Herbert Spencer
From his birth to his death
Birth to Death
Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820, the son of William George Spencer, and then died December 8th, 1903.
Spencer's Education
- Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while the members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution.
- As both an adolescent and a young man Spencer found it difficult to settle to any intellectual or professional discipline.
Spencer's Experience
- Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was "an enthusiastic exponent of evolution" and even "wrote about evolution before Darwin did.
- He worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late 1830's, while also devoting much of his time to writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in their religion and radical in their politics.
- From 1848 to 1853 he served as sub-editor on the free-trade journal The Economist, during which time he published his first book, Social Statistics
- Despite Spencer's early struggles to establish himself as a writer, by the 1870s he had become the most famous philosopher of the age.
Major Contributions to Sociology
- contributed to the idea of evolution
- He developed a theory of two types of society, the militant and the industrial, which corresponded to this evolutionary progression
- Spencer's theories of laissez-faire, survival-of-the-fittest and minimal human interference in the processes of natural law had an enduring and even increasing appeal in the social science fields of economics and political science, and one writer has recently made the case for Spencer's importance for a sociology that must learn to take energy in society seriously