Herbert Spencer Essay -- essays research papers

Herbert SpencerThe most extreme reflection of nineteenth-century individualism is to be found in the encyclopedic system of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Both his paternal and enate ancestors were of a long English and French nonconformists, dissenters and rebels, and Spencer traces in his "Autobiography" his " large disregard" of political, religious, and social authority to the tradition of independence and dissent so long cherished by his family. Spencers education was informal, unconventional, and highly deficient in the more traditional studies of literature and history. His father encouraged his use up in the science and tecnology, and Spencer became an engineer. However, he practiced his profession for a fewer years, because he became increasingly interested in political economy, sociology, biology, and philosophy. He was a subeditor of The economist from 1848 to 1853, and then ventured into a full- sequence c beer as a free-lance author.As early as 1842 Sp encer contributed to the Nonconformist a serial of letters called The Proper scope of brass, his first major publication. It contains his political philosophy of extreme individualism and Laissez Faire, which was not much modified in his belles-lettres in the following sixty years. Spencer expresses in The Proper Sphere of Government his belief that "everything in nature has its laws," organic as well as inorganic matter. Man is subject to laws bot in his physical and spiritual essence, and "as with man individually, so with man socially." Concerning the evils of society, Spencer postu latterlys a "self-adjusting principle" under which evils domesticize themselves, provided that no unmatched interferes with the inherent law of society.In discussing the exits of the soil, Spencer is concerned with what the state should not do, rather than what it should do. Maintenance of order and administration of justice are the only two proper realms of government activity, and their purpose is "simply to halt the natural rights of man to protect person and property." The state has no blood to promote religion, regulate trade and commerce, encourage colonization, aid the poor, or follow out sanitary laws. Spencer went even so far as to deny the state the right to wage war but as he says in his Autobiogra... ...yond the ethical sanction bestowed on it by the free consent of the citizens " The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of the king. The functions of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers of parliaments."Spencers political ideas hardly changed between 1842, when he published his Proper Sphere of Government, and 1903, the year of his death. The constancy of his political thought in the face of speedily changing social and economic scene explains why the same ideas that were the blend in word in radical individualism in the eighteen-fortie s had become the Jewish-Orthodox conservatism by 1900. And Spencers appeal to the English Liberals to return to their genuine individualism remained unheard, but he correctly foresaw that Conservatives would become the defenders of economic individualism. Spencer failed to determine that the issue of the state intervention in the economy was essentially one of means and not of objectives, and that Laissez Faire could be progressive, dynamic, and revolutionary at one time early 19 century-, and conservative, stagnant, and sterile at another time late 19 century-.