The Man vs. the State by Herbert Spencer
Forward by Eric Mack
Herbert Spencer produced four major works in political philosophy, plus numerous additional and important essays.
The first of these works, The Proper Sphere of Government in 1842, is the least well known.
The second is Spencer's most famous systemic treatise in this area, Social Statics, of 1851.
The Man versus the State, 1884, which is the centrepiece of this volume, is the third major political work.
This is a more polemical and quasi-sociological work than either the first two or Spencer's fourth major political study, Justice,
Part IV of The Principles of Ethics, 1891
In addition to presenting the first and third of these studies, the present volume makes
available two of Spencer's relatively early political essays, Over Legislation, 1853,
and Representative Government, 1857. Two of his important essays in political sociology,
The Social Organism 1860 and Specialized Administration 1871 and From Freedom to Bondage 1891, which
extends the polemical and analytic themes of the man versus the state.
Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England on April 27, 1820.
He entered a family of dissenting clergymen and teachers in which a long opposition to
state-church ties and solid identification with the rising commercial classes had bred
a strong anti-statist individualism. Both his father, George Spencer, and his uncle,
the Reverend Thomas Spencer, were supporters of church disestablishment, the anti-corn law
and the extension of the franchise.
As autodidacts and teachers, Spencer's father and uncles looked to the sciences and their
practical applications rather than to the classical tradition.
Their anti-statist individualism and their scientifically oriented rationalism were passed
on to Herbert Spencer.
Spencer himself points to the possible Hussite and Huguenot origins of family as a partial
explanation of his own individualism and disregard for authority, and he often recounts how his
belief in a universe entirely governed by natural causal law grew out of his father's
scientific interests and curiosity about the causes of natural phenomena.
Spencer's education was almost entirely in the hands of his father and, later, his uncles
William and Thomas. The focus was on the natural and biological sciences. He gathered plants
and insects, performed experiments, sketched and worked out problems in mathematics, and
attended lectures at the Derby Philosophical Society. When Spencer was in his teens, his
His uncle Thomas sought to broaden his education with classics, languages and history, but
his rebellious nephew proved to be relatively immune to such useless and dogmatic pastimes.
In November 1837, just after Victoria ascended the throne, Spencer joined the engineering
staff of the London and Birmingham railway. Until 1841, and again from 1845 through 1848,
Working for a number of different firms, Spencer participated in the great expensive phase
of railway construction. He appears to have been highly competent and successful at all
the engineering tasks undertaken. During these years and later, Spencer produced a variety
of mechanical inventions, and between 1839 and 1842 he published seven articles in The
The Civil Engineers and Architects Journal Only his greater interest in a literary career
and, perhaps, the difficulty that this sober and intense young man had in forming warm
relations with his colleagues precluded a full-term career in civil engineering.
In later years, this spectacular growth of the British rail system was continually to
In the spring of 1842, Spencer began a series of letters to the radical dissenting journal,
and, just as continually, he used the failure of municipal governments to restrict the noise of trains as an example of the failure of governments to carry out their proper negative functions.
In the spring of 1842, Spencer began a series of letters to the radical dissenting journal, The Non-Conformist.
reprinted in pamphlet form, The Proper Sphere of Government, is in some respects his most
radical political essay. Spencer maintains that justice construed as respect for natural
rights, and not any direct pursuit of the general good, should be the guide for determining
the sphere of governmental action. This standard requires of individuals only that they not
not engage in positive acts of oppression while it requires that the government act
only to intervene against such positively oppressive actions.
The publication of The Proper Sphere of Government coincided with Spencer's only intense and
sustained period of practical political involvement. He served as the secretary of the Derby branch
of the Complete Suffrage Union and wrote numerous short tracks for this group, as well as for
for the Anti-State Church Association.
The non-remunerative character of his literary activities during this period explains his
return to railway engineering in 1845.
In 1848, however, Spencer secured a post as a sub-editor of The Economist.
At this time, The Economist was the premier organ for free trade and laissez-faire, and
Spencer's submission of a copy of The Proper Sphere of Government can hardly have prejudiced
his application.
Spencer's five years at The Economist were spent in essentially non-ideological ordering
of news items, but in Social Statics, published during the third year, he deepened and systematized
the doctrine of The Proper Sphere of Government.
The decade following the publication and moderate success of social statics was devoted to the
composition of a number of crucial papers developing Spencer's Lamarckian-oriented
evolutionary perspective and also of a series of important political and sociological essays.
Though Spencer's health and finances continued to be in precarious condition, during this
In this period he entered into friendships with many of England's most notable intellectual figures, including George Eliot, Thomas Huxley, George Lewis and John Stuart Mill.
Spencer's status as a political heretic during this and succeeding decades should not obscure his broader role as a valued member of the scientific secularist intellectual community.
In 1858, Spencer formulated the ambitious outline for his synthetic philosophy, on which he was to work in the face of competing projects and recurring in ill hell for the next 38 years.
This scheme included his first principles, plus multi-volume works in the principles of biology, psychology, sociology and ethics.
To fund this project, Spencer at first sought the income of some undemanding governmental
post in the India administration as a prison governor, as a postal official, or even as
a member of the consular service. No suitable posts were available, and, instead, Spencer
developed a subscription arrangement to finance his great project. Crucial to this arrangement,
When in the mid-sixties his financial construction collapsed due to the subscribers' non-payments
and Spencer's delays in issuing sections of the synthetic philosophy, Mill offered to
cover Spencer's immediate losses and to organize a subvention for Spencer's continued work.
Spencer refused this charitable aid. However, when humans organized a fund among American
admirers which would either be paid to Spencer or revert to his American publishers, Spencer,
who detested publishers more than he disliked charity, could not refuse.
The political essays of this decade following the publication of social statics, which are
are reprinted here, over legislation and representative government, can easily be read as elaborations
upon the doctrine of social statics. We find a thoroughly general attack on the efficacy
of governmental action and a faith that progress will bring the demise of superstitious belief
in government omnipotence, albeit this belief will die hard. We find a continued expectation
saying that only general suffrage will block class legislation.
Only in a general diffusion of political power is there safeguard for the general welfare.
But effective voter vigilance is possible only when representative government is confined
to enforcing the simple and permanent principles of equity, and not when that government attempts
The complex business of regulating the entire national life.
The two sociological essays reprinted here, The Social Organism and Specialized Administration
represent another and not entirely compatible side of Spencer's thought.
The relationship between Spencer's political thought and both his general evolutionism
and his evolutionary sociology are too intricate and confused to be untangled here, or perhaps
anywhere.
But a few points can be made with special regard to these two essays.
The foremost is that the main purpose of the social organism metaphor is to emphasize the
non-mechanical, non-intentional, yet mutually coordinated character of the processes which
which give rise to and sustain any given society and its institutions, and the pervasiveness
in any complex society of social orders and structures which are, in Hayek's recent language,
the result of human action but not of human design.
The metaphor also serves to highlight further parallels between, for example, the physiological
and the economic divisions of labour.
It was no part of Spencer's intention to advocate any form of moral or methodological
organicism. Thus he asserts that in contrast to biological organisms, the corporate life
of society must be subservient to the lives of the parts instead of the lives of the parts
being subservient to the corporate life. Yet here too intention and result part company,
Company, for within the social organism we find Spencer proclaiming that our Houses of
Parliament discharge in the social economy functions which are in sundry respects comparable
to those discharged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal. Such assertions clearly
paved the way for T. H. Huckley to claim in Administrative Nihilism that an implication
The definition of the organism metaphor was that the economy can, and occasionally should,
be the subject of Parliament's intentional control and manipulation, just as a biological
organism's body can and usually should be controlled and manipulated by that individual's
central nervous system.
Spencer's response in specialized administration is, unfortunately, both implausible and doctrinally
He maintains that both the higher biological organism and the higher social organism display systems of passive, negatively regulative control over inner organs and their interrelations and systems of active, positively regulative control over outer organs and the relationship of these organs to the external environment, but in order to maintain the parallelism with respect to inner organs,
In order to maintain the parallelism with respect to outer organs, Spencer must hold
that in foreign affairs the state is to go beyond the administration of justice into
the realm of positive action.
This appears to be inconsistent with Spencer's rejection of offensive war, colonialism and
government control of foreign trade.
Spencer fails to see the implications of granting the government a positive regulatory function
in external affairs because he confuses this significant concession with the truism, applicable
to both internal and external affairs, that the government must have positive control
over its own apparatus.
Spencer's growing fame and financial security through the 1870s and 1880s was matched neither
by happiness nor good health.
At least in part, the personal tragedy of the second half of Spencer's life was due
to his perception of an evolutionary regression after 1850 back towards a mercantilistic and
and Warlike Social Order of the sort he labelled militant. Although in one letter he described
the man versus the state as the finished form toward which he had been working for 42 years
and as a positive creed for the advancement of party and politics, for the most part he
was deeply pessimistic about stopping the drift to Communism. By the time this work
was composed, Spencer no longer saw his task to be charting the course of progress which
mankind would be following. Rather, it was his duty to oppose the process of rebarbarization.
The essays of The Man vs. the State are Spencer's most sustained, brilliant, and bitter act
of resistance. The New Toryism seeks to define true liberalism
and to explain how the Liberal Party had come to advocate a new system of state power.
The coming slavery offers a rich explanation of how increments to state power set in play
are dynamic, the ultimate consequences of which are despotism and enslavement.
The sins of legislators attacks legislators' ignorance both of economic laws which coordinate
People's Desires and Efforts, and Evolutionary Law which requires that in the course of progress
sufferings must be endured.
Here we find an invocation of the survival of the fittest, though it must be remembered
that for Spencer the fittest are those well adapted to cooperative social life and even
those in whom spontaneous sympathy engenders aid to the unfortunate worthy.
The Great Political Superstition attacks the doctrine of unlimited governmental sovereignty,
whether monarchical or parliamentary, and the associated doctrine that rights are created
by the State and may, with equal ease, be abolished by the State.
The latter portion of this essay stands as an impressive summary of Spencer's political
worldview.
The present volume closes with From Freedom to Bondage, one of Spencer's best expositions
of his contrast between voluntary industrial society, the society of contract, and compulsory
militant society, the society of status.
We find here prophecies as vivid as Bakunin's about the plight of actual workers subordinated
to an Army of Officials United by Interests Common to Officialdom.
Two of the issues that appear in these later essays operated to further Spencer's defensiveness
and isolation.
Spencer vehemently attacked Henry George and land nationalizers, and was, in turn, attacked
for having abandoned his own belief in the societal ownership of land.
which in particular criticized Spencer's alleged apostasy, which seemed to be epitomized by
the disappearance of the chapter on the right to use the earth from the 1892 edition of
social statics.
Spencer's angry response was that in principles his views had never changed.
He continued to believe in the societal ownership of land and in just compensation to current
Landholders, at least for the costs of improvements. Since, however, he had come to realize, on
the basis of reasoning that can only be classified as suspect, that society could not afford
to pay this just compensation, and since the current rampant officialism would translate
social ownership into socialism, he rejected explicit social reappropriation under the
and further he declared that the whole issue was moot because everyone, including the author of The Great Political Superstition, acknowledged Parliament's ultimate sovereignty over the land.
The land question controversy has become one of the test cases for all theories about Spencer's purported drift to conservatism.
satisfying answers to questions about whether or in what sense there was such a drift, and
about how such a drift might be explained, are crucial to a full understanding of Spencer
and are yet to be provided.
In contrast, with the significant exception of Spencer's sometime acceptance of conscription
in defensive war, Spencer remained clearly and adamantly non-conservative in his opposition
and Intermilitarism and Imperialism. In the early 1880s, Spencer returned to active politics
in an unsuccessful attempt to build an influential anti-aggressive league. It was to these futile
efforts plus the demands of his American tour in the summer and fall of 1882 that Spencer
ascribed a further breakdown in health. Nevertheless, throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Spencer attacked
In the late 1890s, Spencer attacked and tried to organize public opinion against aggressive
British involvement abroad.
In The Sins of Legislators, his greatest ire is directed at those alleged liberal imperialists
who, though they cannot bear to think of the evils accompanying the struggle for existence
as it is carried on without violence among individuals in their own society, contemplate
For Spencer, it was the growth of explicit militarism which, through numerous channels,
was the underlying cause of the social regression of the last decades of the nineteenth century.
And as he concludes in From Freedom to Bondage, everywhere and at all times chronic war generates
is the militant type of structure, not in the body of soldiers only, but throughout
the community at large.
The vision of a nation which had forfeited its historical opportunity and had thereby
defeated Spencer's youthful hopes and prophecies dominated Spencer's declining years.
The bitterness and the sadness of this vision show through in Spencer's final acts of resistance.
His Essays on Regimentation, Rebarbarization and Imperialism and Slavery, published in 1902.
When Herbert Spencer died on December 8, 1903, it was with the conviction that, at least
as a political thinker and writer, his life had been in vain.
Eric Mack Tulane University