History of herbert spencer biography

He authored many books as listed below:. Organic Analogy was one of his important work it was also shared with Comte and Durkheim. In this, he has seen society as an organism. He has taken this concept from Biology. Spencer was more concerned with the structure of the society, the interdependence of different parts of society and functions of each part in the societal system.

He displayed a comparison between a living organism and society keeping in mind the following points:. From all these points mentioned above, we come to know that Herbert Spencer tried to display the similarities between society and living organism. But as we all know everything comes with it worse as well. People tend to judge and criticize each other often.

I am an aspiring writer, ready to give my best. I like to keep things simple and straightforward just like my personality. He authored many books as listed below: Social statics First Principles The study of Sociology The principles of sociology divided into three volumes. He displayed a comparison between a living organism and society keeping in mind the following points: Just like living organism society also grows.

He continued to write throughout his life, often by dictation in his later years, until he succumbed to his poor health at the age of In his writings, Herbert Spencer attempts to create a system of human ethics based on the idea of natural human progress. He sees progress as something innate in human beings that happens over the course of time and in response to a changing environment.

The end goal of this progress, says Spencer, is overall human happiness and prosperity, namely, the surplus of pleasure over pain. In Social Statics Spencer stresses that this evolution is not something that can be simply imposed on an individual by the state or any outside force. Thus, one of the most important factors to human development is the free exercise of natural human faculties.

Spencer believed that the first principle of ethics was "the law of equal freedom" which states that "Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man. In The Principles of Ethics Spencer describes in more detail this "innate moral sense" and natural concern for the well-being of others.

He believed that this sense had developed in human beings over time and that the ability to sympathize with others outside of one's immediately family did not exist in people until recently. This inner conscientiousness, he believed, should be the basis for laws. Spencer often criticized the religious institutions and doctrines of the time and did not see in them anything that could advance the human race.

He argued that one could not adopt a belief in God or the divine without scientific proof of such a being. Thus, he dismissed the matter as unknowable and remained an agnostic throughout his life, focusing instead on the scientific examination of society.

History of herbert spencer biography

In a collection of essays entitled The Man versus the State, Spencer presents his view on politics based largely on "the law of equal freedom. Spencer believed in a "laissez-faire" government whose laws protect the liberty of individuals rather than infringing on them. The business of the government, he believed, should be allowing its individual citizens to act as they see fit.

He thought it absurd that corrupt government officials imposed their beliefs on their citizens, being so arrogant as to think that they knew what was in the best interest of the people. Spencer attacked the practices of elected parliaments and representative governments who, elected by the majority, acted as tyrannies to the minority without the consent of any of their citizens.

In all areas, Spencer said that the government should give way to private enterprises that were much more capable, efficient, and knowledgeable in their respective fields. He goes back to relying on natural law to create harmony and equilibrium within a society. Just as nature governs itself and automatically thrives without any outside interference, Spencer believed human society could operate in the same way.

However, he still believed that governments must exist to protect the weak from the strong and to administer justice when wrongs are committed. Translations of his various works were made in German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and he was offered honors and awards from all over Europe and North America. Spencer's political and economic philosophy, based on the "law of equal liberty," proved most useful for political conservatives, not only for its application towards the hierarchy of social classes but also for its conception of social justice which emphasized the responsibility of individuals for their nature and actions.

Multiple American Supreme Court Justices supported his theories and applied them to their decisions by ruling in favor of corporations and preventing government interference in big business. Many socialists cited his notion of "survival of the fittest" to incite people toward class warfare, and anarchists applied his autonomy of the individual to their own beliefs.

However, while he perceived this difference between human and subhuman behavior as one of degree rather than of kind, Spencer was nevertheless impressed by its enormous magnitude. For him, the universe consisted basically of matter and energy and was to be explained in these terms. In view of this mechanistic attitude it is not surprising that Spencer should have perceived and expressed the fundamental importance of energy to the evolution of culture.

He was, in fact, perhaps the first to make this relationship explicit:. Based as the life of a society is on animal and vegetal products, and dependent as these are on the light and heat of the Sun, it follows that the changes wrought by men as socially organized, are effects of forces having a common origin with those which produce all the other orders of changes.

Not only is the energy expended by the horse harnessed to the plough, and by the labourer guiding it, derived from the same reservoir as is the energy of the cataract and the hurricane; but to this same reservoir are traceable those subtler and more complex manifestations of energy which humanity, as socially embodied, evolves, ibid.

Spencer was among the earliest social scientists to argue that culture change is better explained in terms of sociocultural forces than as the result of actions of important men. He maintained, for example, that it is unrealistic to think of Lycurgus as having originated the Spartan constitution [] , vol. He also maintained that it was not the personal initiative of Cleisthenes that brought about democratic organization in Athens, but rather that his political reorganization was prompted by, and was successful only because of, the large number of non-clan-organized persons living in that city at the time ibid.

Spencer was very much impressed with the importance of war in the development of complex societies, and in fact this is one of the recurring themes of Principles of Sociology. He also called attention to the effect of environment on institutions, maintaining, for example, that rugged, mountainous terrain, like that of Greece, fosters the development of confederacies rather than of strongly centralized monarchies ibid.

Spencer also appreciated the importance of economic factors in the origin and development of customs and institutions. He showed the important role played by commerce and industry in widening the base of Athenian oligarchy and paving the way for Greek democracy ibid. He also argued that representative government and the democratic state resulted from an increased concentration of people in towns, from the rise of artisan and merchant classes, and from expanding production and commerce ibid.

Development of social institutions. Like other evolutionists of the period, Spencer dealt at length with the problem of primal human social organization. Many pages of Principles of Sociology are devoted to the development of marriage and forms of the family, early concepts of property, and the like. For example, he did not believe that the incest taboo is innate ibid.

Nor did he believe that sexual promiscuity was the earliest stage of human marriage ibid. He did. However, think that promiscuity was at one time common and that the resulting difficulty in establishing paternity led to the early reckoning of kinship in the female line ibid. Spencer likewise did not believe that polygyny had preceded monogamy but held that monogamy went back as far as any form of marriage ibid.

In Principles of Sociology Spencer proposed a theory about the origin of religion that came to be known as the ghost theory. According to this view, the concept of a soul that inhabits the human body was the earliest supernatural belief entertained by man, and this notion was later extended to animals, plants, and inanimate objects. Eventually, through further extensions and differentiations, the concept of the soul was transfigured into that of gods of myriad forms and powers.

A belief in rectilinear evolution—the view that cultural evolution proceeds in a straight line, without interruptions or regressions—has been attributed to the classical evolutionists, including Spencer. But Spencer held no such view. Although Spencer ibid. Moreover, he saw the process by which societies develop as consisting, by and large, in responses to particular problems posed by the cultural and natural environments, rather than in movement through a universal and necessary series of stages.

He held that the rapid elimination of unfit individuals from society through natural selection would benefit the race biologically and that the state should therefore do nothing to relieve the condition of the poor, whom he assumed to be the less fit. Spencer also maintained that the economic system works best if each individual is allowed to seek his own private interests and that consequently the state should not intervene in the economy except to enforce contracts and to see to it that no one infringes upon the rights of others.

He believed that in the ensuing competition, the fittest business enterprises and economic institutions would survive. Spencer never abandoned his belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics , a theory which, while essentially biological, also affected his social theory. Certain cultural peculiarities among peoples of the world Spencer attributed to innate psychological differences.

Yet, despite such views, Spencer only rarely resorted to the idea of inherent psychological differences to explain cultural differences. Almost invariably he explained cultural phenomena primarily by the interplay of cultural and environmental factors. Through Durkheim, Spencer influenced A. Radcliffe-Brown, and it is probably fair to say that the core of what Radcliffe-Brown derived from Durkheim—the concept of society as a functioning system, susceptible of scientific study—Durkheim had derived from Spencer.

In fact, it virtually disappeared from the scene during the great reaction against it in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. However, the wave of antievolutionism appears spent, and the last two decades have seen the resurgence of evolution, led by Leslie A. White and Julian H. Steward in the United States and V. Gordon Childe in England.

Anthropologists have come to accept cultural evolution as a fact and to see it as a process of increasing structural differentiation and functional specialization, the very terms in which Spencer first portrayed it more than a century ago. London: Routledge; New York : Humanities. New York : Appleton. Paterson, N. New York: Appleton. New York: Atherton.

Volume 15, pages in The Works of Herbert Spencer. Ann Arbor : Univ. Edited by Robert L. Barker, Ernest Political Thought in England Oxford Univ. Barnes, Harry E. Thought From. Lore to Science. New York: Dover. Becker, Howard Anthropology and Sociology. Pages in John P. Gillin editor , For a Science of Social Man. New York: Macmillan. London: Cassell.

Cooley, Charles H. American Journal of Sociology New rev. Ensor, R. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. New York: Braziller. Hudson, William H. Khoeber, A. Pages in A. Kroeber, The Nature of Culture. Cleveland Ohio Museum of Art. Mukdock, George P. Glencoe, Ill. New York: Dodd. White, Leslie A. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Spencer was the only surviving child of William George and Catherine Spencer; his father, a private school teacher of very modest means, was inclined to a deist rationalism and frequented Quaker meetings.

Thomas Spencer, a radical and scientifically inclined parson. Above fairly elementary levels he was a virtual autodidact, learning his science from casual reading, attending lectures, and, later, associating with working scientists. In Spencer took up railway engineering, during the boom period of railway construction in England, and was active in radical, middle-class, dissenting politics.

Dissatisfied with engineering, he hovered long over other choices, finally taking a job in London in as subeditor of the Economist. There he moved among leaders of literary and scientific opinion and gradually shaped his career as an independent writer and reviewer. He worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late s, while also devoting much of his time to writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in their religion and radical in their politics.

Spencer published his first book, Social Statics , whilst working as sub-editor on the free-trade journal The Economist from to He predicted that humanity would eventually become completely adapted to the requirements of living in society with the consequential withering away of the state. Its publisher, John Chapman , introduced Spencer to his salon which was attended by many of the leading radical and progressive thinkers of the capital, including John Stuart Mill , Harriet Martineau , George Henry Lewes and Mary Ann Evans George Eliot , with whom he was briefly romantically linked.

Spencer himself introduced the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley , who would later win fame as 'Darwin's Bulldog' and who remained Spencer's lifelong friend. However, it was the friendship of Evans and Lewes that acquainted him with John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic and with Auguste Comte 's positivism and which set him on the road to his life's work.

He strongly disagreed with Comte. Spencer's second book, Principles of Psychology , published in , explored a physiological basis for psychology, and was the fruit of his friendship with Evans and Lewes. The book was founded on his fundamental assumption that the human mind is subject to natural laws and that these can be discovered within the framework of general biology.

This permitted the adoption of a developmental perspective not merely in terms of the individual as in traditional psychology , but also of the species and the race. Through this paradigm, Spencer aimed to reconcile the associationist psychology of Mill's Logic , the notion that the human mind is constructed from atomic sensations held together by the laws of the association of ideas, with the apparently more 'scientific' theory of phrenology , which locates specific mental functions in specific parts of the brain.

Spencer argued that both these theories are partial accounts of the truth: repeated associations of ideas are embodied in the formation of specific strands of brain tissue, and these can be passed from one generation to the next by means of the Lamarckian mechanism of use-inheritance. The Psychology , he believed, would do for the human mind what Isaac Newton had done for matter.

Spencer's interest in psychology derived from a more fundamental concern which was to establish the universality of natural law. This was in contrast to the views of many theologians of the time who insisted that some parts of creation, in particular the human soul, are beyond the realm of scientific investigation. However, Spencer differed from Comte in believing it is possible to discover a single law of universal application which he identified with progressive development and was to call the principle of evolution.

In , Spencer produced an outline of what was to become the System of Synthetic Philosophy. This immense undertaking, which has few parallels in the English language, aimed to demonstrate that the principle of evolution applies in biology, psychology, sociology Spencer appropriated Comte's term for the new discipline and morality. Spencer envisaged that this work of ten volumes would take twenty years to complete; in the end, it took him twice as long and consumed almost all the rest of his long life.

Despite Spencer's early struggles to establish himself as a writer, by the s he had become the most famous philosopher of the age. His works were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and into many other languages and he was offered honours and awards all over Europe and North America. He also became a member of the Athenaeum , an exclusive Gentleman's Club in London open only to those distinguished in the arts and sciences, and the X Club , a dining club of nine founded by T.

Huxley that met every month and included some of the most prominent thinkers of the Victorian age three of whom would become presidents of the Royal Society. There were also some quite significant satellites such as liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley , the Dean of Westminster; and guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were entertained from time to time.

Through such associations, Spencer had a strong presence in the heart of the scientific community and was able to secure an influential audience for his views. The last decades of Spencer's life were characterised by growing disillusionment and loneliness. He never married, and after was a life-long hypochondriac [ 14 ] who complained endlessly of pains and maladies that no physician could diagnose at that time.

His nervous sensibility was extreme. A game of billiards was enough to deprive him of his night's rest. He had been looking forward with pleasure to a meeting with Huxley; but he gave it up because there was a difference on some scientific question between them, and this might have given rise to an argument, which Spencer's nerves could not bear.

By the s his readership had begun to desert him while many of his closest friends died and he had come to doubt the confident faith in progress that he had made the centre-piece of his philosophical system. His later years were also ones in which his political views became increasingly conservative. Whereas Social Statics had been the work of a radical democrat who believed in votes for women and even for children and in the nationalisation of the land to break the power of the aristocracy, by the s he had become a staunch opponent of female suffrage and made common cause with the landowners of the Liberty and Property Defence League against what they saw as the drift towards 'socialism' of elements such as Sir William Harcourt within the administration of William Ewart Gladstone — largely against the opinions of Gladstone himself.

Spencer's political views from this period were expressed in what has become his most famous work, The Man Versus the State. The exception to Spencer's growing conservatism was that he remained throughout his life an ardent opponent of imperialism and militarism. His critique of the Boer War was especially scathing, and it contributed to his declining popularity in Britain.

He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in Spencer also invented a precursor to the modern paper clip , though it looked more like a modern cotter pin. Spencer shows drawings of the pin in Appendix I following Appendix H of his autobiography along with published descriptions of its uses. In , shortly before his death, Spencer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature , which was assigned to the German Theodor Mommsen.

He continued writing all his life, in later years often by dictation, until he succumbed to poor health at the age of The basis for Spencer's appeal to many of his generation was that he appeared to offer a ready-made system of belief which could substitute for conventional religious faith at a time when orthodox creeds were crumbling under the advances of modern science.

In essence, Spencer's philosophical vision was formed by a combination of deism and positivism. On the one hand, he had imbibed something of eighteenth-century deism from his father and other members of the Derby Philosophical Society and from books like George Combe 's immensely popular The Constitution of Man This treated the world as a cosmos of benevolent design, and the laws of nature as the decrees of a 'Being transcendentally kind.

Although Spencer lost his Christian faith as a teenager and later rejected any 'anthropomorphic' conception of the Deity, he nonetheless held fast to this conception at an almost subconscious level. At the same time, however, he owed far more than he would ever acknowledge to positivism, in particular in its conception of a philosophical system as the unification of the various branches of scientific knowledge.

He also followed positivism in his insistence that it is only possible to have genuine knowledge of phenomena and hence that it is idle to speculate about the nature of the ultimate reality. The tension between positivism and his residual deism ran through the entire System of Synthetic Philosophy. Spencer followed Comte in aiming for the unification of scientific truth; it was in this sense that his philosophy aimed to be 'synthetic.

The first objective of Synthetic Philosophy was thus to demonstrate that there are no exceptions to being able to discover scientific explanations, in the form of natural laws, of all the phenomena of the universe. Spencer's volumes on biology, psychology, and sociology were all intended to demonstrate the existence of natural laws in these specific disciplines.

Even in his writings on ethics, he held that it is possible to discover 'laws' of morality that have the status of laws of nature while still having normative content, a conception which can be traced to George Combe's Constitution of Man. The second objective of the Synthetic Philosophy was to show that these same laws lead inexorably to progress.

In contrast to Comte, who stressed only the unity of the scientific method, Spencer sought the unification of scientific knowledge in the form of the reduction of all natural laws to one fundamental law, the law of evolution. In this respect, he followed the model laid down by the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers in his anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation Although often dismissed as a lightweight forerunner of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species , Chambers' book was, in reality, a programme for the unification of science which aimed to show that Laplace 's nebular hypothesis for the origin of the solar system and Lamarck's theory of species transformation are both instances of 'one magnificent generalisation of progressive development' Lewes' phrase.

Chambers was associated with Chapman's salon and his work served as the unacknowledged template for the Synthetic Philosophy. Spencer first articulated his evolutionary perspective in his essay, 'Progress: Its Law and Cause', published in Chapman's Westminster Review in , and which later formed the basis of the First Principles of a New System of Philosophy In it he expounded a theory of evolution which combines insights from Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's essay 'The Theory of Life' — itself derivative from Friedrich von Schelling 's Naturphilosophie — with a generalisation of von Baer 's law of embryological development.

Spencer posited that all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity while undergoing increasing integration of the differentiated parts. This evolutionary process can be observed, Spencer believed, throughout the cosmos. It is a universal law, applying to the stars and galaxies and to biological organisms, and to human social organisation and to the human mind.

It differed from other scientific laws only in its greater generality, and the laws of the special sciences can be shown to be illustrations of this principle. The principles described by Herbert Spencer received a variety of interpretations. Bertrand Russell stated in a letter to Beatrice Webb in 'I don't know whether [Spencer] was ever made to realize the implications of the second law of thermodynamics ; if so, he may well be upset.

The law says that everything tends to uniformity and a dead level, diminishing not increasing heterogeneity'. Spencer's attempt to explain the evolution of complexity was radically different from that of Darwin's Origin of Species which was published two years later. Spencer is often, quite erroneously, believed to have merely appropriated and generalised Darwin's work on natural selection.

But although after reading Darwin's work he coined the phrase ' survival of the fittest ' as his own term for Darwin's concept, [ 1 ] and is often misrepresented as a thinker who merely applied the Darwinian theory to society, he only grudgingly incorporated natural selection into his preexisting overall system. The primary mechanism of species transformation that he recognised was Lamarckian use-inheritance which posited that organs are developed or are diminished by use or disuse and that the resulting changes may be transmitted to future generations.

Spencer believed that this evolutionary mechanism is also necessary to explain 'higher' evolution, especially the social development of humanity. Moreover, in contrast to Darwin, he held that evolution has a direction and an end-point, the attainment of a final state of equilibrium. He tried to apply the theory of biological evolution to sociology.

He proposed that society is the product of change from lower to higher forms, just as in the theory of biological evolution, the lowest forms of life are said to be evolving into higher forms. Spencer claimed that man's mind has evolved in the same way from the simple automatic responses of lower animals to the process of reasoning in the thinking man.

Spencer believed in two kinds of knowledge: knowledge gained by the individual and knowledge gained by the race. According to his thinking, intuition or knowledge learned unconsciously is the inherited experience of the race. Spencer in his book Principles of Biology , proposed a pangenesis theory that involves "physiological units" assumed to be related to specific body parts and responsible for the transmission of characteristics to offspring.

These hypothetical hereditary units are similar to Darwin's gemmules. Spencer read with excitement the original positivist sociology of Auguste Comte. A philosopher of science , Comte had proposed a theory of sociocultural evolution that society progresses by a general law of three stages. Writing after various developments in biology, however, Spencer rejected what he regarded as the ideological aspects of Comte's positivism, attempting to reformulate social science in terms of his principle of evolution, which he applied to the biological, psychological and sociological aspects of the universe.

Spencer is also generally credited as the first to use the term ' social structure. Given the primacy which Spencer placed on evolution, his sociology might be described as social Darwinism mixed with Lamarckism. However, despite its popularity, this view of Spencer's sociology is mistaken. While his political and ethical writings have themes consistent with social Darwinism, such themes are absent in Spencer's sociological works, which focus on how processes of societal growth and differentiation lead to changing degrees of complexity in social organization.

The evolutionary progression from simple, undifferentiated homogeneity to complex, differentiated heterogeneity is exemplified, Spencer argued, by the development of society. He developed a theory of two types of society, the militant and the industrial, which corresponded to this evolutionary progression. Militant society, structured around relationships of hierarchy and obedience, is simple and undifferentiated; industrial society, based on voluntary, contractually assumed social obligations, is complex and differentiated.

Society, which Spencer conceptualised as a ' social organism ' evolved from the simpler state to the more complex according to the universal law of evolution. Moreover, industrial society is the direct descendant of the ideal society developed in Social Statics , although Spencer now equivocated over whether the evolution of society would result in anarchism as he had first believed or whether it points to a continued role for the state, albeit one reduced to the minimal functions of the enforcement of contracts and external defence.

Though Spencer made some valuable contributions to early sociology, not least in his influence on structural functionalism , his attempt to introduce Lamarckian or Darwinian ideas into the realm of sociology was unsuccessful. It was considered by many, furthermore, to be actively dangerous. Hermeneuticians of the period, such as Wilhelm Dilthey , would pioneer the distinction between the natural sciences Naturwissenschaften and human sciences Geisteswissenschaften.

In the United States, the sociologist Lester Frank Ward , who would be elected as the first president of the American Sociological Association , launched a relentless attack on Spencer's theories of laissez-faire and political ethics.