simplicity towards heterogeneity and complexity. This movement is characteristic of nature as a whole, and societies evolve in this way as well as individuals. Social evolution is a process of development from homogenous primitive societies to complex heterogeneous ones exhibiting an increasingly complex differentiation of functions. Societies, Spencer believes, have a natural tendency to evolve from monarchical and military to industrial and co-operative forms of organisation. But societies, though in a certain sense ‘organisms’, are nothing more than collections of individuals seeking happiness – that is, seeking to achieve a surplus of pleasure over pain (Spencer is in this respect a utilitarian) – and co-operating with one another in order to do so. Individuals begin to co-operate in order to avoid the threat of violence and war. As they become increasingly aware of the benefits of cooperation, so also do they become aware of the individuality of others. This awareness, augmented by the natural sympathy that Spencer thinks human beings feel for one another, leads them to recognise a fundamental law (although Spencer is not wholly clear about whether it is a moral law or a maxim of prudence or a descriptive natural law) called the ‘law of equal freedom’. This law states that every man has freedom to do whatever he likes, provided he does not infringe the equal freedom of anyone else to do the same. It will be noticed that, in so far as it purports to describe the development of human associations, Spencer’s evolutionary theory also functions as a philosophy of history. Societies advance from militarism to industry, from primitive to advanced, from barbarism to civilisation.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought (set)

  • Gregory Claeys(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  Clive E. Hill Clive E. Hill

  Spencer, Herbert Spencer, herbert

  761 766

  Spencer, Herbert

  The English scholar Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) is generally credited with making a major contribution to the development of sociology in the nineteenth century, although his writings actually covered an extremely wide range of subjects, partly because he saw himself as the author of a complete worldview—a “synthetic philosophy”—which universalized a theory of progress through evolution. Spencer’s works had a significant impact on the biological sciences (he coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” in 1864) and on political thought, as he was a formidable advocate of an ultra-individualist version of Victorian liberalism. In fact, his vision of the good society involved such a small conception of the role of government that he might even be described in modern parlance as a minarchist, while his evolutionary thought anticipated some aspects of socio-biology and functionalist sociology. Spencer’s critics have often accused him of being an apologist for Victorian social hierarchy, but a more complicated picture emerges if one considers his relatively humble social origins and the controversies that attached to some of his views on religion, evolution, land ownership, and imperialism.

  Key Concepts and Influences

  One of the central concepts of Spencer’s theories was the “individuation” or “differentiation” of things from their immediate environment, an emphasis that led him to frequently stress the importance of individuality and specialization. No universal mechanism explained this pluralistic tendency in the world, although, as we shall see later, he believed that it was a common consequence of the tendency for natural processes to have more than one effect and for entities that were originally homogenous to become increasingly diverse or heterogeneous. At one and the same time, Spencer frequently emphasized the interdependence

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior

  • Robert J. Richards(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Social Statics . Some of them have a decidedly social-moral source, for example, his notions that the social organism progresses through ever-more-complex stages of the division of labor and that greater individuality within a context of social dependence characterizes those stages. Some of the roots of his later theories, however, bespeak a mixed parentage, reflecting also phrenological and Lamarckian doctrine (as well as engineering principles)—thus his conception of adaptation to a complex social environment and of an equilibration of forces powering ever more articulated development. And some of his later evolutionary notions were simply taken over from the phrenologists and Lamarck, for example, the idea of the inheritance of individual characteristics through use and disuse. The later changes in Spencer’s social doctrine cover over that original conceptual environment in which his evolutionary theory grew. But it is his youthful utopian vision of a morally perfect terminus to society that makes intelligible to the historian the selective incorporation of these just-mentioned elements into his developing theory of evolution.

  The Development of Spencer’s Theory of Evolution

  Spencer’s ideas about evolution developed against certain moral and social conceptions. The impact of these conceptions penetrated to the very root of his scientific considerations, leading him to identify physiological law with moral principles: “moral truth, as now interpreted,” he concluded in the last chapter of Social Statics , “proves to be a development of physiological truth; for the so-called moral law is in reality the law of complete life.”91 But if moral ideals provided Spencer the mold for his evolutionary conceptions, it is also true that his concentrated effort to work out a theory of evolution produced a reciprocal effect on his moral notions. For example, as he came to have more confidence in the validity of his evolutionary perspective, he depended more on natural law to serve as sanction for his moral principles. Even in Social Statics

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Victorian Values

  Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth Century Society

  • Gordon Marsden(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Nothing! You and I can do nothing at all. It is all a matter of evolution. We can only wait for evolution. Perhaps in four or five thousand years evolution may have carried man beyond this state of affairs. But we can do nothing.

  This is, of course, the reductio ad absurdum of naturalistic ethics. However, it is not difficult to imagine its attractiveness in the period of primitive accumulation of capital in America. His ideas (though much distorted and exaggerated) were used as the basis for the ‘Social Darwinism’ of the Robber Barons, and they dominated American universities between 1860 and 1890. When Spencer visited the United States in 1882 he was treated like royalty. The behaviour of John D. Rockefeller in creating the Standard Oil Trust, along with other attempts at monopoly, were often defended by invoking Spencer’ s theories. Such rapacious behaviour was claimed to lead to progress through struggle, and the elimination of the weak, along with the hierarchical division of labour, was rationalised. Competition, it was argued, gave us the ‘American Beauty’ rose.

  Spencer was the veritable author of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. He can also be said to have condoned starvation of the idle and the shouldering aside of the weak by the strong. However, his own writings on the theory of population and on ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’ (1857), along with his systematic writings, were all predicated on optimism and were in no way designed to condone cruelty. Indeed, on one reading, what he defended was individual competition and not corporate or state rapaciousness. One of his main bugbears was ‘collectivism’. He argued for old-fashioned ‘true’ liberalism and defended a negative concept of liberty as the absence of restraint. The idea was to remove impediments to ‘natural’ progress. This also led him to oppose collective bargaining and trade unions.

  Underlying Spencer’ s belief that evolution was inherently progressive was the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. This meant, quite literally, that life, humanity and society learned from their mistakes and the inheritance of ‘functionally produced modifications’ was for the best. In the human realm individuals would see the reason to move from egotism to altruism and societies from militarism to industrialism. Although the inheritance of acquired characteristics is not now thought to be the mechanism of evolution it was a perfectly respectable theory in Spencer’ s own time.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies

  • Daniel Thomas Cook(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  John R. Morss John R. Morss Morss, John R.

  Spencer, Herbert Spencer, herbert

  1483 1485

  Spencer, Herbert

  The name of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) will ring only faint bells for most scholars of childhood studies. A writer of significant influence in his own lifetime, flourishing in the middle to later decades of the 19th century, Spencer is now referenced rarely, over a century after his death in 1903, in any of the many disciplines to which he contributed: sociology, psychology, education, philosophy, public policy, and political economy. However, Spencer synthesised and promulgated many of the most influential ideas of his times with respect to a scientific understanding of humanity as a natural species defined by biology yet at the same time endowed with the potential and perhaps the obligation to strive for societal advancement.

  Spencer remains well known for coining the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ by which he sought to capture the essence of the Darwinian discovery of evolutionary descent with modification. The term ‘Social Darwinist’ is, therefore, easy to apply to Spencer and while accurate to the extent that Spencer sought to integrate Darwinism as he understood it into a science of society, and to work out the consequences for education and for social policy, the term both obscures and oversimplifies Spencer’s objectives. If not sophisticated, Spencer’s thought was complex. Spencer was no eugenicist and he considered competition to have a limited although vital role in the forwards and upwards movement of individuals or civilisations. He rejected the term ‘laissez-faire’ at least in the context of education, which, while calling for a degree of self-direction in the learner, also calls for adult input and support. Even leaving aside Spencer’s questionable grasp of Darwinism, the term ‘social evolutionist’ if less evocative, would be more accurate than ‘Social Darwinist’. Indeed, Spencer has been credited with establishing the connection between the term ‘evolution’, which of course as such predated Darwin, and the Darwinian account. Darwin himself rarely used the term ‘evolution’, which had previously been used with the sense of an unfolding of a potential, preferring ‘descent with modification’. It was Spencer who ensured that the term ‘evolution’ connoted, for a mass audience, the kinds of process being uncovered by the new investigations. In doing so, Spencer succeeded in indicating to the English-speaking world that Darwin’s proposals about a natural form of the breeder’s art connected up with classic questions. However, Spencer’s use of the term ‘evolution’ also had the effect of muddying the water in the sense of underplaying the novelty of Darwin’s position.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  J. A. Hobson

  A Reader

  • Michael Freeden(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In what sense was he representative? He has not succeeded in making us a nation of scientific philosophers. It cannot even be claimed that he has a large, widespread school or cult. Fame – even a moderate degree of recognition – did not come to him until late in middle life. Though he had been writing closely and continuously since 1842 (many of his most germinal thoughts are to be found in his early scattered writings) it would be safe to say that in 1870 not one in a hundred ‘educated’ Englishmen knew of him more than his bare name. In our Universities and in orthodox scientific circles the claims of a Synthetic Philosophy were regarded with chilly disparagement, or with unintelligent contempt, as the sensational folly of a self-educated outsider. And yet he is ‘representative’. We are all Spencerians today, whether we like it or not. It is true that he had important intellectual allies, such as Lewes, Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin. But while one of these, Darwin, exercised a more direct, immediate, and distinct impression on his age, Spencer must be regarded as the most important, because the largest interpretation and application of the new scientific principles came from him. He was born, 1820, into an England of strong formative intellectual influences and a growing belief in Science. The dominating mind of Bentham was a most significant sign of the new unifying and ordering force in human life. The Utilitarianism of Bentham was only another name for science in the service of man. Law, Politics, History, Ethics, Sociology, were just becoming possible as Sciences. This force of utilitarianism coalesced with another impulse. The New biology was transforming the statical conception of life into the dynamic. Haggling about precedence in the co-operative commonwealth of thought is an idle occupation. Malthus, Spencer, Darwin, Wallace, all contributed to formulate the revolutionary meaning of the new knowledge as applied to Man. Spencer’s paper entitled ‘The Development Hypothesis’ (1852), was admitted by Darwin to have been the first clear anticipation of the leading doctrines of Evolution. Biology – the seed-bed of the new thought – furnished formulæ and analogies, sometimes perilous, but necessary tools in scientific progress.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book