Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T13:05:28.577Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Spencer and the Welfare State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Andreas M. Kazamias
Andreas M. Kazamias*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In background, temperament, and intellectual proclivities Herbert Spencer epitomizes some of the most salient features of Victorianism and the Victorian age. Brought up in a middle-class Nonconformist family, he retained, and often felt impious delight in stressing, many of the characteristics of nineteenth-century English Philistinism, namely, a “hedgehog-like independence,” a reaction to traditional views about religion, education, and morality, an aversion to authority and orthodoxy, and a puritan-like austerity with its contempt for “the pleasures and graces of life.” Like so many of the eminent Victorians at home and abroad, Spencer was a man of remorseless energy, who reveled at his Olympian propensity to grapple with huge questions about the cosmos, man, and society. His prodigious intellectual output (William James called Spencer the “philosopher of vastness”) was a blending of what he perceived to be “scientific” reasoning about organic, inorganic, and superorganic development or evolution, with strong ideological overtones.

Type
Research Article
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Summer 1966 , pp. 73 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 History of Education Quarterly 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Robson, William A., The Welfare State (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

2. Wingfield-Stratford, Esmé, Those Eminent Victorians (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1930), p. 249.Google Scholar

3. Stuart Mill, John, On Liberty Castell, Alburey ed., (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947), p. 107. For a lucid analysis of Mill's views on political and economic liberty, see Ebenstein, William, “John Stuart Mill: Political and Economic Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Friedrich, Carl J., Nomos IV (New York: Atherton Press, 1962), chap. 4.Google Scholar

4. Duncan, David, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1908), I, 122.Google Scholar

5. The reference here is to twelve letters published in a newspaper—The Nonconformist—in 1842. See Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), I, 237–43. Hereafter cited as Autobiography. Google Scholar

6. Spencer, Herbert, Social Statics; or The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified and the First of Them Developed (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873), pp. 360–63.Google Scholar

7. For further analysis of this argument and for selected readings, see Kazamias, Andreas M. (ed.), Herbert Spencer on Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1966).Google Scholar

8. Spencer, Herbert, Essays; Scientific, Political, and Speculative (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1864), II, 221.Google Scholar

9. Duncan, , Life and Letters I, 78; II, 212.Google Scholar

10. For more details on the membership and objects of this League, see Adams, Francis, History of the Elementary School Contest in England (London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1882), pp. 195–207.Google Scholar

11. For a fuller discussion of the provisions of this bill, see Bidwell, Charles E. and Kazamias, Andreas M., “Religion, Politics, and Popular Education: An Historical Comparison of England and America,” Comparative Education Review, VI, No. 2 (October 1962), 99–100.Google Scholar

12. Autobiography, II, 146.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., I, 237.Google Scholar

14. Spencer made these statements in an article entitled “Representative Government—what is it good for?” first published in the Westminster Review in October 1857, and subsequently reprinted in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, pp. 185–227. For other references to this theme, see his essay “The Sins of Legislators,” in The Man Versus the State: A Collection of Essays by Herbert Spencer, Beale, Truxton ed. (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1916), pp. 264–66.Google Scholar

15. Spencer, Herbert, “Parliamentary Reform: the Dangers, and the Safeguards,” reprinted in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, pp. 244–45. For similar criticisms of the education of the “government,” see Ibid., pp. 246ff. For other attacks on the contemporary type of education, see Spencer's famous essays Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (London: D. Appleton and Company, 1860).Google Scholar

16. For details on these questions, see Spencer's essay “Over-Legislation,” first published in 1853 in the Westminster Review, and reprinted in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), I, 307–58.Google Scholar

17. Spencer, Herbert, Facts and Comments (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1902), p. 82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Halévy, Elie, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century: Victorian Years, 1841–1895 (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1961), p. 450.Google Scholar

19. Bagehot, Walter, The English Constitution (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 6.Google Scholar

20. Bosanquet, Bernard, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: The Macmillan Company, Ltd., 1910), pp. 77–78.Google Scholar

21. Asquith, H. H., “Introduction,” in Samuel, Herbert, Liberalism: An Attempt to State the Principles and Proposals of Contemporary Liberalism in England (London: Grant Richards, 1902), pp. ix–x.Google Scholar

22. For an excellent historical account of these reforms, see Bruce, Maurice, The Coming of the Welfare State (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1961), pp. 150–94.Google Scholar

23. For the most cogent definition of “welfare state,” see Briggs, Asa, “The Welfare State in Historical Perspective,” European Journal of Sociology, II (Paris, 1961), 228. On the principle of “universality,” which includes education, see Titmuss, Richard, “Goals of Today's Welfare State,” in Towards Socialism, eds. Anderson, Perry, et al. (London: Cox and Wyman Ltd, 1965), p. 357. During and after the war, both major political parties (Conservative and Labour) supported the idea that the state and/or other public agencies should assume major responsibilities in educational provision and opportunity. They also endorsed the policies of tripartitism and selection at 11-plus in the immediate years after the war. Both of them couched their policy aims in such terms as equality of opportunity and social justice. But there were also significant differences among the two parties: in the extent of state responsibility for social policy, the role of public agencies in social welfare, the distribution of income, private ownership, the organization of schools, and in the related question of selection. For differences in their views, see Macleod, Iain and Maude, Angus, One Nation: A Tory Approach to Social Problems. (London: Knightly Vernon & Son, 1950), p. 9; The Welfare State, Labour Party Political Discussion Pamphlet, No. 4, 1952, p. 3; Crosland, C. A. R., The Conservative Enemy: A Programme of Radical Reform for the 1960's (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p. 49.Google Scholar

24. Crosland, , op. cit., pp. 28–29, 12.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., p. 37. See Vaizey, John, Britain in the Sixties: Education for Tomorrow (Penguin Books, 1962). For recent Labour policy statements, see Fair Deal for Kids: Why Labour Believes in Comprehensive Schools (“Talking Points,” No. 5), April 1965; “Labour Party Manifesto Sets Out Programme: The New Britain,” The Times (London), August 12, 1964.Google Scholar

26. For the Liberal views, see Watson (ed.), George, The Unservile State: Essays in Liberty and Welfare (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1957). For the Conservative views, see Macleod and Maud, op. cit., p. 9.Google Scholar

27. Myrdal, Gunnar, Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning and Its International Implications (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 3–19.Google Scholar

28. Marrou, H. I., A History of Education in Antiquity Lamb, George trans. (New York: Sheed and Ward, Inc., 1956), pp. xii–xiii.Google Scholar

29. See, for example, Hobhouse, L. T., Liberalism (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1911), p. 32, and Labour Party, The Welfare State, pp. 27–28.Google Scholar

30. Berlin, Isaiah, Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 51–52.Google Scholar

31. Bottomore, T. B., Elites and Society (London: C. A. Watts & Company Ltd., 1964), p. 142.Google Scholar

32. Social Statics, pp. 108–9.Google Scholar

33. Titmuss, , op. cit., pp. 357–60.Google Scholar

34. Sillitoe, Alan, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (New York: Signet Books, The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1958), p. 175.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., p. 30.Google Scholar

36. Marsh, David C., The Future of the Welfare State (Penguin Books, Inc., 1964), p. 79.Google Scholar

37. Titmuss, , op. cit., p. 363.Google Scholar

38. Crosland, , op. cit., pp. 26–27.Google Scholar

39. Marsh, , op. cit., p. 106.Google Scholar

40. Spencer, , Facts and Comments pp. 84–89.Google Scholar

41. Cockshut, A. O. J., The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought 1840–1890 (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1964), pp. 73–85.Google Scholar