Marx and Spencer: Celebrity Death Match

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

I recently came across an article called Cooperative Urges by Glen Gibbons. It begins like this:

In London's Highgate Cemetery, about midway between the grave sites of Karl Marx and George Eliot, is an overgrown tombstone with the name Herbert Spencer inscribed on it. The generally neglected circumstances of the plot echo Spencer's failed effort to apply to human society some of the principles Charles Darwin espoused for evolutionary biology -- such concepts as survival of the fittest and natural selection. Consequently, the 19th century British social philosopher never earned the sort of lasting recognition accorded his eternal neighbors.

Against the arguments that human progress reflected the benefits of cooperation and community, Spencer's followers extolled the benefits of individuals and individual enterprises vanquishing the less effective among them, securing the place of the strong and weeding out the weaker.

But sometimes the world is not quite so Darwinian as it's made out to be, especially in human affairs. Sometimes qualities and resources are complementary and their judicious combination, synergistic.

And then the rest of the article goes on to extol the benefits of cooperation.

By now I should be used to such misrepresentations of Herbert Spencer -- and Gibbons' article doesn't even come close to being one of the most egregious in this regard. (See my article Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues as well as this follow-up.) But to see Spencer, one of history’s greatest champions of"synergistic cooperation," being described as an opponent of such cooperation, and to see him being compared unfavourably in this regard to Marx, of all people, is truly surreal.

For Marx, society is characterised by inherent conflicts of interest among economic classes, conflicts that can ultimately be resolved only through violent revolution and expropriation; it's no coincidence that the chief legacy of Marxist régimes has been mass death. For Spencer, by contrast, such ideas belong to the misguided"militant" model of society, against which Spencer championed the"industrial" model of peaceful cooperation and mutual benefit. When Spencer speaks of the"survival of the fittest" (a phrase Darwin borrowed from Spencer, not vice versa), he means that cooperative modes of interaction, being"fitter," are destined in the long run to displace conflictual modes of interaction, and he regarded social progress as a matter of increasing fusion among people’s interests.

He explained his view over and over in books such as Social Statics, The Principles of Sociology, and The Principles of Ethics, but he might as well have been tossing his books into the ocean as far as modern discussions of Spencer go; everyone's sure what he said, what as a"Social Darwinist" he must have said, but no one seems to go to the trouble of actually reading him.

It is misleading in any case to think of Spencer as applying Darwinian theories to society; Spencer's Social Statics came out in 1851, predating Darwin's Origin of Species by eight years. As Friedrich Hayek notes in Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

It was in the discussion of such formations as language and morals, law and money, that in the eighteenth century the twin conceptions of evolution and the spontaneous formation of an order were at least clearly formulated, and provided the intellectual tools which Darwin and his contemporaries were able to apply to biological evolution. ... A nineteenth-century social theorist who needed Darwin to teach him the idea of evolution was not worth his salt.

And far from being a"failed effort," Spencer’s work offers far more valuable contributions to the understanding of human society than does the work of essentially reactionary thinkers like Marx.

According to Gibbons, Spencer's modest gravesite is"overgrown" and"neglected" in comparison with its bombastic Marxian neighbour because Spencer"never earned the sort of lasting recognition" that Marx enjoys. It would be more accurate to say that Spencer has earned such recognition but hasn't received it. As contemporary society lurches ever further back into the"militant" mode of dirigisme at home and warmongering abroad, a thoughtful reassessment of this much-maligned but seldom studied philosopher is long overdue. (One of the goals of the Molinari Institute is eventually to make all of Spencer's works available online.)