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Spencer and the Welfare State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Andreas M. Kazamias
Andreas M. Kazamias*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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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 

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References

Notes

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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

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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

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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

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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

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