Rothbard introduces Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) in his essay “Herbert Spencer: Andreski & Peel”:
Herbert Spencer was a great and protean thinker, a self-taught genius who ranged over and systematically integrated vast realms of human thought: philosophy, politics, sociology, biology, and the other natural sciences. He was also one of the great libertarians in the history of thought, and his first, splendid work, Social Statics (1850) is still the best systematic exposition of libertarianism ever written…. Despite a few flaws, it stands today as a landmark, an inspiration, and a fountainhead of libertarian ideas. It was Spencer who coined the great libertarian “law of equal liberty,” and Spencer who penetratingly developed the vital contrast between “industrial” and “militant” (militarist) principles. Spencer’s seemingly naive optimism, his belief in the inevitable progress of mankind (in his early years) was undoubtedly overdrawn, but it rested on a sound insight that the free-market economy and the libertarian society were indispensable for the successful workings of an industrial world. Hence Spencer’s belief that, since society had been progressing in the direction of freedom and industrialization, it would continue to do so. Perhaps his optimism was only premature by a century or so.
Spencer, in short, more than any other figure, was “our Marx.” At the height of his career, in the middle and late nineteenth century, Spencer was acknowledged to be the greatest intellectual figure of his age, read and hailed widely by scientists, intellectuals, and the general public alike.
Freedom-giant Henry Hazlitt referred to Spencer’s book, Man Versus the State (1884), as “One of the most powerful and influential arguments for limited government, laissez faire and individualism ever written.” In Hazlitt’s own Spencer-inspired book Man vs. The Welfare State (1969), Hazlitt writes:
…we are deeply indebted to Herbert Spencer for recognizing with a sharper eye than any of his contemporaries, and warning them against, “the coming slavery” [essay about socialism] toward which the State of their own time was drifting, and toward which we are more swiftly drifting today.
Spencer was an admired personal acquaintance of Charles Darwin, who—in a correspondence to Spencer—said to him, “Every one with eyes to see and ears to hear (the number, I fear, are not many) ought to bow their knee to you, and I for one do.” And, on another occasion, Darwin referred to Spencer as “twenty times my superior.” Michio Nagai writes in “Herbert Spencer in Early Meiji Japan”:
Spencer has been called the most widely read and possibly the most influential Western social and political thinker in Japan during the 1880’s. Between 1877 and 1900, at least thirty-two translations and one critical study of Spencer’s works were published, besides many articles in journals and magazines. The writings of John Stuart Mill ranked next in popularity. Other Western thinkers—such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Guizot, Haeckel, T. H. Huxley, Darwin, Bentham, and Bagehot—received much less public attention.
Spencer was so respected by leading Japanese ideologues and politicians that he would be in close correspondence with them as they drafted their laws. Spencer’s influence is likely one of the reasons why the Japanese moved towards individual rights, emerging capitalism and technological advancement faster than others in Asia, leading to an embarrassing and shocking blow to naïve racist imperialists everywhere by crushing the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). For more about the immense role Spencer played in spreading freedom worldwide, read the wonderful article “How Herbert Spencer Helped Liberate Japan, Egypt, and India” (in audio) by Paul Meany.
Spencer could also be seen as a proto-Austrian, or someone playing a potentially significant role in the eventual emergence of the “Austrian School” of economics due to his likely influence on Carl Menger and more. Per Rothbard above, Spencer—whose active writing period spanned sixty years from 1842 to 1902—was “the greatest intellectual figure of his age.” The age into which Carl Menger (1840-1921) was born.
Like Spencer, Menger studied the emergence and functioning of the socioeconomic order using an organic or evolutionary “method,” and even devoted an entire book, titled Investigations into the Methods of the Social Sciences (1883), to making a case along such lines. Menger divided the book into large sections called “Books” which were composed of smaller chapters. The heading of “Book Three” is “The Organic Understanding of Social Phenomena.” In this book’s chapter 1, aptly titled “The Analogy Between Social Phenomena and Natural Organisms: Its Limits, and the Methodological Points of View for Social Research Resulting Therefrom,” Menger writes:
Natural organisms almost without exception exhibit, when closely observed, a really admirable functionality of all parts with respect to the whole, a functionality which is not, however, the result of human calculation, but of a natural process. Similarly we can observe in numerous social institutions a strikingly apparent functionality with respect to the whole. But with closer consideration they still do not prove to be the result of an intention aimed at this purpose, i.e., the result of an agreement of members of society or of positive legislation. They, too, present themselves to us rather as “natural” products (in a certain sense), as unintended results of historical development. One needs, e.g., only to think of the phenomenon of money, an institution which to so great a measure serves the welfare of society, and yet in most nations, by far, is by no means the result of an agreement directed at its establishment as a social institution, or of positive legislation, but is the unintended product of historical development. One needs only to think of law, of language, of the origin of markets, the origin of communities and of states, etc.
Now if social phenomena and natural organisms exhibit analogies with respect to their nature, their origin, and their function, it is at once clear that this fact cannot remain without influence on the method of research in the field of the social sciences in general and economics in particular. . . .
Now if state, society, economy, etc., are conceived of as organisms, or as structures analogous to them, the notion of following directions of research in the realm of social phenomena similar to those followed in the realm of organic nature readily suggests itself. The above analogy leads to the idea of theoretical social sciences analogous to those which are the result of theoretical research in the realm of the physico-organic world, to the conception of an anatomy and physiology of “social organisms” of state, society, economy, etc.
…social phenomena come about as the unintended result of individual human efforts (pursuing individual interests) without a common will directed toward their establishment.
Further down in same “book” within the same context, Menger writes in a footnote praising Spencer among others:
It is here, too, that the works by A. Comte, H. Spencer, Schaffle, and Lilienfeld, which are excellent in their way, have really contributed essentially to a deepening of the theoretical understanding of social phenomena.
In 1860, when Menger first attended the University of Vienna at 20 years old—23 years before Menger wrote the above—Spencer published one of his iconic masterpieces “The Social Organism” where we can see some of his brilliance, focus on what can only be called an “Organic Understanding of Social Phenomena,” methodological individualism, and likely influence on Menger:
…that societies are not artificially put together, is a truth so manifest, that it seems wonderful men should ever have overlooked it. Perhaps nothing more clearly shows the small value of historical studies, as they have been commonly pursued. You need but to look at the changes going on around, or observe social organization in its leading traits, to see that these are neither supernatural, nor are determined by the wills of individual men, as by implication the older historians teach; but are consequent on general natural causes. The one case of the division of labour suffices to prove this. It has not been by command of any ruler that some men have become manufacturers, while others have remained cultivators of the soil. In Lancashire, millions have devoted themselves to the making of cotton-fabrics; in Yorkshire, another million lives by producing woollens; and the pottery of Staffordshire, the cutlery of Sheffield, the hardware of Birmingham, severally occupy their hundreds of thousands. These are large facts in the structure of English society; but we can ascribe them neither to miracle, nor to legislation. It is not by “the hero as king,” any more than by “collective wisdom,” that men have been segregated into producers, wholesale distributors, and retail distributors. Our industrial organization, from its main outlines down to its minutest details, has become what it is, not simply without legislative guidance, but, to a considerable extent, in spite of legislative hindrances. It has arisen under the pressure of human wants and resulting activities. While each citizen has been pursuing his individual welfare, and none taking thought about division of labour, or conscious of the need of it, division of labour has yet been ever becoming more complete. It has been doing this slowly and silently: few having observed it until quite modern times. By steps so small, that year after year the industrial arrangements have seemed just what they were before—by changes as insensible as those through which a seed passes into a tree; society has become the complex body of mutually-dependent workers we now see. And this economic organization, mark, is the all-essential organization. Through the combination thus spontaneously evolved, every citizen is supplied with daily necessaries; while he yields some product or aid to others. That we are severally alive today, we owe to the regular working of this combination during the past week; and could it be suddenly abolished, multitudes would be dead before another week ended. If these most conspicuous and vital arrangements of our social structure have arisen not by the devising of any one, but through the individual efforts of citizens to satisfy their own wants; we may be tolerably certain that the less important arrangements have similarly arisen.
