Yesterday, I spoke of James's discussion of the theory of mind-stuff, or mental chemistry, as a proposed basis for psychology. James famously responded that you cannot understand a sentence as a self-compounding of a number of words. The theory is a bygone. Why bother with it now, except as a curiosity that was on the way out even when James critiqued it in 1890? Because the theory has one proponent whose name is still very much with us: Herbert Spencer. We tend to think of Spencer as a social theorist. We associate him with the notion that 'survival of the fittest' should be allowed to work its way through the social sphere as it did in the primordial jungle. Those of us who have been to law school associate this in turn with a famous taunt that Oliver Wendell Holmes directed at his laissez-faire colleagues, that the constitution does not enshrine Spencer's philosophy. But, think of Spencer in this way, we may forget to think of Spencer as his own contemporaries tho...
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Yet again with Herbert Spencer. My comment on him today is that a chapter on his work in a recent book by Robert Bannister makes the whole arc of Spencer's work and his life seem tragic. Spencer's big picture was that the world is Matter in Motion There is a Mystery to this -- Spencer in full Victorian manner bowed toward the Mystery of why there is any matter in motion at all, but then he showed Mystery the door again as outside the purview of science or of his sort of philosophy, the sort that seeks to remain in close touch with science. Having bowed God out the door, he stuck with Matter in Motion. Moreover, what we can say about this world is that progress always proceeds from homogeneity to heterogeneity. The increasingly heterogeneous world, or for any given chunk of the world the increasing heterogeneity of THAT, requires ever more complicated relations among the parts, but change always works toward new equilibriums, accommodating these complications. Spencer thought h...
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 ...
Here are some dates. Herbert Spencer, SOCIAL STATICS (1851) Charles Darwin, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859) Henry Maine ANCIENT LAW (1861) Henry Maine, VILLAGE COMMUNITIES (1871) Charles Darwin, THE DESCENT OF MAN (1871) Joseph Fisher, THE HISTORY OF LANDHOLDING (1877) Herbert Spencer, THE DATA OF ETHICS (1879) Social Statics , the one specific ally cited (and rejected as a constitutional authority) by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Lochner case, was early Spencer, and preceded the great Darwinian controversy. Maine did develop his legal theories subsequent to Darwin, but there is no biologism in them. Maine believed that human societies have passed through predictable stages, and that the overall direction of progress in which the world was engaged in the 19th century was a move away from status toward contract. A movement away from inborn identity to voluntary choices and the acceptance of their consequences. The later Spencer may well owe a lot to...
Herbert Spencer is often called a “Social Darwinist.” I have called him that myself, and will probably do so often in the future as well, because that has become the traditional term and it is sometimes necessary to abide by conventions in order to make oneself understood. But I have come to believe that the term is inapt. Two other labels suggest themselves as superior. If one is looking for a label Spencer would accept for his own social/ethical views, the term "rational utilitarianism" would work. If one doesn't care to ask his permission, social Lamarckianism will also apply. Spencer's works on relevant subjects include SOCIAL STATICS (1851), THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY (1873), and MAN VERSUS THE STATE (1884). Spencer called his own view “rational utilitarianism,” because -- as one might guess -- he believed utilitarians before him had been inadequately rational. He did identify the good with happiness, and that identification was associated for him wit...
I've been thinking about the Jim Croce song, "Don't Mess Around With Jim." SPOILER ALERT: If you don't know the song, and want to be surprised by the final verse thereof should you someday listen to it, don't read further. It's a song about what is sometimes nowadays called "micro-history." Micro-history is a term for scholarly inquiries into a narrow slice of space and time, a specific and localized event, and usually not one that strikes a non-professional reader as the obvious concern of History with the capital "H." So, for example, a careful study of a miller brought to trial by the Inquisition for heretical views in the 16th century became a micro-historical classic. This is in part because the narrow slice of time and space involved, but also because the miller at the heart of the story was an ordinary fellow, not an aristocrat, diplomat, judge. And that brings us back to Jim Croce. The song tells the tale of a confli...
Headnote: I have just learned that the great scholar Jacques Barzun has died. It is hardly a life cut short -- he was born on November 30, 1907, so he was about a month short of turning 105. Still, for those of us to whom his life and work mattered, he had come to seem immortal. And in any sense that scholarship can secure: he is. For now, I will proceed with the material prepared for this and the following two entries in this blog. But I will have more to say about Barzun here soon enough.] Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist who did a good deal to educate the non-scientists of the world about the biology of evolution, passed away back in 2002. He might be surprised to learn that his name has now become a bone of contention [a fossilized bone of contention?] among economists. Of course it isn't all that surprising that there should be cross-fertilization between biology and economics. Ask Malthus about this. Ask Herbert Spencer. Still, my understanding is that this wasn...