Collective Action

One model of collective action is that which relies on unintended outcomes of egoistic action for the static welfare and the dynamic upgrading of the social organism as a whole — which argues that private vices are public virtues where adaptation to environment and the consequent collective progress are concerned. This model sees the normal relationship between citizens in a society as being based not upon benevolence and stranger-gifts but rather upon self-interest and the exchange of the quid for the quo. The orientation is perhaps sordid but the co-ordinated collective action which results, as if guided by an invisible hand, is not: because I demand your deer I must supply your beaver and not your pin-factory, much as the function of the heart is to pump blood and not breath. This is the model of collective action that was presented by Herbert Spencer when, in the shadow of Smith and the footsteps of Darwin, he reached the following conclusion concerning the primacy of individual action in an inescapable future which he was only too happy to welcome: ‘The ultimate man will be one whose private requirements coincide with public ones. He will be that manner of man, who, in spontaneously fulfilling his own nature, incidentally performs the functions of a social unit; and yet is only enabled so to fulfill his own nature, by all others doing the like.’1 Spencer’s most eloquent defence of maximal personal responsibility, minimal governmental direction, may be found in the four essays which he contributed to the Contemporary Review of 1884 and which, appearing soon thereafter in book form under the important title of The Man Versus The State, did much to advance the libertarian cause at a time when Spencer’s influence upon the Victorian mind was at its zenith.