This will be the first in a series covering the victorian age thinker and proto-social scientist Herbert Spencer. Introduction Every so often a philosopher emerges who has a long-lasting effect on the ideas and concepts of experts and common people alike. Herbert Spencer is one of those rare individuals who contributed groundbreaking ideas during his …
This will be the first in a series covering the victorian age thinker and proto-social scientist Herbert Spencer.
Introduction
Every so often a philosopher emerges who has a long-lasting effect on the ideas and concepts of experts and common people alike. Herbert Spencer is one of those rare individuals who contributed groundbreaking ideas during his lifetime and was forgotten only to emerge again a century later in a new context. Indeed, Spencer has changed the world in countless ways and seems to have received very little credit. His contributions in the areas of evolutionary theory, sociology, sociobiology, and the philosophy of science alone, make him an undeniably powerful influence in the formulation of modern thought. In an unfortunate turn of events, he was later slandered as a eugenicist with a cruel attitude towards the poor, causing many to turn away from him.
Spencer did more than just contribute to scientific advancement. He also created a unique political and social theory identified by him as ‘Rational Utilitarianism.’ Rational Utilitarianism was at odds with the Empirical Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill. This difference between Spencer’s political theory and Mill’s go a long way to explaining the chasm between modern liberalism and the classical liberalism of the Libertarians. This unique political and social theory are at the heart of the modern Libertarian movement, thus making Herbert Spencer possibly the first modern Libertarian.
In the early parts of this paper Spencer’s early childhood, family relationships, and education will be discussed. It is crucial to understand these aspects of Spencer to help place his later years into a clearer context. His relationship with his mother and father go a long way to explaining why Spencer eventually came to oppose the women’s suffrage movement. This will be closely followed by Spencer’s initial influences which would help to contribute to his natural philosophy of evolution, and his views on religion.
This will be followed by a look at his Victorian masterpiece A System of Synthetic Philosophy which laid out an entirely scientific and philosophical system designed to replace religion as the center of everyday human thought. A system which, despite its authors disremembered contributions to modern thought, was highly successful in doing so. Despite Spencer’s fall from lofty heights, at least some of his contributions still stand the test of time.
The final sections will address the many criticisms leveled at Spencer from colleagues, competitors, estranged disciples, and eventually society at large. These sections will also address Spencer’s last few years in which his popularity had already begun to wane greatly. Lastly, an overview of Spencer as possibly the single most important contributor to modern sociology, and as a primary influence on Karl Menger, Hayek, Rothbard, and Ayn Rand. His influence, however, was not confined to Austrian economics as he has had a lasting influence on many notable mainstream philosophers and so it ends fittingly with last words from the philosopher and historian Will Durant. The goal of this work is to help reintroduce an entire generation of libertarians to one of the greatest intellectual inheritances of the libertarian tradition.
Section 1. Herbert Spencer, the man
Herbert Spencer was born in Derby on April 27, 1820. In his father’s family were several generations of church Anglican non-conformists, and his grandmother on his father’s side was a devoted Wesleyan. Even though his uncle Thomas was an Anglican clergyman, he was a prominent Wesleyan within the Church. Spencer’s father, however, was more of a non-conformist than either his grandmother or his uncle. William George Spencer was the primary source for Herbert Spencer’s strong individualism. “This drive to heresy became stronger in the father and culminated in the almost obstinate individualism of Herbert Spencer himself” (Durant 144). George refused to remove his hat in public when in the presence of highly ranked members of society which Herbert mimicked throughout his later life. At one point, Spencer remarked on the fact that in Britain, people removed their hats in the presence of people of high rank less than anywhere else in Europe. To him, this was a symbol of the kind of freedoms enjoyed by British citizens (Francis 93).
Though Spencer’s family members were people of faith, his father, George, rarely explained anything within the bounds of the supernatural. George Spencer preferred mathematics to religion as a means of truth. Though Spencer himself felt that this was not the case, it appears according to other accounts to be accurate (Durant 144).
Spencer’s grandfather and father were well-known teachers, and because of this, it is rather surprising that he did not complete his education until he reached middle age. “The father, as well as an uncle, and the paternal grandfather were teachers of private schools; and yet the son, who was to be the most famous English philosopher of his century, remained till forty an uneducated man” (Durant 144). While many hold that Spencer was a lazy child, this is not likely. It is true that George Spencer indulged his son until the age of thirteen by not sending him off for education, but this was not caused by the young Spencer’s lack of a diligent attitude. What is more likely is that Spencer was very attached to his mother and protective of her due to the abuse she sustained at the hands of George (Francis 52).
According to Spencer, his mother, Harriet, was a soft-spoken and kind but mistreated woman. “According to her son, Harriet was sweet, moderate in temper when irritated, and self-sacrificing to the point of exhaustion. Since she had married a man who never yielded, Herbert was left with a disaster to chronicle, although his filial sense of duty towards his father led him to do this in such a way as to make the latter appear less culpable” (Francis 52). It has been noted that his mother was not an educated woman; she did not always speak in proper English, nor was she tactful in her manners. Apparently, when Harriet spoke to George her informal manner of speaking caused irritation for George, resulting in his dismissal of her as if she did not exist. “If he did not understand some question my mother put, he would remain silent; not asking what the question was, and letting it go unanswered. He continued this course all through his life, notwithstanding its futility; there resulted in no improvement” (qtd. in Durant 144).
The strong, intransigent, overbearing, science-minded, non-conformist George Spencer, and the kind, gentle, and meek Christian Harriet Spencer, and the dysfunctional relationship that resulted left Herbert skeptical of relationships. This situation was an almost perfect representation of a dialectical dynamic. The strong versus the weak and the dominated are trapped in an oppressive relationship with the dominator. It is a relationship that would have a lasting effect on Spencer’s views on women, feminism, and evolution for the rest of his life. While Spencer held a certain amount of disdain for his mother’s weakness, he also held her willingness to sacrifice for the betterment of her son in high esteem. In Spencer’s view, human altruism was the direction of humanity’s evolution. In his philosophy, it was women who would one day hold the highest place on the evolutionary ladder of humanity. “Since Spencer thought the future of the human species was one in which altruism would replace competition, he was assigning the highest evolutionary place to women” (Francis 53). Thus, at 13 years old, young Herbert was finally sent to his uncle Thomas Spencer to begin his long overdue tutelage. It was painful for Herbert to say the least.
George Spencer did have a mental collapse from which he never quite recovered. Herbert personally claimed this as the reason that he did not receive an education until he was thirteen years old. For a time, Spencer’s uncle Thomas took the place of George when discipline was to be applied. Thomas apparently was a stifling paternal figure who regularly intervened on George’s behalf with young Spencer to stave off a rebellion. “When George’s illness became so severe as to prevent him from exercising his parental duty, he did not rely on his wife as a substitute. Instead, one of his brothers, Thomas or William, would stand in his place, exercising sufficient authority to frustrate rebellion” (Francis 30). Another indication of the repressive nature of Spencer’s upbringing was a conspiracy between his uncle Thomas and his father to keep him from spending very much time with his mother. It seems that George and Thomas blamed her for Spencer’s rebellious moments (Francis 30). From all indications, Spencer was taught to not display his personal emotions, especially in public. It might be said that emotional outbursts appear to have been considered rebellion. This emotional repression would bring Spencer anguish later in his life, and lead him to lament his choice to forgo romantic relationships.
Hence, the young Spencer began his academic training. “Whereas Mill began Greek at the age of three, Spencer admits that at the age of thirteen he knew nothing worth mentioning of either Latin or Greek” (Copleston 122). By the age of sixteen, however, he became knowledgeable in the application of mathematics. Thomas whose education was funded by his brother George was tasked with the reformation and refinement of Herbert. Thomas was a ruthless disciplinarian with Herbert, instilling in him a fearthat would only be exhibited in his presence. “It was imperative to Thomas that the curb on the boy be enforced for a long period. He also strove to alter Herbert’s character, which he saw as being deficient in the principle of fear, by which he meant “both that Fear of the Lord” which “is the beginning of wisdom,” and “that fear of Parents, Tutors, etc.”. Ominously, he recorded that – “after a few struggles” during which he induced this principle – Herbert “entirely surrendered himself to obey me” (Francis 31). Over a period of three years, Thomas crushed much of Herbert’s will, but he managed to teach him enough mathematics, science, and academic subjects that he was able to take a post as the schoolmaster at Derby. After a few months, however, he took a position as a civil engineer for the Gloucester Railway (Copleston 122).
Spencer would later say that he was not sure just exactly what he had learned during the time he spent at his Uncle Thomas’s house. It seemed to him he learned very little, and it was the only real serious application of teaching he had ever received in his entire life. “He says, with characteristic pride: “That neither in boyhood nor youth did I receive a single lesson in English, and that I have remained entirely without formal knowledge of syntax down to the present hour, are facts which should be known; since their implications are at variance with assumptions universally accepted” (qtd. in Durant 144). It is amazing that Spencer, undoubtedly the greatest philosopher of the Victorian age, the most famous mind in all the world in his own time, should have had little more than three years of formal education.
Even so, this was a dark period for Spencer due to the strict discipline he received at the hands of his family. When combined with the influence of living in a household with a mentally ill father who was abusive towards his mother, it is a wonder he managed to thrive at all. Spencer always made excuses for his father’s behavior by placing much of the blame on his mother’s meek Christian values. He was resentful towards his mother due to her inability to protect him or herself; due to this he rarely mentioned her later in life. It is, however, these relationships that provide some of his future thoughts about women, authority, and the overall nature of humans.
Spencer did, over the years, assuage his loneliness with his surrogate family, the Potters. He treated them with all the love and respected them as any person would their real family, and they treated him as the well-loved eccentric uncle. In the mid-1850’s, he suffered a breakdown of his health. It is primarily attributed to his long hours spent researching and writing, with little or no rest or leisure time. Some have suggested that Spencer had a nervous breakdown. Which is quite possible, but for the rest of his life, he made time for recreation. Spencer was notoriously thrifty with money and a very eccentric character. It has been said that he was the inspiration for the Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carole. This notorious claim, however, is wholly untrue. What is more likely is that Charles Dickens demonstrated Spencer’s point that government welfare encouraged the better off to be less charitable and more callous towards the poor and infirm (Wolfram).
Contrary to belief, his political views changed very little in his later years. The changes that were made were not surprising. One was Spencer’s position on universal suffrage in his later years. It can primarily be attributed to his long-standing distrust for socialism and an increasing belief that women were more likely to support social programs and vote to increase the authority of government (Francis 73).
He was also accused of changing his stance on the nationalization of land. He denied this claim, and maintained that his stance on property never changed, but was instead misinterpreted. He was also disparaged by T.H. Huxley for his refusal to remove what Huxley viewed as an appeal to divinity from his A system of Synthetic Philosophy.
Lastly, Spencer refused to edit his works, as the science they were based on, became outdated. As a result, a great deal of it became irrelevant before the end of his life. However, his work The Man Versus the State, which was comprised of four essays, was first published in 1884. It proved to be quite popular, but it also drew the ire of Huxley and other more progressive liberals (Francis 321). In the last years of his life, Spencer became less and less visible in public and less popular as well.
As he neared the end of his life, he worked to complete his book An Autobiography. Spencer sought to control what posterity would know about him. By intentionally not acknowledging his influences, writing his biography and burning many of his personal letters and notes it is obvious he hoped to control the narrative. On December 3, 1903, Herbert Spencer died at the age of 83. The greatest philosopher of the Victorian age had already begun to fade away before he was, ironically laid to rest just a few dozen feet from Karl Marx. A man whose ideology he had argued against most of his adult life.
Section 2. Herbert Spencer’s influences
Spencer did not show interest in a topic until he decided to write about it. It is one way in which he earned his reputation as an autodidact. Even then, Spencer often lacked the patience to research his topic fully. “Collier, one of his secretaries, tells us that Spencer never finished any book of science. Even in his favorite fields, he received no systematic instruction” (Durant 144). He tried to read Kant, but when he realized that Kant did not see time as an objective feature of the world, he became disgusted and discarded the book. Regarding the philosophers that came before him, he was not greatly educated. Spencer spent most of his time focusing on his ideas, and therefore his influences were few. It might have been just as well, considering the amount of ground that he had to cover over the years writing his giant work A System of Synthetic Philosophy. There was little time to pursue anything other than the topics for which he was to cover. “As for the history of philosophy, he knew little about it, except from secondary sources” (Copleston 123).
Most of his influences were from his contemporaries and from the previous generation of academics or philosophers. Many were obscure and have largely been forgotten, and because of this, Spencer’s ideas appear peculiarly unique, but this is not truly the case. His first exposure to philosophy was probably G.H. Lewes after being appointed to the position of sub-editor to the Economist in 1848. Lewes became a close friend of Spencer’s, and it is through him that many of his ideas regarding evolution were formulated. He wrote for Lewes’s publication, the Leader, regularly on the subject of evolution. One such article written anonymously was called The Development Hypothesis, in which a Lamarckian-influenced theory of evolution was put forth.
Spencer came about a great deal of his knowledge through his associations with T.H. Huxley, George Eliot, John Tyndall, and of course Lewes. Much of the grist for Spencer’s ideas can be found throughout the pages of the Leader. The publication was dedicated to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. However, it attempted to create a quasi-religious foundation based on science to replace Christianity and what were viewed as its contradictions. This talented group spent time together socially, and they believed they would start something profound. It was to be a ‘new reformation’ in which religion would be reformed and renewed for the age of industry and science. Spencer replaced God with the “Unknown Cause” which he was fond of telling his readers from the Leader about, in hopes that they would search for answers that transcended experience. Spencer said that without transcendence, those who searched for answers would be little more than atheists, and this meant a meaningless and empty universe was waiting for them (Francis 111). It was almost Emersonian in its proselytization. Spencer held to his ideas of the Unknown for the rest of his life, and it became a point of contention between him and T.H. Huxley later.
Spencer had primary influences from a few popular philosophers such John Stuart Mill. Mill who was a friend through most of Spencer’s life became somewhat estranged in later years. At the time, the philosophical landscape in Britain was sparse. With the choice falling between Logical Empiricism or ‘Scottish Common Sense’ philosophy, Spencer opted for the latter, even when William Hamilton refused to acknowledge him, and Mill was more than happy to accommodate.
“The choice was philosophically stark: one could follow J. S. Mill and rely on experience without knowledge of a first cause: alternatively, one could uphold the intuitionism of William Hamilton, which would also mean that one truly possessed no knowledge. The second choice was slightly less bleak because a person might feel meaningful responses that indicated there was something out there even if this could not be known. This was Spencer’s solution; he believed that the responses he felt were significant, and on this basis chose to construct his philosophy” (Francis 111).
Spencer had a distrust for pure logic and was unwilling to accept it as the only fundamental aspect of human reasoning. For Spencer, once a set of first principles had been established then the decisions which followed were a matter of intuition. While Mills’ work certainly influenced him, he almost always sided with the intuition of Reid when there was a conflict between the two. “The young Herbert Spencer was typical when he conflated the ideas of Hamilton’s edition of Reid with Mill’s A System of Logic; it seemed permissible to combine the former’s intuitive metaphysics with the latter’s empiricism. Although Spencer usually came down on the side of intuition rather than experience, he believed that he was striking a balance between the two compatible and parallel traditions of British philosophy” (Francis 166). This influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy and Mill’s Empirical Utilitarianism resulted in a unique and highly effective hybrid, one which Spencer called Rational Utilitarianism.
Spencer’s unique formulation of utilitarianism meshed very well with natural rights arguments. While Bentham and Mill could justify, certain actions based on the total happiness of the collective society, Spencer’s system held that consequentialism was not morally justifiable. It is precisely this belief, in which the common good does not take precedence over the individual which separated Spencer from his fellow liberals. It combined with his metaphysical first principles, based on the theory of evolution, made him vulnerable to slanderous allegations of being a eugenicist. His individualism is also a primary reason why his theories became conflated with Social Darwinism.
A major influence upon Spencer was the religious writer F.W. Newman. Newman was a Christian progressive who espoused a form of Christian utility. Newman called for such things as universal suffrage, socialism, and other national reforms that many would consider radical for the time. Newman was also an influence on the editors and writers of the Leader and should be considered important in its formation of ideas on the new reformation. A great deal of time was spent discussing ideas such as these within that group. “The author who most completely captured the spirit of this age was F. W. Newman, whose Soul and Phases of Faith were required reading for any self-conscious radical of the mid-century” (Francis 115). While Spencer was a part of this group and influenced by Newman’s ideas about religion and science, he attempted to conceal it in later years. One reason for the subterfuge on this matter was his hesitance to be associated with the publication at all, which Spencer claimed was because of the socialist ideas which most in the group held (Francis 112). What is far more likely is that Spencer felt personal egoistic satisfaction from the idea that his philosophy was a unique formula that he had created entirely from his original thoughts. A look at the publications made during the short life of the Leader seems to provide much evidence otherwise.
Herbert Spencer was influenced early on by Ralph Waldo Emerson. There is some reason to believe that early Spencer had accepted Emerson’s ideas regarding platonic love and beauty. Initially, Spencer believed that physical beauty was only a means to bring one closer to the Beautiful Soul, as Emerson maintained (Francis 67). He discarded this idea after his disastrous affair with the writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) ended. Spencer maintained that he was not attracted to Eliot and her intellect was simply not enough for him. It was because of this incident that he discarded Emerson’s idea of beauty and artwork as well. “Spencer’s failure to love Eliot had destroyed his soulful imitation of Emerson’s ideal. He was shocked at the discovery that he was on the edge of feeling physical attractions and revulsions that had nothing to do with his estimate of a woman’s intellect or soul. This threw him into a lifelong desire to free his emotions, and his appreciation of art, from the idealistic shackles that imprisoned them” (Francis 67). He maintained ever after that beauty was a part of evolution and grew critical of Emerson’s philosophy.
Spencer’s core ideas about religion are a direct result of his association with the staff of the Leader publication. The Leader, in turn, was greatly influenced by F.W. Newman, who was a Christian progressive. Inspired by these ideas, Spencer planned to create a new reformation based on a religion centered on the Unknown, and science was the motivation to develop his A System of Synthetic Philosophy. Spencer was influenced by the ideas of John Locke and British Empiricism through the work of his friend John Stuart Mill. Though Mill should not be considered the primary influence upon him, it is nonetheless important because, for many years, he believed he and Mill were in step with each other.
In the end, it was William Hamilton and several of his Students who provided the fundamental basis for Spencer’s views on ethics, politics, sociology, and psychology. Spencer’s Rational Utilitarianism is based on William Hamilton’s Theory of Utilitarianism and not Mill’s. It was unique at the time and provided a scientific justification for natural rights and an intuition-based ethics system. Both Mill and Spencer had assumed that they were of the same thought regarding their theories of utility, but in later years, Mill came to understand this was not the case and attacked Spencer for it publicly. Spencer was not a true empiricist in the strictest sense, at least not in terms of philosophical meaning. In truth, Spencer was first and foremost an intuitionist, and for this reason, there is little doubt that his primary influence was Scottish Common Sense philosophy.
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