Herbert Spenser

Herbert Spenser (1820 – 1903) was the most prominent early sociologist writing in English to claim that there should be a science of society, just as there is a science of nature. Spenser’s social thought rejected arrangements that were incompatible with the unfolding Industrial Revolution. Industrial leaders viewed the first generation of factory workers in the same way (Spenser 1972). His ideas were compatible with the interest of industrial capitalists; Andrew Carnegie was one of his admirers. Unlike Marx he didn’t view society from the perspective of the exploited and disinherited.

In nature, progress moves from the simple to the complex; from homogeneity in structure to heterogeneity in structure. According to Spenser, the “more advanced” human races developed larger brains.

Spenser borrowed and modified ideas from biology and perhaps is best-known for applying survival of the fittest, a phrase he coined to human culture and society.

Throughout his life Spenser remained wedded to what came to be the discredited ideas of Lamarckian evolution. Chevalier Lamarck (1744 – 1829) was a French naturalist, who believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited. Spenser also thought that acquired characteristics such as changes, occurring in human culture, were biologically transmitted to the next generation. Spenser remains significant for important ideas he contributed in the early history of sociology, such as structure, function system and equilibrium.