capitalism

484 Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903)
mark out the boundaries of the thing defined,” and “that
cannot be a definition of the duty of a government, which
will allow it to do anything and everything.”
Spencer expanded on this theme in his first book, Social
Statics (1851). Here he focuses his criticism on the principle
of utility defended by Jeremy Bentham and his followers.
He there stated that a government should promote the
greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
Spencer noted that standards of happiness are “infinitely
variable,” so the principle of utility, although it may serve
as a general formulation of the purpose of government, cannot
serve as a determinate standard of legislation; an appeal
to social utility does not tell us which measures a government
should, and should not, enact. Hence, doctrines of
expediency—whether expressed in terms of utility or the
general good—“afford not a solitary command of a practical
character. Let but rulers think, or profess to think, that
their measures will benefit the community, and your philosophy
stands mute in the presence of the most egregious
folly, or the blackest misconduct.” Social Statics contained
Spencer’s first extended justification of his celebrated “law
of equal freedom,” according to which “every man may
claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible
with the possession of like liberty by every other man.” The
young Spencer, having been raised in a tradition of
Protestant dissent, which he once described as “an expression
of antagonism to arbitrary control,” grounded this
principle in a divinely ordained duty to pursue happiness,
which in turn requires the freedom to exercise one’s faculties
according to one’s own judgments. He further defends
a version of the moral sense theory that had been developed
by Francis Hutcheson and other luminaries of the Scottish
Enlightenment.
Spencer later abandoned these doctrines, replacing them
with an ethical theory that was thoroughly positivistic and
more attuned to his theory of evolution. The “establishment
of rules of right conduct on a scientific basis is a pressing
need,” wrote Spencer in 1879, and he published his twovolume
Principles of Ethics to fill this need. These volumes
constitute the final volumes of his massive Synthetic
Philosophy, a project that took 38 years to complete.
Spencer’s efforts to deduce moral rules, including the law
of equal freedom, from the “laws of life” and thereby
achieve “results which follow ...in the same necessary
way as does the trajectory of a cannon-shot from the laws
of motion and atmospheric resistance” had mixed results.
Some critics, including those who were otherwise sympathetic
to Spencer’s ideas, have claimed that this scientistic
approach to ethics undermined the earlier humanistic tradition
of natural rights. However one may appraise Spencer’s
“scientific” system of ethics, there can be little doubt it later
became discredited as the Larmarckian theory of evolution
on which it was based (which upheld the inheritability of
acquired characteristics) fell into disfavor.
Spencer’s sociological insights almost certainly were to
influence later libertarian thinkers such as Albert J. Nock
more than did his ethical theories. In The Study of
Sociology, Spencer pointed to instances of short-sighted
political thinking by persons who have but a rudimentary
grasp of social causation and who accordingly propose simplistic
political solutions for complex social problems.
Many people are ignorant of physical causation, he
observed, so it is perhaps no surprise that many more are
ignorant of social causation, “which is so much more subtle
and complex.” Where there is little or no appreciation of
social causation, “political superstitions” flourish. Among
these false notions is the belief that government has a special
efficacy “beyond that naturally possessed by a certain
group of citizens subsidized by the rest of the citizens.” In
addition, the “ordinary political schemer is convinced that
out of a legislative apparatus, properly devised and worked
with due dexterity, may be had beneficial State-action,
without any detrimental reaction.”
In addition to his other contributions to libertarian theory,
such as his detailed typology of the militant and industrial
forms of social organization, Spencer made seminal
contributions to the theory of spontaneous order. In The
Principles of Sociology, Spencer likened social development
to a “rolling snowball or a spreading fire” where there
is “compound accumulation and acceleration.” An intricate
social network evolves as in a market economy that is so
interdependent that any considerable change in one activity
“sends reverberating changes among all the rest.” Society,
in other words, is an unplanned spontaneous order, one
that “grows” rather than is “made.” A major function of
sociology—which in Spencer’s conception subsumed
economics—is to explain the evolution of this order that is
the result of human action, but not of human design. The
difficulty of this task is why Spencer displayed such contempt
for social planners: “A fly seated on the surface of the
body has about as good a conception of its internal structure,
as one of the schemers has of the social organization
in which he is embedded.”
GHS
See also Liberalism, Classical; Limited Government; Sociology and
Libertarianism; Spontaneous Order
Further Readings
Caneiro, Robert L. “Herbert Spencer as an Anthropologist.” Journal
of Libertarian Studies 5 no 2 (Spring 1981): 153–210.
Francis, Mark. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Smith, George H. “Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Causation.” Journal
of Libertarian Studies 5 no. 2 (Spring 1981): 113–153.
Spencer, Herbert. The Man versus the State; with Six Essays on
Government, Society, and Freedom. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty
Classics, 1981.