Principles of Sociology

The accomplishments of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) are somewhat paradoxical. He was unarguably one of the most widely read figures at the end of the nineteenth century, a fact easily confirmed by his importance to fields as various as biology, anthropology, sociology, politics, and ethics. But his fortunes quickly changed; even by the early years of the twentieth century, Spencer already carried the image that still regularly haunts him in histories of science – in the words of Chris Renwick, “as a populist amateur whose importance stopped a long way short of the laboratory door.” 1 Despite his having been the first person to extensively use the term sociology in English, his fate is little better in histories…