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In 1833, at age thirteen, Herbert Spencer was sent by his parents to live with his uncle and aunt. Herbert’s uncle, Rev. Thomas Spencer (1796-1853), assumed responsibility for his education over the next three years. Thomas’s knowledge of mathematics gave Herbert the foundation he would later need during his early career as a railway engineer.

Herbert described his uncle (a Cambridge graduate) as a leader of the evangelical movement within the Anglican Church, a movement that shared the “asceticism” of “the Wesleyan movement outside of it.” To illustrate his point, Herbert told the story of a party he attended as a boy, accompanied by his uncle. When the hostess asked Herbert why he did not join “some other young people who were waltzing,” his uncle answered for him: “No Spencer ever dances.”

Despite some occasional tension between nephew and uncle – the former had rebelled against authority for as long as anyone in his family could remember, and this future “agnostic” never showed much interest in religion – Herbert admired his uncle for his “philanthropy” and for his political views. Thomas Spencer had evolved from a typical Anglican Tory early in his career to a radical (classical) liberal who worked with the Anti-Corn Law League on behalf of free trade, who championed universal suffrage and the separation of church and state, and who spoke out against state education, militarism, war, and British imperialism. As Thomas Spencer wrote in his pamphlet The People’s Rights: and How to Get Them:

The expenses … of a just government are very small; and the rights of property require that the least possible amount that is consistent with security, and a sense of security, shall be taken away. Taxation becomes unjust, when those to whom the power of taxing is entrusted use it for other purposes than for the preservation of order. Taxes raised for the teaching of religion, for the building of places of worship, for the undertaking for the people the education of their children, for the dispensing of their alms, for granting of pensions, for extending the boundaries of empire, for interfering with the affairs of other nations, for controlling commerce, and for standing armies and useless wars, are so many infringements of this right. Taxes for these purposes involve a principle of injustice….

Although this mix of causes, which Herbert Spencer himself would go on to defend for many years, may seem peculiar to the modern reader, it was fairly typical of classical liberals at the time. Many classical liberals, the forerunners of modern libertarianism, favored a government that is strictly limited to the protection of individual rights and equal freedom.

In the same pamphlet cited above, Thomas Spencer quoted the full text of the American Declaration of Independence, recommending it as a model that Britain should follow. And he went on to discuss two rights that he viewed as especially important for the people of Britain: “The right to earn a living with the fewest possible impediments,” and “The right to keep property when acquired, with the fewest possible demands on it.”

In later life Herbert Spencer remarked that he had been raised in “an essentially dissenting family; and dissent is an expression of antagonism to arbitrary control.” A “wish to limit State-action is a natural concomitant” of this attitude.

Herbert Spencer published his first extended discussion of his libertarian political views in 1842, at age twenty-two, in a series of twelve articles that appeared in Edward Miall’s periodical, The Nonconformist. (Spencer noted that he wasn’t paid anything for his articles, which goes to show that some things never change.)

In these articles on “The Proper Sphere of Government,” Spencer devoted considerable space to the issue of charity, and he summarized the position that he would defend throughout his life:

Can any individual, whose wickedness or improvidence has brought him to want, claim relief from his fellow men as an act of justice? Can even the industrious labourer, whose distresses have not resulted from his own misconduct, complain that his natural rights are infringed, unless the legislature compels his neighbours to subscribe for his relief? Certainly not. Injustice implies a positive act of oppression, and no man or men can be charged with it, when merely maintaining a negative position.

There can be little doubt that Spencer’s views on paupers and poverty were greatly influenced by his uncle. During the three years (from the ages of thirteen to sixteen) that Herbert lived with his uncle, he had the opportunity to observe the operation of England’s poor laws first-hand.

In 1826, Thomas Spencer was appointed curate of Hinton Charterhouse, a small parish near Bath. Known as a friend to paupers who defended them against overseers under the old poor-law system of outdoor relief, Thomas erected cottages and established a school for the poor, along with a clothing club, a village library, and field gardens. Through his efforts to teach marketable skills and habits of thrift to the poor in Hinton, Thomas Spencer eventually reduced local poor-law taxes (known as “rates”) from 700 to 200 pounds per year.

Thomas Spencer published a number of interesting articles on the poor laws, such as The New Poor Law; Its Evils and Their Remedies and a four-part article, Reasons for a Poor Law Considered. Thomas also testified before the Poor Law Commission in 1836.

Herbert Spencer discussed his uncle’s views in a number of books and essays (e.g., The Coming Slavery), so it surprising that most Spencer scholars have overlooked the striking similarity between their views. Indeed, the chapter on “Poor Laws” in Social Statics (1851), Spencer’s first book, is essentially an elaboration of the views of Thomas Spencer.

As I have said, a thirteen-year-old Herbert moved in with his uncle in 1833. A year later the New Poor Law was passed by Parliament. Technically known as the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, this measure was designed to remedy the abuses of the previous system of “outdoor relief” that had been in effect, in one form or another, since Elizabethan times.

The New Poor Law abolished the parish-based system of poor relief, established larger “unions” with centralized administration, and attempted to shift poor relief to workhouses. Largely inspired by the writings of classical economists, such as Thomas Malthus, and implemented by various followers of Jeremy Bentham, the New Poor Law was based on the premise that the recipients of poor relief should not be better off than the “industrious” and “laboring” poor.

That the older policy of outdoor relief had resulted in a system with perverse incentives was beyond question and widely acknowledged. As the laboring poor were taxed to support the poor laws, many found it difficult to feed their families, and it became evident that one could do better as a pauper on poor relief than by working. The old system, moreover, incentivized the birth of illegitimate children. As poor-rates skyrocketed, the demand for reform intensified, but the resulting workhouses were widely criticized as inhumane – most famously in the writings of Charles Dickens.

Thomas Spencer, with years of practical experience in assisting the poor, defended the New Poor Law as superior to the old system. He claimed that the English press had selectively focused on some abuses in workhouses – the unspeakable conditions in Andover, brought about by the criminal actions of an overseer, were especially notorious – but Thomas maintained that these abuses were not typical of the New Poor Law as a whole.

Both Spencers opposed state welfare in principle, while acknowledging that this centuries-old policy could not and should not be abolished immediately. They deplored the older system of outdoor relief because it merely exacerbated the problem it was intended to solve by institutionalizing incentives to go on parish relief. A class of professional paupers had arisen – people who could work but who chose not to work, preferring instead to live off the labor of others. And as these people passed their values and habits to their children, often teaching them that they had a “right” to welfare, a permanent underclass became more firmly entrenched. Although neither Spencer supported the New Poor Law for its own sake, it at least made welfare less attractive than work and thereby restricted poor relief to the truly needy.

Thomas Spencer once observed that some paupers in his parish, who had lived off poor rates for years, were suddenly willing to work, and were able to find work, when their only other alternative was to move into a workhouse. He also noted that tavern owners were among the most vociferous critics of the New Poor Law, because many beneficiaries of outdoor relief spent most of their money on beer and gin. The notion that hard-working Englishmen should be taxed to support the vices of the indolent deeply offended Thomas Spencer.

Like many of their Victorian contemporaries, Thomas and Herbert Spencer distinguished between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. By modern standards this distinction is as politically incorrect as it is possible to get. But both men understood the principle known to economists as the “disutility of labor”; both men knew that many people would rather not work than work, if the results of these options are roughly equal.

In my last essay I discussed how Herbert Spencer’s support of voluntary charity, and voluntary charity alone, caused some critics to attack him as an “enemy of the poor.” Spencer believed that charity should begin with one’s family and friends, and then extend to the deserving poor, who were in circumstances beyond their control.

I also discussed Spencer’s belief that voluntary assistance is an essential characteristic of the higher stages of civilization. We react negatively to being coerced, so Spencer believed that state charity would retard and even reverse this progress. State charity transforms the inner qualities of both benefactors and beneficiaries, corrupting our sympathetic sentiments and generating resentment and class conflict instead.

Spencer’s perceptive remarks on this subject in Social Statics, which were probably influenced by his uncle, deserve to be quoted at length:

Note again how this act-of-Parliament charity perpetually supersedes men’s better sentiments. Here is a respectable citizen with enough and time to spare: a man of some feeling; liberal, if there is need; generous even if his pity is excited. A beggar knocks at his door, or he is accosted in his walk by some wayworn tramp. What does he do? Does he listen, investigate, and, if proper, assist? No; he commonly cuts short the tale with, ‘I have nothing for you, my good man; you must go to your parish.’ And then he shuts the door or walks on, as the case may be, with evident unconcern. Should it strike him the next moment that there was something very woebegone in the petitioner’s look, this uncomfortable thought is met by the reflection that so long as there is a Poor Law, he cannot starve and that it will be time enough to consider his claims when he applies for relief. Thus does the consciousness that there exists a legal provision for the indigent act as an opiate for the yearnings of sympathy. Had there been no ready-made excuse, the behavior would probably have been different. Commiseration, pleading for at least an inquiry into the case, would most likely have prevailed; and, in place of an application to the board of guardians, ending in a pittance coldly handed across the pay table to be thanklessly received, might have commenced a relationship good for both parties – a generosity humanizing to the one, and a succor made doubly valuable to the other by a few words of consolation and encouragement, followed, it may be, by a lift into some self-supporting position.

In truth there could hardly be found a more efficient device for estranging men from each other and decreasing their fellow feeling than this system of state almsgiving. Being kind by proxy! Could anything be more blighting to the finer instincts?

Spencer was concerned about the dehumanizing effects of government bureaucracies, where people are treated as ciphers, as interchangeable units to be manipulated and controlled by government employees. By turning what should be matters of personal conscience over to bureaucratic machines, the finer sensibilities of human nature are warped into feelings that generate discord and animosity.

And thus we have the gentle, softening, elevating intercourse that should be habitually taking place between rich and poor superseded by a cold, hard, lifeless mechanism bound together by dry parchment acts and regulations, managed by commissioners, boards, clerks, and collectors, who perform their respective functions as tasks, and kept a-going by money forcibly taken from all classes indiscriminately. In place of the music breathed by feeling attuned to kind deeds, we have the harsh creaking and jarring of a thing that cannot stir without creating discord – a thing whose every act, from the gathering of its funds to their final distribution, is prolific of grumblings, discontent, anger – a thing that breeds squabbles about authority, disputes as to claims, browbeatings, jealousies, litigations, corruption, trickery, lying, ingratitude -–a thing that supplants, and therefore makes dormant, men’s nobler feelings, while it stimulates their baser ones.

Spencer regarded these consequences as more than incidental byproducts of state charity – negative side-effects that are outweighed, in the long run, by its benefits. Rather, government programs enmesh themselves into the social fabric, generate social conflict between haves and have-nots, and thus not only exacerbate the problems they are intended to solve but create new problems as well.

Government does not create additional wealth but merely redistributes wealth that has been created through social cooperation. Government, therefore, cannot eliminate burdens that come from the struggle to survive. It merely redistributes those burdens, causing untold hardships among working people who are compelled to sacrifice their own welfare for the benefit of others, including the army of bureaucrats needed to run a vast administrative machinery.

This is not the Herbert Spencer of popular mythology.

On April 3, President Obama called Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” In a Huffington Post article, Obama Sparks Debate On His Meaning Of ‘Social Darwinism’, a quizzical Jennifer C. Kerr asked: “But what exactly does the president mean? And will the theory’s negative historical background be lost on most people?”

The key word in Kerr’s first question is “exactly.” This question can easily be answered: Obama didn’t mean anything exactly. The expression “social Darwinism,” when applied to free-market economics and a limited government, has no precise meaning, and it never did. Nor has the term ever been embraced by libertarian advocates of laissez-faire. Rather, “social Darwinism,” a term that first appeared during the 1880s, was concocted by the enemies of free-market capitalism to smear their adversaries. And this is how President Obama used the term, exactly.

Kerr’s second question – “And will the theory’s negative historical background be lost on most people?” – is a curious one, especially since she cites the questionable opinion of a “language expert” to the effect that “social Darwinism” is “a risky term to use for political ammunition.”

Here we may chalk one up to President Obama and demagogues everywhere. It doesn’t matter whether or not people understand what Obama meant by “social Darwinism.” All that matters is that “social Darwinism” evokes ugly connotations of the “law of the jungle” — a society without compassion in which the helpless poor are sacrificed to the avaricious rich.

In a speech given in January of this year, President Obama declared: “We are not a country that was built on the idea of survival of the fittest.” Here at least we have an expression that was actually used by free-market advocates – most notably the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who coined the term; and his American counterpart, William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), the first professor of sociology at Yale.

It is clear that “social Darwinism” and “survival of the fittest” were intended by Obama to evoke feelings of fear and disgust. It is highly doubtful that Obama knows anything about the history of these ideas, and it is even more doubtful that he cares. A concern for truth is not the coin of the political realm. But these expressions have long been of interest to me, mainly because the great libertarian Herbert Spencer is frequently said to have originated social Darwinism.

Spencer – again, he never used the term “social Darwinism” — repeatedly protested that his views had been grievously distorted, but to no avail. The myths surrounding his theory of survival of the fittest became standard fare in generations of textbooks, and these myths received a shot of adrenaline in the 1977 BBC production of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. This thirteen-part television series, which was the basis for Galbraith’s best-selling book of the same title, purports to be a history of economic thought from Adam Smith to modern times, one that focuses on ideas about capitalism. But the series is little more than leftist propaganda, chock-full of distortions and falsehoods. Galbraith stated explicitly what Obama left to the imagination of the American booboisie (to use H.L. Mencken’s memorable word).

I first watched The Age of Uncertainty in 1977, when it was aired by a PBS station in Los Angeles. I found the series annoying throughout, but what especially incurred my wrath was Galbraith’s treatment of Herbert Spencer – a segment, around five minutes long, that barely contains a shred of truth. (The segment can be seen here, beginning at 3.50.)

I felt like throwing my plaster bust of Adam Smith at the television screen, but I decided on a less destructive course of action. I wrote an article, “Will the Real Herbert Spencer Please Stand Up?” that was published in Libertarian Review (December 1978) [PDF]. After calling Galbraith’s presentation “crude and grossly inaccurate,” I continued: “The traditional interpretation of Spencer on this point is so fundamentally wrong – in fact, Spencer explicitly repudiated it on many occasions – that one must wonder whether any of Spencer’s critics bother to read him.”

A few days ago, after reading Obama’s comment about social Darwinism and deciding to interrupt my Cato series on education with this essay (and one more to follow), I watched Galbraith’s segment on Spencer again. It is even more deplorable than I remembered. Ham-fisted from start to finish, it could be mistaken for a Monty Python parody.

Immediately after Herbert Spencer is mentioned, we see a caged tiger devouring a chunk of meat. Then, as a Spencer voice-over talks about survival of the species in a biological context, the camera pans up to a sign that reads: “THESE ANIMALS ARE DANGEROUS.”

Seconds later Galbraith enters stage left and surveys three dummies of Victorian capitalists. These figures, with money strewn about their feet – we all know that capitalists would rather throw money on the ground than give it to the poor – are labeled “CAPITALOPITHECUS ROBUSTUS.” Galbraith shuffles his feet and then drones on about the “higher primates” that survived through natural selection: “They are the strongest of the species, those best-adapted to their environment, and so they survived.”

Spencer is soon quoted again, but this time we are treated to more than a voice. We see an actor in pale-blue makeup who appears to have climbed out of a grave. After this zombie reads a passage from Spencer about how humans adapt to their “conditions of existence,” the camera moves back to Galbraith. With a stuffed tiger to his right – a prop to drive the message home, just in case the ravenous tiger shown earlier left any doubt – Galbraith lets us know he is a serious thinker by putting on his glasses in a professorial manner. He then proceeds to misrepresent Spencer’s ideas with reckless abandon.

Galbraith tells us that Spencer applied his doctrine of “survival of the fittest” not only to survival in the animal kingdom but also “to survival in the equally cutthroat world, as Spencer saw it, of economic life.” Spencer “eliminated all guilt” that the wealthy might experience by assuring them that “wealth was the natural result of strength, intelligence, capacity to adapt. The wealthy were innocent beneficiaries of their own superiority.” The poor, according to Galbraith’s fictional Spencer, were “biologically inferior” and “were being selected out.”

Cheesy theatrics aside, virtually the only reliable statements that Galbraith makes about Spencer are the years of his birth and death, and the fact that it was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”

Our first impressions will often determine whether we will study a given thinker or theory in greater detail. We must be selective, after all; we cannot possibly read what every prominent writer has written about every significant issue. This is where secondary “textbook” accounts play a significant role in shaping public opinion. If a college student, in her first textbook encounter with Spencer or Sumner, is told that they favored a ruthless social Darwinism, she is unlikely to be enthusiastic about reading these villains for herself. And should that student ever become a teacher, she will teach her students the same errors that were taught to her.

Social Darwinism, as that label has been applied to libertarian theory, is sheer fabrication. For one thing, Spencer’s approach to evolution (which he developed independently of Darwin) was essentially Lamarckian. Spencer, unlike Darwin, believed that some acquired characteristics are genetically transmitted from one generation to the next, and he placed relatively little emphasis on the process of natural selection. This Lamarckian approach, despite its failures as a biological theory, is a better model of social development than is its Darwinian counterpart. Humans do indeed build upon the acquired skills and accomplishments of preceding generations — as we see in language, the transmission of knowledge, technology, capital investment, social institutions, and the like. 

Both Spencer and Sumner used the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and both men lived to regret it, because it made them easy targets for their critics. Spencer complained that his views were frequently distorted beyond recognition, and in some cases deliberately so. “I have had much experience in controversy,” he wrote in later life, “and my impression is that in three cases out of four the alleged opinions of mine condemned by opponents, are not opinions of mine at all, but are opinions wrongly ascribed by them to me.” Sumner became so frustrated by the same problem that he stopped using the phrase “survival of the fittest” altogether; it never appears in his later writings and speeches.

It is largely owing to the “survival of the fittest” doctrine that Spencer and Sumner have been condemned as social Darwinists. Social Darwinists, we are told, were infused with a stern and implacable contempt for the poor, disabled, and disadvantaged — those allegedly unfit persons who, by a law of nature, should give way in the struggle for existence to those who are more fit. It is a safe bet that if you consult a standard text on the history of ideas, you will find this view (or a close approximation) attributed to Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner.

The ideological purpose of this caricature is evident. The textbook assaults on Spencer and Sumner are intended to characterize the attitude of laissez-faire advocates in general. We have advanced, it is said, from the heartless dog-eat-dog attitude of social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics to the compassionate welfare policies of modern governments. We are told that the modern liberal (in contrast to the classical liberal, or libertarian) cares about people more than profits, that he values human rights over property rights — and so on, until we drown in a sea of tiresome clichés.

So what did Spencer and Sumner mean by “survival of the fittest”? Before I address this question, we need to be clear about what they did not mean.

Spencer repeatedly emphasized that in using the terms “fit” and “fittest” in a social context, he was not expressing a value judgment; nor was he referring to a particular characteristic, such as strength, wealth, or intelligence; nor was he expressing any kind of approval or disapproval; nor was he referring to the biological competition to survive. This doctrine, wrote Spencer, “is expressible in purely physical terms, which neither imply competition nor imply better and worse.” Most importantly, “survival of the fittest is not always the survival of the best.”

The law [of survival of the fittest] is not the survival of the ‘better’ or the ‘stronger.’… It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking is inferiority, causes the survival.

In a social context, the “fittest” are those persons who are able to adapt to the survival requirements of their society. If, for example, a government decrees that all redheads shall be executed on the spot, then it follows that the persons best fitted for survival in such a society would be non-redheads, or those natural redheads who adapt by changing their hair color or shaving their heads.

We can apply this survival of the fittest principle without condoning the penalty against redheads, and without regarding non-redheads as superior people. It is a simple, inescapable fact: If a government kills redheads, then (other things being equal) you will have a better chance to survive – that is, you will be more “fit” under the specified conditions – if you do not have red hair.

This interpretation, which treats “survival of the fittest” as a value-free description of what in fact does occur, rather than as a prescription or an approval of what ought to occur, was also put forward by Sumner, who tried – in vain, as it turned out – to correct the distorted interpretations of his critics.

At the meeting of the Liberal Union Club at which I read a paper, it seemed to me that there was some misapprehension in regard to the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. Such misapprehension is very common in spite of many efforts of the leading evolutionists to correct it. It is supposed that the doctrine is that the best survive. This is an error, and it forms the basis for all disputes about evolution and ethics. For the word “best” implies moral standards, a moral standpoint, etc.; and if the doctrine were affirmed in that form, it would not be scientific at all, but would be theological, for it would involve the notion that man is the end of creation and that his notions of things are the standard to which things must conform. The doctrine is that those survive who are fittest to survive.

The idea expressed here was central to the sociological theories of Spencer and Sumner. Both believed that human beings respond to incentives and that they adapt to social conditions through the formation of their characters and habits. Both believed that character traits play a more important role in social interaction than do abstract beliefs and theories. Which character traits tend to develop in a given society depend a great deal on the social and political sanctions found in that society, i.e.., on what kinds of behavior are encouraged or discouraged, rewarded or punished.

Suppose a society rewards indolence and penalizes industry. In this case, according to Spencer, indolent people will tend to fare better than industrious people. The indolent, having adapted to the conditions of their society, will be more “fit” than the industrious who fail to adapt. This is the meaning of Spencer’s oft-quoted remark, “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.” 

To be continued….

When Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner applied their survival of the fittest doctrine to a free society, they reached conclusions that differed radically from the position attributed to social Darwinists. True, the sacrifice of one individual for the benefit of another is the general rule for lower life forms. And this may also be true of the lower forms of human society – militaristic, authoritarian societies that Spencer and Sumner (following the legal historian Henry S. Maine) called “regimes of status.” But in the course of social evolution, as regimes of status gradually gave way to regimes of contract, as voluntary cooperation replaced coercion as the dominant mode of social interaction, a fundamental transformation occurred in the conditions of social existence and in the corresponding standard of “fitness.”

In a free society people are able to pursue their own interests as they see fit, provided they respect the equal rights of others. As cooperation in a regime of contract replaces exploitation in a regime of status, the fittest prosper not by coercing others but by assisting them through voluntary exchanges. (Adam Smith had previously dubbed this process the “invisible hand.”) Here as elsewhere survival of the fittest is an iron law of social existence, but this standard of fitness is far removed from that invoked by the specter of social Darwinism. Voluntary cooperation, not coercive exploitation, is the standard of fitness in a free society.

Spencer and Sumner emphasized that market competition differs dramatically from biological competition. Market competition, unlike biological competition, produces immense wealth, thereby making it possible for many people to survive and prosper who otherwise could not. Moreover, the sophisticated division of labor that develops in a market economy generates specialization, and this specialization generates social interdependence — a condition in which every person must rely on the cooperation and assistance of others for necessary goods and services. The solitary individual cannot produce everything he needs or wants in a market economy, so he must persuade many others to assist him. This condition of survival cultivates the character traits (or virtues) necessary for peaceful interaction – those civilizing mores, as Sumner called them, that make social interaction not only productive and mutually beneficial but pleasant as well.

To associate market competition with biological competition is to misunderstand how Spencer and Sumner (and other classical liberals) viewed the market. Biological competition, in which one individual survives at the expense of other individuals, is a zero-sum game, whereas market competition is a positive-sum game in which all participants gain from voluntary cooperation. Therefore, it is precisely in a free society that social Darwinism does not apply. In a society with an advanced division of labor and where we must give others what they want in order to get what we want, the “fit” are those who can enlist the voluntary cooperation of others. When success depends upon persuasion rather than coercion, social fitness is measured by one’s ability to influence others by offering them something of value, i.e., by benefiting them.

But what about the poor, disabled, and disadvantaged? Popular mythology about laissez-faire liberals, propagated in one textbook account after another, depicts them as implacable enemies of charity and other efforts to help those who cannot help themselves.

If we are to understand the views of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner on charity and related matters, we must first understand their roles as pioneers in sociology. Spencer is widely acknowledged as a founder of the “functionalist” school of sociology; and Sumner, during his many years as a Yale professor, did much to establish sociology as a legitimate discipline in American universities.

Spencer and Sumner believed that natural laws (i.e., laws of cause and effect) operate in the social world as surely as they do in physics, biology, and other natural sciences; and they believed that a basic purpose of sociology (the “science of society”) is to discover and formulate these causal laws. They also believed that social causation is extremely complex, and that ignorance of this fact has led to many ill-conceived political measures. In The Study of Sociology, Spencer had this to say about those who offer simplistic political solutions for complex social problems:

Proximate causes and proximate results are alone contemplated. There is scarcely any consciousness that the original causes are often numerous and widely different from the apparent cause; and that beyond each immediate result there will be multitudinous remote results, most of them quite incalculable.

Many people are ignorant of physical causation, so it no surprise that even more people are ignorant of social causation, which is “so much more subtle and complex.” Where there is little or no awareness of social causation, “political superstitions” abound, including the belief that government has a special power, transcending that of mere individuals, to eradicate social problems.

The ordinary political schemer is convinced that out of a legislative apparatus, properly devised and worked with due dexterity, may be had beneficial State-action without any detrimental reaction.

William Graham Sumner made the same point in a number of his essays. Three facts, he said, are essential to an understanding of social causation. First, social phenomena always present themselves to us in complex combinations. Second, it is by no means easy to interpret these phenomena. Third, we cannot conduct controlled social experiments of the sort used in the physical sciences. Sociology is therefore an extremely difficult discipline, one that requires years of study and observation.

Nevertheless, virtually everyone has opinions about social problems and what is needed to solve them. This generates the dangerous notion that people, acting through a government, can eradicate any social problems they wish, if only they have good intentions and sufficient determination. As Sumner put it:

The assumption which underlies almost all discussion of social topics is that we men need only to make up our minds what kind of society we want, and that then we can devise means for calling that society into existence.

This is the basic fallacy in socialism and other utopian schemes to remodel society according to preconceived ideals. For instance, if we believe that everyone has a right to the good things in life or to equal wealth, then we need only empower and instruct government to implement these moral ideals. Such fallacies flow from what Sumner called a “sentimental philosophy.”

The sentimental philosophy starts from the first principle that nothing is true which is disagreeable, and that we must not believe anything which is ‘shocking,’ no matter what the evidence may be. It touches on one side the intuitional philosophy which proves that certain things must exist by proving that man needs them, and it touches on the other side the vulgar socialism which affirms that the individual has a right to whatever he needs, and that this right is good against his fellow men.

Sumner and Spencer criticized this way of thinking in a manner similar to that of F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Murray Rothbard, and other modern free-market economists. Central to their analysis is the doctrine of unintended consequences, a theory that was developed in considerable detail by Herbert Spencer, who called it the “multiplication of effects.”

In social affairs, according to Spencer, “the effect is more complex than the cause.” A single cause, such as an economic regulation, will generate a complex network of effects, and each of these effects, in turn, will cause innumerable other effects, as purposeful human beings adjust and adapt themselves to the new conditions. This is why social legislation, despite the best intentions of legislators, typically generates unintended and detrimental long-term consequences. Spencer, throughout his many books and essays, discussed hundreds of legislative measures that exacerbated the problems they were intended to solve.

Spencer and Sumner opposed state charity – i.e., charity that is coercively financed through taxation – but both favored voluntary charity. This was a crucial distinction, since they believed that coercion changes the essential nature of an act and alters its impact on society in general. Nevertheless, even in their own day the positions of both men were frequently misrepresented.

Spencer opposed coercive, state-enforced charity, but he favored charity that is voluntarily bestowed. As a matter of justice, one should not be forced to help others; but as a matter of personal or religious ethics, one may be obligated to help others. Spencer noted with consternation that his views brought on him “condemnation as an enemy of the poor.” In one essay he observed that it was becoming more common for the rich to contribute money and time to the poor, and he praised this trend as “the latest and most hopeful fact in human history.” Moreover, the final chapters in Spencer’s The Principles of Ethics are devoted to the subject of “positive beneficence,” the highest form of society in which people voluntarily help those in need.

These and many similar facts scarcely fit the common picture of a Herbert Spencer devoid of humanitarian sentiments. One must read Spencer’s extensive treatments of poverty and the poor to appreciate fully the outrageous misrepresentations of his critics. That Spencer was offended by such lies is dramatically illustrated by the fact that he broke off a close friendship of some forty years with Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”), after Huxley had written that, according to the Spencerian individualist, a poor man should be left to starve because charity interferes with “survival of the fittest.”

In reply to this accusation of “reasoned savagery,” Spencer wrote: “For nearly fifty years I have contended that the pains attendant on the struggle for existence may fitly be qualified by the aid which private sympathy prompts.” Even after Huxley apologized, it took several years for the friendship to heal.

I planned to end my discussion of Spencer and Sumner with this installment, but there are other things that need to be said, so a third part will appear next week.