Herbert Spencer died in 1903, four years before the founding of the Eugenics Education Society, precursor to the Galton Institute. Would he have joined? He shared the eugenicists’ concerns about our biological destiny, and the way civilization subverted nature’s rule of the “survival of the fittest” (as Spencer first called it). He too wanted people to take responsibility for the progressive evolution of the species. But he would likely have kept his distance. With some notable exceptions, he was a classic non-joiner. More than that, the eugenicists prescribed a remedy opposite to Spencer’s. They sought biological betterment through state intervention: innately inferior individuals had to be steered or even stopped from breeding. For Spencer, however, the state was the problem, not the solution. He recommended a return to natural struggle, through elimination of whatever hindered free competition. The unhappy name that stuck for this proposal was “social Darwinism.”

This excellent volume, from a centenary conference at the Galton Institute, reminds us that Spencer’s legacies extended much more broadly. In their introduction, the editors recall some connections and parallels between Galton and Spencer. They met for occasional chats and games of billiards at their shared London club. They even collaborated briefly – and not very successfully – on the editorial board of a scientific journal, ancestral to Nature. Both were hostile to organized religion. Both were obsessed with heredity and fecundity, yet were childless. Both advanced the evolutionist cause while, in quite different ways, relegating the Darwinian process of natural selection to the margins. Both had the most diverse interests, though with Galton one is always in a mathematician’s company, and with Spencer a philosopher’s. Where Galton was seemingly oblivious to how his contributions added up, Spencer built a system that rivalled Descartes’ in its synthetic sweep.

Greta Jones considers the matrix of this achievement in the first chapter. In the spirit of much recent historical writing on the sciences, her subject is less Spencer the thinker than Spencer the author, whose success depended on the emergence of a reading public hungry for evolutionary ideas. The prime mediator in this relationship, she shows, was the enterprising American editor Edward Youmans, who marketed the writings of Spencer and other British evolutionists in appealing new periodicals and book series. Spencer the thinker is hard to avoid for long, however; and Robert Richards follows with a chapter comparing Spencer’s evolutionary theory with Darwin’s. Richards brings out the very different uses to which Darwin and Spencer put a common stock of concepts, including the Malthusian population principle, competition, survival of the fittest (“Darwinism”), the inheritance of acquired characters (“Lamarckism”), gradualism, and progress as increased adaptation and differentiation.

In an echo of Spencer’s own sequencing, the volume turns in the following three chapters to Spencer’s social and ethical ideas. “Conservatism and Spencer’s philosophy walked hand in hand,” teaches a classic history of social Darwinism in American thought. “Acceptance of the Spencerian philosophy brought with it a paralysis of the will to reform.” The chapters by Naomi Beck and John Laurent show that outside the USA the reverse was sometimes true. Beck looks at France and Italy, where influential public men argued in Spencer’s name for meliorative state action. “Left” readings of Spencer were not altogether aberrant, especially when applied to land policy. Though he later repudiated it, Spencer early on argued – consistently, he thought – that every individual had a “right to the use of the earth,” and that this right could be guaranteed only if private property were abolished, and land held in common. In Australia and New Zealand, as Laurent shows, Spencerian legislators indeed sought to tax unused land heavily, as a means of discouraging property hoarding.

Thomas Dixon’s chapter on Spencer and altruism further undermines Spencer’s reputation as the ideologue of every-man-for-himself. The great capitalists of the age were also great philanthropists; and Spencer foresaw a future where, thanks to competition and its unique power to adapt individuals to social life, humans would develop to the full an innate potential for helping others spontaneously. As a matter of biology, our descendants would, in Spencerian terms, temper their egoism with altruism. “Altruism” was a neologism, coined by the French philosopher Comte and popularized in the Anglophone world by Spencer – and Dixon produces some amusing quotations reminding us that this now familiar word made some people at the time uncomfortable. And well it should have; for, as Dixon argues, “altruism” was a linguistic weapon, part of a nineteenth-century campaign on behalf of a new, secularized morality.

The proceedings close on an elegant, elegiac note with J.D.Y. Peel’s 2003 Galton lecture. An anthropologist, Peel observes that while Darwin has become a totemic figure in our culture, Spencer is “treated as the dark counterpart to Darwin, the unacceptable face of Darwinism, even a sort of scapegoat who can be used to carry away the sins of Darwinism.” He laments that scholars have been little more attentive to Spencer than the wider public. His useful survey misses out some important contributions – I think of Robert Boakes on Spencer’s instinct theory and its modifications, Michael Ruse on how Spencerian notions of equilibria survive in modern Darwinian theory, and Robert Richards’ defence of Spencer’s ethics against the “naturalistic fallacy” charge (that one cannot derive “ought” from “is”) – but he is right that we still await the work that does full justice to the man and his impact. This volume whets the appetite.

Gregory Radick
Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science
Division of History and Philosophy of Science
School of Philosophy
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Email: G.M.Radick@leeds.ac.uk