Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist and political theorist whose synthetic philosophy applied evolutionary ideas to every field he could reach, and whose phrase survival of the fittest entered the language of biology and economics.

He was born in Derby, the only surviving child of a schoolmaster, and was educated at home in a dissenting and freethinking household. He worked as a railway engineer in his twenties before turning to journalism, joining The Economist as a sub-editor in 1848. The success of his first book, Social Statics in 1851, encouraged him to leave salaried work for a long life of independent writing.

From 1860 he set out a multivolume System of Synthetic Philosophy, beginning with First Principles in 1862 and continuing through volumes on biology, psychology, sociology and ethics. He coined the phrase survival of the fittest in Principles of Biology in 1864 after reading Darwin, and Darwin himself adopted it in later editions of On the Origin of Species. He defended a stringent classical liberalism, opposed state welfare and warned against what he called the coming slavery of socialism.

He was the most widely read philosopher in the English-speaking world in the 1870s and 1880s, especially in the United States, before his reputation declined sharply in the twentieth century. He never married, lived for years in London boarding houses and died at Brighton at the age of 83. His Autobiography appeared posthumously in 1904.

The given name Herbert comes from the Old Germanic Hariberht, combining hari meaning army with beraht meaning bright, so the sense is bright army. Carried to England by Anglo-Saxon and Norman settlers, it became fashionable again in the Victorian period. Herbert Spencer wore it through a vast philosophical career, and he is remembered as one of the most ambitious system-builders of the nineteenth century.