H I S T O RY O F T H E H U M A N S C I E N C E S
Vo l . 2 0 N o . 3
© 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
pp. 21–40
[20:3; 21–40; DOI: 10.1177/0952695107079332]
Progression and retrogression:
Herbert Spencer’s explanations
of social inequality
THOMAS GONDERMANN
ABSTRACT
Herbert Spencer was one of the most important contributors to the
Victorian discourse on social evolution. His theory of evolution in
nature and society has been the subject of countless scholarly works
over the last hundred years. Nevertheless, not all of its dimensions
have been studied in due depth. Contrary to a widespread belief, Spencer
did not just design an evolutionary theory of upward, yet branched
development. Searching for explanations for the social distance between
presumably civilized and primitive societies and between presumably
well-conducted and pauperized Victorians, he introduced elements of
retrogression into his theory of social evolution. In addition, he biologized social structures and social phenomena by constructing a causal
relationship between social and somatic features. This article discusses
Spencer’s account of the social conditions of the so-called savages and
paupers. It aims to shed light on the progressive and retrogressive
modes of evolutionary development and the biologistic explanations he
employed in his social theory to explain these conditions.
Key words biologization, pauperism, race, social evolution,
Herbert Spencer
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INTRODUCTION
Today, Victorian theories of social evolution are firmly tied to the name of
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) (Bowler, 1975; Ruse, 1979; Desmond, 1989;
Richards, 1992). Common understanding also exists with regard to the view
that Spencer’s theory of social evolution was progressive. Spencer’s sociology
dealt with contemporary society. It attempted to explain economical growth
and the development of political and social systems. But it also addressed
pressing social issues like mass poverty and the question of so-called race
relations. According to the widespread progressive view of Spencer’s sociology, these economically marginalized or racially suppressed groups were
represented as precarious ‘outcasts of evolution’ – left behind by a social
progress irresistibly steaming forward. Notions of class and race had been
significantly rewritten during the 19th century – and Spencer, with his sociological writings, had a considerable share in this ‘reshaping’ of the Victorian
understanding of race and class (Lorimer, 1997: 228; cf. Banton, 1998: 81–97;
Hall et al., 2000; Winant, 2004: ix-x).
However, despite a constant flow of academic work on Spencer (cf. Perrin,
1993; Burrow, 1966; Peel, 1971; Collini, 1979; Bowler, 1986; Coser, 1996), there
remains a remarkable lack of clarity, with regard to the specific mechanisms
with which he explained existing social relations, especially those between
classes and ‘races’. Two closely related aspects of his sociological explanations
demand further elucidation. First, the circumstance that Spencer not only
characterized social evolution with a progressive outlook but also allowed
for degenerative development has been completely neglected. Second, the
role and function of biological explanations remain disputed among scholars
interested in Spencer’s theory. In the course of a revival of scholarly interest
in his work during the late 1960s and the 1970s, a debate arose on the question
of whether biological determinism seriously impaired Spencer’s theory of
social evolution, or if it could be separated from the theoretical framework
(Carneiro, 1967; Harris, 1969; Peel, 1971). This debate of some 30 years ago is
still the only one concerning this controversial issue, and it did not lead to
any systematic research into the role and functions of biological determinism for Spencer’s sociology.
In this article, I will discuss these neglected aspects of retrogressive
development and of biological determinism in Spencer’s theory of social
evolution. I will focus on the practical applications at which Spencer aimed,
and consider his work not only as a piece of philosophical thinking, but also
as a contribution to pressing contemporary debates and as an attempt to
explain the specific social conditions of the poor and the colonized. The
conditions of the poor played a major role in Victorian debates on social
reform, and the conditions of the so-called savages were central for the
colonial discourse of the time. First, I will analyse Spencer’s accounts for
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PROGRESSION AND RETROGRESSION
‘racial’ and class differences, respectively. I will discuss the extent to which
his approach rested on progressive, as well as on degenerative, assumptions
and the role of biological explanations. Second, I will correlate my results
with Spencer’s general concept of social evolution, asking how he managed
to employ these diametrically opposed suppositions and why the contradiction between them had hardly been recognized before.
PRIMITIVES: SPENCER’S CONSTRUCTION OF
RACIAL DIFFERENCES
In his first sociological work, Social Statics, Spencer described social development as a progressive ascent, leading from rude and simple, to civil and
complex societies. This picture of human development, ever tending to higher
perfection, allowed for ‘unnumbered degrees of difference’ between the
primitive and the civilized (Spencer, 1851: 416). In early writings, like Social
Statics, Spencer did not develop theoretical explanations which went beyond
a rudimentary adaptation theory, assuming that ‘[e]very age, every nation,
every climate, exhibits a modified form of humanity’ (ibid.: 33–4; cf. Jahoda,
1999). The driving force he imagined in a teleological manner behind social
development was an urge for self-perfection and a tendency towards a state
of affairs, ‘when civilization becomes complete’, which he owed to continental philosophy and his reading of Auguste Comte (Spencer, 1851: 442).
A thorough Lamarckian in his theory of organic evolution, he relied on
the innate capacity of organisms to adapt themselves to environmental changes
(Stark, 1961; Perrin, 1976; La Vergata, 1995). Today, Spencer’s contribution
to an understanding of natural theory is generally held in very little esteem.
Yet, the aspect of adaptation also played a significant role in his theory of
social evolution. It became central for him from the 1850s onwards. These
were years of a scientific turn in his writings, producing a theoretical shift
from social self-perfection to a full-grown theory of social evolution,
embedded in a holistic framework of universal evolution. He discovered the
writings of Ernst von Baer (1792–1876) on embryonic development, of Johan
Steenstrup (1813–1897) on the alternation of generations, and of William B.
Carpenter (1813–1885) on comparative physiology, and he subsequently
conceptualized an evolutionary approach to organic and species development
(cf. Spencer, 1908: 543). This change in epistemological perspective also had
its impact on Spencer’s anthropological views and his interpretation of
certain somatic features that were commonly used as distinctive marks
between the races, mainly brain size and the proportion between jaw and
brain (Gould, 1981). Spencer now suggested not only a correlation between
living conditions and physical appearance, but also a functional connection.
Functional adaptation was elementary for his connex of physical features and
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social development: ‘[T]he projecting jaw, characteristic of the lower human
races’ would be the outward appearance of a
. . . comparative lack of intelligence. . . . In conformity with the law that
organs develop in proportion as they are exercised, the jaws are relatively large where the demands made on them are great; and diminish in
size as their functions become less numerous and less onerous. . . . From
the bushman state upwards, there has been a gradual increase in the
complexity of our appliances. . . . Thus that simultaneous protrusion of
the brain and recession of the jaws . . . has continued during the advance
of Humanity from barbarism to civilization. (Spencer, 1912: II, 389)
According to Spencer, the evolutionary progression of the social is manifested in the proportions of brain and jaw. He explained this correlation with
reference to the Lamarckian mechanism of an organ’s strengthening by its
frequent and constant use (Spencer, 1904: I, 176; Jones, 1980). For the human
species this presumed effect of use-inheritance would be seen in physiognomically described differences between ‘the European and the Papuan’,
where ‘the one cuts in two with knife and fork, the other tears with his jaws’
(Spencer, 1912: II, 390). Spencer thus declared the use of tools and other
cultural implements to correlate with the growth of brain-mass; a growth that,
for him, was recognizable in a shift in physiognomy, expressing the ascent
from barbarism to civilization.
This method of connecting skull and civilization stood in the line of a long
anthropological tradition (Mosse, 1978; Meijer, 1999). But Spencer’s approach
differed from those of contemporary anthropologists in a very important
aspect. While anthropology in the middle of the 19th century was divided
into monogenists and polygenists, who believed that human races were either
separate and distinct species, or that the so-called lower races had degenerated
from the assumed higher ones (Stepan, 1982: 20–46; Stocking, 1987; Banton,
1998: 17–80), Spencer’s core concept of development was progressive evolution. And while Enlightenment philosophers constructed their progressive
histories of civilization from a hypothetical savage with which the ascent of
civilization had begun, for Spencer, social evolution did not begin with the
hypothetical, but with what he believed to be real savages (Nisbet, 1969;
Mills, 1997).
Spencer proposed an ascending order of races according to their assumed
brain sizes, ‘showing an increase in the course of the advance from the savage
state to our present phase of civilization, amounting to nearly 30 per cent on
the original size’ (Spencer, 1852: 498). Referring to the ‘original size’, he
regarded the Australians as the first, ‘original’ humans and therefore, denied
them any historic or prehistoric development. He believed this comparison
of crania to be evidence for an ‘enlargement of the nervous centres’, tantamount to human progression (ibid.: 497). Spencer’s biological interpretation
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PROGRESSION AND RETROGRESSION
of the human races was unequivocally progressive. For him, social evolution
was a process of growth, improvement and refinement on a social level and
on a somatic level, but his arrangement rested on a constructive moment. By
means of the comparative method, he constructed the Europeans’ ancestors
out of their contemporaries: Australians, Africans and Malayans represented
for him a savage state in a temporal distance to ‘our present state’. At the
same time, this broad perspective of global social evolution implied that some
societies did not develop at all. Within an explanatory framework that tied
up social and cranial development, the presumably small-brained Australians
represented the original state of humankind and had passed through no social
development at all.
For Spencer, as for many of his contemporaries, brain size became the
measure of all things (cf. Gould, 1981). Yet, he did not simply employ it as a
mere indicator of primitiveness, he also tried to give functional explanations
for the assumed smaller brain size of savages. He reasoned that the brains of
savages developed in quite different ways than those of the civilized:
The future process of civilization which the never ceasing pressure of
population must produce, will be accompanied by an enhanced cost of
Individuation, both in structure and in function; and most especially in
nervous structure and function. The peaceful struggle for existence in
societies ever growing more crowded and complicated, must have for
its concomitant an increase of the great nervous centres in mass, in
complexity, in activity. . . . Already, the brain of the civilized man is
larger by nearly 30 per cent than the brain of the savage. (Spencer, 1884:
II, 501–2)
This assumption had an important consequence. His supposition that the size
of the brain – considered to be the most reliable indicator of intelligence and
cultural capabilities – was determined by the demands of the complexity of
the social structure, meant that social evolution propelled somatic evolution.
The background to this belief was the theory of the effects of use and disuse
put forward by Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). Spencer considered such
traits to be hereditable. He constructed not only a correlation, but also a
causal relationship between the two assumed traits. It is worth remembering
that most of his contemporaries believed that the brain volume determined
intellectual and cultural capacities. Spencer agreed, but also introduced the
dynamic aspect of evolution into a static hierarchy of races and their assumed
brain sizes. His theory of social evolution inverted the traditional biological
determination of the social and regarded instead the biological, i.e. the brain
size, as the function of the social. What at first glance looks like waiving
biological determinism, is in fact not. Although for him social evolution was
not a function of biological evolution, but its determinant, Spencer nevertheless cemented the social difference between savages and civilized. Though
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the difference of brain size be determined socially, it could not be bridged by
social means, because individual intellectual capacities were, for Spencer, still
determined by the volume of the brain. Even more, his assumption of culturally caused cerebral growth rendered the social distance between the civilized
and the savage almost insurmountable, and caused an ever widening distance
between the primitive and the civilized.
Up to this point in his career, Spencer accounted for social differences
mainly by references to progressive development on the one hand, and to
arrested development on the other. But in later writings, he also developed
a theory of degenerative social development. Against the background of a
commencing professionalization in anthropology, Spencer seemed to be
dissatisfied with the empirical foundations of his reasoning (Stocking, 1971;
Spencer, 1994; Gondermann, 2007: 97–173). In preparation of his major
sociological work, The Principles of Sociology, he collected an unimaginably
huge body of social data. This collection of often prejudiced material served
as the foundation for his description of social evolution. Spencer arranged
clippings from all kinds of sources in a massive work of nine folios, each
dedicated to a race or a group of races: Descriptive Sociology.1 Descriptive
Sociology aimed at the presentation of ‘definite accounts of the institutions
and actions of societies of various types, and in various stages of evolution’
(Spencer, 1874: i).
He explained the wretched existence of societies, like the Eskimos or the
Fuegians, with two mechanisms. First, he claimed that in the struggle of
existence between societies, the weakest had been driven to more and more
desolate environments: ‘The more-evolved societies drive the less-evolved
societies into unfavourable habitats; and so entail on them decrease of size,
or decay of structure, or both’ (Spencer, 1898[1876]: 97). He conceded that
this evolutionary process might also embrace the ‘killing-off of relativelyfeeble tribes’ (Spencer, 1899: 175; cf. Brantlinger, 2003). Thus, inferiority in
the struggle for life led, in Spencer’s eyes, to adaptation to harsh living
conditions. And second, he assumed that under desolate climatic conditions,
any social development must come to a halt:
But where, as in such places, the temperature which man’s vital functions
require can be maintained with difficulty, social evolution is not possible
. . . This great physiological cost of individual life, indirectly checking
the multiplication of individuals, arrests social evolution. (Spencer,
1898[1876]: 18)
He considered the influence of external factors, environmental as well as social,
to be a hindrance to social evolution. In addition, he argued that societies,
pushed even beyond the borders of the earth’s habitable regions, would
‘decay’ in their structures and ‘decrease’ in numbers. Although Spencer
claimed all drudgery and misery to be results of misadaptation to the social
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state, he was at pains to show that the ‘savages’ were best fitted to their
environment. Yet, the most important aspect of his construction of savageness
is that the process of degeneration would be irreversible and that the status of
primitiveness could not be cast off. The implications of his future visions were
severe: because social statuses were inscribed in brain size and because the
processes of social progression and degeneration were irreversible, the social
distance between the civilized and savage became an enormous hindrance to
equality, which could not be mitigated socially or politically.
Spencer stated that not every adaptational change would ‘necessarily imply
advance’ (Spencer, 1898[1876]: 96). This view was far more than a simple
truism. It was essential for him because, as he had learned from the ethnological material of his Descriptive Sociology, presumably savage societies
showed social phenomena that were not primitive at all, and thus called for
an explanation. Spencer asserted that they were remnants of past higher social
states: ‘most of the tribes known as lowest, exhibit some social phenomena
which are due, not to causes now operating, but to causes that operated during
past social states higher than the present’ (ibid.: 98). Therefore, he allowed
for retrogression in his generally progressive model of social evolution:
‘While the current degradation theory [of contemporary, monogenist anthropology, T.G.] is untenable, the theory of progression in this orderly form,
seems to me untenable also. . . . It is possible, and, I believe, probable, that
retrogression has been as frequent as progression’ (ibid.: 95). Although
Spencer maintained a progressive outlook of his general theory of social
evolution, he employed mechanisms of arrested development and of retrogression to account for the social conditions of the most wretched savages.
But he did not explain how this assumption could be harmonized with his
former explanation that there was not only a significant correlation between
brain size and the degree of civilization, but that social complexity was itself
the driving force behind cerebral growth. However, social differences between
civilized and primitive societies were, for Spencer, caused by progressive, as
well as by non-progressive, development, and both processes were propelled
by adaptational mechanisms.
PAUPERISM: SPENCER’S EXPLANATION OF
SOCIAL DIFFERENCES
The theoretical framework in which Spencer’s theory of social evolution is most
frequently taken into consideration is the history of social Darwinism. Social
Darwinism is directed to class issues, but its close relation to concepts of race
had already been noticed by the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward in
1907 (Ward, 1907). Spencer’s contribution to social Darwinism is undisputed.
Most definitions of social Darwinism, albeit themselves controversial (Ruse,
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1982; Shapin and Barnes, 1979), associated social Darwinism with Spencer on
the grounds of two combined elements: first, his individualism and rejection
of governmental aid for those he considered ‘unfit’, and second, his belief that
societies develop under some rule or mechanism similar to natural selection
(Bannister, 1979; Hawkins, 1997; Jones, 1980; Halliday, 2000; Crook, 1996;
Williams, 2000).
Neologisms like ‘social Lamarckism’ (Bowler), ‘sociological Spencerism’
(Leaf), or ‘biological Spencerism’ (Freeman) indicate a certain suspicion that
Spencer’s argument against the administration of public relief to the poor
rested on a recourse to biological conceptions (Bowler, 1988: 158; Leaf, 1979:
73; Freeman, 1974: 216). Indeed, the idea that pauperism was an expression
of innate and unalterable moral or behavioural propensities formed the
traditional background for the discourse of social Darwinism and the growing
biologization of social differences in the 19th century. In spite of the widespread attention paid to Spencer’s contribution to social Darwinism, in terms
of the application of natural laws to social problems, his explanations for
pauperism have triggered lesser scientific interest and have often been
reduced to a quite conventional assumption of hereditable social and biological unfitness (Hawkins, 1997: 99; Bolt, 1971).
The so-called social question stood at the very beginning of Spencer’s
publishing career (Wiltshire, 1978). The decades following the reform of the
Poor Laws in 1834 were marked by an ongoing debate on poverty and social
policy (Ignatieff, 1978; Knott, 1986; Driver, 1993). Spencer took up the issue
and developed the radical laissez-faire standpoint with which he was henceforth identified.2 He argued for a complete hands-off policy, being convinced
that ‘there is in society, as in every other part of creation, that beautiful selfadjusting principle, which will keep all its elements in equilibrium’ (Spencer,
1994: 6). For Spencer, poor relief was a way of putting this equilibrium out
of order. It is the administration of this poor relief which, in his eyes, was
responsible for the degradation of the pauper, because it would take away the
‘[i]mperious necessity [which] is the grand stimulus to man’s physical and
mental endowments’ (ibid.: 49). With these views, he was quite in line with
the ongoing discourse on poverty and poor relief since Elizabethan times
(Pick, 1989; Paul, 1995: 22–41; Carlson, 2001).3 Spencer explained that the most
effective stimulus to labour would be unmitigated poverty itself: ‘The poverty
of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of
the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong . . . are the
decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence’ (Spencer, 1851: 323). To maintain
mankind’s ascent to perfect humanity he also recommended applying a ‘stern
discipline of nature’ to the social sphere (ibid.: 322).
Spencer believed that a developmental tendency toward an ideal social state
exists, in which ‘the ultimate man will be one whose private requirements
coincide with public ones’ (Spencer, 1851: 441–2). That is why he was very
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much interested in those processes that possibly counteract the general direction of social development. While he, like many of his contemporaries,
derived the idea of an upward development from technical, infrastructural
and economic development, he held paupers, and their assumed refusal to
diligence, to be a hindrance to this process.
Spencer never gave up the motives of distress and misery as appropriate
incitements to industrious labour, but he had to account for the endurance
of pauperism and mass poverty in decades of relative economic prosperity
(Best, 1990: 101–53). The factual persistence of pauperism, which did not
change in substance in those years, called for a particular explanation. For
this reason, he introduced the Malthusian idea of population pressure into
his account of the social question, which would necessitate the ‘social state’
– the normative framework that, for him, characterized developed societies.
Man had to become fit for this state (Spencer, 1851: 62). Within this framework poverty appeared as an expression of unfitness to this social state.
Under natural conditions, he assured, such unfit, diseased or simply weak
individuals would decay. Yet the poor relief, for him, produced ‘an increase
in the number of the feebler who survive and leave posterity’ (Spencer, 1899:
310). Under the given social conditions, the survival and multiplication of
these weaklings would weaken the whole society, to the effect that ‘generation after generation, a greater unworthiness’ would be produced (ibid.). This
assertion rests on the assumption that certain behavioural or even psychic
patterns, which were supposed to lie at the bottom of such unworthiness,
were hereditable, not only in a cultural, but also in a biological, sense:
Hereditary transmission . . . applies not only to physical but to psychical peculiarities. It is not simply that a modified form of constitution
produced by new habits of life, is bequeathed to future generations; but
it is that the modified nervous tendencies produced by such new habits
of life, are also bequeathed: and if the new habits of life become permanent, the tendencies become permanent. (Spencer, 1855: 526)
Applying this very general conviction to the actual social question, Spencer
claimed that ‘the quality of a society is physically lowered by the artificial
preservation of its feeblest members’, and that likewise ‘the quality of a society
is lowered morally and intellectually, by the artificial preservation of those
who are least able to take care of themselves’ (Spencer, 1899: 313). This shows
that, for Spencer, psychic properties were transmitted biologically, like the
physical constitution. Thus certain habits, at least the inclinations to them,
are hereditable and could hardly be meliorated by educational measures.
Such hereditability is, in Spencer’s Lamarckian approach to evolution and
social evolution, the co-mechanism of adaptation. Individuals bequeath traits
to their progeny that they have acquired by processes of adaptation: ‘While
the bodily natures of the citizens are being fitted to the physical influences
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. . . of their locality, their mental natures are being fitted to the structure of
the society they live in’ (Spencer, 1899: 316).
Spencer argued that all individuals had to adapt themselves to their
progressively changing social environment. Yet, not all did. And despite his
credo of the ‘survival of the fittest’, those unfit for the contemporary social
state did survive and multiply (Spencer, 1898[1876]: 50). He attempted to
solve this problem by explaining that the paupers had adapted themselves to
an alternative, yet ‘inferior mode of life’ (Spencer, 1899: 330). They were
‘improvident because they have been for ages disciplined in improvidence’
(ibid.: 336). That is to say that, for Spencer, pauperism was the result of an
adaptation to a certain social environment, which would allow for their
particular lifestyle, with the effect of an arrested upward development or an
interruption of the assumed tendency to perfection.
But adaptation does not offer a complete explanation for the assumed arrest
of development. If it did, why was not everyone, or at least, every member
of the working class, adapting to the lifestyle of happy-go-lucky under the
benefactory wings of poor relief? Peel tried to answer this question with
Spencer: ‘It is because “we are as yet imperfectly adapted to our conditions”’
(Peel, 1971: 93). Yet, Spencer’s usage of ‘we’ is misleading and applies only
rhetorically, because he argued for a differentiated adaptation. And Carneiro’s
and Perrin’s answer that society would, in Spencer’s eyes, enforce ‘everyone
to become better’, did not realize that Spencer dealt with the factuality that
not everyone was effectively forced to self-betterment and that he tried to
account for this problem by a reference to differentiated adaptation (Carneiro
and Perrin, 2002: 227).
Spencer regarded degenerative social development as the outcome of a
disadvantageous adaptation only of those with an innate tendency to the
adaptation to pauperism. In his view, pauperism was not just an expression
of a certain social stratification or the result of a sudden blow of fate. Rather
it was the outcome of an incorporated, hereditable moral and psychical predisposition, correlated with unfitness for a regular conduct of life. Stressing
the hereditability of the psychic predisposition of pauperism, Spencer biologized the social difference that had sedimented in the individuals and
constituted the distinct psychical condition of pauperism. John Offer tried
to minimize such biologized accounts of social differences as ‘dubious pseudobiological explanations’ (Offer, 1985: 658). But it is only in combination with
the assumption of a bi-directional social development, of progression and
degeneration, that this biological determinism gains momentum. Yet, as the
examples of his evolutionary theory of racial differences and of his explanation of pauperism show, they are not just accidental misconceptions; rather,
they lie at the heart of Spencer’s sociology. Spencer’s account for pauperism
as an expression of a specific form of adaptation resulted on the one hand
from his understanding of adaptation, borrowed from the scientific discourse
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on evolution, and on the other from his sociological understanding of society
functioning as the environment for individuals (Jones, 1980: 79). As one of the
pioneers of Victorian evolutionism, Spencer introduced the notion of adaptation into social philosophy and its reasoning about the social question. And
with this degenerative outlook, Spencer was one of the earliest predecessors of
the late-Victorian and Edwardian discourse on the degeneration of the urban
poor, on ‘Outcast London’ (Jones, 1971: 281–7), although, instead of accusing
the severity of the hygienic circumstances, he pointed to social and political
causes that would serve as a social environment and foster a pauper lifestyle.
‘MAN’S PROGRESS’: SPENCER’S THEORY OF
SOCIAL EVOLUTION
It is quite a commonplace to regard Spencer as a philosopher of progress.
However, the finding that he employed progressive, as well as retrogressive,
mechanisms in his concept of social evolution at least partly contradicts this
prevalent understanding. To examine this question more closely, it is necessary to grasp his general model of social evolution. For Spencer, social evolution was progressive because of a tendency towards equilibrium, derived from
a supposed bent towards an ideal social state in early works like Social Statics
(cf. Perrin, 1976). Probably, its most concise outline can be found in Spencer’s
definition of the task of sociology:
Beginning with types of men who form but small and incoherent social
aggregates, such a science has to show in what ways the individual
qualities, intellectual and emotional, negative further aggregation. It has
to explain how slight modifications of individual nature, arising under
modified conditions of life, make somewhat larger aggregates possible.
It has to trace out . . . the genesis of the social relations, regulative and
operative, into which the members fall. . . . Among societies of all orders
and sizes, from the smallest and rudest up to the largest and most civilized, it has to ascertain what traits there are in common, determined by
the common traits of human beings; what less-general traits, distinguishing certain groups of societies, result from traits distinguishing
certain races of men; and what peculiarities in each society are traceable
to the peculiarities of its members. In every case it has for its subjectmatter the growth, development, structure, and functions of the social
aggregate. (Spencer, 1899: 47)
Despite this linear and progressive picture of social evolution, ranging from the
‘smallest and rudest’ to the ‘largest and most civilized’, Spencer pointed out
that ‘the different forms of society presented by savage and civilized races all
over the globe . . . do not form a series, but are classifiable only in divergent
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and re-divergent groups’ (ibid.: 300). Thus, Spencer constructed societies’
genealogy as a branching structure. His usage of the tree model did not rule
out a hierarchical order of societies. The tree analogy allowed for regional
differences and the focus on adaptation as the key factor to social differentiation. Adaptation to different social loci and environments was also Spencer’s
explanation for the social difference between the well-off and the pauper.
Therefore, the two modes of adaptation by which he accounted for the
specific social differences of paupers and savages were integral elements of
his theory of social evolution, and corresponded with the branching shape
of its arrangement of societies and its stages of social development.
In his general approach, Spencer described social evolution as a process of
growth and of structural, as well as functional, differentiation which had
begun with small and incoherent societies and developed further from there
(Perrin, 1976). To illustrate his point, he referred to Fuegians, Australians and
the so-called Bushmen, societies which he considered to be the utmost primitive, and which he characterized as ‘still extant samples of the primordial
type of society’ and ‘headless clusters, wholly ungoverned [and] incoherent’
(Spencer, 1898[1876]: 464, 472). These societies would represent the germs of
social evolution.
This theoretical concept is obviously at odds with Spencer’s explanations
discussed above: these societies cannot at the same time represent the origin
of civilization and the outcome of degenerative processes. Obviously, he
employed two very different optics in his social writings. His general concepts
consider society as a whole. But when Spencer took up issues of social differences, especially with relation to the conditions of ‘primitive’ societies or
paupers, he apparently felt that a purely progressive view on social development would not suffice. Had only the established stereotypes about them
been at issue, Spencer might have easily explained them within a purely
progressive model, claiming, for instance, that the development of savage
societies was slower or that paupers were not able to meet the demands of
industrial life. But his more focused views on social differences put more
emphasis on adaptation than on progressive development.
It has been noticed by a number of scholars that adaptation played a major
part in Spencer’s theory of social evolution. But Peel, for example, interpreted
Spencer’s concept of adaptation in a teleological manner. He thought that for
Spencer, ‘adaptation to the social state’ would be the never-ending process of
social modification towards an ideal social state (Peel, 1971: 154). Nevertheless, recognizing that Spencer had some notion of adaptation ‘to a less than
perfect state of society’, he assumed this to contradict Spencer’s generally
progressive scheme and did not examine the context in which Spencer
applied non-progressive modes of adaptation (ibid.). A similar restriction to
progressive social development marks John Burrow’s, Valerie Haines’s and
Antonello de La Vergata’s accounts of Spencer (Burrow, 1966; La Vergata,
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PROGRESSION AND RETROGRESSION
1995; Haines, 1988). Haines recognized that Spencer’s theory of social evolution implied ‘the idea that societies can be ranked’, but she assumed that he
derived his notion of evolution from Ernst von Baer’s embryology and that
consequently, for Spencer, societies would represent different stages of an
upward development (Haines, 1988: 1213). According to Haines, Spencer did
not present only a progressive, but also a linear, design of social evolution.
That Spencer also argued for adaptation to adverse conditions has remained
unnoticed by those approaches that were mainly interested in his broad picture
of social development. They describe Spencer as being ‘explicitly progressivist’, because they believe that Spencer held his notion of decline ‘at a
sufficient level of generality’ to employ it as an argument in political
discourses (Pick, 1989: 11, 20). Yet, as I have shown, Spencer employed his
concept of degeneration not on the general level, but on the level of concrete
social phenomena. That is why degeneration, for him, was not a political
threat, it was a diagnosis of existing social conditions.
The reason for the inconsistency between Spencer’s broad theoretical
model of social evolution and his more detailed pictures of social differences
can be found in a methodological split between deductive and inductive
reasoning. He had already been criticized for this split by contemporaries –
his friend Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) had joked that if Spencer ever
wrote a tragedy, the plot would be the killing of a beautiful deduction by a
nasty little fact (Galton, 1924: 627) – and it constitutes a major issue in the
research on his work. This split also characterizes his sociology. Spencer
deduced his concept of social evolution by analogy from his understanding
of natural evolution, from what he termed ‘first principles’ – universal laws
of development.4
But the deductive construction of social evolution, which lies at the heart
of his programmatic definitions, did not carry him far when he interpreted the
sociological data from various societies, which he collected in his Descriptive
Sociology. Although he arranged societies according to a deductive scheme of
social evolution, he still had to explain the social differences on the basis
of social facts. And these explanations supposed processes of adaptation,
leading to progressive and retrogressive social development, respectively.
Such a dichotomous image of social evolution also structured Spencer’s
discussion of class relations in Victorian Britain. As was shown, he explained
that the social conditions of the paupers were due to their specific adaptation
to the conditions provided by the Poor Laws. Again, this assumption of nondevelopment or degeneration is incompatible with Spencer’s general, deductively perceived, progressive model of social evolution.
Some scholars have attempted to handle Spencer’s representations of
paupers and savages as a literal interpretation of his formula of the survival
of the fittest. But likewise, Spencer was interested in those whom he thought
not to be the fittest, or even the fit, rather, he was interested in the unfit.
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Does his evolutionary progress entail ‘the continuous purging of the unfit’
(Hawkins, 1997: 88)? Spencer’s most explicit statement on the extinction of
weaker races was part of his considerations of the effects of war. He rested
his explanation of the wretched living conditions of so-called savages on their
adaptation to environmental conditions. For him, they continued to live under
these conditions unless a ‘stronger race’ took possession of their territories.
The same is true for his discussion of paupers. One of the first theoretical
desiderata for Spencer resulted from the fact that pauperism continued to
exist – not only in terms of individual survival, but also as a mass phenomenon. Accounts regarding Spencer as a progressivist, pointed out that social
evolution, for him, was synonymous with a progressive process of civilization and supposed that he treated paupers and savages simply as ‘outcasts
from evolution’ (Bowler, 1989: 38; Haller, 1971; Rylance, 2000; Young, 1990).
Yet, in the logic of Spencer’s theory, they were not left behind by social
evolution, rather social evolution directed them a different social place. He
described that they were well, indeed, only too well, adapted to their specific
natural and social environments.
In times of an unflappable belief in progress, the temptation was great to
corroborate existing images of paupers and savages with a rationale of social
development. Consequently these groups stood at the cradle of Spencer’s
social theory and his attempt to solve the riddle of the social question. Spencer
was at pains to incorporate an explanation of the envisaged miseries of life into
his theory of social evolution. The rationale of social evolution superseded
static and creationist explanations of traditional racial theories (Banton, 1998;
Stepan, 1982; Stocking, 1987). It also supplanted explanations for pauperism,
which simply rested on assumptions that this mass phenomenon resulted
from individual inclinations to so-called pauper habits. A circumstance which
has often been overlooked is that Spencer’s evolutionary accounts of savagery
and pauperism were anchored in a huge mass of what he thought to be valid
social data, especially those assembled in the Descriptive Sociology. The disregard of his empirical basis might be due to the fact that his data, as well
as their arrangement, would today be considered useless for sociological or
anthropological research.
Spencer’s explanation of the social traits that would mark paupers and
savages, rested on the evolutionary mechanism of adaptation. Most scholars
have ignored not only that he provided a bi-directional development, but also
that he called on biological reasons in terms of psycho-somatic dispositions,
which were at the same time the cause and the effect of the specific adaptation of the savages and the paupers to their social environments. The reason
for the widespread unawareness of Spencer’s binary design of adaptation seems
to be a preference for discussions of Spencer’s grand theory. Discussions that
are mainly focused on the theoretical edifice obviously tend to put aside representations of paupers and savages as ideology. Carneiro’s frank declaration
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PROGRESSION AND RETROGRESSION
to have omitted all presumably unscientific passages in Spencer’s work is
representative of almost an entire research tradition (Carneiro, 1967: v). One
reason that insufficient attention has been paid to this aspect of Spencer’s
theory is an idealistic differentiation between pure and socially determined
science (Barnes, 1974; Bloor, 1991). Conflicting views on the relation of pure
science and external influences, i.e. political influences, were exchanged
between David Wiltshire, stressing that Spencer was an ‘individualist first and
an evolutionist second’ (Wiltshire, 1978: 135), John Offer, who retorted that
this could be read as a ‘straightforward denial that Spencer is doing science’
(Offer, 1980: 134) and, finally, Carneiro and Perrin, who argued that Spencer
originally intended to write his Principles of Sociology in support of his
political convictions, but produced a ‘classic of social science’ in its own
right. They explained that ‘attempts far too numerous to cite have been made
to reduce Spencer’s mature social thought and sociology to little more than
a thinly disguised expression of his social and political ideas, that is, his
resolute individualism’ (Carneiro and Perrin, 2002: 232–3).
CONCLUSION
Recapitulating, three points should be highlighted. First, Spencer’s theory of
social evolution provided two modes of adaptation: one to progressive and
one to retrogressive conditions of life. Therefore, it was neither linear nor was
it based on the tree model of contemporary natural evolutionists. Spencer
combined the tree model with two modes of social development. His tree
model of evolutionary development, thus, in general, was striving upwards,
but some branches were pointing downwards. Second, as a precondition for
this dichotomy of modes of adaptation, Spencer’s explanations of social
differences rested on assertions of the psychic and somatic otherness of
paupers and savages, which was at the same time the cause and consequence
of their adaptation to specific living conditions. Third, the duality of progression and retrogression contradicts the widespread image that Spencer was a
pure progressivist. Scholars tended to overlook the dichotomous structure of
his social theory because they apparently restricted their considerations to
the theoretical edifice of his oeuvre, and refrained from dealing with his
questionable empirical material, which only occasionally has been considered
in passing. The disregard of his empirical material did not only limit the
understanding of Spencer’s notions of race and pauperism. It also left open
the question of the role biologisms played in Spencer’s theory of social evolution. It has become clear that these biological explanations played an essential part in his theory of social evolution and that they could by no means be
separated from its broad outline. Any estimations of its explanatory power
have to take this circumstance into consideration.
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NOTES
1
2
3
4
Descriptive Sociology (eight vols, 1873–81) is a widely neglected work of Spencer’s.
The first reason for this neglect could lie in the circumstance that Spencer himself
treated this work, which he originally designed only as preparatory work for
The Principles of Sociology, as subordinate. The second reason could be that it
is a huge collection of citations. Spencer contributed only the foreword and, of
course, the structure of arrangement; the work itself was executed by varying
assistants. Thus, the Descriptive Sociology contains no analysis and no interpretation of Spencer in a verbalized form. Notwithstanding the methodological
problems arising from amateurish reports and decontextualized clippings,
Carneiro and Perrin, like Jonathan Turner before them, hold the Descriptive
Sociology to be an unduly forgotten work which would still be of worth for
ethnologists and sociologists today (cf. Carneiro and Perrin, 2002; Turner, 1985).
In his Descriptive Sociology, Spencer sampled information from a considerable
body of anthropological and travel literature about many different societies, and
arranged the clippings in tables and in a typological catalogue of social phenomena.
To enable comparisons between societies, he furthermore placed, in front of
each table, brief descriptions of the environment of the race, demonstrating his
Lamarckian conviction that climate, vegetation, etc., significantly influence its
social features. The Descriptive Sociology was an attempt not only to arrange the
whole population of the world in corresponding tables, but also to confirm an
assumed causal relationhip between environmental, somatic and social phenomena.
Spencer had already written on the Poor Laws as a juvenile of 16, and he had
welcomed the reform together with its hallmark, the workhouse, as a way to
reduce the reception of public relief (cf. Spencer, 1836). However, these comments
in a regional newspaper were also biographically isolated, because, for many years,
Spencer took no notice at all of these questions.
It is telling that he wrote of an equilibrium in society, while during the 50 years
before, the industrial revolution, as well as crop failures, had brought distress to
hundreds of thousands of labourers. Under such conditions, what could Spencer
have meant by an equilibrium? He was not concerned with wages or employment
rates; instead, he regarded the social problem of mass poverty as a question of individual propensities. Disregarding structural and economic reasons for the distress
of the poor, he supposed that the problem was just a lack of willingness to work,
a ‘tendency to immorality’ among the poor (Spencer, 1994: 18). Spencer still shared
the assumption of the Poor Law reformers, that a little coercion to self-help would
initiate a sustaining process of self-betterment among the poor, except that he
thought the Poor Relief to be an incentive to idleness and improvidence.
Spencer’s deductive construction of natural evolution is best illustrated by the
following passage: ‘Only when the process of evolution of organisms, is affiliated on the process of evolution in general, can it be truly said to be explained.
The thing required is to show that its various results are corollaries from first
principles’ (Spencer, 1883: I, 409–10). Spencer tried expressively to harmonize
empirical facts with these first principles, according to which ‘Evolution under
its most general aspect is the integration of matter and concomitant dissipation
of motion; while Dissolution is the absorption of motion and concomitant disintegration of matter’ (Spencer, 1898[1860]: 295).
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
is at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies,
the University of Bielefeld. He studied sociology at the universities of
Hamburg and Essex and wrote his thesis on ‘Evolution and Race: Theoretical and institutional change in Victorian anthropology’.
THOMAS GONDERMANN
Address: Esmarchstraße 56, 22767 Hamburg, Germany. [email: Thomas.
[email protected]]
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