Spencer, Herbert

(1820-1903)

The Victorian prophet of Social Darwinism , who was famous in his time, and especially admired in the United States. Many of his ideas have entered Western culture as conventional wisdoms-or at least as conventional prejudices-yet few people read his books or remember his name today.

Born in the English Midlands of non-conformist parents, Spencer became a railway engineer and a draughtsman. After a time he moved into journalism and began to produce a steady stream of books which are the basis of his reputation in social science. The complete bibliography is formidable, but includes Social Statics(1851), First Principles (1862), The Study of Sociology (1873), and First Principles of Sociology and Descriptive Sociology in parts through the 1870s and 1890s. (For a full account, which discusses Spencer against the social background of his time, see, Herbert Spencer, 1971.)

Spencer was the sociological prophet of the high Victorian era. Unlike Marx, he saw nothing but progress in the Industrial Revolution. Spencer interpreted society as a living, growing organism which, as it becomes more complex, must self-consciously understand and control the mechanisms of its own success. The most important of those mechanisms was the intense competition for resources which Spencer labelled ‘the survival of the fittest’ (anticipating Darwin's ‘natural selection’ by several years). Spencer believed that the unrestricted application of this principle would eventually lead to the best possible society. His ideas were adopted with enthusiasm in America, notably by William Graham Sumner , and remain to this day the foundation of libertarian and laissez-faire social and economic theories.