Herbert Spencer

Abstract

This chapter will discuss Spencer’s organic analogy, his law of evolution, and his concepts of “structure,” “system,” “function,” and “moving equilibrium.” Furthermore, it will critically reflect on Spencer’s “ill-equipped to compete” and “survival of the fittest” concepts. The study of Spencer’s social Darwinism will prompt us to question whether the state should increase public debt to aid the poor or leave them to fend for themselves, as Spencer advocated. The text will also delve into Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid as a counter to social Darwinism.

The last section of this chapter is dedicated to methodological individualism, of which Spencer was one of the founders, and to Boudon’s formula that summarizes this methodological paradigm: M = M{m[S(M^′)]}

Introduction

In this chapter, we will discuss Spencer’s organic analogy, his law of evolution, and his concepts of “structure,” “system,” “function,” and “moving equilibrium.” Furthermore, we will critically reflect on Spencer’s concepts of “ill-equipped to compete” and “survival of the fittest.” The study of Spencer’s social Darwinism will prompt us to question whether the state should increase public debt to aid the poor or leave them to fend for themselves, as Spencer advocated. The text will also delve into Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid as a counter to social Darwinism to better understand the limitations of Spencer’s political theory.

The last section of this chapter will be dedicated to methodological individualism, of which Spencer was one of the founders, and to Boudon’s formula that summarizes this methodological paradigm: M = M{m[S(M^′)]}

This text will explain the concept of “unintended consequences.” The examples of the birth of language, money, and weapons will be used to illustrate the principle of methodological individualism.

Spencer’s Paradox

It is astonishing that Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) has disappeared from almost all sociological theory manuals and that so few young sociologists know his work directly. Yet, many concepts developed by Spencer are the foundation of contemporary sociological theory, and sociologists cite them constantly. There is another reason Spencer should be included in sociological theory manuals. I am referring to his ideas on public policies toward the poor. Does the State have to increase public debt to reduce poverty? This question from Spencer is very topical today.

Born in Derby, England, Spencer was a railway engineer in London and then a journalist for The Economist (1848–1853). In 1853, he received an inheritance from an uncle, which allowed him to devote himself only to a scholar’s activity (Spencer 1904, 415). Throughout his life, he achieved great success by publishing numerous works. Major American universities adopted his philosophy, biology, and psychology books as exam texts (Duncan 1908, 208). He had many honors. The universities of Bologna, St. Andrews, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Budapest awarded him doctoral degrees. He refused them because he thought such awards created a tendency toward conformity, depriving scholars of the courage necessary to face intellectual enterprise (Gaupp 1910, 42). In 1860, he designed a monumental work, A System of Synthetic Philosophy, which includes The Principles of Sociology, published in three volumes between 1877 and 1896 (Carneiro and Perrin, 2002). Immediately after publishing his second book, The Principles of Psychology (1855), he was struck by a severe nervous disease, which would have severely debilitated him. He could not concentrate, write, or read for at least a year and a half. He could not study more than three hours daily for the rest of his life. He was frugal and solitary until his death.

Spencer’s intellectual story has been defined as “the most paradoxical in the history of philosophy” (Abbagnano and Fornero 1992, vol. III, 311). While Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and other philosophers had misfortune in life and success after death, Spencer and his The Principles of Sociology had great success and real misfortune once he passed away (Cooley 1920, 129–145). Thanks to the publication of his A System of Synthetic Philosophy, considered “the Bible of positivism” in the second half of the nineteenth century, Spencer became the most famous philosopher of his time and the most authoritative interpreter of the evolutionary Weltanschauung. Spencer’s First Principles were translated, in a short time, into almost all European languages, including Russian. During his visit to London, Tsar Alexander II asked to meet the most illustrious personalities of the West, and Spencer was among the first to be invited by Lord Derby.

The Organic Analogy

Spencer conceived society as a living organism, like a plant or an animal. In his article, The Social Organism (1860), Spencer lists four peculiarities societies share with individual bodies (Spencer 1891a, vol. I, 265–307).

• 1. Both societies and organisms begin as small aggregates, which increase in mass. Some of them eventually reach a size ten thousand times larger than they originally started.

• 2. They both start with a simple structure that continuously increases and becomes more and more complex.

• 3. The parts, initially underdeveloped, gradually grow, becoming so interdependent that each part’s life depends on the remaining parts’ life.

• 4. The life of society is independent of the life of each of its components and is even more lasting; individuals are born, grow, work, reproduce, and die, while the political body, made up of them, survives generation after generation, growing in mass, in the complexity of the structure, and functional activity.

At the basis of Spencer’s sociology, there is the idea that society is subject to a universal law, which must be studied with the scientific method. (Simon 1960, 294). This universal law is the law of evolution, according to which an evolutionary principle governs the universe.

The Law of Evolution

Evolution is the passage of an organism from the simple to the complex through successive differentiations. The first nebulae evolved in the solar system; single-celled organisms evolved into humans; the first tribes evolved into modern industrial societies composed of differentiated parts which perform specific functions. Everything evolves from the simple to the complex, and the same happens with society. Initially, its groups are small in number and size, but then they grow and differentiate. As with the individual organism, the social organism reaches maturity through differentiation and then begins to decay.

Evolution marks the transition from undifferentiated to differentiated, uniform to multiform, and homogeneous to heterogeneous (Spencer 1862). Evolution and differentiation are inseparable concepts. In his essay, Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857), Spencer writes that the law of all progress is the law of organic progress. Everything evolves from simple to complex through successive differentiations. The development of the earth, life on the surface, the government of industries, trade, language, literature, science, or art all are subjected to this same law (Spencer 1891b, Vol. 1, 10).

Spencer distinguishes reality into three domains or fields of observation: (a) the inorganic world of inanimate matter, (b) the organic world of plant and animal species, and (c) the superorganic world or the world of society. Each of these worlds is subject to evolution.

To evolve, the superorganic world must adapt to the surrounding environment, which requires some favorable external factors divided into inorganic and organic factors. The inorganic factors that favor social evolution are the climate and the surface; the organic ones are the flora and fauna that we will investigate.

Climate and Surface

A very rigid climate makes it challenging to develop a complex social organization. The more organized and differentiated a society is, the greater the goals it can cut on the road to civilization. Spencer outlines the life of the Eskimos, to whom the cold forces them to dedicate much time to protect the body from heat loss and to accumulate provisions to keep the body temperature high even during the night. Even the physiological processes of the Eskimos are affected by the cold. Their digestive system suffers from the large quantities of whale fat and oil they must ingest inside their snow huts, lit only by a faint oil lamp; otherwise, the walls would risk liquefying. The weight of the individual life of the Eskimos is too high and leaves no time for the many activities that a society needs to develop. Such an intense cold stops social evolution, indirectly opposing the multiplication of individuals.

Spencer concludes that the real enemy of man is extreme cold and not heat, as evidenced by the fact that the Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Phoenician civilizations arose in hot and dry regions. Excessive heat does not impede progress. The most ancient civilizations arose in regions characterized by tropical or nearly tropical climates. Spencer mentions southern China and India. The complex architecture of Java and Cambodia are evidence of other tropical civilizations in the East. The extinct societies of Mexico and Peru in Central America confirm that great social advances occurred in the hot regions, even in the New World. Tahiti, the Tonga Islands, and the Sandwich Islands are in the tropics. Once discovered, they displayed considerable social evolution despite the lack of metals. On one side, excessive heat prevents the vital actions of man and those of mammals in general; on the other, the day always offers a certain number of hours in which the temperature drops, making social life possible and enjoying abundant subsistence food produced by the heat.

The surface is the second inorganic factor that favors social evolution.

The best surface is that which causes men to accept submission to a higher power. If a territory has a temperate climate and abundant food but all around it is surrounded by dangers, then the probability that man will stabilize and accept subordination to a higher power grows. The fact that men agree to submit to authority is fundamental to the civilization process. Submission to central power allows rulers to use the energies of society to carry out military, economic, and architectural feats. Spencer cites the case of ancient Egypt. The Egyptians were surrounded by the desert, inhabited by marauders expert in looting and kidnapping. The Egyptian surface offered incentives to stay and disincentives to leave (Spencer 1898, Vol. 1, 25).

Furthermore, the surface must be distinguished by its geographic and geological heterogeneity. Hills, mountains, valleys, plains, and an extensive coast with many rivers that flow into the sea made it possible for the Phoenician society to develop. The Greek civilization also benefited from a heterogeneous territory. No land in the world, like Greece, has a great variety of natural forms in such a limited space. These characteristics are also typical of the surface of Italy. This same geological and geographical complexity is also found in the New World. The Mexican Plateau, surrounded by mountains, contains many beautiful lakes. Lake Texcoco, with its islands and shores, was the seat of government. In like manner, the power of the Incas arose on the mountainous islands of the large and elevated Lake Titicaca.

Flora and Fauna

Flora is the first organic factor of social evolution. The abundance of vegetables improves nutrition and promotes reproduction. The larger the population, the greater the chances of development, especially if people have trees. Spencer again cites the example of the Eskimos, who, without wood, can build neither solid boats nor make construction progress.

Some Eskimos have no timber; others, on the other hand, have to be satisfied with the little transported by the Ocean. In these cases, men have to build their houses with snow or ice and come up with many painful expedients to deal with the difficulties caused by excessive cold. An insurmountable obstacle to social progress is the lack, or the great shortage, of food plants for human consumption, which only restricts food to animal meat.

Fauna is the second organic factor that favors social evolution.

Whether or not a territory has wild animals to hunt has significant consequences. If the game is abundant, men can settle in one place or follow the animals to hunt and practice nomadism, which cannot develop a complex society. If the terrestrial fauna is poor, men are forced to devote themselves to agriculture and lead a stable life, which favors the development of society. By settling down, men can increase the population; develop industry and the arts; and create armies, bridges, and fortifications. However, flora and fauna can also be an obstacle to progress. If the flora is full of harmful plants and impenetrable forests, men are doomed not to evolve. The same happens when the fauna is full of large carnivorous and ferocious animals. Spencer cites the case of the island of Sumatra, in the Indian Ocean, where the assaults of tigers depopulated entire villages. Prey animals also impede perfect freedom of movement and communication, thus hindering social progress. Spencer gives the example of wolves in northern Europe and farmers who are victims of snake bites. He adds the torment of predatory mosquitoes, which discourage the external work of men in tropical regions.

Spencer does not find it helpful to linger further on the external factors of social evolution. He is interested in fixing the fundamental principle of his sociology, according to which evolution means adaptation and adaptation means progress.

Original external characters matter and the characteristics of the environment and those of human individuals cooperate in determining social phenomena. Local conditions affect the primitive stage of social evolution more than they affect the later stages. Highly organized societies can use a large number of scientific knowledge and resources to adapt to unfavorable environments, unlike weak and disorganized ones that live at the mercy of circumstances. For over one hundred thousand years, civilization has not known any progress as it is very rare for men to find themselves surrounded by many favorable circumstances and few unfavorable ones. In some cases, men made little progress by pooling their forces. Still, the surrounding difficulties eventually swept away all they had built in favor of civilization by not having the means to consolidate their efforts. This helps explain why no complex society has ever arisen for millennia.

Sociologists no longer use Spencer’s law of evolution, but the concepts supporting it are among sociology’s most current. Donald N. Levine recalled three: “Social structure,” “social function,” and “system equilibrium” (Levine 1995, 248). I add two more concepts to be remembered: The “survival of the fittest” and “unintended consequences.” In the final section of this chapter, I will address the topic of methodological individualism, which is another significant theoretical contribution made by Spencer.

The Structure

The social structure is a very abstract mental image, representing society as a system of interconnected parts (Spencer 1871). We must be careful not to confuse the system with the structure. The system represents the whole; the structure indicates how the parts or units of the system are arranged. A system is composed of a structure and parts that interact. The structure defines the order or arrangement of the parts of a system (Waltz 2010, 78). The structure is not the set of units of a system; it is how they relate to each other, combine, and position themselves. The structure is not the parliament, the government, and the judiciary, but how these three system units are arranged relative to each other. A system in which parliament is subject to the prime minister has a different structure than one in which the premier is subject to the parliament.

A good definition of social structure comes from the English anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955). According to Radcliffe-Brown, whom Spencer strongly influenced, the social structure is a disposition of people who have controlled or institutionally defined relationships with each other, such as the relationships between the kings and their subjects or those between husband and wife (Radcliffe-Brown 1952, 11). Spencer used the concept of structure similar to that of the biologists of his time, according to whom the structure is synonymous with the organization of the parts. In The Principles of Sociology, although used in different ways, the word structure and organization are strictly interrelated (Spencer 1898, Vol. 1, 439).

The Function

According to the organic analogy, each system part performs a particular function.

In a biological sense, the function is a component’s contribution to the organization it belongs to. Biology developed by analyzing the functions of the human body’s liver, kidneys, heart, and lungs. Biology can study the functioning of a single organ or the activity of a group of organs, for example, the function performed by the digestive system. Similarly, sociology can analyze the function of socialization, which requires the cooperation of multiple social groups in favor of the social organism (school, family, political parties, media, etc.). Spencer’s sociology is based on this analogy with the living body.

Box 3.1: The Meaning of Function

In the organic theory of society, “function” implies the concept of “need.”

To understand the function of an institution, we need to identify the specific need it is intended to meet. Each function corresponds to a need. Inspired by the organic model, Durkheim explained that function is a concept that can be used in two ways. Firstly, the function is cited without referring to the corresponding need. In this case, we will say that “digestion is important” and limit ourselves to designating a system of movements abstracting from their consequences. In a second way, the only one that interests sociology, the function is associated with the need it must satisfy. Thus, we will say that digestion satisfies the organism’s need to assimilate nutrients and that respiration introduces the gases necessary for maintaining life in the animal’s tissues. Therefore, asking what the function of the division of labor is means asking about the needs it satisfies. The function of the division of labor, Durkheim explains, is to satisfy the need for solidarity in a society that has become more complex and developed. By dividing labor, men depend on each other.

The System Equilibrium

The third fundamental concept is that of “moving equilibrium.”

Being made up of interconnected parts, society tends to restore its balance spontaneously whenever it is disturbed. Spencer writes in The Principles of Biology (1864) that a system is: “A whole whose parts are held together by complex forces that are ever re-balancing themselves—a whole whose moving equilibrium continually disturbed and continually rectified” (Spencer 1898a, Vol. 1, 544).

A social organism, like an individual organism, is subject to modifications until it finds itself in equilibrium with the conditions of the environment. Today, sociologists express this idea of Spencer with the example of the airport hit by a storm or a technical system failure (Wallace & Wolf 1995, 18). To avoid paralysis, pilots, flight attendants, control personnel, baggage, and catering staff, i.e., the system’s organs, will increase their activity to restore the situation to a state of equilibrium comparable to the healthy condition of the human body.

As anticipated, Spencer has elaborated a fourth fundamental concept in the history of the social sciences and of Western culture in general. I am talking about the concept of “survival of the fittest,” an expression coined by Spencer in The Principles of Biology published five years after The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin (1909). Spencer clarified that “survival of the fittest” amounted to Darwin’s “natural selection,” indicating the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life (Spencer 1898a, Vol. 1, 571). The fittest are the ones who survive on their strength. Darwin appreciated this expression and undertook to use it (Darwin 1888, Vol. III, 45–46; Claeys 2000, 227). Again, one has to be careful not to get confused. It would be wrong to believe that Spencer discovered evolutionism, thanks to Darwin.

Spencer coined the term survival of the fittest under the influence of Darwin but embraced evolutionism before the publication of The Origin of Species. Initially influenced by Lamarck (1744–1829), evolutionism is already present in Spencer’s debut work, Social Statics (Spencer 1851, 462), published eight years before The Origin of Species (1859). According to Robert L. Carneiro, Spencer’s most significant contribution to science was that he, of all scientists, was the first to recognize evolution as a fundamental process operating throughout the entire cosmos, from the formation of galaxies to the transmutation of species (Carneiro and Perrin 2002, 236). In 1852, seven years before Darwin published The Origin of Species (1859), Spencer had already published an article entitled The Development Hypothesis (Spencer 1852, 280–281), in which he argued that the organic theory of evolution was the most reasonable way to account for the diversity of species. Darwin and Spencer echoed each other on essential ideas such as social evolution, the social meaning of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and hereditary (Kennedy 1978, 77). To Spencer, we also owe the theories of differentiation, the division of labor, and the notion of density, which, as we will see in the fourth chapter, will have a prominent place in Durkheim’s sociology (Boudon and Bourricaud, 466).

The Relationship Between Function and Structure

After clarifying the relationship between functions and structure, Spencer deals with their joint evolution, to which Carneiro has dedicated a close study, which I use in this account (Carneiro 1973).

In the first volume of The Principles of Biology, Spencer wonders whether structure or function comes first. Answering this question is not easy because once a system has taken shape, its functions and its structure seem to us to vary together. However, thinking about the triggering of the initial process, it is clear that function precedes structure. Once life has emerged, it has to perform some minimal functions to take its first steps. The function has a causal priority on the structure. Function comes first: “On the hypothesis of Evolution—Spencer writes in The Principles of Biology—life necessarily comes before organization” (Spencer 1898a, Vol. I, 210). Since the passing from a state without a structure to a state with a structure is a vital process, it follows that vital activity must have existed when there was no structure yet.

Spencer knows how to be even more precise. He explains that each advancement is the effect of a better adaptation to the external environment in all stages of life, from the simplest to the most complex. The structure becomes more complex to improve adaptation. In short, structures arise to help functions do their job better. The causal mechanism is this: Life arises and performs some minimal functions, from which the first elementary structures arise. All this is as true for superorganic life as organic life. Once the system is born, the function and the structure trigger an action and reaction mechanism. The variation in the functions, which the system needs to adapt to the environment, involves a variation of the structure and vice versa. Functions, like structures, progress from homogeneous, indefinite, and inconsistent to heterogeneous, defined, and coherent. The structure and the functions advance from the simple to the complex and from the general to the special. As the structure and functions progress together, their size must be mutually proportionate. The more a company performs a certain type of function, the more developed the structure to perform that function will become. In summary, the functions and the structure differ in adapting to the surrounding environment, and the adaptation to the surrounding environment creates the conditions for further growth of the functions and structure. The more the system grows, the better its chances of survival.

In Spencer’s definition, society becomes a social system when it transforms into an aggregate that works to establish or maintain a balance. Balance and moving equilibrium keep any society in balance with the surrounding environment. Any society must procure food, build houses, exchange goods, defend itself from enemies, and perform these functions daily. What happens if an external factor, for example, the sudden shortage of food, alters the balance of the system? Spencer answers that society, like the body, initiates a spontaneous balancing mechanism. It is important to clarify that, according to Spencer, society does not advance due to a universal law, which inexorably pushes men in a specific direction; society progresses due to the recurring need to readjust its structure to environmental change. If the change is minimal, the structure and functions can cope by increasing or reorganizing their usual activity. If, on the contrary, the change is too significant, the structure and functions, being interrelated, must develop further. Spencer compares what happens to the human body when it is subjected to great physical effort due to training. A change in the cardiovascular system must occur for the musculature to develop further. The circulatory system must expand to the smallest capillaries. Only in this way will the muscles subjected to exercise find the nourishment necessary to increase their activity. Obviously, in addition to changes in the cardiovascular system, there must be other, albeit minor, changes in the body’s lymphatic, nervous, and other systems for the muscular system to enlarge. In society, there is also a mutual dependence on functions, like that which exists in organisms, and the reaction of functions on the structure is similar.

Spencer shows the ramification of structural and functional changes occurring in society, using the example of a maritime nation whose shipbuilding industry is called upon to face a new demand from the market. The first consequence is that builders will employ new workers and purchase greater quantities of iron to adapt to the challenge of the environment. Thanks to the law of supply and demand, the shipbuilding industry will push the iron industry to increase its production, which will induce other industries to increase staff. Thus, an evolutionary process is triggered, increasing the size of industries and the number of their functions. The industrial system, on the one hand, is growing; on the other, it is becoming more integrated.

It must be remembered that without integration, there is no society and that is why Spencer is very careful in clarifying that differentiation creates an evolution to the extent that it produces integration. The naval and iron industries become more complex and are linked to each other. The movement of one affects the other. According to the principle of the interdependence of the parts, the growth of one structure often involves the downsizing of another, as happened in ancient Rome when the rise of the merchant class led to a significant loss of power for the landed aristocracy. The system, to rebalance itself, must sometimes subtract much energy from one part of it to transfer them elsewhere in search of the right balance. If iron is in short supply, its use will be reduced in certain sectors of society to be diverted to shipyards.

The type of balance discussed so far is, in Spencer’s homeostatic model, a direct balance, which occurs when the society uses the functions and structure at its disposal to adapt to the environment. However, direct balancing is only sometimes possible because the challenges that come from the environment are sometimes too large and rapid, and the system is unable to adapt on the first try. In this case, indirect balancing intervenes, triggered when natural selection becomes very hard and consists of the extinction of the less-well suited parts.

There may need to be more than partial changes to ensure the system’s survival, so the most ruthless natural selection comes into play. The mechanism is simple: when the struggle for survival fails, natural selection becomes extreme, decreeing the extinction of those societies that have failed to adapt to new challenges through internal reorganization. If external pressure persists, surviving societies are subject to increasingly harsh natural selection, and in order not to die, they must make further changes in their structures and functions. Intense selective pressure can continue indefinitely, producing the extermination of some societies and the partial change of others. This gradual sorting of the less suitable societies, and the successive modifications of the more suitable ones, ultimately lead to a balancing between the surviving societies and the new environment, or indirect balancing. Once the selection process is complete, only the societies and individuals well-equipped to face survival remain alive.

Which societies will adapt successfully to the new conditions and which ones will fail depend largely on the rigidity and plasticity of their social structure. Societies with a rigid structure fail to change under the pressure of natural selection; those with a plastic structure, on the other hand, have a greater ability to adapt to change. It is always a question of balance. The structure, up to a certain degree of structuring, is a precondition for the growth of society; beyond that point, the structure becomes too structured and prevents growth.

To clarify, Spencer notes that balancing does not necessarily result in evolution. Only adaptive changes that produce greater complexity can be considered evolutionary. There is no evolution if there is no increase in the structure and function complexity connected to the balancing process.

The Relationship Between Comte and Spencer

What was the relationship between Comte and Spencer?

Spencer was very upset by anyone who approached him to Comte, against whom he waged a “holy war” (Eisen 1967, 49). He even asked John Stuart Mill, of whom he was a friend, to help him deny any rumor of his alleged intellectual debt to the French philosopher (Lanaro 1981, 33). Spencer published an essay entitled Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of Mister Comte (Spencer [1864] 1969), with whom he had met in Paris in 1856, having just a conversation of courtesy because of his limited French. In the essay mentioned above, Spencer claims to share Comte’s following ideas: (a) knowledge derives from experience; (b) the theory of relativity of knowledge; (c) the refusal to assume unverifiable metaphysical entities as a principle of scientific explanation; (d) the belief in the existence of invariable laws of phenomena. But then he hastens to clarify that Comte did not invent these ideas and that he would eventually have absorbed them from other philosophers.

However, Comte’s influence on Spencer seems evident, starting with his use of the terms “sociology,” “social statics,” and “altruism” that was coined by Comte in The Catechism of Positive Religion (1852) to indicate the principle of positivist morality, which consists in “living for others.” (Comte 1858, 66; Dixon 2008).

Spencer, like Comte, also distinguishes between military society and industrial society. In a military society characterized by strength, the life and property of the individual are in the hands of the state, which uses them to improve its warfare capabilities. Just as the soldier is subjected to the officer, Spencer writes, so the citizen is subjected to the government in public and private life. In the military society, there is forced cooperation, unlike in the industrial society, in which cooperation is voluntary. It is worth noting that, in Spencer’s analysis, the transition from military society to industrial society does not depend on a law that pushes men toward irreversible progress but on a social factor or the conflict in the surrounding environment. This implies that an industrial society involved in a war can take the aspect of a military society.

I want also to point out the main differences between Comte and Spencer.

For Comte, individuals are to be explained by society; for Spencer, society is to be explained by individuals. Comte’s view is holistic, and Spencer’s is individualistic.

For Comte, progress continues unabated and cannot go back. For Spencer, progress can stop, and society can regress. For the sake of clarity, an industrial society, if it is subjected to an external attack, can go back to being a military society.

Comte and Spencer are also distinguished for another reason.

Comte derives the need for an authoritarian society from organicism, while Spencer derives the need for a liberal society. In his book, The Man Versus the State (1884), collecting articles previously published in “The Contemporary Review,” Spencer attacks all doctrines that seek to limit individual freedom in the name of higher social objectives, such as Comte’s altruism.

Finally, Comte and Spencer are divided on the role of altruism in society. For Comte, efforts must be made to help the weak and needy. In human nature—according to Comte—there is no other moral imperative but love, the only one that tends to make sociality prevail immediately (Comte 1858, 51).

And Spencer?

The question is challenging because it requires a reflection on the relationship between Spencer and social Darwinism. By social Darwinism, we mean the application of Darwinian concepts of struggle for existence and natural selection in the relationships between men who become merciless when resources are scarce. This social doctrine has taken on a very negative meaning and is today almost always compared to racism (Toscano 1980, 56). George L. Mosse even placed social Darwinism among the cultural roots of Nazism, in his book on the intellectual origins of the Third Reich: “In Darwinian terms, the Jews were an arrested development in evolution, a fossil that lacked the strength or roots to nourish itself” (1981, 143). Let’s anticipate the answer: Spencer believes that society must eliminate the less well-suited and, to succeed in this enterprise, it must first eliminate socialism.

Spencer Against Socialism

Spencer rejects socialism for the sake of evolution.

Spencer’s arguments deserve to be discussed because they have always been topical and raised heated intellectual debates. Today as yesterday, men wonder whether it is just for the state to help poor people. Spencer’s question is still relevant concerning the current debate on the relationship between equality, freedom, and democracy (Morlino 2020).

Evolution, Spencer explains, selects the fittest, and socialism would like to alter this law of nature. Indeed, it is nature that must decide, not governments. For example, primitive men had a more vigorous physical constitution than that civilized men because their feral environment required much strength to survive.

Take the case of pregnant women.

According to Spencer, the physiological superiority of the fittest emerges clearly when one compares the severe pregnancy test to which the civilized woman’s constitution is subjected to the relatively mild disturbance suffered by the savage. The mothers and children of savage societies must have greater strength than those of civilized societies. When medical progress did not exist, the survival of the fittest left only the most energetic bodies capable of withstanding the miseries and travails of life at the mercy of the environment. Nature took its course, and bodies unable to adapt to a hostile environment were eliminated through selection. Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801–1894) notes that almost all the Tamulian aborigines of India can endure malaria as if it were natural fresh air (Waterhouse 2014). Among domestic animals, the more resistant breeds are fewer than the less resistant ones. In hostile environments, a body poorly suited changes in shape and weight to survive. In comfortable environments, on the other hand, the body does not need to adapt since adaptation is made possible by the tools created by medical and scientific progress that allows men to solve their problems using technology.

Socialism would like to place the best-suited and the less well-suited on the same level, eliminating free competition, which must be preserved. Competition is so natural that it even exists in the living body between the parts that perform the same function and those that perform different functions. The food that men ingest must support the whole organism, and each organ tries to appropriate the largest amount of nourishment possible to compensate for losses and grow. Nutrient absorbed by one organ is taken away from another organ. The sustenance taken by one organ reduces the part available for the others. All other organs, jointly and individually, vie for blood. Organs are also in competition with each other.

The brain that works too hard draws in so much blood that it stops digestion; on the contrary, consuming blood by the viscera after a heavy meal exhausts the brain so much that it causes sleep. Since there is a fundamental identity between humans and social organisms, it is evident that the social classes take away money from each other as the brain removes the blood from digestion. We have evidence that individuals and social classes struggle to appropriate the bulk of goods. Their ability to prevail in this struggle depends on their degree of activity. Everyone tries to absorb the common material for sustenance as much as possible. According to Spencer, economic competition is natural. Since even the organs of the human body compete with each other, how could men, factories, states, and social groups not compete? Socialists do not realize that the abolition of competition is equivalent to the abolition of activity as spontaneous as it is vital in all organisms.

The Fate of the “ill-equipped to compete”

The law of evolution establishes that the fittest survive and the ill-equipped succumb. Therefore, the principle that moves the universe is contrary to the intervention of the state in the economy, which alters the process of natural selection.

What is the relationship between Spencer and the ill-equipped?

Based on his writings, we can distinguish the ill-equipped into two categories: The ill-equipped, morally responsible for their misery, and those without blame. As for the former, Spencer believes they should be abandoned to their misfortunes as a just punishment and as a helpful warning to society not to follow their example. In Social Statics, he writes that, in general, society shouldn’t help any ill-equipped person (Spencer 1851, 323–324). In sum, it is proper and valuable to leave poor children in misery to pay for the sins of their immoral parents because children inherit immorality from their parents.

Let’s pay attention to Spencer’s passage on the fate of the ill-equipped to avoid doubts about the intertwining of his political ideology and philosophy: an intertwining that we must unravel to bring to light the most fruitful part of his sociology.

In The Man Versus the State (1884), Spencer, leveling against the “poor laws,” explains that leaving a child in poverty, for which the parents are responsible, is just and advantageous. Where does the “great advantage” lie? The offspring inherit the tendency toward immorality that characterizes the parents: “The moral disease requires a cure—under a healthy social condition that cure will be found in the poverty which has followed in its train” (Spencer 1843, 13). The poor would exist even if society offered everyone the opportunity to work and get rich since, in nine out of ten cases, poverty and social unease are the individual’s or their parent’s faults. The state should not waste public money to help the poor. Wealthy people have no right to prevent life from inflicting the punishment they deserve on lazy people. According to Spencer, immorality is transmitted through genes like genetic disorders, and the sins of wicked people fall on their children up to the third or fourth generation. The poor laws take money away from sober people to give to immoral people. How can we help those who make mistakes become better people? Leaving them alone to face the consequences of their wrong actions. The poor laws—Spencer concludes—prevent the administration of the right “medicine,” a synonym for proper punishment. Suffering and adversities are the best schools to learn from mistakes.

In Spencer’s evolutionary liberalism, there are two contradictions, which I highlight with a question: Who should establish the alleged moral sins of a couple of poor parents with whom to condemn their children to misery? To issue such a decree, the government would have to form an ethics committee that judges the private life of citizens. But such an idea is the denial of liberalism, which repudiates the intrusion of public power into the private sphere. More: When the government judges the poor morally, should it also judge how the rich have accumulated their assets? And if the government, or someone on its behalf, discovers that among the so-called fittest, there are also rich idlers, who survive thanks to the assets inherited from their parents, should it intervene with expropriation to enforce competition in respect for natural selection? And who would morally judge Spencer for having freed himself from work, thanks to the inheritance received from an uncle?

The second contradiction I see is a fundamental logical fallacy. Spencer tends to associate poverty with a lack of morality. Spencer’s writings suggest that a poor person is immoral nine times out of ten. However, the evidence shows that many become wealthy through immorality, as we will see studying Robert K. Merton’s theory of deviance later on. Immorality, including lying, theft, and political corruption, is often a means of accumulating wealth and power.

If Spencer were alive, I would ask him, “Do you want to punish immorality or poverty?” Spencer is gone, and it’s up to us to answer these very topical questions.

Spencer and Social Darwinism

The relationship between Spencer and social Darwinism has been the subject of in-depth studies, and knowing the most significant ones is helpful. Some scholars believe Spencer spread and popularized social Darwinism (Tort 1992, 18–44; Oldroyd 1980; Ruse 2000). Others, on the other hand, believe that Spencer’s writings represent its greatest incarnation (Hawkins 1997).

According to Richard Weikart, Spencer and Darwin both believed that competition between individuals helped fuel the progress of human evolution. With one crucial difference: Spencer predicted a future era in which competition between men would no longer be necessary (Weikart 2009, 21). Darwin was more pessimistic, imagining that the struggle for scarce resources would never end. In his view of the past and the present, Spencer was a social Darwinist like Darwin and perhaps even more than him. However, in his vision of the future, Spencer was less of a social Darwinist than Darwin because he believed that the problem of resource scarcity would eventually be overcome.

Weikart ends his study by clarifying that Darwin and Spencer were both laissez-faire social Darwinists. Both have used biological arguments to justify economic policies designed to exacerbate competition between men. Both thought those laws to lessen competition in favor of the ill-equipped would cause a biological deterioration of the species. The intellectual context in which they developed these ideas was dominated by economic laissez-faire, which appeared like a real economic orthodoxy. Spencer was undoubtedly the first of the two to publish his Social Darwinist ideas, if that term is appropriate, before 1859. Spencer had more radical ideas than Darwin about laissez-faire, and his opposition to government intervention to help the poor was one of the most extreme of his time. Darwin’s ideas have been more in line with conventional ideas about economic laissez-faire. However, Spencer was less social Darwinist than Darwin regarding the future of society. Spencer believed that the Malthusian population growth overpressure would decrease in the future, eliminating the struggle for existence.

On the other hand, Darwin argued that population overpressure was beneficial and that humans would be subjected to a severe struggle for life, preventing evolutionary decline. Thus, in Spencer’s view, human cooperation would eventually supplant the struggle for life. Darwin was not so optimistic and offered no such hope for the future.

Spencer Against Public Schools

William H. Jeynes mainly dealt with the racist ideas of Darwin, who was convinced that the white race was superior to all others (Jeynes 2011, 536) and of Spencer, one of the principal promoters of social Darwinism. Jeynes focuses mainly on how Darwinist evolution contributed to the spread of racism in the United States.

Jeynes’s indictment against Spencer is harsh.

Spencer argued that the purpose of the schools was to improve the human species. To allow the human species to evolve more rapidly, teachers should have spent more time educating the fittest to help them unleash their highest potential. Spencer would have wanted to allow only the fittest to attend school and, in fact, was against public schools, which he called a “monopoly for mediocrity.” There was a clear difference in opinion between Christians and evolutionists when it came to education. Christians believed that education should be available to everyone while evolutionists thought it should only be accessible to a select few. For Christians, having God created all individuals equal before his eyes, the intellectual hierarchy pursued by Darwinist evolutionary thought has to be rejected. On the contrary, Spencer believed there were too many people not intellectually advanced enough. Investing much time in educating them would take time away from the education of the fittest, reducing the species’ intellectual potential. For this same reason, Spencer and other social Darwinists did not support the practice of ​special education for the mentally handicapped and other problematic groups that should be left to die out, like inferior species (Rafter 2004, 234).

During the last years of the nineteenth century, the American nation’s philosophy of helping those with special needs was transformed due to various works by Spencer and Darwin that touched upon teaching mentally handicapped people. In his The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin is very clear about how to deal with the minds of “utter idiots.” To Darwin, those with special needs should be regarded by society as beneath that “low” animals. Educating those of below-average intelligence and those of special needs means wasting resources and damaging the progress of the human race. Spencer and other social Darwinists advised that problematic groups, like inferior species, should be left to die out (Rafter 2004, 234). A short excerpt from Social Statics does not seem to leave much doubt about Spencer’s social Darwinism. Spencer lashes out against philanthropists, including defenders of poor laws and those who want to help too weak or ill-equipped people for love or compassion.

The passage from Spencer that we are about to read is important for the history of sociology because, once we reach the end of this volume, it will allow us to better understand the critiques of postcolonial theorists of Eurocentrism. It is important to note that the ideas Spencer expresses below are the same ideas that European colonizers used to judge colonized peoples:

Blind to the fact, that under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation—absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision, and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident by heightening the prospective difficulty of maintaining a family. And thus, in their eagerness to prevent the really salutary sufferings that surround us, these sigh-wise and groan-foolish people bequeath to posterity a continually increasing curse. (Spencer 1851, 324)

In The Coming Slavery (1884), an article key to understanding Spencer’s stance on social issues, such as unemployment and poverty, we read that a liberal society should not educate to feel love or pity for the needy because most of them deserve to suffer. Love feeds piety, which leads to forgetting the faults of the poor, who should not be idealized. People who suffer are often wicked. Suffering does not erase guilt. Lazy people remain lazy, and poverty is the just punishment for their faults (Spencer 1902, 18).

Military and Industrial Societies

A final question must be clarified to avoid misunderstanding a fundamental aspect of Spencer’s thinking.

After so much talk about natural selection and the survival of the fittest, some might believe, and indeed very much believe, that Spencer has placed competition at the foundation of society.

This is not precisely the case.

In The Principles of Sociology, Spencer writes, “Social life in its entirety is carried on by cooperation” (Spencer 1898b, III, 553). Immediately after, he distinguishes two types of cooperation: military and industrial.

Military cooperation is conscious, while industrial cooperation is unconscious. As for conscious cooperation, Spencer gives the example of commissioned officers and soldiers who consciously cooperate to achieve a particular goal. As for unconscious cooperation, Spencer gives the example of ordinary individuals employed in jobs of all kinds, who pursue their private interests independently of each other, and who, without realizing it, achieve a public purpose they have not planned.

In this case, individual actions satisfy the needs of society as a whole without being imposed by any higher authority. Everyone, by pursuing their well-being, ends up promoting the collective interest.

If society is based on cooperation, what role does Spencer attribute to the competition?

Spencer’s answer is unclear and must be obtained by digging into his works. His argument seems that competition is necessary and must be intensified so that the best elements, whose cooperation depends on progress, remain alive. According to Spencer’s individualism, society depends on its units. If the ill-equipped remain alive, society collapses. If individuals are vigorous, thanks to competition, society will be vigorous, thanks to cooperation.

Spencer has an obsession with progress. He would even sacrifice children to further it.

Since it is such an obsession, we need to investigate the idea of progress in Spencer further.

Progress in Spencer

In Spencer’s first work, Social Statics (1851), progress is identified with the goals reached by civilization. With the term civilization, Spencer indicates the adaptation that has already occurred. The changes that constitute progress are the next steps in the transition (Spencer 1851, 43). Spencer talks about “progress” whenever men improve their ability to adapt to their natural and social environment.

Progress can be of two kinds: direct and indirect. It is direct when it is based on the hereditary transmission of the functional changes of the fittest in the struggle for life. Direct progress occurs when the fittest transmit their qualities to their heirs. It is indirect when it is based on the extinction of the ill-equipped. It does not seem to be a straining to summarize Spencer’s thinking in the following way: Life is evolution, evolution is adaptation, and adaptation is progress.

Spencer writes that all evil is caused by an organism’s failure to adapt to the external environment. Isn’t it true, he wonders, that a vegetable dies if it is moved to a hostile climate? Death, suffering and disease, occur every time the harmony between the body and the environment is destroyed. This law is universal and applies to all forms of life. It applies to the body of man but also to his spirit. A man whose values ​​are unable to adapt to the surrounding environment suffers. Spencer optimistically writes in Social Statics that, fortunately, evil tends to disappear perpetually.

Failure of an organism to adapt to the environment is corrected either because the organism adapts to the environment or because the environment adapts to the organism through human intervention. Modification of one or both continues until the adaptation is complete. This law is valid for every life form, from the elementary cell to men and women. Plants adapt to the climate as the pets get used to living at home. Siberian plants sprout quickly because the summer in Siberia is very short; animals in icy regions develop thick fur.

According to the law of evolution, “evil” is nothing more than the inability of the living organism to adapt to changes in the environment (Spencer 1851, 41). Even the ability to reason and the reasonings change to better adapt to the surrounding environment. To survive, men must ensure that their thoughts are in harmony with their actions and vice versa. If the government becomes authoritarian or democratic, man survives by embracing the ideas best-suited to change. Life is possible only by keeping actions and thoughts in harmony. Let us imagine that a violent and authoritarian government imposes itself on an entire population in a particular situation. A theory that faith in the ruling class and subordination are right will quickly assert itself because social life will only become possible if individuals obediently submit to a higher authority test. However, suppose the context changes and the survival of society requires individuals to be freer. In that case, a new theory will develop to justify acts of insubordination and criticism against political power, gradually giving rise to a theory of the limits of public power.

For Comte, progress is men’s ability to dominate nature with intelligence. For Spencer, men can adapt to nature, sacrificing their ill-equipped children. Comte’s idea of progress evokes the image of a man who attacks nature to subdue it; Spencer’s idea of progress evokes the image of men defending themselves from nature in order not to be subdued.

Spencer’s Conception of Evolution

Spencer’s scholars are divided over the issue of progress. Some believe that Spencer’s conception of progress is optimistic and even a little naive, similar to that of Comte. Robert A. Nisbet has no doubts that Social Statics contains such a linear conception of progress (Nisbet 1981, 369). Others, on the contrary, believe that Spencer’s conception of progress is realistic and still relevant today. The question is relevant to the history of sociological thought. If the first group of scholars is correct, Spencer will appear outdated, and the reasons for forgetting him will increase.

I will begin by presenting my assessment of the problem, and then I will leave the floor to three of Spencer’s scholars, who have dedicated themselves to this crucial aspect of his thinking.

In an extensive work like that of Spencer, there is no doubt that it is possible to come across a series of naive and optimistic statements about progress. However, the idea that evolution can stop and go back is exposed by Spencer with solar clarity, so much so that Spencer announces the end of all life on Earth with the extinction of the Sun, which physicists are discussing today.

In the second chapter of Social Statics, significantly titled “The Evanescence of Evil,” Spencer talks about an unstoppable and unilinear evolution of society. In a riot of optimism, he writes: “Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. […] As surely as the tree becomes bulky when it stands alone, […] so surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect” (Spencer 1851, 65).

However, as the years go by, Spencer dilutes this optimism and repeats that some particular societies can take steps forward and back more often. In The Principles of Sociology, he specifies that society, as a whole, constantly evolves, but particular societies can experience evolutions and retrogressions. Concerning freedom, Spencer acknowledges that European society can progress and regress. From 1850 onward, individual freedoms have contracted compared to 1815–1850. Spencer adds that conflicts, armaments, and military sentiment have grown, rather than diminished, under the pressure of governments that have become more authoritarian. Furthermore, we have already seen that an industrial society can return to performing the functions of a military society.

In summary, after writing some naive phrases about progress, Spencer explained that societies could regress until they disappear.

Among the passages with which I could document my conclusion, this one, which I draw from The Principles of Sociology, seems to be the only one capable of resolving the dispute in favor of Spencer. Societies can grow to full splendor and fall into the dust and dissolve. The following passage allows me to affirm that Spencer’s conception of progress is mature and current, in all respects similar to the one we contemporaries have.

The length of the quote is justified by its importance:

It is possible, and, I believe, probable, that retrogression has been as frequent as progression. Evolution is commonly conceived to imply in everything an intrinsic tendency to become something higher. This is an erroneous conception of it. In all cases it is determined by the cooperation of inner and outer factors. This cooperation works changes until there is reached an equilibrium between the environing actions and the actions which the aggregate opposes to them—a complete equilibrium if the aggregate is without life, and a moving equilibrium if the aggregate is living. Thereupon evolution, continuing to show itself only in the progressing integration that ends in rigidity, practically ceases. If, in the case of the living aggregates forming a species, the environing actions remain constant, the species remains constant. If the environing actions change, the species changes until it re-equilibriates itself with them. But it by no means follows that this change constitutes a step in evolution. Usually neither advance nor recession results; and often, certain previously-acquired structures being rendered superfluous, there results a simpler form. […] Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Persians, Jews, Greeks, Romans—it needs but to name these to be reminded that many large and highly-evolved societies have either disappeared, or have dwindled to barbarous hordes, or have been long passing through slow decay. Ruins show us that in Java there existed in the past a more-developed society than exists now; and the like is shown by ruins in Cambodia. Peru and Mexico were once the seats of societies large and elaborately organized, which have been disorganized by conquest; and where the cities of Central America once contained great populations carrying on various industries and arts, there are now but scattered tribes of savages. Unquestionably, causes like those which produced these retrogressions, have been at work during the whole period of human existence. (Spencer 1898, Vol. I, 95)

Spencer marks a sociological advancement compared to Comte. Unlike the second, the first does not think that progress is dominated by an external force that drags individuals inexorably toward an ever better pre-established goal. Where this universal force comes from is far from being clear in Comte’s work. The Comtian law of the three stages is a kind of “will of God,” over which men have no control. In Spencer’s works, the progress of society largely depends on observable forces. These forces are the climate, the surface, flora, fauna, emigration, and demography. Still, they are also men who build ships and women who give birth, setting in motion an evolutionary chain. These forces may or may not exist, and so does evolution. Comte’s progress has a metaphysical aspect; Spencer’s has an earthly aspect.

Spencer’s Evolutionism in the Judgment of Boudon and Bourricaud

Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud strongly support the thesis that Spencer has a mature and current conception of evolution. They argue that Spencer’s evolutionism is “moderate” because it considers a wide range of sociological factors. Spencer’s evolutionism is not outdated; in fact, it is even more modern than Durkheim’s. What sets Spencer apart is his remarkable methodological caution. He is aware that evolution depends on conditions that can favor or inhibit it. Evolution is not an ineluctable necessity, and there is nothing mechanical about it, so much so that military societies can continually appear. Spencer’s evolutionism is moderate, in that, it is attentive to the complexity of the factors that make up a society. Individuals are inclined to adapt to the social system to which they belong. In a military society, they adopt those submissive behaviors needed to survive but demonstrate their inventiveness and creativity in an industrial society. However, the attitudes of individuals can hinder or favor the formation of a certain type of society. The actions of individuals depend on the social system, but those actions affect the system. Spencer envisions a circular mechanism. His idea of ​​progress would be outdated if it were mechanical and unidirectional; Spencer does not say everything depends on the environment. The effects are circular. Individual attitudes and structures of the social system are two sets of variables that are not determined mechanically because they are influenced by other variables that involve unpredictable feedback effects. According to Boudon and Bourricaud, Spencer grasped the diversity of the world and the complexity of history even better than Marx and Durkheim. Spencer knows that, in a complex system, a change can develop cascading consequences that are difficult to predict (Boudon and Bourricaud 1991, 463–465).

Spencer’s Conception of Evolution in Carneiro’s Assessment

Carneiro made the point that Spencer’s perspective on evolution is both sociologically mature and current.

Evolution, for Spencer, is not irreversible because it depends on a series of material conditions. When these conditions are absent, we witness the dissolution of the system. The evolutionary process is reversible. The system can undergo a simplification of the structure and its functions and return to a more primitive level. This case can occur if the environment deteriorates and stops supplying the system with the energy sources and raw materials it depends on. For Spencer, evolution is the succession of the general states of a system. For human societies, social dissolution is the reduction of the movements of the whole, that is, of society as a whole, and the increase of the movements of the parts, that is, of its units. From a logical point of view, Spencer’s speech is clear: Evolution occurs when the parts are integrated into the whole.

Consequently, dissolution is the reverse process. It is the whole that breaks down into its parts. When a society dissolves, its larger segments are the first to decompose, each releasing the smaller units previously incorporated and now subordinate. These smaller units, growing in number but becoming simpler in function, operate with increasing autonomy. As the dissolution proceeds, fragmentation continues until all coordinated activity ceases and even the smallest units reach the maximum degree of freedom of movement, free from any relationship of dependence on the larger social system. In this way, through continuous disintegrations, human society is brought back to its primordial simplicity and meets its ultimate end.

Spencer thought that evolution could not go beyond a certain limit. When the population has become dense on all the habitable parts of the earth’s surface, when the resources of each region have been fully explored, and when the productive arts will not allow for further improvement, the result will be an almost complete balance between fertility and mortality in any society and between its production and consumption activities. Each society will show only small deviations from its average population, and the pace of its industrial functions will go on day by day, year by year, with relatively insignificant perturbations. Evolution will not go beyond this condition.

Is such a general equilibrium, Spencer wonders, the final fate that awaits humanity? If the evolution of everything is represented by a growth in the complexity of the structure and functions related to the universal process of balancing, and if the balancing must end in complete stillness, what is the destiny toward which everything tends?

Suppose the solar system slowly dissipates its energies and loses its heat at a rate that we can only estimate in millions of years. In that case, it turns out that the decrease in solar radiation will necessarily cause a reduction in the activity of geological and meteorological processes as well as in the quantity of plant and animal life; if man and society are dependent on this reserve of energy which is slowly running out, aren’t we progressing to complete death? This must be precisely the outcome of the changes that we observe everywhere. This is the case, Spencer concludes, beyond any doubt.

Ultimately, Carneiro defends Spencer from his critics and exalts his relevance.

First, Spencer’s idea of evolution is non-rectilinear. On the contrary, it welcomes stability, fluctuation, and retrogression to end in dissolution.

Second, it is not unilinear. Spencer has highlighted the individual adaptations of society to varying local conditions, which cause great cultural diversity. Spencer is said to have ignored the environment as if it were irrelevant to evolution, yet he makes the environment the key to evolution.

Third, Spencer’s vision of evolution is not axiomatic. Still, it depends not on abstract trends but on the daily give and takes between society and the surrounding environment. Fourth, it is not teleological. Spencer never speaks of “ends” but of “functions.” There are no vague and abstruse notions of evolution in Spencer but rather rigorous, empirical, and comprehensive concepts to better understand the evolution of human societies.

Far from being obsolete, Spencer’s ideas on evolution are more alive than ever in many authors who have not studied him or who do not cite him. Some have proposed them as new, unaware that Spencer had already developed them a century ago. In addition to anticipating many ideas of modern evolution, Spencer expressed them more clearly, precisely, and incisively than almost anyone else. Spencer still has a lot to teach us. An in-depth study of his work would help us understand the process of evolution leading us to where we are (Carneiro 1973, 94).

Spencer is more than a mere precursor of functionalism (Andresky 1971, 7). Among the sociologists most influenced by Spencer, there are Durkheim in France, Arthur Radcliffe-Brown in England, Albert Schäffle in Germany, Parsons in the United States (Perrin 1976, 1340). Spencer should not be excluded from sociological theory textbooks. Spencer still speaks to us on our time’s most critical political, social, and moral issues.

Kropotkin Versus Spencer

Spencer used sociological evolutionism to legitimize a society without duties of solidarity toward ill-equipped or too-weak people. What lesson can we draw from his sociology? Do we have to abandon our fellow men when natural selection gets tough?

Russian naturalist Pëtr Kropotkin came to opposite conclusions.

When the struggle for survival is unleashed, cooperation between men increases the chances of survival. If men are in solidarity with each other and reach out to each other in difficulties, the chances of survival will increase for all. In his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)—a collection of essays that appeared between 1890 and 1896—Kropotkin studies the role of cooperation in the animal and social world, concluding that natural selection rewards cooperation because of the practical advantages it offers to the cooperators. Moral conscience, which exalts altruism, can offer more benefits than egoism. Brief: The evolution of the animal kingdom takes place much more through cooperation than competition.

Kropotkin, one of the most famous anarchist philosophers, had a life troubled by arrests, exiles, and escapes from prison. During a series of trips to Siberia at the age of twenty-nine, he went to meet the winters of that boundless land, which gave temperatures up to sixty degrees below zero. Kropotkin was convinced that he would witness gruesome spectacles among the fighting beasts. Yet, instead of natural selection, he saw mutual aid everywhere. He could not find—he wrote—although he eagerly sought it, that bitter struggle for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) considered the dominant feature of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution (Kropotkin 1902, 1).

Kropotkin saw that the harshness of Siberia spurred the animals to cooperate to face hostile nature and also saw a migration of tens of thousands of fallow-deer on the Amur river, where those intelligent animals gathered from an immense territory. Kropotkin saw mutual help and aid in all those scenes of animal life that flowed before his eyes. Kropotkin reported similar observations on birds and other animals, but his greatest sympathies were for social insects: bees, ants, and wasps. Of the ants, he highlighted the incredible cooperative capacity and mutual help based on a relational structure in which the stronger ants help the weakest, even bringing them food. Recalling the studies of Auguste Forel (Forel 1928), Kropotkin noted that ants are skilled at regurgitating food in favor of the community, even assuming that the cooperation had changed their anatomy. Forel believed that the digestive tract of ants was composed of two distinct parts: The posterior one, for their use to absorb food, and the anterior part, for community use, to regurgitate it. What struck Kropotkin’s eye the most was the ants’ ability to punish those hostile to cooperation in times of greatest need.

The punishment that falls on an ant that refuses to feed a hungry comrade is very severe. The selfish will be treated as an enemy. And if its selfishness manifested while the other ants were fighting against another species, the traitor comrade is treated worse than an enemy. Not to mention the solidarity unleashed between horses and zebras attacked by predatory animals. Instead of running away and abandoning each other, they unite and chase away wolves and lions. They succumb when they move away from the herd and cannot rely on mutual support. Unity is their primary weapon in the struggle for life.

Is it right to portray the world as a merciless struggle for life? No, replies Kropotkin: This representation is disproved by the direct observation of reality.

Looking from the animals to the men of Siberia, Kropotkin saw the same mutual support. Where the government managed to reach the settlements, providing help with its administrative apparatus, mutual support was limited; where the government did not reach, mutual support was unlimited. This phenomenon led Kropotkin to believe that mutual support had a biological root. Despite being a Darwinist, who viewed evolutionary transformations as a result of natural selection, Kropotkin became convinced that life on Earth was guided by the universal law of mutual aid, conceived as the true evolutionary drive behind every form of life.

Kropotkin concludes that the success of the cooperation derives mainly from the practical advantages it offers to cooperators, but also from an altruistic instinct rooted in biology: “It is not love to my neighbour—whom I often do not know at all—which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me” (Kropotkin 1902, 4).

From his evolutionary theory, Kropotkin derived anarchism; Spencer derived Darwinism. Both were convinced that they had the support of biology.

Biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin, the author of books like Principles of Animal Behavior and Cooperation between animals (Dugatkin 1997, 2009, 2017, 2020a), wrote that Kropotkin was a figure of extraordinary importance in the scientific world. He was the first to put forward the hypothesis that cooperation between animals was fundamental for understanding the evolutionary process, challenging the dominant Darwinian principle according to which evolution was reduced solely to the survival of the fittest. Today there is an entire branch of biology dedicated to studying mutual support (cooperation and altruism) between animals. Edward O. Wilson defined cooperation as one of the fundamental issues in studying animal behavior (See Wilson 1972, 1978, 1980, 2010). Dugatkin reminds us that today there are laboratories full of researchers specialized in this field—from the universities of Princeton and Harvard to those of Helsinki, Oxford, and Cambridge. Many of the hypotheses analyzed in these laboratories are based on re-elaborating the theories originally formulated by Kropotkin, the first proponent of the mutual aid theory at the end of the nineteenth century. Hundreds of articles are published yearly on animal cooperation, many in authoritative journals such as Nature and Science. Most show how Kropotkin was even prophetic in this field of study. To give just one example, Kropotkin talked about how some individuals among cooperative animals played the role of sentinels; today, the Cornell and Cambridge laboratories have dozens of researchers studying this phenomenon. Many should thank Kropotkin for bringing the subject to their attention and convincing them of its extraordinary importance. Kropotkin was not only the first to demonstrate how important cooperation was between animals, but he was also the first to strongly argue that understanding cooperation between animals would shed new light on cooperation between humans, helping science to promote it and, who knows, maybe saving our species from self-destruction. Today, anthropologists, political scientists, economists, and psychologists publish hundreds of studies on human cooperation annually. Those who do research in this field are beginning to realize that many of the hypotheses under consideration were initially formulated by Kropotkin. Only time will reveal if empathy is a common phenomenon among animals and if it is somehow associated with mutual support in the way suggested by Kropotkin. Dugatkin concludes that Kropotkin was ahead of his time by suggesting to look for a link between empathy and mutual support in animals (Dugatkin 2020b).

Spencer’s Methodological Individualism

Spencer’s ideas have undergone a re-evaluation in recent years, with a particular focus on “methodological individualism,” a concept that Joseph Schumpeter first defined.

Spencer bases his evolutionary theory of society on a strictly individualistic methodology, interpreting the social order as an unintended process shaped by the spontaneous composition of subjective actions aimed at private purposes. Spencer uses philosophical-methodological categories—such as those of rationality of action and beliefs, the principle of rationality, unintentional consequences, and spontaneous order—which will then be the key concepts of the best consolidated individualistic methodology of the latter decades. Spencer can, therefore, rightly be considered as one of the first social scientists who brought into the more properly sociological tradition those notions of unintended and spontaneous consequences characterizing the reflections of philosophers and economists like Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Carl Menger (Di Nuoscio 2000, 9–10).

To appreciate Spencer’s topicality, we must first have a clear idea of the principles of methodological individualism.

I will proceed like this.

In the following two paragraphs, I will focus on the principles of this theoretical paradigm. Immediately after, I will study how Spencer used methodological individualism to explain the birth of language and money.

Unintended Consequences

According to methodological individualists, all social phenomena and institutions are the result, intentional or unintentional, of individual actions which, by spontaneously aggregating, allow us to move from the micro to the macro dimension of significant historical events (Di Nuoscio 2004, 251–253). The market, the state, the language, and many other great social institutions have established themselves, thanks to spontaneous evolutionary adaptation, in which millions of individuals have participated over centuries. For methodological individualists, social order is the unintentional result of the action of individuals (Infantino 1998, 2).

Let’s see how Spencer defends methodological individualism.

Some might argue, Spencer writes in his already mentioned essay The Social Organism (1860), that the social changes produced by laws cannot be classified as a case of spontaneous growth. When kings or parliaments order that the subjects act in a certain way—critics object—the process is artificial. In this case, society becomes a manufacture rather than a growth.

Spencer replies that this is not the case at all.

If the changes introduced by the king or parliament are stable, real and permanent, then the deepest source of the change is not found in the decrees of the ruling class. Even when the kings create an institution and entrust their officers with enforcing it, the individuals give life to that institution by interacting with each other. So much so that when governments enact a law contrary to the character of citizens, they do not respect it, and then the institution is not born or is born lame or sickly. The feudal system could not exist without the feeling of loyalty of the servants. Cromwell instituted a new social order, which was abandoned soon after his death because the British preferred to return to the previous order. Cromwell artificially established new social conditions that were not sound and extinguished in no time. This shows how weak kings’ powers are in changing the society they rule through decree. The general course of the social process is beyond their control. Those who conceive the history of society as the history of its most extraordinary men, and think that these glorious personalities shape the destinies of their societies, do not see how much these men are the product of their societies. Industrial societies, like all social systems, arise spontaneously. According to methodological individualism, all the great secular institutions that accompany our daily life were not born, thanks to a superior mind that first invented and then coordinated such a complex project. The fall of the Roman Empire, or the birth of capitalism, must be conceived as the result of a series of unintentional actions.

For example, Italian ancient historian Gaetano De Sanctis traced the process of disintegration of the Roman Empire to the strategy of its political class, which was responsible for having made a decision that would have provoked an outcome opposite to the desired one. The Romans conferred citizenship on the defeated peoples to integrate them into the Empire without knowing that they were incorporating a mass of unfaithful and resentful individuals devoid of any identification with the government of Rome. The dissolution of the Empire was in germ in this amalgam of very different peoples by civilization, ethnic tendencies, and economic conditions (De Sanctis 1932, 38). Without a unifying ethnic spirit, writes De Sanctis, nothing solid can be built. When the Roman Empire was creating political unification, it laid the foundations for its dissolution (Orsini 2005, 69–89).

Unlike Comte, methodological individualists deny that institutions are born and die on the basis of a preordained plan, which pushes society toward a certain political order. Collective phenomena do not arise because some individuals strategically organize them. To say that the actions are intentional and consequences unintentional means to affirm that the individual can decide how to act, but cannot decide how events will unfold, which depends on the uncontrollable actions of many individuals. These actions can be combined unpredictably, giving unexpected and often unwanted outcomes.

Max Weber used the principles of methodological individualism to explain the birth of the mentality of the modern entrepreneur, which he calls the “spirit of capitalism.” Weber raised the three canonical questions for any methodological individualist: Who, why, and how (Di Nuoscio 2004, 256).

Who caused the phenomenon? Calvinist entrepreneurs.

Why did they act this way? Because they believed, based on a religious belief, that economic success could perhaps be understood as a sign of God’s benevolence.

How do we pass from the micro-sociological level of individual actions to the macro-sociological level of the historical phenomenon? Through the aggregation of individual actions. Thousands of Calvinists, spontaneously acting in the same way, have given rise to the spirit of capitalism, as we will see in Chap. 6.

Giambattista Vico already expounded the idea that actions are intentional and the consequences are unintended in The New Science (Vico [1725] 1831, vol. II, 370), conquering many historians. Edward H. Carr, for example, wrote that history is full of individual actions that cause effects neither expected nor desired by those who acted or by other individuals. Nobody willed or desired the great economic depression of the 1930s. The worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world was caused by the aggregation of the actions of millions of individuals who acted to pursue completely different goals. The discrepancy between individuals’ intentions and their actions’ effects is frequent. The study of history—Carr concludes—concerns individuals and the relationships by which they are linked, but also the social forces that arise from individual actions and which often go in very different or even opposite directions concerning the intentions and desires of individuals (Carr 1961, 29).

Boudon’s Formula of Methodological Individualism

In summary, there are four key points to Spencer’s methodological individualism that I would like to highlight:

• First, only subjective actions are the causes of social phenomena.

• Second, to explain any social phenomenon, it must be considered as the result of the aggregation of individual actions dictated by their motivations.

• Third, the individuals are social agent endowed with rationality and intentionality, which, conditioned by the situation in which they find themselves, adopts their decision-making strategy based on the limited knowledge available while acting, the time available to act, the faculties of their minds, and so on. Individuals are endowed with intentionality and rationality, although this rationality is “bounded rationality.”

• Fourth, the individual is not directed by social structures or the laws of history.

Raymond Boudon created a formula to summarize this paradigm. First, I will explain the formula and then use it to demonstrate how it applies to a specific historical event.

The formula is: M = M{m[S(M^′)]} which, simplified, becomes:

$$ \mathrm{M}=\mathrm{MmS}{\mathrm{M}}^{\prime } $$

• M is the aggregated phenomenon to be explained.

• m are the individual actions.

• S is the situation perceived by each of the social actors.

• M′ is the broader historical-social context or structural data.

On the basis of this formula, the phenomenon to be explained (M) must be interpreted as a function (in the mathematical sense) of a set of individual actions (m); individual actions are functions of the situation (S); the situation depends on the broader macro-sociological context or social system (M′). We could also express ourselves in this way: the phenomenon M is a function of the individual actions m, which depend on the situation S, which in turn depends on the broader context M′.

This formula, which Boudon calls the “Weberian paradigm of action,” mentally evokes a matryoshka, the wooden doll made up of a series of smaller dolls, each located in the cavity of the immediately larger doll. What does it mean?

It means:

• 1. Phenomenon (M) is a function of actions (m).

• 2. Actions (m) are dependent on the situation (S) of the actor.

• 3. Situation (S) is itself affected by macro social actions (M′).

The consequentiality, which characterizes the passages of this formula, must not lead us to believe that the situation determines the individual’s action: We must not make the mistake of falling into micro-sociological determinism (Di Nuoscio 1996, 73). The situation influences, but does not determine, the strategies of action. According to Karl R. Popper, our actions are, to a very large extent, explicable in terms of the situation in which they take place. Of course, they can never be explained in terms of the situation alone (Popper 1963, vol. II, 90). The best historians, more or less unconsciously, often make use of “the logic of the situations” based on methodological individualism (Popper 1964, 149).

Individuals in the same situation may act differently because of values, personality, ideology, willingness to take risks, past experiences, including personal trauma, information available (some have more and others less), political or religious ideology, etc. Despite being in the same situation, two individuals can perceive reality differently. In other cases, their perception is the same. Still, they act differently because they have different priorities or because an affective factor, such as love or resentment, conditions them (Boudon 1997, 234). Cognitive mediation is essential (Boudon 2003, 24; Hamlin 2002; Orsini 2012).

It is clear that, based on the structure of the individualistic explanation, the sociologist needs to collect information to reconstruct the motivations that inspired individual action. The information allows the sociologist to understand the motivations of individuals and the “logic of the situation” (Popper 1972, 121).

Individualistic sociologists are like “detectives” (Di Nuoscio 2006, 63). If they are not good at the phenomenological description of the situation, they cannot take the point of view of the social actors and understand their motivations. Individuals act on how they interpret the world as a function of their situation or social position (Boudon 1991, 147). Since the individuals are not transparent, the observer must strive to collect as much information as possible about the situation of the people under observation to understand their reasons. However, many reject that motivations can be analyzed, and Comte is among them. Comte’s holism does not consider subjective motivations or the relationship between actions and situations. Spencer’s individualism does.

Box 3.2: Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?

As promised, I will try to apply the formula to the individualistic explanation of some historical phenomena. I will start with the lack of a strong socialist movement in the United States, which Werner Sombart deals with in his book Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (Sombart [1906] 1976).

And so, why not?

The structural datum, represented by the fact that the United States is a frontier country (M′), is of capital importance here since it creates a situation where the “exit strategy,” as Albert O. Hirschman names it (Hirschman 1970), is accessible to workers (S) who can find better conditions by seeking fortune elsewhere (m) leaving the socialist movement with few workers to recruit (M). Workers can act twofold. On the one hand, they can decide to fight in a workers’ movement and, therefore, follow the path of collective protest strategy. On the other hand, they can choose to disengage and worry about taking action only in their egoistic interest. Given the situation created by the macro context, the collective protest strategy appears to be of little benefit because the commitment to a working-class organization requires sacrificing time, energy, and money. Also, socialist movements sometimes take years to achieve their goals. The road to political conflict is long and tiring. Quite differently, the workers solve the problem quickly and without spending personal resources by moving elsewhere. In other words, they choose a strategy of individual defection rather than a collective protest strategy. Once aggregated, workers’ actions have a consequence, M or the phenomenon to be explained. The socialist movement finds itself with few workers to recruit. Whether or not this theory is credible, the proposed explanation’s structure has precisely the form: M = MmSM′. (Boudon 1986, 40)

The Birth of Language and Money

Spencer used methodological individualism to explain the birth of language (Gray 1981, 161–186, 1984, 217–231, 1988, 259–278, 1996).

In an essay from 1871, Spencer refuses to believe that language has had a supernatural origin because its symbols and rules are too complex to have been invented by a human mind. The language was neither a miraculous gift nor the product of a plan designed by a group of savages at the dawn of humanity. The evolution of language was spontaneous and natural. Men, feeling the need to communicate ideas and feelings, have unwittingly developed language to satisfy their momentary egoistic interest. With the passage of time and the succession of generations, language has evolved from simple to increasingly complex forms, allowing the man to achieve extraordinary feats (Spencer 1871, 627–641). Spencer wants to demonstrate that cooperation between men pursuing their subjective ends can produce wonderful results. For Spencer, “under all its aspects and through all its ramifications, society is a growth and not a manufacture.” (Spencer 1891a, vol. I, 269). Evolution is a consequence of the unpredictable multiplication of the effects of individual actions.

Spencer also applies methodological individualism to explain the birth of money. The process began with the gifts that the first travelers offered to the communities where they stayed, creating bonds of gratitude and friendship. Over time, the use of the gift was used, increasingly extensively, to regulate relations between populations. The gifts also began to be used by individuals of the lower classes to reaffirm their loyalty to rulers. The gift became more and more an obligatory act, which the leaders used to remain at peace with other peoples, but also to finance the political apparatuses. The more gift giving extended, the more it penetrated all strata of society. The leaders also began to give gifts to their subjects, who thus received the means to survive. The gifts of the subjects, continuing their evolution, gave rise to taxes and tributes, while the gifts of the leaders gave rise to wages.

The gift, having lost its initial spontaneous character, turned into barter. Since the time to establish the value of the items to be exchanged was often excessive, men began to use food as a circulating intermediary. Livestock was used as the first form of currency. Herds were the main assets of the pastoral peoples of southern Africa, who used livestock to buy women and slaves. Bartering, evolving into ever more complex forms, made it necessary to resort to a means of mediation that could be preserved that did not deteriorate over time. Dried fish, cotton, and clothing became increasingly popular as circulating intermediaries. In some regions of Africa and China, some individuals began making payments using metal tools, mostly agricultural and rudimentary tools. To facilitate payments, the cutting part of these tools gradually became smaller than the rest, giving rise to the first metal coins. The evolution continued and only the most precious metals were selected, which had a greater value due to the difficulty of obtaining them.

The Birth of Weapons

Spencer concludes his analysis with a very timely methodological warning: Men should not make the mistake of attributing their current intentions to the people of the past.

Spencer cites the example of weapons.

Modern men, who produce weapons knowing their usefulness, retrospectively attribute their awareness and their motives to primitive men as well. But it is one thing to invent weapons at the dawn of humanity; another is to produce them in modernity. Modern men often act like ancient men but with different goals and motivations. The original and simple stick used by primitive man has evolved into increasingly complex forms through a series of accidental passages until the birth of the first weapons. Many institutions arise spontaneously and become complex over time in an accidental way.

Similarly, it is not true that society was born because men have entered into an ancient social contract, such as the one described by Hobbes and Rousseau. The first form of subordination did not arise because some individuals, foreseeing the consequences of their actions, chose to submit to a sovereign in order to guarantee their physical safety and that of their property. The first forms of subordination arose spontaneously and created increasingly complex and differentiated aggregates by evolving due to the multiplication of effects.

Subordination began when a strong and courageous warrior, having distinguished himself in battle, began to receive the respect and submission of weak men seeking protection. In the ensuing battle, that warrior naturally found himself in a position of leadership. Having won that battle, the community members treated him as a leader, even in times of peace.

Individualism and Optimism in Spencer

Spencer enriched his individualism with a specific dose of optimism. He was convinced that the law of evolution produced a growth in individual freedom. His reasoning is based on a logical chain, which, for the sake of clarity, I divide into three steps: 1) The more the social organism evolves, the more complex the division of labor becomes; 2) the more complex the division of labor becomes, the greater the functions performed by individuals; 3) the greater the functions performed by individuals, the greater the individualism and freedom.

The individuals have to perform the new functions imposed by differentiation, which gives them great importance. Evolution contains a progressive tendency to individualization. Spencer concludes that individualism is the way of living and thinking that best suits the characteristics of industrial society. Today we know that the link between industrialization, differentiation, and individualism is not always confirmed. Authoritarian regimes govern highly differentiated industrial societies where individual freedom is suppressed (Orsini 2011; Pasqualini 1977; Ming, 2006; Wang 1993; Applebaum 2004; Kotek and Rigoulot 2002).

For Spencer, evolution is a principle governing the universe. Still, we cannot predict precisely where it will lead due to the unpredictable multiplication of unintended outcomes of individual actions. No one can know where the world will end because every action sets a potentially infinite chain of consequences in motion. It should also be considered that in interaction systems characterized by a high level of openness, information coming from the outside continuously modifies the action strategies of individuals.

Even if the consequences of intentional actions were predictable—a possibility Spencer rules out—it would be impossible to predict them all.

Conclusion

This chapter explored many concepts.

The concepts of “function,” “system,” and “structure,” developed by Spencer, have retained all their relevance. The concept of “moving equilibrium” is also fundamental in contemporary sociological theory, as we will see in the chapter on functionalist theory. Furthermore, Spencer was the protagonist of a public debate that recurs in the same form today. Should the state help the poor by increasing public debt or not? Should individuals be abandoned to the struggle for life? Kropotkin demonstrated that individuals can win the struggle for life through cooperation much more than through competition. Kropotkin’s thesis is similar to the one we will find later in Durkheim, which states that solidarity between individuals is the greatest strength of every society. Boudon’s formula on methodological individualism demonstrates that Spencer’s sociological theory is still very current and worthy of study. We have learned that the term “individualism” can be misleading. You have to be careful to use it correctly. The birth of language, money, and weapons has shown that methodological individualism is a method for explaining all social phenomena, both simple and complex. It is wrong to think that individualism is a method for studying small groups or interactions between individuals. As we will see later, Weber used methodological individualism to study macrophenomena, such as the birth of capitalism. In the same chapter on Weber, we will also see that Victor Zaslavsky used methodological individualism to explain the collapse of the Soviet economy.

Self-test Path

• 1. Explain the Spencer’s organic analogy.

• 2. Explain the law of evolution.

• 3. What are Spencer’s four fundamental concepts?

• 4. What relationship does exist between Spencer and social Darwinism?

• 5. What does progress consist of, according to Spencer?

• 6. Please explain Spencer’s theory of evolution.

• 7. What is social Darwinism?

• 8. Please expose Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid.

• 9. Why is the concept of “unintended consequences”?

• 10. Could you please explain Boudon’s “formula” of methodological individualism?