Yet some scholars and historians dispute this characterization of Spencer’s work. Gregory Claeys, a historian at the University of London, writes that of all the great Victorian thinkers, it is Spencer whose “reputation has now indisputably fallen the farthest.” Philosopher Daniel Dennett has described social Darwinism as “an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking in defense of political doctrines that range from callous to heinous,” while the journalist Robert Wright said that social Darwinism “now lies in the dustbin of intellectual history.” Today, few read Spencer’s dense and ponderous books, and his ideas are rarely taught. Modern scholars, and the public at large, understandably view this idea with disdain. Today, when Spencer is remembered at all, it is usually for inspiring the ideology known as “ social Darwinism”: roughly, the idea that the successful deserve their success while those who fail deserve their failure. In his mind, it governed entire societies. But where Darwin focused on biology, Spencer imagined that evolutionary thinking could be applied much more broadly. Like his more famous contemporary, Spencer was enamored with the idea of evolution. “For a brief period, for a couple of decades at the end of the 19th century, he was world-famous,” says Bernard Lightman, a historian of science at York University in Toronto. Darwin has called ‘natural selection’, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.” Spencer introduced the phrase in his 1864 book, Principles of Biology, where he saw parallels between his conservative ideas about economics and what Darwin had written about the natural world: “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. And it was Spencer, not Darwin, who gave us the phrase “survival of the fittest,” though Darwin would later use it in his writing. Spencer’s first writings on evolution came in 1851, eight years before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Teetering on the boundary is Herbert Spencer, born 200 years ago this week. Some, like Charles Darwin, changed the way we think about the world, while many more have faded into obscurity-along with their ideas. Victorian England had its fair share of great minds.
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