ABSTRACT
In Spencer’s sociology the presence of state-led justice as a goal for human evolution is signifi cant in two respects. First, it reinforces the teleology that came to dominate his evolutionary thought, once he had forgotten the warnings issued against this in Th e Principles of Biology. Secondly, it is a recurrent feature of his political theory that long pre-dates the whole of “A System of Synthetic Philosophy”. From the s he had consistently upheld the primacy of institutional justice. Its continued presence in Spencer’s political theory is yet another reminder that his individualism was not libertarian. e organizations that would protect individuals in the future would not wither away: the movement towards social justice was irreversible. People had permanently lost the right to protect themselves. Spencer found the notion that modern individuals should resume a right to self-protection as absurd as expecting the state to undertake commercial business as if that were its core activity. Spencer’s views are sensible if it is acknowledged that his restrictions on state activity do not develop from a public-private distinction. Such an argument might, as with J. S. Mill, divide human activities between those that intimately invoke self-knowledge and those that imply external or objective knowledge. From Spencer’s perspective this bifurcation was based on a faulty description of society. It was not the method of acquiring knowledge that was important, but the study of which human characteristics had already developed and which ones could be retained. He believed that intimate or private choices were more likely to evolve quickly than those formal rights and duties that were embedded in institutional arrangements. is was a sociological, not a philosophical, problem. Changes in one’s sense of intimacy or privacy were no more or less objective than those that aff ected political institutions. e danger in the future was not our ability to control our choices; it was, rather, that the slowness of political evolution was likely to cause reactionary behaviour in archaically educated elites, who would then encourage the very militarism that was endangering the new-found civility of our private lives.
