------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (October 2008)

Mark Francis, _Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life_. 
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.  xiv + 434 pp. $45 (cloth), 
ISBN: 978-0-8014-4590-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Sandra J. Peart, Jepson School of Leadership 
Studies, University of Richmond.


This is a wonderful book, filled with detail, substance and purpose. 
Mark Francis, professor of political science at the University of 
Canterbury, rightly informs us that Spencer has been misinterpreted over 
the years.  Francis acknowledges that Spencer himself is partly 
responsible for those misinterpretations, having been careless about how 
his arguments might be used by others (p. 285).  Consequently, the 
biographer of Spencer faces ?an intriguing task? (p. 330) -- how to 
correct the misconceptions while preserving what is worth preserving in 
the enormous amount of Spencer scholarship that followed upon Spencer?s 
work.

Francis correctly re-orients our interpretation of Spencer on a number 
of important fronts, emphasizing that Spencer was first and foremost a 
philosopher as opposed to a biologist or psychologist.  Though the 
literature has stressed Spencer?s role in the development of 
professional science, Francis emphasizes Spencer?s major contributions 
to the philosophy of science (p. 233).  Spencer was the ?most consistent 
evolutionary theorist among the founding fathers of modern social 
science? (p. 78).  But he ?was not pursuing the same goals as Darwin,? 
Francis writes, and so ?It was therefore painless for him to admit that 
he and Darwin had used evolution in different ways? (p. 189).  Spencer 
introduced evolutionary theory ?to prop up the intuitionist part of his 
common-sense philosophy? (p. 175).

In this account Spencer?s defense of liberalism rested neither on 
libertarianism nor socialism.  Instead it is a unique doctrine 
intertwined with ethics:  ?His doctrine was an ethical and humane 
approach to future social development, which prohibited dominance and 
aggression towards dependent persons or groups, even if it could be 
demonstrated that the long-term result would be beneficial? (p. 337).

Economists will find Spencer?s ideas on progress most interesting. 
Throughout his life he insisted that the goal of human progress was an 
altruistic one.  But his views on progress changed over time; in 
Francis? telling, ?from the late 1850?s he began to cast aside his 
philistine faith in the dreams of progress through hard work and the 
renunciation of pleasure? (p. 48).  Was progress a biological notion of 
improvement for Spencer?  The common misconception has Spencer defending 
?progress? where some perish in the name of overall human flourishing. 
Francis rightly presents a contrary argument that reconciles 
evolutionary change with flourishing for all.  His solution to this 
quandary, Francis argues, ?was to say that with progress drawing them 
forwards, future human beings would remain part of the natural world 
(and thus experience evolutionary change); yet, at the same time, they 
would be above it and thus able to avoid its perils.  His vision had 
humanity ultimately evolving to the point where individuals avoided the 
cruelty and destruction that the demands of hunger and reproduction had 
imposed on other organisms? (p. 243).

Spencer?s writings on politics fit with some difficulty into his 
philosophical system.  Francis opposes the commonly-held view that 
Spencer?s liberalism was fundamentally concerned with limiting social or 
political control over the individual.  In Francis? view, Spencer was no 
classical liberal (p. 250).  More than this, he has been ill-served by 
ethicists who take his later ideas as conservative or individualistic. 
Instead, Francis emphasizes the originality of Spencer?s evolutionary 
theory in which progress was determined by the planning of individuals 
who increasingly moved into correspondence with each other (pp. 291-92). In this telling, justice rightly limits the sphere of the individual 
for Spencer (p. 251).

Francis? re-orientation of our thinking on Spencer raises the question 
of whether we have correctly characterized classical liberalism at all. Our misconceptions about Spencer may simply be a severe example of our 
misconception of classical political economists one and all.[1] 
Political economists from Adam Smith through John Stuart Mill held that 
individuals were connected to each other through sympathy.  More than 
this, they held that people are morally constrained by these 
connections, in addition to the constraints imposed by the legal system.

Indeed, Smith characterized humans as unique among animals because they 
connect with others through trade and discussion.  From this 
characterization of humans as sympathetically connected, he developed 
his system of natural liberty in which individuals come to do the right 
thing, to care for others as a result of the imaginative process of 
changing position with each other.  Sympathy was a staple of eighteenth 
and nineteenth century theory of mind as developed by Scottish 
philosophers, including Smith?s colleague, Dugald Stewart, and two 
generations of Stewart?s students, James and John Stuart Mill.  These 
philosophers foresaw an extension of the range of sympathy to all 
mankind (Mill, 1829, 2:278) and, as such, they became identified with 
philanthropy.

So, too, Spencer held that as sympathy flourishes ?natural selection? is 
superseded by another, human law of social development (Peart and Levy, 
2005, 220-22).  For Spencer, the extension of sympathy to encompass 
universal concern for others is evidence of a fully developed race. 
Humans become civilized through the development of language and 
sympathy.  Spencer explicitly rejected social Darwinism entailing racial 
development through misery induced by competition for resources and 
argued to the contrary that individuals who have developed sympathetic 
tendencies toward one another will come to reduce misery by reducing 
births (Peart and Levy, 2005, 222).

But as we know, Spencer has been interpreted quite differently.  As 
Francis points out, when W. G. Sumner taught sociology using Spencer?s 
_The Study of Sociology_, he omitted an analysis of Spencer?s final 
chapter, on altruism (p. 189). And the device of sympathy was 
successfully attacked by social commentators, such as the co-founder of 
eugenics, W. R. Greg, who wished to see natural selection in humans 
unimpeded by concern for others, the ?unfit? (Peart and Levy 2005, 
63-64).  With the demise of sympathy as an analytical device late in the 
century, the phrase ?survival of the fittest? came to mean fittest 
_absent concern_ for others.  As Francis has demonstrated so 
convincingly, this was a re-orienting of our interpretation of Spencer. 
When sympathy disappeared from the toolkit of economics, we also began 
to misremember classical political economy.

Note:
1. This of course is not to say that political economists spoke with one 
and the same voice throughout the nineteenth century.  It is, instead, 
meant to suggest that from Smith through J. S. Mill, the dimension of 
sympathy is important in their analyses.

References:

Mill, James. [1829] 1869. _Analysis of the  Phenomena of the Human 
Mind_ (edited by John Stuart Mill). London: Longmans, Green, Reader and 
Dyer.

Peart, Sandra J. and David M. Levy. 2005. _The ?Vanity of the 
Philosopher?: From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics_. 
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 	


Sandra J. Peart is dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at 
the University of Richmond. Previously, she was on the economics faculty 
at the College of William and Mary, and Baldwin-Wallace College.  She is 
the past President of the History of Economics Society and, with David 
Levy, co-directs the Summer Institute for the History of Economic 
Thought.  With David Levy, Peart has written on classical political 
economy and the rise of eugenics in the nineteenth century.  Her most 
recent book, edited with David Levy, is _The Street Porter and the 
Philosopher: Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism_.

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