Replete with endless examples from the distant past, recent past and present, it speculatively describes and explains the entire arch of human social evolution. They are its whole point. Overpopulation causing violent conflicts between social groups fuels this cycle of consolidation and reversal to which no society is immune. II, — The more these primal societies crowd each other, the more externally violent and militant they become.
Success in war requires greater solidarity and politically consolidated and enforced cohesion. Unremitting warfare fuses and formalizes political control, eradicating societies that fail to consolidate sufficiently.
Clans form into nations and tribal chiefs become kings. Other things being equal, a society in which life, liberty, and property, are secure, and all interests justly regarded, must prosper more than one in which they are not; and, consequently, among competing industrial societies there must be gradual replacing of those in which personal rights are imperfectly maintained, by those in which they are perfectly maintained.
And societies where rights are perfectly maintained will in due course confederate together in an ever-expanding pacific equilibrium. As noted previously, equilibrium is always unstable, risking dissolution and regression. Indeed by the end of his life, Spencer was far less sanguine about industrial societies avoiding war.
Sociology and ethics intertwine. We shall shortly see just how utilitarian as well as how individualistic both were. Many recent interpreters of Spencer, especially sociologists, have insisted that his sociological theory and his ethics do not intertwine, that his sociology stands apart and that therefore we can discount his moral theory in our efforts to understand his legacy to social science. For instance, J. It is one thing to discover how a past thinker seems to presage our present thinking on this matter or that, and it is another thing entirely to try to interpret a past thinker as best we can.
However, Peter J. Bowler has lately argued that both Spencer and Darwin believed that the inheritance of acquired characteristics and natural selection together drove evolution. For Bowler, it is no less mistaken to view Spencer as owing everything to Lamarck as it is to see him as owing very little to Lamarck. The latter gradually replaces the former as the mechanism of evolutionary change.
Actions producing pleasure or pain tend to cause mental associations between types of actions and pleasures or pains. Sentiments of approval and disapproval also complement these associations. We tend naturally to approve pleasure-producing actions and disapprove pain-producing ones. Because of use-inheritance, these feelings of approval and disapproval intensify into deep-seated moral instincts of approval and disapproval, which gradually become refined moral intuitions.
According to James G. Kennedy, Spencer created functionalism. That is, social evolution favors social institutions and normative practices that promote human solidarity, happiness and flourishing. Social theorists remember him though most probably remember little about him though this may be changing somewhat. Moral philosophers, for their part, have mostly forgotten him even though 19th-century classical utilitarians like Mill and Henry Sidgwick, Idealists like T.
Green and J. Mackenzie, and new liberals like D. Ritchie discussed him at considerable length though mostly critically. And 20th-century ideal utilitarians like Moore and Hastings Rashdall and Oxford intuitionists like W. Ross also felt compelled to engage him. Spencer was very much part of their intellectual context. He oriented their thinking not insignificantly.
We cannot properly interpret them unless we take Spencer more seriously than we do. Spencer was a sociologist in part. But he was even more a moral philosopher. He was what we now refer to as a liberal utilitarian first who traded heavily in evolutionary theory in order to explain how our liberal utilitarian sense of justice emerges.
Though a utilitarian, Spencer took distributive justice no less seriously than Mill. For him as for Mill, liberty and justice were equivalent. Moreover, for Spencer as for Mill, liberty was sacrosanct, insuring that his utilitarianism was equally a bona fide form of liberalism. For both, respect for liberty also just happened to work out for the utilitarian best all things considered. Indefeasible liberty, properly formulated, and utility were therefore fully compossible.
Pleasure-producing activity has tended to generate biologically inheritable associations between certain types of actions, pleasurable feelings and feelings of approval. Gradually, utilitarianism becomes intuitive. Social evolution favors cultures that internalize utilitarian maxims intuitively. II, Wherever general utility thrives, societies thrive. General utility and cultural stamina go hand-in-hand.
And general utility thrives best where individuals exercise and develop their faculties within the parameters stipulated by equal freedom. In short, like any moral intuition, equal freedom favors societies that internalize it and, ultimately, self-consciously invoke it. And wherever societies celebrate equal freedom as an ultimate principle of justice, well-being flourishes and utilitarian liberalism spreads.
They stipulate our most essential sources of happiness, namely life and liberty. Moral rights to life and liberty are conditions of general happiness. They guarantee each individual the opportunity to exercise his or her faculties according to his or her own lights, which is the source of real happiness. They consequently promote general happiness indirectly. Basic moral rights, then, emerge as intuitions too though they are more specific than our generalized intuitive appreciation of the utilitarian prowess of equal freedom.
Consequently, self-consciously internalizing and refining our intuitive sense of equal freedom, transforming it into a principle of practical reasoning, simultaneously transforms our emerging normative intuitions about the sanctity of life and liberty into stringent juridical principles.
And this is simply another way of claiming that general utility flourishes best wherever liberal principles are seriously invoked. Moral societies are happier societies and more vibrant and successful to boot. Though conventional practices, only very specific rights nevertheless effectively promote human well-being. Only those societies that fortuitously embrace them flourish. The essay is a highly polemical protest, in the name of strong rights as the best antidote, against the dangers of incremental legislative reforms introducing socialism surreptitiously into Britain.
He next adds:. Specific types of actions, in short, necessarily always promote general utility best over the long term though not always in the interim. While they may not always promote it proximately, they invariably promote it ultimately or, in other words, indirectly. That is, they constitute our fundamental moral rights. We have moral rights to these action types if we have moral rights to anything at all. Spencer as much as Mill, then, advocates indirect utilitarianism by featuring robust moral rights.
For both theorists, rights-oriented utilitarianism best fosters general happiness because individuals succeed in making themselves happiest when they develop their mental and physical faculties by exercising them as they deem most appropriate, which, in turn, requires extensive freedom. But since we live socially, what we practically require is equal freedom suitably fleshed out in terms of its moral right corollaries. Moral rights to life and liberty secure our most vital opportunities for making ourselves as happy as we possibly can.
So if Mill remains potently germane because his legacy to contemporary liberal utilitarian still inspires, then we should take better account of Spencer than, unfortunately, we currently do. Indeed, Mill regarded this difference as the fundamental one between them.
Spencer, by the standards of the day, also held a progressive view of gender, arguing that women were as intellectually capable as men and advocating for full political and legal rights for women. Claeys even describes him as a feminist. That label is open to debate.
Spencer never married, and he appears to have been isolated and lonely in his final years. He spent nearly two decades writing and rewriting his two-volume autobiography. He struggled to control his public image, even going so far as asking to have his letters returned to him and then destroying those that he felt might damage his reputation. All the while, English politics were drifting to the left. Anything that had any scent of government regulation about it, he associated with socialism.
Science and philosophy had moved on as well. Still, as remote as Spencer and his ideas seem today, he was a vital figure in his own time, Barton says. The present article has a different primary focus, a reassessment of his substantial body of work on the professions and professional institutions. It has been an overlooked strength of Spencer that he nuanced his abstract sociological thinking about aspects of social life with micro-level everyday observation as argued by Turner, , Ch.
One interest which Spencer had in particular was professionals and professional institutions. These are matters which will be explained in the first main section. Spencer's interest in professions must have dated back at least to his years as a young man from to , when he experienced first-hand the professional responsibilities associated with a brand-new frontier of the art of civil engineering: for, as an early participant in some of the first railway schemes in England as they were constructed or projected, he was in at the birth of a revolution in communications.
The primary focus here, then, is a reappraisal of what Spencer says on the professions, professional institutions and work more generally as it is situated within his theoretical framework , and how these contributions have implications for certain practical problems and theoretical issues in the understanding of facets of professional life today.
The discussion also, looking back, shows how his mechanism of individual and social change is one constituent of a cascade of ideas that is itself related to the contemporary social science focus on the complexity of interaction in general and between service users and professionals in particular. It can be more rewarding to give prominence to other features.
Militant structures are geared for aggression, with strong central and coercive control of the individuals in a society. In this way, boundaries between whole societies and their environments, and hierarchies established between their various constituent social elements or groupings can possess a porous quality 3. The burning question was how could a society be envisaged in this highly charged context?
Neither any particular society nor societies in general was assimilated to any one known individual organism or set of organisms. In the process, Spencer grasped that his understanding of the social organism was entirely different to Comte's holistic version Spencer, , p. Individuals adapt to each other and to the society over time, and to external conditions, and the changes made in turn lead to further adaptations, helical in nature. His primary mechanism of organic and social change was pre-Darwinian and consciously derived from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or functionally produced changes.
It is not in fact a surprising matter that in our participation in ordinary social life we showed capacities to change, to react and act with knowledge and innovation, not least through the form of professional activity, as will be discussed later. What was and in a measure remains a stumbling block, however, is the idea that the accumulation of these changes should in biological terms be inherited 8.
See too Peel, , p. As a society coheres through spontaneous cooperation, and as a division of labor emerges, it starts to exhibit a relatively stable set of functions and allied structures.
Functions and structures are mutable , they are malleable according to the changing and varied contents of what the spontaneous cooperations of individuals are in practice attempting to create. A society was an organism, but one with singular characteristics. Acts of spontaneous cooperation between social individuals can be regarded partly as an adaptive response to what they experienced as complexity or the unfamiliar in the world being encountered.
Viewed in this way, Spencer was in the forefront as a sociologist who was confronting the challenge to understand social life as involving people who were making sense of and negotiating ways through complex landscapes, although as it happens he has been largely unrecognized as such Despite the observations of the previous section, it remains possible that reservations might still be raised on the legitimacy of presenting Spencer in this way, or that the themes in question are to be strongly associated with Spencer.
A likely source is the influence of a still commonly-held view that Spencer is definitively associated with a theory of evolution in general and social evolution in particular that is directional and lineal in nature. For if true, Spencer could lack the salience to contemporary sociological concerns being implied. However, Spencer himself clarified his position.
Immediately after his most detailed remarks on professions in his Principles of Sociology were written, he went on, in the same volume, to disown with conviction that the alleged position on evolution was one he occupied. With that reminder now in place, this article moves on to show that Spencer's focus, on understanding social life as involving social individuals confronting challenging and complex terrains, shapes his work on the actions of professionals and professional institutions in particular.
In the event, it is worth noting that this discussion is also providing a rare opportunity to revisit at least a part of the substantive aspects of his sociology. No group of institutions illustrates with greater clearness the process of social evolution; and none shows more undeniably how social evolution conforms to the law of evolution at large.
The germs out of which the professional agencies arise, forming at first a part of the regulative agency, differentiate from it at the same time that they differentiate from one another; and, while severally being rendered more multiform by the rise of subdivisions, severally become more coherent within themselves and more definitely marked off , p.
Though by its vital activities capital is drafted to places where it is most wanted, supplies of commodities balanced in every locality and prices universally adjusted—all without official supervision; yet, being oblivious of the truth that these processes are socially originated without design of anyone, they cannot believe that society will be bettered by natural agencies.
And hence when they see an evil to be cured or a good to be achieved, they ask for legal coercion as the only possible means Spencer, : Through the passage of time, occupations have become so specialized that the labor of each person, satisfying some needs of others, has had their own needs satisfied by the work of hundreds of others. Given the breadth of activities covered in Professional Institutions, only a few examples of Spencer's comments can be chosen.
Spencer occupied a position which embraced utilitarianism and an orientation toward social science, whereas by the s Idealist modes of philosophical thought about how to discover fundamental values and knowledge were in the ascendant in Britain, concerned to question those very developments as heralds of a dehumanizing materialism. In Professional Institutions, Spencer eschewed making any remark that this trend toward Idealist philosophy was tantamount to harking back to the orthodoxies associated with militant and coercive social relations Perhaps he judged that a concise developmental account of professions in general was an inappropriate place to display personal philosophical divergences, even if they were profound.
Spencer viewed professional specialization as adaptive for individuals and societies. Such accounts correctly conclude that Spencer understood professionals in industrial societies as market actors, acknowledging that they enhance the quality of life by having services to offer which are innovative and substantive. Relationships between the professions and the state were of constant interest to Spencer.
I am not aware that anyone has more emphatically asserted that society in its corporate capacity must exercise a rigorous control over its individual members, to the extent needful for preventing trespasses one upon another.
No one has more frequently or strongly denounced governments for the laxity with which they fulfill this duty. So far from being, as some have alleged, an advocacy of the claims of the strong against the weak, it is much more an insistence that the weak shall be guarded against the strong, so that they may suffer no greater evils than their relative weakness itself involves.
Dealing with the protection of the liberty of all in social relationships providing that none should infringe the like liberty of another is the proper sphere of government. In his later Principles of Ethics Spencer renewed the complaint. Spencer had identified a serious hindrance in the way of permitting ready access to sound and practical professional advice and guidance for ordinary citizens at the point of need. Perhaps with the best of intentions, myopic professionals desired compulsory legislation, depriving individuals of their liberty and encouraging dependence on the state, at the price of slowing the process of social evolution by which individuals and by inheritance their offspring can progressively adapt to their circumstances.
See too Spencer, , p. Spencer had interpreted ecclesiastical institutions as one of the original sources of later, largely secular professionals. An earlier section of the Sociology had discussed the prospects for churches and priests. In this case, of course, self-interest might indicate joining a profession such as social work.
Spencer seems to have not considered any case of professions or of professional institutions in decline beyond those associated with religious observation for a recent study of the decline of the profession of actuary see Collins et al. Aspects of work and employment which impinge on professional activities, in particular the trades unions, working conditions in general and unpaid work, attracted Spencer's attention.
His critical comments derive from his equal freedom principle justice. Trades unions can resort to coercion to demand obedience from their members and obstruct piece-work practices Spencer, , ii, p. However, justice is also a weapon on the side of unions. On some general working conditions Spencer's condemnation is unequivocal as Peel noted, , p.
Spencer's misgivings about wage labor and injustice, and his support for trade unionism, receive further discussion in Weinstein, , p. Always each may continue to further the welfare of others by warding off from them evils they cannot see, and by aiding their actions in ways unknown to them; or, conversely putting it, each may have, as it were, supplementary eyes and ears in other persons, which perceive for him things he cannot perceive himself: so perfecting his life in numerous details, by making its adjustments to environing actions complete Spencer, , p.
Private beneficence had moral qualities that made it preferable to state beneficence, but he was disquieted by the disproportionate burdens of care which were performed by women and the restricted opportunities which followed in its wake on Spencer on this aspect see Offer, Voluntariness in the shape of voluntary organizations conformed to Spencer's ideas about social development. Hiskes traces the treatment of Spencer's idea of social individuals and his liberal idea of community since his day, criticizing some libertarian sources, including Robert Nozich's Anarchy, State, and Utopia , for ignoring the altruistic attitudes and motivations of people in social life which Spencer had described in detail.
In , the third type became the theme of his speech delivered in New York, warning his audience of the barrenness of an obsession with work Spencer, ; Shapin, ; Werth, , ii, p. Again, it is significant that Spencer frowned on laissez-faire without boundaries. Spencer identified professions by their role or function in social life in his own evolutionary-based narrative his distinctive, non-Darwinian, theory of evolution.
Some important points arise around his emphasis on the idea of adaptation to circumstances by individuals and societies. As has been discussed already, the key mechanism of change in the organic world in general for Spencer is the inheritance of acquired characteristics following adaptation to circumstances, and by social individuals in particular and thus on to the communities which they form.
Since and the Dingwall and King publication, Abbott's work drawing on ecology has been enlarged upon in approaches invoking co-evolution and complex adaptation, as described and explained in, for example, Room's Complexity, Institutions and Public Policy: Agile Decision-Making in a Turbulent World Room, Other recent work covering the quintessential Spencerian theme of professionals, change, and complexity has been explored fruitfully by the French sociologist Florent Champy although in this case as far as I am aware without making a specific connection to Spencer.
It is impossible to know with scientific certainty what should be done and what exactly would result from any action once completed.
Working with people e. In this context Room , while referring to a later publication than was available to Dingwall and King by Abbott , ch. Given the concerns of the present article, Room's ideas in particular need further discussion. All these social actors are likely to be seeking positional advantage Room, , p.
Room included a discussion of a population group at risk of social exclusion and poverty in this scenario, applying findings from research on lone mothers by Millar and Ridge Ridge, ; Millar and Ridge, The parts played by family, friends and neighbors come into the mix, and if a job is available the question becomes whether or not taking the job is likely to dovetail adequately with the children's childcare needs.
At the same time, social institutions and the professionals associated with them can be expected to adapt to the terrain with which they are newly confronted. The risks associated with their decisions may create turbulence, with unequal costs falling on the least agile households.
Implicit gender assumptions about individual members of families and how their incomes and expenditures in fact contribute to family as opposed to individual life may need to be confronted, especially in times of crisis Walby, —the previous Section made a relevant link to Spencer is this regard. There is in fact a considerable and highly relevant research literature on informal care and the interface between family members who are informal carers on the one hand and professionals and policy-makers who devise their community care support on the other In the interests of both the history of social theory and the reflexive development of the recent theorizing in relation to professionals, policy-makers and service-users, Spencer's mechanism and his own applications of it to interpreting professional and social life, and apparent resemblances between them and the more recent investigations, suggest an affinity which merits more sustained enquiry and acknowledgment in the future.
This article began by reviewing some recent reinterpretations of the sociological work of Spencer which have substantially helped to retrieve his reputation by clarifying its central ideas, emphasizing his own interpretation of the social organism and idea of the social self-consciousness of individuals.
The narrative explained the overall structure and theoretical cohesion of Spencer's sociological thought, and then how he came to apply it to professionals and work in general. Although helpful insights were noted from Dingwall and King their view that Spencer was an uncritical supporter of laissez-faire was challenged as against the evidence. Aspects of the wider world of employment and work in Spencer's sociology were raised, including the injustices represented by unreasonable working conditions, just criticisms made by trade unions, the significance of the role of women in unpaid domestic care and the costs to them, and the prospect for professional life in a future, post-industrial form of society.
The discussion of Spencer and relationships between professionals and users suggested how accounts of Spencer's ecological approach to the evolution of the professions can be updated.
To end it will be helpful to highlight just two of the substantial range of themes of conceptual and theoretical significance in particular that occupied Spencer which have special resonance in making sense of professional activity and everyday social life today.
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