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Carniero (1974)

• [Exellent 15-page review of Spencer on 100th anniversary of The Study of Sociology's publication. Many other refeences gleaned from here. ]
• Edward Youmans "bullied" (Youmans' word in a letter quoted by Fiske) Spencer into writing The Study of Sociology. It was not part of Spencer's plan for his Synthetic Philosophy.
  • He was busy writing other things and first said no, then said "I'll outline it and someone else can write it," then finally he wrong it.
• Spencer desired to publish it in serialized form in England and U.S.
  • Difficult in U.S. because journals weren't up to Spencer's standards of quality, and they published 2 weeks earlier than English journals.
  • Spencer suggested a newspaper, but Youmans objected: "newspapers die after 12 hours" and the usually favor politics. Also, some were opposed to laissez-faire economics and would refuse to publish anything that smacked of that.
• Spencer wrote a lot about cognitive biases in reseachers in The Study of Sociology
  • Presages the modern "science of knowledge". A treatise on sources of bias borne of "religious, political, educational, class, and other allegiances and antagonisms."
  • It helped him sharpen his own wits for his later writing.
• Charles Darwin was impressed by it, particularly its debunking of the Great Man theory of history
• Was considered very readable when it came out. Spencer checked his own "ponderous" tendencies when writing it, to broaden its appeal.
• Sold very well, and was profitable
• Described as not so much laying the foundations of sociology as it was clearing the ground to prepare for the foundations to be subsequently laid.
• Study of Sociology was despised by the Platonic idealist establishment at Cambridge and Oxford (e.g. Benjamin Jowett), who didn't like the idea of man being strictly subject to natural law. They were more interested in culturing men to be able to move about in society than actually studying society.
  • People like this also despised the word sociology itself, being a "barbarous" mixture of Greek and Latin roots
• Was more warmly received in the United States.
• Closing paragraph: "We find, then, the curious anomaly that a book that Spencer himself did not conceive of, which he did not want to undertake but had to be "bullied" into writing, whose composition he at first considered so burdensome that he wished to put it off on a collaborator, and which he finally sandwiched in between more serious volumes of his Synthetic Philosophy, turned out to exert a profound influence on modern thought, and continues to this day to hold a lofty place in the history of social science."

• Spencer published over 90 articles in Popular Science Monthly.
• His Descriptive Sociology 8-volume folio set were the first systematic comparative work in social science, and presaged the modern Human Relations "area files".

Social Statics (1851)

Spencer's first book

• “The poverty of the incapable, the distress that comes upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many ‘in shallows and in miseries,’ are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence.”

Holmes (1873)

• [Review of The Study of Socioloigy by famous Supreme Court Justice and thinker
• Spencer described enthusiastically as "omnivorous" and "periscopic", with an mind that is fair and "nearly achromatic"

New York Times (April 1880)

• April 3
• April 4
• April 5 here
  • Spencer: "the white czar of agnosticism"
  • Author of this article argues that Spencer's intellect was what was uniquely disturbing to Christians. There are plenty of agnostics, but few with Spencer's intellect.

Fiske (1894)

John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans (New York, 1894).

• Youmans observed Spencer prodigiously revising the manuscript in 1877 to make it more readable. (p. 337)

Moore (1903)

Principia Ethica here

• Per Falk (2020), major takedown of Spencer's "naturalistic fallacy" by G.E. Moore in "Principia Ethica" (1903)
• Includes critique of Spencer's "doctrine."
• p. 46: "To argue that a thing is good because it is ‘natural' or bad because it is ‘unnatural' in these common senses of the term, is therefore certainly fallacious..."
• p. 48: [Notes teleological thinking] "Spencer, for example, constantly uses ‘more evolved’ as equivalent to ‘higher.’"
• p. 50: "It is possible that Mr Spencer is a naturalistic Hedonist."

Dewey (1904)

• [Immediately after his death, a somewhat flowery reflection on the nature of his work and life ]
• Spencer's education was largely ahistorical
• Spencer was an isolated fellow, and his philosophy also is isolated and closed.
  • "The austere devotion, the singleness, simplicity, and straightforwardness of Spencer's own life, and its seclusion, its remoteness, its singular immunity from all intellectual contagion, are chapters in the same story. Here, we may well believe, is the revenge of nature. The element of individual life so lacking in the philosophy, both in its content and in its style, is the thing that strikes us in the history of Spencer's personal effort. No system, after all, has ever been more thoroughly conditioned by the intellectual and moral personality of its author. The impersonal content of the system is the register of the personal separation of its author from vital participation in the moving currents of history."
• His 1860 First Principles outline is amazing because it lays out the master pla right from the beginning.
  • By contrast, most well-known systems of philosophy are constructed experientially by the authors (e.g., Kant, Aristotle), and more by their readers ex post facto than by the authors as they go along.
• It's a remarkable historical stroke of luck that Spencer and Darwin developed their evolutionary theories at the same time. The one supported the other [perhaps "not a coincidence"?]

Spencer's autobiography

• Worked on it for 20 years according to Carniero (1974), obsessing over his public image.
• p. 243: Considered having C.E. Appleton write The Study of Sociology, but after an interview found they'd not even agree on Chapter 1. So He'd write it himself.
• p. 358: Enjoys revising and polishing manuscripts, unlike so many other people. The Study of Society received 5 revisions.

Burns (1930-35)

Burns, The Social Sciences as Disciplines: Great Britain (15 vol.)

• p. 237: Spencer's death in late 1903 caused a re-evaluation in 1904 of his body of work in Britain, finally leading to acceptance of the validity of sociology as a study in that country [it has already taken off quite well in the US by this point]

Goldman (1953)

13 books that changed America" Saturday Review no. 36 (1953)

• The Study of Sociology listed alongside The Federalist Papers, Common Sense, Uncle Tom's Cabin, etc.

Francis and Taylor (2014)

Expensive set of collected recent essays, here.

Falk (2020)

Falk, Dan. (2020) "The Complicated Legacy of Herbert Spencer, the Man Who Coined ‘Survival of the Fittest’", Smithsonian Magazine here

• Sums up social Darwinism: "the successful deserve their success while those who fail deserve their failure."
  • "Modern scholars, and the public at large, understandably view this idea with disdain."
• "Gregory Claeys, a historian at the University of London, writes that of all the great Victorian thinkers, it is Spencer whose “reputation has now indisputably fallen the farthest.”"
• Spencer was largely self-taught
• In his 1851 "Social Statics," he acknowledges suffering harming the individual, but it's part of nature's "plan", leading to society wide improvement over time.
• Laissez-Faire capitalists of the time (e.g. Andrew Carnegie) liked his ideas; socialists of his day hated his ideas.
• Historian Bernard Lightman (York Univerity, Toronto): “Spencer hated socialism because he thought socialism was all about protecting the weak. To him, that was intervening in the natural unfolding of the evolutionary process.”
• Political scientist David Weinstein (Wake Forest Univ, North Carolina) characterized Spencer's idea as defining the good as that which survives. "Those who survive the struggle are by definition not only the fittest but also morally the best. So it’s defining ‘good’ as ‘survival.’ Whatever survives is by definition good."
• Some saw Spencer's other side: altruistic, pacifistic (war is in the past, not future), nature is beneficient and progressive.
  • This view became eclipsed by Darwin's "chance" in nature that has no guidance.
• Spencer saw women as just as capable as men, perhaps.
• Spencer dated Mary Ann Evans (pen name George Eliot) for a year, but broke it off because she wasn't beautiful or feminine enough and he thought their children would be too ugly as a result. He liked her mind, though."
• Spencer obsessed over his autobiography for almost 20 years.
• Tried to control his image in these last years, asking letters be returned to him if they'd negatively impact his image.
• Bernard Lightman calls him a "tragic figure" who saw his ideas being forgotten or passed by near the end of his life, as society drifted to the left and socialist ideas.

The Study of Sociology (1873, 1880)

Editions available:

• The Study of Sociology (1880) Spencer's library edition. "...as finished a shape as I can give to it" (p. iv)
  • Superfluities removed. Illustrations added. Revision of form and expression. But "differs in no important respects from the original edition." (p. iv)
• The Study of Sociology (1872) Original edition sold to Appleton publisher
  • Appeared serially in Youman's Popular Science Monthly
  • Appeared with Youman's multi-volume International Scientific Series
  • Printed as a standalone book in multiple editions. Most recent may have been University of Michigan paperback edition.
• As serialized in Popular Science Monthly. He says the final, compiled, non-serialized version has some small improvements.

Notes on The Study of Sociology

Chapter 1

• Proximate results versus remote results "Is there distress somewhere? They suppose nothing more is required than to subscribe money for relieving it. They never trace the reactive effects which charitable donations work on bank-accounts, on the surplus capital bankers have to lend, on the productive activity which the capital now abstracted would have set up, on the number of laborers who would have received wages and who now go without wages—they do not perceive that certain necessaries of life have been withheld from one man who would have exchanged useful work for them, and given to another who perhaps persistently evades working. Nor do they look beyond the immediate mitigation of misery. They shut their eyes to the fact that as fast as the provision for those who live without labor in increased, so fast does there increase the number of those who live without labor; and that with an ever-growing distribution of alms, there comes an ever-growing outcry for more alms. Similarly throughout all their political thinking. Proximate causes and proximate results are alone contemplated. There is scarcely any consciousness that the original causes are often numerous and widely different from the apparent cause; and that beyond each immediate result there will be multitudinous remote results, most of them quite incalculable."

Chapter 3

• “structure up to a certain point is requisite for further growth, structure beyond that point impedes growth.”
• “Socially, as well as individually, organization is indispensable to growth: beyond a certain point there cannot be further growth without further organization. Yet...beyond this point organization...increases the obstacles to those readjustments required for larger growth and more perfect structure.”
• "if there does exist an order among those structural and functional changes which societies pass through, knowledge of that order can scarcely fail to affect our judgments as to what is progressive, and what retrograde—what is desirable, what is practicable, what is Utopian."

Chapter 6

• Revolution just papers over things for a bit, but never works. " Again and again for three generations France has been showing the world that it is impossible essentially to change the type of a social structure by a revolution. However great the transformation may for a time seem, the original thing reappears in disguise."

Postscript (1880)

• Answers common critiques or misrepresentations or misunderstandings of this work.
• Paraphrased: I thought my meaning was clear. Upon re-reading, it is still quite clear, and yet people suppose I expressed views quite different from those I intended.
• Why we are often misunderstood:
  1. Often people form a snap judgment or premature conclusion after hearing/reading only the very beginning of a statement.
  2. An "undisciplined intelligence" may not be able to hold the whole of a complex argument in their mind; by the time the end is reached the beginning has been forgotten.
  3. An amore propore (self-love) on the part of the listener also can cause them to stop listening or not listen carefully
• Assertion: Spencer is so callous, he wants a return to the barbarous days of leaving defective or inferior babies to die by exposure.
  • Response: Never said that. Let them do the best they can in life on their own merits. Let them accept private/familiar charity. But do not let the state give them charity; this is actually less humane than letting them get by more on their own. The long-term consequence of state charity to inferiors is like sending "enemies" into the towns of your successors.
  • Stop thinking of only proximal effects (which may seem positive). Think of the distant (long term) effects
  • Thought exercise: Imagine denying someone needed surgery because, proximally, it will cause them pain, even if distally it will result in their healing. Everyone thinks this is absurd. Now just consider the inverse of this
• Assertion: Spencer says society evolves impersonally. People might as well become passive and do nothing in the face of these impersonal forces.
  • Response: Two things are true: individuals in a society exert willpower and make decisions and MUST. Yet there also are inexorable statstical averages. To expect people could evolve without action is to say something ca occur without a cause.
  • Thought exercise: Consider statistics on marriage and births in a given society and time. These hold steady over time, but each individual marriage and birth most assuredly is a "private matter" of will.
• Handing industry over to the state and socialist forces reduces innovation
  • Example: Telegrams in England used to cost more in rural areas than urban, because of infrastructure costs. Then the state took over and instituted uniform pricing. Now the urban people pay more, and subsidize the rural. And ever since, the 9privately run) USA telegraph companies have exceeded Britain in telegraph innovation.
  • "Every extension of public action limits the sphere for private action; modifies the conceptions of private responsibility and public responsibility; makes further extensions of public responsibility easier; and tends eventually to make the needful, since the more help the more helplessness."
  • For every public library, museum, garden, water supply, dwelling, railway, and telegraph, there come inspectors aplenty.
  • The idea becomes stronger that "corporate agency is to do everything and individual agency nothing."
  • [He is unrepentant in these views, but is clarifying them with precise language]
  • Example: French mountain guides and their donkeys used to be strictly prices based on experience and merit. Then the State regulated it and forced guides and donkeys to be on a uniform rotating basis after having been "certified" through an examination. Tour guides are worse now.
• Maladministration of justice--superfluous litigation,say--raises prices at every step along the way of a supply chain. Lawyers pocket the money. But proper and swift administration of justice avoids the "multiplication of aggressions" by people who noice they can get away with something.