Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was one of the most influential philosophers of the Victorian era. He argued that state power should be limited to the protection of property and the administration of justice, and that any use of state power for other purposes was illegitimate. Further, he argued that these propositions rested on such firm scientific authority that they were themselves scientific facts, no less certain than Newtonian gravity or Keplers laws of planetary motion. His reasoning was that evolution was a natural process which must be allowed to run its course. Just as that process had created the enlightened and prosperous society of his time (i.e. Great Britain, then the foremost power in the world), so it would continue to do so in the future. But this could only happen if the state resisted the temptation to tamper in the operations of society, which it did not and could not understand. No matter how cruel or harsh the process of industrialization might seem, it must be allowed to run its course free of state interference. Such interference would only hamper the natural process of evolution, from which society could ultimately expect unlimited benefits. This philosophy was known to its critics as Social Darwinism, because it put the state in the position of frankly privileging the interests of the strong and wealthy over those of the weak and impoverished. The survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence - the terms most often associated with Charles Darwin - were in fact invented by Herbert Spencer about a decade before Darwin published Origin of the Species in 1859. The term is somewhat innaccurate in the technical sense, since Spencer was not in fact a Darwinian (he preferred the theories of Lamarck.) However, in the sense of a philosophy which sanctions the right of the strong to do what they can, and the obligation of the weak to suffer what they must, Spencerism definitely qualifies. Spencer was *the* philosopher of industrial laissez faire capitalism in the 1870s and 1880s. His books were popularized by Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Edward Youmans (founder of popular science magazine.) His most famous American disciple was William Graham Sumner, who coined the phrase root hog or die. During the first world war this philosophy began to lose credibility, because German politicians habitually justified their own policies in its terms. It thus came to seem like dangerous German talk. Today Herbert Spencer is a more or less forgotten philosopher, although he does retain a hardy following among Libertarians and other advocates of laissez faire. plato.stanford.edu/entries/spencer/
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 04:35:35 +0000
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