Abstract
Spencer’s enterprise was to lay the foundations for psychology and sociology as scientific disciplines through evolutionizing, focusing on both human individuality and sociality. His basic epistemological/methodological framework of living nature was a tripartite model: the changing interrelations of the changing interactions between organism and environment, and the changing effects they induce. I explicate its main sources, components, and accompanying conceptual cluster—complexity, hierarchy, and plasticity, and distinguish between Spencer’s and Darwin’s ‘evolution.’
Drawing upon this framework I elucidate the entangled roles of individuals and collectivities in three works: The Principles of Biology, the two editions of Principles of Psychology, the Principles of Sociology, and some essays.
In Principles of Biology (1864–67), Spencer elaborated on the tripartite model, positing a novel concept of biological individuality as being a consequence of evolutionary processes rather than a foundational unit in the description of living nature. His evolutionary framework based on Lamarckian heredity and its living entities, anachronistically put, manifested extensive phenotypic plasticity and tangled and nested hierarchies and required complicated classifications and developmental histories.
Deploying the tripartite model, Principles of Psychology (1855, 1870/72) refashioned the assumptions of contemporary human sciences through evolutionizing them, intentionally blurring the demarcation between biological heredity and social/cultural/psychological inheritance, positing hybrid categories. The edifice could be coherently sustained (as universal) if the underpinning of hybridizing became collectivist, while the rhetoric—political, ideological, and scientific—remained individualistic. I apply similar tools to Principles of Sociology, especially to society as ‘superorganism,’ and relate to his use of ‘race.’
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Notes
- 1.
I have used three detailed groups of interpretation since the 1970s: one that focused on Spencer’s concepts of ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’ and their relation to those of his contemporaries, including Darwin and somewhat earlier writers; a second that grappled with Spencer’s multi-disciplinary network of concepts, the centrality of ‘evolution’ and ‘complexity’; and a third that situated Spencer within historical, philosophical, scientific, and biographical contexts and contemporaneous controversies, and offered insights on the primacy of the ethical, the social, or the scientific in his work.
- 2.
I am grateful to Trevor Pearce for letting me read two chapters from the MS of his book 2020 on pragmatism.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
E.g., 1864–1867, 1:184–200, ‘adaptation’ in the discussion of a social analogy, 193–99, and 432–62.
- 6.
- 7.
Between the appearance of Princ.Psycho.i and Princ.Psycho.ii: Maine, Ancient Law (1861); Lubbock, Prehistoric Times (1865); McLennan, Primitive Marriage (1865); Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865); Lubbock (ed.), The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870); Maine, Village Communities in the East and West (1871); Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871).
- 8.
The third edition 1880 was identical to the second, except for a 50-page penultimate chapter of “congruities,” separately paginated.
- 9.
Also, an 1867 memorandum to the same effect (1908, 1:184).
- 10.
When discussing ‘repetition’ in Spencer’s mental mechanism, Francis (2007) relates it to Spencer’s empiricism, while I would argue that it is part and parcel of his being a Lamarckist, rather than a proponent of neo-Lamarckism.
- 11.
See also the two appendices at the end of vol. I of Princ.Psycho.ii “On the actions of anaesthetics and narcotics,” “Consciousness under chloroform” (Spencer 1870/1872, 631–40).
- 12.
Altruistic sentiments are beyond the scope of the discussion here, having to do with the construction of human reproduction as an exceptional case.
- 13.
There Albion Small (1905, chap. 7) questioned Spencer’s theorizing of social change.
- 14.
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Gissis, S.B. (2024). Herbert Spencer: The Tripartite Model. In: Lamarckism and the Emergence of 'Scientific' Social Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52756-2_2
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