Spencer and the Welfare State

Abstract

IN BACKGROUND, temperament, and intellectual proclivities Herbert Spencer epitomizes some of most salient features of Victorianism and Victorian age. Brought up in a middle-class Nonconformist family, he retained, and often felt impious delight in stressing, many of 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 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 cosmos, man, and society. His prodigious intellectual output (William James called Spencer 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. Above all, Spencer was a liberal, a nineteenth-century classical liberal who emphasized freedom more than equality and individualism more than collectivism. Hence, he viewed with distrust excessive use of government power to regulate market forces of economy, to channel individual interests according to some government plan, or in any sense to constrain spontaneous social and intellectual development of man. But if Spencer is a nineteenth-century phenomenon, to use another of William James's apt terms, Welfare State is a twentiethcentury creation. Indeed, for all meaningful purposes, it was not until after Second World War that term gained currency. As a social concept, it was used to describe a certain type of social and economic organization, coordinated and planned; as an ideology, it was