The inimitable Mr Spencer

I have a soft spot for Herbert Spencer [see also here]. Supposedly the founder of social Darwinism and the precursor to American libertarianism and justifier of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, he has been the whipping boy of progressives and anti-evolutionists alike. Ever since Richard Hofstadter fingered him as the source of rough individualism and eugenics in his Social Darwinism in American Thought in 1943, Spencer has been the evil demon of philosophy, political thought, and evolution. But a recent article in The New Yorker occasioned by a new book Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Mark Francis), goes some way to rejuvenating his ideas.

Spencer was an independent thinker in his way, but he was never a Darwinian, although his phrase “survival of the fittest”, urged upon Darwin by Wallace to replace “natural selection”, has caused untold confusion. Spencer held that evolution was always progressive, contrary to Darwin, and he was a positivist (he thought science dealt only with positive statements of factual kinds, which Darwin was sophisticated enough to know better). But he tried, rather well if you read him in context, to give a universal philosophy of change.

He is derided for his wordiness and arcane terminology, unfairly, as I have written before. And he is derided as the founder of social Darwinism, also unfairly. What is becoming clear is that a great many of the standard rhetorical devices of the “modern”, post-Darwinian, world regarding the nineteenth century thinkers are misplaced or even fundamentally false. This is one of them. Read the article for more details. Spencer himself attacked the materialism of American economic culture in his visit to the US, and deserves more respect and credit than we have given him.

I will be reading Francis’ book as soon as I can.