Introduction

This book deals at some length with Herbert Spencer as an example of non-idealist social thought. Since today Spencer's thought is not generally familiar (his name certainly remains known from his phrase ‘survival of the fittest’) the present chapter begins with a brief outline of his ideas and their context.

Over a century ago, Spencer was an acknowledged leading light in Victorian intellectual life with a reputation that permeated popular thought. His books were rapidly translated into the major languages, including Japanese. T.H. Green, Henry Sidgwick, A.J. Balfour and G.E. Moore gave his work careful philosophical criticism. As sociology grew as a discipline Spencer's pioneering contributions were explicitly engaged with as Tönnies (Offer, 1991) and Durkheim (Perrin, 1995) fashioned their own distinctive analyses of fundamental forms of social relationships, social change and social cohesion. Beatrice Webb, committed to social research and social reform, listed at length her indebtedness to Spencer in her autobiographical My apprenticeship (1926) and in her letters and diaries. In economics Alfred Marshall read Spencer closely on the course and direction of social and industrial change and wrote in 1904,

From the 1850s onwards Spencer was part of a circle of science-minded movers and shakers, which included Professor T.H. Huxley, Professor Alexander Bain, Professor David Masson, Professor John Tyndall and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, who combined shared conviviality with constructive criticism of each other's works (one forum with these purposes was the ‘X club’, on which see Jensen, 1970 and Barton, 1990). His letters record numerous further exchanges with Darwin, J.E. Cairnes, John Stuart Mill, the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, and a great many others. Among creative writers of his time Grant Allen (1904), W.H. Hudson (1904) and Lynn Linton (1894) held him in high regard and he was personally close to Marian Evans (George Eliot) up to her death, despite a lopsided emotional entanglement between them in the 1850s, Spencer being the less enthusiastic (Hughes, 1998).