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Herbert Spencer and Economics

 





My view of Spencer as a philosopher has largely been shaped by William James' comments on Spencer,which were consistently negative. This negativity was later confirmed as I came to understand the criticisms of Spencer offered by G.E. Moore and Emile Durkheim. 

Nonetheless, Murray Rothbard has said good things about Spencer, and there has been a bit of a Spencer revival in recent years, The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that Spencer has been the victim of "interpretive caricatures," and that it is fortunate he is enjoying some "restoring and repairing" scholarship. 

So: I decided to go back to the source. In Spencer' FIRST PRINCIPLES (1862), he wrote as follows about economic markets:

The production and distribution of a commodity imply a certain aggregate of forces causing special kinds and amounts of motion. The price of this commodity is the measure of a certain other aggregate of forces expended in other kinds and amounts of motion by the laborer who purchases it. And the variations of prices represent a rhythmical balancing of these forces. Every rise or fall in the value of a particular security, implies a conflict of forces in which some, becoming temporarily predominant, cause a movement that is temporarily arrested, or equilibrated by the increased opposing forces; and amid these daily and hourly oscillations lies a more slowly-varying medium, into which the value ever tends to settle, and would settle but for the constant addition of new influences.   

 That is astonishingly vacuous, an attempt to throw economics into the machinery of a mind to which it is foreign, in the hope that it is not too badly mauled by the gears and sharp edges there. 

Spencer wants to think of everything as the collection of forces that play upon matter, moving it around in "rhythmic" and ever more complicated ways. There is little room in this picture for supply or demand, so Spencer has to make room for them by some fancy semantic footwork. To say that the variations of prices represents a "rhythmical balancing ... of forces" is to say nothing except that prices sometimes go up and sometimes go down. We knew that already, learned sir, but thank you. Over any given period of time, a given price will necessarily have an average, and its ups and downs will have taken it both above and below that average. But that is a tautology which Spencer is here trying to dress up as a discovery.  

I instantly lost interest in any restoring and repairing. 

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