Herbert Spencer 1820 – 1903

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist who set himself the task, in his ten-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy, of unifying biology, psychology, sociology, and ethics under the single principle of evolution. He coined the phrase survival of the fittest, applied evolutionary thinking to social and political questions, and articulated a classical-liberal political philosophy in The Man versus the State. Although his system has not retained its former dominance, his influence on the development of modern social science was very wide, and his books outsold those of any other philosopher of his century.

Herbert Spencer was born in 1820 at Derby, the only surviving child of a Methodist nonconformist schoolmaster. His education was almost entirely informal: he read widely at home, worked as a railway engineer in his early twenties, and from 1848 supported himself in London as a sub-editor of The Economist. He never attended a university and held no academic post, living from his books, his investments, and the patronage of his many international admirers.

His major works are Social Statics (1851), Principles of Psychology (1855, much expanded 1870-1872), the long First Principles (1862) that opened the System of Synthetic Philosophy, the Principles of Biology, the Principles of Sociology, the Principles of Ethics, and the methodological Study of Sociology and the polemical Man versus the State (1884). Together they aim at a comprehensive evolutionary synthesis of science, ethics, and politics on the principle of the differentiation of homogeneous matter into heterogeneous wholes.

Spencer coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest', defended a thoroughgoing classical liberalism, and made evolution the master concept of late-Victorian thought. Enormously influential in his lifetime, especially in the United States and Meiji Japan, his standing collapsed after the First World War; he is now read more often by historians than by philosophers. He died at Brighton in December 1903.