Herbert Spencer: A Renewed Appreciation

by Jonathan H. Turner

This first volume in the new series Masters of Social Theory examines the work of Herbert Spencer. Jonathan Turner says of Spencer ′There are so many misconceptions about Spencer that someone needs to set the record straight...(this) is a book about what is still useful and interesting in Spencer′s sociology.′ Each volume in the series will feature prominent sociological theorists of the 19th and 20th centuries; they aim to provide both scholarly analysis and to summarize the fundamental ideas associated with each respective figure. The volumes provide a short, scholarly reference work and individual texts for undergraduate and graduate students. The series editor is Jonathan H Turner, Professor of S

160 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1985

About the author

Jonathan H. Turner is a professor of sociology at University of California, Riverside.

Reviews

[Otto Lehto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marx, Weber, Durkheim... and Spencer?

Turner's book makes a powerful case that the legacy of Herbert Spencer has been unprofitably tarnished due to the ideological biases and prejudices of subsequent sociologists. I concur with him that the violent dethronement of Spencer from the status of a great thinker has been a tragedy.

Turner is a sociologist who is most interested in comparing Spencer to sociological literature. He is unsympathetic to the ideological positions of Spencer's libertarian moral and economic philosophy, but he shows that the systematic import of Spencer's analytical and theoretical categories is not dependent upon an acceptance of his moral and economic views. (A point with which I slightly disagree.) While mostly calm and persuasive, Turner's tone gets understandably exasperated as he attempts (in vain, as it turns out) to turn the attention of his colleagues back to this forgotten great thinker.

In his brave attempt to rescue Spencer from oblivion, Turner occasionally commits the double sin of 1) exaggerating the insights of Spencer on particular topics compared to other contemporary and later thinkers, and 2) of whitewashing some of Spencer's more glaring issues: his unwavering evolutionary progressivism, his social Lamarckianism (i.e. his belief in in the inheritance of acquired characteristics), and his opposition to all (even mild) forms of social democracy. And not all of Turner's ways of framing Spencer can be explained in reference to an attempt to make him palatable to a modern audience. For example, Turner's incorrigible resentment towards functionalism makes him unable to take a clear stance on the kind of functionalism that Spencer's organistic philosophy is clearly full of. At one time Turner seems committed to a weak version of it, while at other times he seems ready to reject all of it. (Nor does he offer any good reasons for his strong allergy to functional explanations; although I can imagine what those might be.)

Overall, the book does a good job presenting the importance of Spencer's social and political thinking for contemporary sociologists and systems theorists. Despite its problems, it stands tall amidst its oblivious contemporaries who have yet to fathom the major insights of Spencer.

In a world that still insists on its forgetfulness of the great insights of Herbert Spencer, from sociology to economics, books like this are a vigorous reminder of the perpetual need to go back to the classics. If we have the temerity to go back, we may be surprised to discover that we have lost an inexcusable amount of the theoretical insights of the past due to our myopic desire to be exclusively relevant to the prejudices of our equally myopic, path dependent contemporaries.