Herbert Spencer and His American Audience - Loyola ... 

by JF Yoder - ‎2015 - ‎

INTRODUCTION

British philosopher Herbert Spencer has fallen into such obscurity that his
tremendous popularity among his contemporaries is difficult to believe. Though he was
an “independent scholar” in the truest sense of the word—refusing all institutional
affiliation and almost all public recognition of any kind—he was famous not just among
intellectuals, but among educated readers worldwide. He was, quite possibly, the only
philosopher in history whose books sold more than a million copies during his lifetime.1
Spencer’s work was translated into more than a dozen languages, first into Russian, then
to French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and eventually to Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish,
Dutch, Swedish, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and possibly even Mohawk.2 For many non‐
Western readers he stood for science, rationality, and progress against backwardness
and mysticism; his anti‐imperialism took some of the sting out of his affirmations of
European superiority.3 Educated men and women all over the world considered Spencer
the master thinker of the age, whether or not they agreed with him.
                                                 
Spencer wrote on an incredible variety of topics, from physics to metaphysics,
from biology to aesthetics. His greatest work, and the one which cemented his fame,
was his ten‐volume Synthetic Philosophy, which covered all scientific phenomena from
the beginning of the cosmos to its end, embracing biology, psychology, sociology, and
ethics. He also wrote on topics as diverse as style, manners, music, art, health, and
parenting. Yet today his books sit in libraries unread. One brave explorer, reporting that
he was the first to read the Royal Society’s copy of The Principles of Biology, described
the volumes as “thicker and squarer than Gibbon’s, each bound in a cloth which has
acquired with age a reptilian colour and texture, so putting one in mind of some great
extinct monster of philosophic learning.”4 The metaphor is pervasive: in a book on
Spencer’s sociology, J. D. Y. Peel referred to Spencer’s works as “the fossil remains of an
extinct megasaur,” while Richard Hofstadter called them “a fossil specimen from which
the intellectual body of the period may be reconstructed.”5 Spencer’s work no longer
lives for modern readers. However, a study of its petrified remains provides a window
into the intellectual culture of the Victorian era. This is particularly true of the American
scene, for Spencer was more popular in the United States than in his home country,
especially at the beginning of his career

 1 Michael W. Taylor, The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (London: Continuum, 2007), 4. Taylor
extrapolates based on the nearly 370,000 books sold by his American publisher alone.
2 John Offer, Herbert Spencer and Social Theory (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 8‐9.; Naomi Beck, “The Diffusion of Spencerism and its Political Implications in France
and Italy,” in Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy, Proceedings of a Conference Organised by the
Galton Institute, London, 2003 (London: The Galton Institute, 2004), 41‐57.
3 J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York: Basic Books, 1971),