ABSTRACT
Spencer has been ill-served by ethical philosophers. Instead of pondering his serious evolutionary writings in sociology, psychology and biology they have mistakenly restricted themselves to examination of two texts: Social Statics and Th e Principles of Ethics. e fi rst of these was published before Spencer developed his detailed evolutionary theories, while the second is partly a product of senescence, written when Spencer had lost sight of his own fi ndings and was desperately attempting to complete “A System of Synthetic Philosophy” before his eightieth birthday. e valuable portion of Th e Principles of Ethics is derived from his sociology; the remainder is a decrepit response to later Victorians, such as Henry Sidgwick, whose philosophies represented the kind of non-scientifi c scholasticism Spencer detested. Political theorists have done no better than philosophers. ey too concentrate on a narrow band of Spencerian literature, ignoring anything complex or systematic about his philosophy or social science. In particular, the excessive attention paid to Spencer’s popular essays, Th e Man “versus” the State, has caused the more considered political ideas embedded in his sociology to be overlooked. e result has been the construction of a misleading image of an ageing Spencer, whose youthful radicalism had become buried under a conservative individualism based on an appeal for the preservation of private property. Such an interpretation has marginalized Spencer’s political ideas because it allows them to be grouped with a kind of libertarianism that was rare in the late Victorian period. is, in turn, has led careful scholars of ideology to warn that Spencer’s stance in the s was untypical. e resulting impression is that by this stage he had stopped incorporating new political ideas into his work, and was content to recycle content from the middle of the century.
