ABSTRACT
It has been more than thirty years since a general book on Herbert Spencer has appeared. Although there have been monographs and articles by sociologists, anthropologists, historians of science, philosophers and political theorists, there is now a need for a fuller study that takes account of recent advances in scholarship. e need is for a coherent portrait of a man whose ideas have been selectively splintered into fragments and then press-ganged into narratives on the development of scholarly disciplines. Spencer scholarship has concentrated on producing a series of vignettes of why emerging academic subjects have responded to, or ignored, a great Victorian. As a result his ideas have been forced into explanatory models lacking historical sophistication. is, in turn, has led to the creation of contradictory patterns where none exist. Instead of being portrayed
as an intrinsically interesting and coherent fi gure, Spencer has been lauded, or belaboured, as an intellectual who opposed Darwinism, utilitarianism, socialism or rights theory. For many academic writers, Spencer has served only as a plausible straw man who unsuccessfully resisted scientifi c and philosophical progress.
