Herbert Spencer and the Political Economy of Mean-Spiritedness Revived

In recent years the reputation of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) has undergone a transformation. Indeed, until the mid-1970s the answer to the rhetorical question, “Who reads Spencer now?” would surely have been “hardly anyone.” However, since then sociologist Jonathan Turner, intellectual historian Robert Bannister, political scientist Robert Perrin and dozens of economists and humanists have contributed to reconsideration of his role in nineteenth-century thought. They have also reinterpreted the corpus of his work and suggested new ways to utilize his contributions as a social theorist. Most important for our purposes is their effort to demonstrate that his stances on policy issues were not as mean-spirited as his critics have claimed. Indeed, Bannister, for example, forcefully argues that neither Spencer nor his American contemporary, William Graham Summer, were as consistently in favor of laissez faire or as harsh in their attitudes toward the underprivileged and the lower classes as scholarly convention once had it.