Readers will enjoy Steven Shapin's informed appreciation of Herbert Spencer.

"For Spencer, the importance of being earnest could not be underestimated; the truth was all that mattered. Science, and a scientific approach to all the problems of social life, was another mode of sincerity, and the more science there was, the more moral people would be."

The occasion for Shapin's essay is the publication of Mark Francis' Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Cornell University Press, 2007). Scroll down for the reviews. This is the first full-scale intellectual biography of Spencer since J. D. Y. Peel's Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (Heinemann Educational and Basic Books, 1971).

UPDATE: Carl Rollyson writes an appreciative review here.

"Aside from the value of Mr. Francis's study as a fresh view of how Spencer's ideas developed, his book also represents an attack on the way academics have specialized knowledge, thus a disservice to someone as protean as Spencer. 'Writing about Herbert Spencer had made me aware of the narrowness of academic disciplines,' he notes in his preface. Without knowledge of Spencer's 'authorial intentions,' of the way he 'lived his philosophy,' his ideas, in themselves, seem 'uninspired and disconnected.'

"Intellectual biography can be problematic because it makes for an awkward conflation of narrative and textual analysis, but in Mr. Francis's hands it becomes a rewarding re-creation of his subject and of the world from which he emerged."