Encyclopedic System of Herbert Spencer

The most extreme conside symmetryn of nineteenth-century individualism is to be found in the encyclopedic system of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). two his paternal and maternal ancestors were of a long side and French nonconformists, dissenters and rebels, and Spencer traces in his Autobiography his conspicuous disregard of policy-making, religious, and sociable authority to the tradition of liberty and dissent so long cherished by his family. Spencers discipline was informal, unconventional, and highly deficient in the much traditional studies of literature and history.His draw encouraged his interest in the science and tecnology, and Spencer became an engineer. However, he practiced his trading for a few socio-economic classs, because he became increasingly interested in political economy, sociology, biology, and philosophy. He was a subeditor of The economist from 1848 to 1853, and then ventured into a full-time life history as a free-lance author. As betimes as 1842 Spe ncer contri hardlyed to the nonconforming a series of letters called The decent Sphere of Government, his first major humansation.It contains his political philosophy of extreme individualism and Laissez Faire, which was not much limited in his writings in the following sixty years. Spencer expresses in The Proper Sphere of Government his belief that eitherthing in nature has its laws, organic as well as inorganic matter. Man is subject to laws bot in his carnal and spiritual essence, and as with man individually, so with man socially. Concerning the evils of hostelry, Spencer postulates a self-adjusting rule under which evils rectify themselves, provided that no one interferes with the inherent law of club.In discussing the functions of the advance, Spencer is concerned with what the conjure up should not do, rather than what it should do. Maintenance of order and presidential term of justice are the only two proper realms of government activity, and their design is s imply to def demolition the natural rights of man to protect person and property. The resign has no business to promote religion, regulate trade and commerce, encourage colonization, supporter the poor, or enforce sanitary laws.Spencer went even so farther as to deny the state the right to wage war but as he says in his Autobiography, his youthful enthusiasm of two-and twenty had carried him too far in this respect. Viewing the nature of the state in evolutionary terms, Spencer is pocketable interested in forms of government, such as the traditional distinctions of monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies. The two briny forms of the state and purchase order, according to Spencer, are the multitude state and the industrial state.The military state is the early form of social organization, primitive, barbarian, and geared to permanent grooming for war. The individual is no more than a convey to an end aim by the state victory in war. Society is firmly organized, and every individual occupies the organize assigned to him by the exigencies of militarism and authoritarian government. Status is the character principle of the military society, and there is little mobility between classes and groups. Spencer defines the military state as one in which the army is the people mobilized while the nation is the quiescent army.Showing unusual foresight long before make sense war was a reality, Spencer understood the impact of war on society as a whole, although his analysis of the military state refers to an early horizontal surface of society, it anticipates with remarkable accuracy the developments of the twentieth century. In the military state, Spencer says, the military psyche is the likes ofly to be the political leader, and the economic activities of the industrial classes are point to the military needs of the state. There is massive corporation in a military state, but it is enforced and involuntary.Because the security of the state is the primar y heading of all public actions. As the military state expands its territory and achieves stability over a long period of time, it gradually evolves into the industrial typecast of state and society. The way of life in the industrial state and society is based on voluntary cooperation, and the tendency is toward gradual voidance of elimination of obsession in all forms. Diversity, variety, and nonconformity characterize the industrial society with its emphasis on the value of the individual as the supreme end of government.The purpose of the industrial society is to assure the maximum liberty and felicity of its members, whereas the purpose of the military society is to increase its power by located regimentation at home and imperialists conquest abroad. In social intercourse with other nations, the industrial society is pacific, eager to exchange the products of labor rather than to acquire riches by force. As Spencer explains the members of the industrial society are the refore antimilitarist, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan, and humanitarian. clear trade within and between nations is the formula of the industrial society, whereas economic patriotism is the ideal of the military state. In 1884 Spencer published four essays in the present-day(a) Review, which were assembled in a book under the title, The Man Versus the State. It is his most known work on politics and it is still the most influential description of the Laissez Faire. In the first essay, The New Tories, Spencer attacks the English Liberals for abandoning their historical individualism in favor of social reform and the welfare state.According to Spencer, English buttoned-ups, like any conservative party, are the historical descendants of the principles of the military state, whereas the English Liberals, like liberals generally are the descendants of the industrial society. Moreover, Spencer also sight that economic individualism, abandoned by Liberals, was more and more adopted by Conservatives, so that the roles of both parties came to be the opposite of what they had originally been. Therefore, the English Conservative would become the party of economic individualism and free enterprise, whereas the Liberals would accept public control of the economy.The second essay is The Coming Slavery. In it, Spencer refocus on the necessity that the laws of the society must not be interfered with the beneficent serve up of the survival of the fittest, and that interference with natural selection lowers the standards of society as a whole. Spencer stresses on the official regulations to increase in a geometrical ratio to the power of resistance of the regulated citizens. People get more and more accustomed to the idea that the state will take care of them, and therefore, they relapse the spirit of initiative and enterprise.Spencer predicted that social-welfare programs would lead to socialization of the means of production, and all socialist economy is slavery. Spe ncer defines a slave as a person who labors under coercion to satisfy anothers desires. Under socialism or collectivism the individual would be enslaved to the whole community rather than to a private master. In his third essay, The Sins of Legislators, Spencer rejects the spread of government activity in social and economic areas.Progress is the result of the desire to increase personal welfare, and not the product of governmental regulation It is not the state that owe the numberless useful inventions from the spade to the telephone it was not the state which made the discoveries in physics, chemistry, and the rest, which guide modern manufactures it was not the state which devised the machinery for producing fabrics of every kind, for transferring men and things from place to place, and for ministering in a thousand ways to our comforts. Spencer charges legislators with confusing family ethics with state ethics. In the family, benefits received have little or no coincidence to merit. In the state, the ruling principle ought to be justice therefore the relation between benefits and merits should be proportional. Spencer explains that the intrusion of family ethics into state ethics is a dangerous interference with the laws of nature and society, and slowly followed by fatal results. The remainder essay is the Great Political Superstition. In which Spencer says that the great political fanaticism of the past, was the divine right of kings. Whereas, in the present it is the divine right of parliaments.He attacks the doctrine of sovereignty as propounded by Hobbes and rejects the claim of popular majorities for untrammelled authority as being inconsistent with the inalienable rights of the individual. Spencer concludes his book with the final reminder that government is not a divine institution but a committee of management, and that it has no intrinsic authority beyond the honourable sanction bestowed on it by the free consent of the citizens The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of the king.The functions of true Liberalism in the rising will be that of putting a limit to the powers of parliaments. Spencers political ideas hardly changed between 1842, when he published his Proper Sphere of Government, and 1903, the year of his death. The constancy of his political thought in the face of rapidly changing social and economic scene explains why the same ideas that were the last term in radical individualism in the eighteen-forties had become the orthodox conservativism by 1900.And Spencers appeal to the English Liberals to return to their original individualism remained unheard, but he correctly foresaw that Conservatives would become the defenders of economic individualism. Spencer failed to see that the have sex of the state intervention in the economy was essentially one of means and not of objectives, and that Laissez Faire could be progressive, dynamic, and revolutionary at o ne time early 19 century-, and conservative, stagnant, and sterile at another time late 19 century-.