Herbert Spencer

Biography of Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was born in 1820 in the small English city of Derby. His father, William George Spencer, was a teacher who was famous for founding his own school and using unconventional teaching methods with his students. William Spencer was against all types of religious and political authority. He raised his son in this spirit, which would affect Herbert Spencer’s philosophy later on.

When Herbert was 13, his father sent him to his uncle for a formal education. Reverend Thomas Spencer, Herbert’s uncle, was the one to introduce the young boy to Latin, mathematics, physics and radical political thinking. Herbert Spencer adopted his uncle’s radical reformist ideas in his economic and political theories.

Reverend Thomas Spencer offered to finance his nephew's studies at the University of Cambridge, but Herbert declined it. His higher education was mainly done through individual learning and reading. He focused on the natural sciences in the beginning.

To support himself, he became a school teacher for a few months, then a railway civil engineer between 1837 and 1841.

In 1842 at the age of 22, Herbert visited his uncle again. Reverend Thomas Spencer encouraged the young man to send his writings to the Nonconformist, a radical political journal. Spencer did so, and thus became a journalist and political writer. His articles were later reprinted as a pamphlet, The Proper Sphere of Government.

Between 1848 and 1853, Spencer was the editor of The Economist. In this position, he met several of the period’s most important intellects and political thinkers, including George Eliot, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Stuart Mill and George Henry Lewes.

Spencer's academic books

• Spencer’s first book Social Statics came out in 1851. He argued for the adoption of governmental long-term solutions to social issues to benefit mankind.
• His second book, The Principles of Psychology (1855) argued that human intelligence was developing in response to its physical environment.
• His most important work, The Synthetic Philosopher (1896) contained several volumes on diverse subjects, such as biology, psychology, morality and sociology.

At the end of his life, he suffered from constant fatigue, which did not allow him to work for long hours. His illness worsened for several years until he died at the age of 83 in 1902. A few months before his death, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Herbert Spencer's contribution to sociology

Herbert Spencer was one of the most-discussed English thinkers of the Victorian era. He was one of the three most influential structural-functionalist thinkers in sociology next to Émile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons.

Influenced by his natural sciences studies, Spencer had a scientific approach to philosophical and sociological questions. He believed that it was the discipline of philosophy that was set out to replace the theological system of thinking that was widespread and accepted in the Middle Ages.

Spencer was revolutionary in his scientific approach to philosophy and sociology. His way of doing sociology, however, transformed into the discipline of social and cultural anthropology by now.

Many sociologists argued that Herbert Spencer - despite his scientific approach - was a very theoretical thinker, who built grand ideas and looked for facts that confirmed his theories while ignoring the ones that contradicted them. English writer and philosopher, Aldous Huxley once said that Spencer’s idea of tragedy was "the slaying of a beautiful idea by an ugly fact" (1911).

Two types of societies

He argued that there existed two types of societies; military societies and industrial societies.

In military societies, cooperation between individuals and institutions was secured by force, while in industrial societies, cooperation was voluntary and rather spontaneous. He compared despotism and individualism as two examples for his classification. He characterized despotism as primitive and bad, while he referred to individualism as civilized and good. This ideology would influence his work later on.

Herbert Spencer and survival of the fittest

It may be surprising for you to learn that the term ‘survival of the fittest’ comes from Herbert Spencer, although it is most associated with Charles Darwin. Darwin added the phrase to his later works and editions of The Origin of Species, as he found it perfectly suitable for what he had described with natural selection.

Social Darwinism: Herbert Spencer

Spencer's most important sociological theory was his theory of Social Darwinism (1896).

Fig. 2 - The Origin of Species is a well-known book by Charles Darwin.

Cultural adaptation

Social Darwinism argues that the most powerful human races had adapted to their environment: not biologically, but culturally. Herbert Spencer argued that those groups of people who managed to quickly adapter to new situations and to cultural changes were the most successful at being powerful in society and passing their benefits to their children.

Spencer believed that it was the natural course of life that the strong survived at the cost of the weak. According to Social Darwinism, the rich and powerful in any society became so because they were better suited for those positions than weaker individuals from weaker races.

Later, sociologists pointed out that the most dangerous idea of Social Darwinism was its arguments of ‘naturalness’ and ‘inevitability’ regarding social inequalities. Social Darwinist thinking is often seen as a contributor to the rise of national socialism and the practice of eugenics in Nazi Germany. Social Darwinism is also said to be standing behind the American eugenics movements of 1910-1930.

Herbert Spencer: society as an organism

Spencer compared societies to an organism of living species. He argued that societies, just like organisms, start by being simple before progressing towards complexity.

According to Spencer, societies and organisms had three main systems; a regulative system, sustaining system and distributing system. Let's consider how societies and organisms may be similar.

Table 1 - a break-down of Spencer's idea that societey acts like a living organism.

Spencer found a few differences between societies and living organisms. The most important, he said, was that in a living organism there is one, centralised consciousness that directs and supervises the whole system, while in societies there are numerous individual consciousnesses.

Criticism of Spencer’s organismic analogy

• Many critics pointed out that while a living organism is a concrete being, societies are abstract creations. Consequently, it is impossible and wrong to compare them. The comparison does not stand on its own feet, only in Spencer's mind.

• The difference between the nature of consciousness in a living organism and in societies is an issue for many sociologists, as they claim the since the two don't share the same type of consciousness, they cannot be compared.

• Some critics point out that the birth, growth and death of a living organism are so different from those of a society that the two cannot possibly be compared.