A new reading of Spencer on ‘society’,‘organicism’ and ‘spontaneous order’

Introduction

Herbert Spencer is noted for invoking the idea of the ‘social organism’ to represent societies. Much less familiar is that he also interpreted social life as a ‘spontaneous order’, subject to prevailing social and psychological circumstances. This examination of Spencer reintroduces the links he made when discussing the ‘social organism’ to ‘transcendental physiology’ and morphological variety. It argues that the social organism idea was an attempt to fuse the conceptualisation of order, pattern and change in social life on the one hand and the mutually interdependent lives of social individuals as moral beings on the other. For him, these features were two sides of the same coin. Critics, particularly with sympathies towards idealist social thought, including Tönnies, Durkheim and Bernard Bosanquet, have overlooked the subtlety of Spencer’s thought on the social organism and socially minded individuals. There is too often a lamentable gap between what Spencer said and what subsequent critics thought he said. One unfortunate consequence has been a misleading ‘discovery’ of two contradictory interpretations of Spencer as committed to either a reified and holistic ‘social system’ or ‘laissez-faire’ and amoral ‘individualism’. ¹ The re-reading proposed suggests that individuals were understood not as ‘atomic’ or amoral but as capable of altruism and beneficence, and as exhibiting a ‘social self-consciousness’ within societies, making their structures mutable. His contribution to sociology has in this respect been misjudged. ²

Organismic models enchanted many early sociologists, for whom they epitomised ‘system’ and prospects for theory and scientific legitimacy. Of the five volumes of the Russian sociologist Paul von Lilienfeld’s (1873) main work, Gedanken über die Socialwissenschaft der Zukunft, the first was Human Society as Real Organism. In Germany, the first volume of Albert Schäffle’s (1875) Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers pinpointed the nuclear family as the basic cell of the ‘body social’, around which formed connective tissues (Levine, 1995). ³ These organismic models tended to be locked in a sinful embrace, or at least so we presume today, with an exclusive focus on functionalist and holistic theory. A little later, Albion Small (1896) claimed to value ‘obvious analogies’ between social and physiological relations as ‘spurs to scientific curiosity’, enabling simultaneous exploration of the limits to analogy and the nature of ‘distinctively social phenomena’ (p. 311). Capturing the essence of a social ‘system’ may have been the shared aim, but a difficulty became apparent, noted by Gouldner (1973), over the arbitrary nature of stipulating ‘which organism is to be used as a model’ (p. 191), given the diversity of biological forms. However, Spencer’s unique but neglected significance is that he had embraced this diversity, treating it as his premise.

Spencer adopted a hypothetical or ‘transcendental’ approach to the idea of a biological ‘organism’, in the process extending it to capture an understanding of social life beyond crude forms of sociological functionalism and holism. On the assumption that it remains worthwhile to conceptualise ‘societies’ as theoretical entities, faced with the twin traps of inappropriate reification and ambush by the reconfigurations associated with ‘globalisation’, a reconsideration of Spencer on the ‘social organism’ is worthwhile. This article reassesses his position and indicates ways in which it challenges thought today.

Spencer made passing reference to the ‘social organism’ as early as 1843 in The Proper Sphere of Government. The expression accompanies his claim that everything in nature follows laws, man socially as well as individually (1843: 23). In Social Statics, completed in 1850, it contributed to a developmental social analysis, founded on the inheritance of characteristics associated with the adaptation of individuals to their circumstances (this mechanism became crucial to the theory of parallel psychical and physical mental development maintained in all the editions of his Principles of Psychology, which was first published in 1855). Spencer argues that the living connection between a society and its members is captured by the idea of the ‘social organism’ but not by mechanical models. Because men are members of the community and themselves affected by whatever affects it, there is a ‘vital law of the social organism – the law of equal freedom’ (1851: 443). The law is ‘Every man has freedom to do all that he wills; provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man’ (1851: 103). An ‘essentially vital’ (1851: 448) relation thus holds between each person and the society of which he is a unit. The development of life in individuals and society (later described in his theory of evolution in First Principles in terms of ‘integration’, ‘differentiation’ and ‘equilibration’) ⁴ is the outcome of the equal freedom principle in operation:

broadly generalizing, as it does, the prerequisites of existence, both personal and social – being on the one hand the law under which each citizen may attain complete life, and on the other hand being, not figuratively, but literally, the vital law of the social organism – being the law under which perfect individuation, both of man and of society, is achieved – being, therefore, the law of that state towards which creation tends – the law of equal freedom may properly be considered as a law of nature.

A few years later, he discussed ‘manners’ and ‘fashion’ as forms of ‘control’ which were becoming functionally and structurally more specific and differentiated over time ‘in the social organism’ (1854: 23), reflecting a developmental ‘division of labour’. However, there remained the three questions of what makes a society, or ‘social organism’, possible, what are the morphological features of this ‘organism’, and what relationship is there between whole and parts (although Social Statics had pinpointed equal freedom as ‘vital’). These were addressed in his essay of 1860, ‘The social organism’. ⁵

Spencer and the ‘social organism’ in 1860

Spencer (1860) views societies not as ‘arranged’ by ‘direct interposition of Providence’ or ‘the wills of individual men’ (p. 266), but as natural growths. ‘By almost insensible steps’, through the division of labour, ‘a society becomes a complex body of mutually-dependent workers’ (1860: 267): economic activity and other aspects of the social structure have ‘spontaneously evolved’. The laws of governments survive only if they ‘fit’ with circumstances, their fate depending under representative government upon ‘the average of individual desires’. The ‘character’ of people is the original source of political form, and if a form has departed far from character as it is at the time it perishes. If one class monopolises power, laws reflect that division. Even should a ‘great man’ re-mould his society in some way, he was ‘before and after birth’ moulded by the factors which bred the ancestral character, quite literally, furnishing his ‘creed, morals, knowledge, aspirations’ (1860: 269).

For Spencer (1860), physiological science had made visible ‘real parallelisms’ between a social body and living individual organisms (p. 269). The analogies drawn by Plato and Hobbes had presented a society as ‘made’ rather than as a growth (see also Spencer, 1884: 136–137) and mistakenly taken the human being as the model. A more fruitful approach was now available. Societies, Spencer proposes, ‘agree’ with individual organisms in four ways. They begin as small aggregations but grow in mass, with an increasing complexity arising in their structure. Early forms display little mutual dependence of parts and functions, but this becomes marked in advanced forms. Finally, individual organisms and societies outlive the ‘lives’ of their component units: ‘in each part of a society the organ remains, though the persons who compose it change’ (1860: 275). However, there are apparent differences between individual organisms and societies. There is no continuous mass of living tissue in a society. Yet some organisms, he observes, have bodies of differentiated parts ‘dispersed through an undifferentiated jelly’, which ministers to its life (1860: 274). The idea of a social organism needs to incorporate this model: ‘the citizens who make up a community may be considered as highly vitalized units surrounded by substances of lower vitality, from which they draw their nutriment’ (1860: 275. Spencer does not, though, claim that mankind forms one social organism). A further apparent difference is that the living (human) elements of the social organism are capable of mobility, whereas the living elements of an individual organism are mostly fixed in their relative positions. Yet, this difference is partial only: ‘while citizens are locomotive in their private capacities, they are fixed in their public capacities’ (1860: 276). Where absence arises, deputies will be appointed. There is, however, one wholly real difference singling out the ‘social organism’: ‘while in the body of an animal only a special tissue is endowed with feeling, in a society all the members are endowed with feeling’ (1860: 276). ⁶ The contrast highlighted is one of cardinal significance in his conception of a society as organism:

while, in individual bodies, the welfare of all other parts is rightly subservient to the welfare of the nervous system, whose pleasurable or painful activities make up the good or ill of life; in bodies-politic the same thing does not hold. Corporate life in bodies-politic, he adds, must therefore serve the lives of the parts.

Spencer argues further that in the same manner as there is a major division within organisms between the ectoderm, which develops an apparatus for dealing with the outside, and the endoderm, which develops the processing of food into nutriment, there is in a society a warrior class confronting external threats and a class devoted to alimentation. In individual organisms and in members of a society alike, when ‘faculties’ or functions are exercised growth occurs, provided that nourishment keeps pace. And just as the brain resolves conflicting needs ‘reported’ to it by an organism by averaging them in the interests of life, a parliament averages the demands of ‘representatives’ according to the interests of other classes in the community (1860: 303).

The discussion so far should have conveyed already a little of the eclectic physiological features of organic diversity which permitted Spencer to speculate that societies too should be viewed as organisms. ⁷ As it happens, while Spencer was pondering the nature of ‘societies’, he was also wrestling with practically based but ultimately conceptual problems in biology over the puzzling ‘compound individuality’ then predicated of certain organisms (Elwick, 2003, 2007). ⁸ His essay complemented another on ‘Transcendental physiology’, speculating on possible or hypothetical physiological structures beyond specimens populating anatomy laboratories. ⁹ He was not likening a society to any one known individual organism or set of organisms. The focus was on the forms of organisms and their physiologies, and their modification by the forces associated with the exercise of functions. ‘Transcendental physiology’ announced ‘sundry laws of development and function which hold not of particular kinds or classes of organisms, but of all organisms: laws, some of which have not, we believe, been hitherto enunciated’ (1857: 63).

‘Transcendental physiology’, in fact, compared physiological phenomena with social phenomena: ‘the general principles of development and structure displayed in organized bodies are displayed in societies also’. Both display a mutual dependence of parts, which involves ‘a community of various characteristics’. Specialists acquainted with ‘the broad facts of both physiology and sociology’ are coming to see this correspondence ‘not as a plausible fancy, but as a scientific truth’ (1857: 101–102). In Spencer’s ‘new’ physiology, sociology and physiology will ‘more or less interpret each other’. Relations of cause and effect in ‘the social organism’ may lead to the search for analogous ones in the individual organism, and so may elucidate what might else be inexplicable. Moreover, laws of growth and function, ‘disclosed by the pure physiologist, may occasionally give us the clue to certain social modifications otherwise difficult to understand’. If nothing else, ‘the two sciences can at least exchange suggestions and confirmations; and this will be no small aid’ (1857: 102). No extra-natural source was needed as a foundation for understanding ‘life’ or ‘mind’. Nature itself provided the transcendental organisation which reason might conjecture. ¹⁰

By 1860, therefore, the foundations of Spencer’s idea of the ‘social organism’ were much more sophisticated than conventionally acknowledged. A society was stipulated to be an organism, but one with highly distinctive characteristics. Moreover, his general theory of evolution embraced both individualism and organicism, not self-evidently involving contradiction. It postulated movement over time from relative homogeneity to relative heterogeneity and accompanying processes of integration and individuation, dependent on an equilibrium or community of functions, and this of course applied to social organisms. While there was no division of labour in human ‘societies’ of the ‘lowest races’, but instead ‘an undifferentiated group of individuals, forming the germ of a society’ (1860: 279), in civilized societies an increasing differentiation takes place during evolution through ‘the economical division of labour’. There was a parallel here with the ‘physiological division of labour’, familiar to ‘scientific naturalists’ (1860: 283). Social organisms became more integrated as their parts (‘units’) became more individuated. A key condition of greater individuation was strong central control of a specific kind. Wide-ranging state action was incompatible with the greater individuation of a society’s component parts, but, confined to its ‘proper sphere’ of protecting an individual’s liberty against transgressions and providing redress when these occurred, government acted ‘justly’. In this manner but in this manner alone, its actions promoted the conditions of sociality.

Objections that the organic ‘analogy’, drawn ‘correctly’, must give to government in a ‘social organism’ more extensive powers short-changed Spencer’s position. He thus considered ill-informed his friend the biologist T.H. Huxley’s ‘Administrative nihilism’ of 1871. Huxley had an agenda: to swing the state behind scientific education. He declared,

if the resemblances between the body physiological and the body politic, are any indication, not only of what the latter is, and how it has become what it is, but of what it ought to be, and what it is tending to become, I cannot but think that the real force of the analogy is totally opposed to the negative view of State function.

Spencer’s detailed defence in ‘Specialized administration’ emphasised the sheer range of organic forms in which parts have the autonomy of ‘individuals’. Unplanned but real social satisfactions are created out of individual actions, and by ‘spontaneous co-operation’, omitted by Huxley (1871) and ‘habitually ignored in sociological discussions’, which fulfils men’s ‘sympathetic interests’ (pp. 432–433). ¹¹ Where peaceful ‘industrial’ social relations have evolved and obtain, Spencer (1871) insists on the distinction between legitimate ‘negative’ and illegitimate ‘positive’ regulation (pp. 419–420), adding, on the first, that ‘were the restraining action of the State prompt, effective, and costless to those aggrieved, the pleas put in for positive regulation would nearly all disappear’ (1871: 437). ¹² To the charge of ‘astynomocracy’, support for laissez-faire, Spencer (1871) replied,

Far from contending for a laissez faire policy in the sense which the phrase commonly suggests, I have contended for a more active control of the kind distinguishable as negatively regulative. One of the reasons I have urged for excluding State-action from other spheres, is, that it may become more efficient within its proper sphere.

Sociology, social life and the ‘social organism’

Spencer’s discussion of the ‘social organism’ in his subsequent Principles of Sociology sets the concept in the novel context of ‘super-organic’ evolution. ¹³ Note that references here to the first volume of 1876 are to the third edition of 1893, but there are no changes of subtance between the editions. Although super-organic evolution has come about out of organic evolution, Spencer marks it off from the organic ‘as including all those processes and products which imply the co-ordinated actions of many individuals’ (1893: 4). While other organisms may exhibit super-organic features, such manifestations are uniquely elaborated in human societies, although Spencer insists too that super-organic evolution ‘of the highest order’ arises out of an order no higher than ‘that variously displayed in the animal world at large’ (1893: 7). The factors of ‘super-organic’ evolution are the units themselves with their intrinsic conditions (physical and psychical) and their external conditions (climate, for instance). Both sets of conditions interact. There are also derived factors which social evolution introduces. As a society grows in mass, the more it transforms its environment and the actions and reactions between the community and its members. Other societies form a social environment to which a society must relate. Finally, there are distinctively super-organic products which we commonly think of as artificial but which, ‘philosophically considered, are no less natural than all other products of evolution’ (1893: 12). Spencer here specified features such as culture, tools, language and knowledge, ‘the potency of which can scarcely be over-estimated’ (1893:12). The various factors which he has listed affect action and reaction and modify each other: accompanying a permanent combination of men are

actions and reactions between the community and each member of it, such that either affects the other in nature. The control exercised by the aggregate over its units, tends ever to mould their activities and sentiments and ideas into congruity with social requirements; and these activities, sentiments, and ideas, in so far as they are changed by changing circumstances, tend to re-mould the society into congruity with themselves.

Spencer counts a society an entity because its arrangements, co-ordinated rather than accidental, are relatively permanent. Although a society is formed of discrete units,

a certain concreteness in the aggregate of them is implied by the general persistence of the arrangements among them throughout the area occupied. And it is this trait which yields our idea of a society. For, withholding the name from an ever-changing cluster such as primitive men form, we apply it only where some constancy in the distribution of parts has resulted from settled life.

By 1882, in the ‘political institutions’ division of the Sociology, cooperation rather than co-ordination was emphasised (cooperation now subsuming ‘co-ordination’):

The mere gathering of individuals into a group does not constitute them a society. A society, in the sociological sense, is formed only when, besides juxtaposition there is cooperation … Cooperation, then, is at once that which cannot exist without a society, and that for which a society exists. It may be a joining of many strengths to effect something which the strength of no single man can effect; or it may be an apportioning of different activities to different persons, who severally participate in the benefits of one another’s activities.

A society grows provided that cooperation survives. Exchange develops, permitting specialisation: ‘This division of labour, first dwelt on by political economists as a social phenomenon, and thereupon recognized by biologists as a phenomenon of living bodies … is that which in the society … makes it a living whole’ (1893: 440). The directly physical cooperation of a biological organism may be missing, but language takes its place. Each ‘unit’ has continued to possess a brain, and thus, ‘consciousness is diffused throughout the aggregate: all the units possess the capacities for happiness and misery’ (1893: 449). As emphasised in his 1860 essay, this feature of the ‘social’ organism is a ‘contrast of great significance – a contrast fundamentally affecting our idea of the ends to be achieved by social life’ (1893: 448). It permits a ‘catallaxy’ of interactions and transactions. ¹⁴ The interactions and transactions are made viable by a government maintaining the equal freedom principle, and in such a way that individuals are free to receive the consequences of their conduct, whether pleasurable or painful. ¹⁵ For Spencer (1893), therefore

the welfare of the aggregate, considered apart from that of the units, is not an end to be sought. The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society. It has ever to be remembered that great as may be the efforts made for the prosperity of the body politic, yet the claims of the body politic are nothing in themselves, and become something only in so far as they embody the claims of its component individuals.

Spencer (1893) still saw little prospect of a unified ‘mankind’: ‘in relation to its component individuals, each social aggregate stands for the species. Mankind survives … by survival of its separate societies; each of which struggles to maintain its existence in presence of other societies’ (p. 598). ¹⁷

Spencer also examines the structures and functions associated with social growth. The social ‘germ’ grows through conquest and by autochthonous population increase. The accumulation of unlike parts, heterogeneity, is accompanied by the appearance of co-ordinating structures, which foster the integration of the parts and their sharper differentiation (1893: 459). Each ‘organ’ of a society, such as a university or a port, has, as in an individual organism, its own regulation and supply mechanisms (1893: 466). Once an institution has been developed, the process of reproducing it can become abridged (this he calls ‘direct metamorphosis’, outlined in ‘Transcendental physiology’): universities are now built with all features in place ab initio; and factories appear without a preceding phase of domestic production. Changes of structures, Spencer declares, ‘cannot appear without changes of functions’ (1893: 473), and changes in function often herald changes in structure.

Spencer does not directly address the question of the connection between such super-organic features and spontaneous cooperation. Peel (1971) recognised the potential problem here:

A dangerous distinction is set up between events, the particular doings of men, on the one hand, and the stuff of social change, on the other, to which they are epiphenomenal. The evolution of structures and functions thus becomes ‘reified’.

Certainly, Spencer’s conception of all change in social life (including spontaneous cooperation) is idiosyncratically sclerotic, attributable to his understanding of psychical/physical and social adaptation to circumstances, part of a general process of ‘equilibration’ at work in the world. Spencer’s denial of freedom of will in his Principles of Psychology of 1855 seems to leave no effective scope for genuinely deliberative agency innovation on the part of the ‘units’; whatever appearances suggest, change is caused by what went before or by surrounding conditions. The phenomena associated with ‘co-ordination’ and ‘cooperation’ reflect the adaptive and developmental dynamics of neural structure and function which he had proposed in the Psychology. ¹⁸ This complication, though, does not invalidate the idea of ‘spontaneous’ in the sense of ‘unplanned’. The doings of men are not in this context for Spencer ‘epiphenomenal’, and social structures and functions are not ‘reified’ as in principle external to men’s doings. Spencer’s approach did not raise a problem in principle about taking everyday life seriously, and he himself wrote sociologically at length on beneficence in everyday life, including on how cultural practices and the enabling and constraining dimensions of structures were embedded in its familial and communal hierarchies of obligations and on the potential for the actual practice of beneficence to effect modifications in these features (see Offer, 1999).

There is indeed a helical pattern to Spencerian psychological and social causation: structures and functions are regularities in actions constituted by the outputs of cooperative doings, which then shape these outputs further, with these modifications in turn modifying afresh the structures and functions, whose survival is always a matter not guaranteed. Changes to structures and functions are the outcome of a ‘natural’ process of adaptation between men and circumstances, in which men themselves and their circumstances may alter (objections which Spencer registered against what he called the ‘artificial’ changes made by legislatures remain in force). Spencer could have said, as Marx ([1852] 1934) did, that ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ (p. 10). ¹⁹ There is no contradiction arising from Spencer adhering to his altruistic ‘spontaneous cooperation’ or catallaxy ‘model’ of interaction and to social structures and functions conceived as mutable, as produced and re-produced (Perrin, 1995; Smith, 1981). Stark (1961) believed three sociologies existed in Spencer – social ‘system’, voluntary cooperation and evolving altruism – but there is one, possessing interrelated facets (altruism and ‘social self-consciousness’ are discussed further in the next section of this article, ‘The drifts of criticism’).

The Sociology also introduces an unexpected twist. Having reprised his general evolutionary theory as applied to sociology, Spencer (1893) then insists, as we have come to expect, that there are ‘no analogies between the body politic and a living body, save those necessitated by that mutual dependence of parts which they display in common’: the social organism ‘is not comparable to any particular type of individual organism, animal or vegetal’ (p. 580). However, he then proposes to drop ‘this alleged parallelism between individual organizations and social organizations’. He has used the analogies elaborated, he writes, ‘but as a scaffolding to help in building up a coherent body of sociological inductions. Let us take away the scaffolding: the inductions will stand by themselves’ (1893: 580–581). In an essay of 1896, Spencer again denied that some ‘analogy between animal-structures and social structures is to be taken as the basis for sociological interpretations’ (1896b: 475–476). After all, associated with the idea of the division of labour (originating from social science), there have been two-way influences between biology and social science around the idea of the social organism and, indeed, of ‘organism’.

Societies, then, are ‘organisms’ and thereby a constituent of the natural world, but essentially sui generis in their units, structures and functions (they are therefore ‘super-organisms’). ‘Parallels’ with other organisms have ceased to matter, in accord with the ‘thought experiment’ on organic structures in ‘Transcendental physiology’. For Spencer (1896a), that was sufficient to underpin his project of founding a scientific sociology: ‘nations acquire their vital structures by natural processes and not by artificial devices’ (p. 315). ²⁰ Of course, his resort on this and other occasions to a natural/artificial division is precarious, as Mill (1874) most comprehensively if indirectly argued. ²¹ But Spencer had to demonstrate that a science of social life made sense in an often unsympathetic historical context, and it is hard to see how better to do that than by appeal to a ‘community in the fundamental principles of organization’ in both the actual and the ‘transcendental’ physiology of organisms. It seems probable that Durkheim, with an eye on functions and structures, and who thus made a similar journey on quite different pathways, also recognised this kind of imperative‎. ²²

Certainly, Spencer himself continued to invoke the idea of the social organism. In the third volume of the Sociology of 1896, he repeated that the prevalent idea that society was something ‘made’ was erroneous and could injure the unprompted and smooth workings of spontaneous cooperation (‘without design of anyone’) through its support for ‘positive regulation’. Such injuries inflicted in earlier times had afterwards been ‘healed by social forces which have thereupon set up afresh the normal courses of growth’ (1896a: 316–317). Spencer also used his conception of the ‘social organism’ in his ‘Reflections’ of 1893 to distance himself from Comte’s holistic characterisation of incorporated humanity as the ‘supreme being’. Men are less products of this body than the reverse:

the society is created by its units, and … the nature of its organization is determined by the natures of its units. The two act and re-act; but the original factor is the character of the individuals, and the derived factor is the character of the society. The conception of the social organism necessarily implies this.

Although advanced societies are quite new, and comparatively fluid, any such society ‘inheres in so considerable a degree’ that complete change from one social type to another is impracticable: ‘suddenly-made change is inevitably followed by a reversion, if not to the previous type in its old form, yet to the previous type in a superficially different form’ (in 1904, ii: 466). If institutions can re-make men only gradually, essentially the same constraint furnished by ‘human nature’ applies to men’s re-making of institutions. It takes a deus ex machine such as external aggression to engender a comparatively rapid change.

The drifts of criticism

Huxley, as already shown, judged as unpersuasive Spencer’s version of the organic analogy. But how did other contemporaries respond to ‘society’ conceived as a (quasi-) organic ‘growth’? The Irish economist, John Elliot Cairnes, charged Spencer with neglecting that societies of men become conscious of a corporate existence and as a consequence that ‘the improvement of the conditions of this existence becomes for them an object of conscious and deliberate effort’. To Cairnes (1875), the improvement of conditions ‘is a new social force, wholly different in character from any which had hitherto helped to shape human destiny – wholly different, also, from those influences which have guided the unfolding either of the individual animal or of the species’ (p. 133). Political institutions and private altruism are two ways in which such efforts are made. To describe political institutions and voluntary associations as having ‘grown’ or developed ‘spontaneously’ when they have been ‘deliberately created or adopted by intelligent beings for the precise purpose which they serve’ is objectionable: the use of a word such as ‘grown’ is ‘unwarrantable, and … a cover for fallacious inference’ (1875: 134). Political institutions

are not the ‘products’ of a community in the sense in which the fauna and flora of a country are its products; but are due to causes and to processes of an entirely different kind … to describe them as examples of spontaneous development, and to class them with the ordinary phenomena of organic life, is to use language … fitted to obscure and to confound, rather than to elucidate, the problems of social existence.

Spencer, argued Cairnes (1875), had neglected acts of creation ‘by the human will in the deliberate pursuit of public well-being’ (p. 138). The record of innovation is not explained but explained away by the evasive generalities of ‘the workings-out of sociological processes’ (1875: 139), in which ‘even a philosopher of evolution’ is a ‘conscious automaton’ (1875: 143). Spencer (1873) might well have replied that his conception of individuals as possessing a ‘social self-consciousness’ (p. 291, discussed later in this section) embraced consciousness of a corporate existence. Neutralising other aspects of the critique, though, was possible only if the helical and causal structure of Spencer’s psychological and social explanations of action was in some way compromised. However, by conceding as arbitrary the limits which he insisted the explanations set to change in individuals and societies at any point in time, Spencer would have undermined at a stroke his directional ‘evolutionary’ narrative. This was not a step which he appears have to contemplated.

In contrast, J.A. Hobson and Benjamin Kidd echoed Huxley, finding the idea of the social organism in Spencer materially inadequate. Hobson (1904) thought it perverse to see society as ‘a low-grade organism, without a sensorium’, and which ‘must remain so’ (p. 15). Kidd (1908) devised a holistically spiritual idea of social evolution, convinced that a ‘more organic’ conception of society was gaining currency, changing the relation of evolution to society (p. 24). More warily, in America, H.E. Barnes (1921) noted that, while Spencer’s conception had been ‘roundly criticized by many writers’, with a tension alleged between his organismic analysis and the inference that the state’s regulating structure would wither with social advance, the contrary opinion was ‘hardly more satisfactory’ that ‘the function of government must become more and more all-inclusive’. A state might aim to hasten ‘progress’ through new laws, but there were difficulties: given the present levels of intelligence and moral character among ‘the usual run of the governmental officers in modern political systems, many modern thinkers would rather trust to the efficacy of voluntary organization’ (1921: 40).

In Germany, Ferdinand Tönnies ([1904] 1974) pronounced Spencer’s social organism unimpressive: ‘wanting in clear conception, and unworkable’ (p. 109). His chief objection was that it conflated accidental unity and social unity – a social whole has to be conceived as such by its members. Tönnies failed to prove his point. Spencer (1893) emphasised ‘permanence’ and the presence of ‘cooperation’ and ‘co-ordinated actions’, and interpreted cultural products, as noted above, as social or super-organic phenomena (pp. 12–13). Moreover, Spencer’s (1871) individuals had altruistic feelings and evinced ‘sympathetic interests’ (p. 433). Spencer’s evolutionary outlook could also have challenged the historicity of Tönnies’ binary distinction. Tönnies (1892) in addition questioned the ‘division of labour’ as evidence of the ‘organic’ unity of a particular society; it could owe more to the dynamics of international trade. Neither this point nor Roland Wilson’s (1911) observation that individuals could belong to more than one society, with split interests trumping ties of geographical propinquity (pp. 223–224), was an effective criticism of Spencer’s conception of the social organism.

Tönnies had idealist sympathies. Most idealists were, however, less concerned to demonstrate limited and ‘factual’ shortcomings in Spencer’s conception than, as champions of a collective morality, to stipulate a reconceptualisation of it to serve corporatist ends. While Bernard Bosanquet ([1895] 1997), like Cairnes, may have scorned the application of ‘inadequate conceptions, drawn from the life of plants and of lower animals, to the life of man’, an ‘evil’ for which ‘we have largely to thank Mr. Herbert Spencer’ (pp. 56–57), ²³ Henry Jones (1883), considered it

impossible to separate the welfare of the whole from the welfare of the members, or the welfare of the members from the welfare of the whole. To separate the one from the other is to give independent existence to unreal abstractions and to empty the notion of organic unity of its distinctive content.

An individual has no life ‘except that which is social’; he cannot realise his own purposes

except in realising the larger purposes of society … if we hold to the doctrine and make it more than metaphor, we must recognise that society and individuals actually form such a whole, and that apart from each other they are nothing but names.

In idealist circles, the idea of society as an organism was mutating into a holistic moral or ‘organic’ conception of a communion of souls, uniquely at one, capable of a single and uncontested moral growth: the social organism became a metaphor for ‘society’ as an indivisible collectivity, a united moral force expressing a ‘general will’. It became axiomatic that idealists disparaged Spencer; his explanations and his ‘individualism’ were taken as emblematic of ‘un-social’ social ontology.

More recently, Wiltshire (1978), a critic of Spencer who echoed idealist positions, has insisted that Spencer’s view that a society apart from its units has no feeling or perception ‘substantially contradicts the organic analogy’ (p. 234). The shared error here is that the reality of a social organism for Spencer, simply and legitimately, does not reside in it itself possessing perceptions independent of its members but in the consciousness and experience of all members of the society of each other as members. Between an individual organism and a social organism,

such analogies as exist result from one unquestionable community between the two organizations: there is in both a mutual dependence of parts. This is the origin of all organization; and determines what similarities there are between an individual organism and a social organism.

However, once the true nature of the Spencerian ‘social organism’ is understood, the absence of a reified ‘collective consciousness’ ceases to furnish what Wiltshire (1978) regards as ‘an insuperable barrier to literal acceptance of the social organism’ (p. 235). To regard Spencer’s concept as incomplete or misinformed sidesteps his remarks on organisms and morphology in ‘Transcendental physiology’. Indeed, the allegedly ‘correct’ form of the ‘social organism’ may, as Barnes implied, eliminate individual autonomy.

However, the most often noted critic of Spencer on the social organism has been beyond doubt Durkheim, although his comments follow similar lines to many of those encountered above. As already outlined, in the Principles of Sociology Spencer viewed changes to ‘social organisms’ as the facet of his theory of evolution forming the division super-organic evolution. Spencer himself was clear that, over time and through experience, members of a society develop a sense of themselves and their society: ‘A well-balanced social self-consciousness, like a well-balanced individual self-consciousness, is the accompaniment of a high evolution’ (1873: 291; see also 1859: 140–141). Consciousness of others was in fact beyond doubt an essential constituent of individual social relations in Spencer’s social organism. However, even if Durkheim was at all aware of Spencer’s emphasis on the ‘social self-consciousness’ of individuals, he feared that the ‘social organism’ idea embodied a merely mechanical juxtaposition of individuals which sacrificed l’esprit collectif, excluding ‘a social consciousness of which individual consciousnesses are, at least in part, only an emanation’ (quoted in Thompson, 2002: 4).

In considering Spencer and Durkheim, Ingold has suggested that the word ‘super’ for Spencer

denotes not a transcendence of the organic by an emergent domain of reality but an extension of organization beyond the boundaries of the individual. Spencer’s society was a resultant, not an emergent, containing nothing that was not already prefigured in the properties of its original constituents.

For Spencer, Ingold (1986) continues,

the essence of sociality lies in the association, interaction and co-operation of numerous, discrete individuals, each equipped with a set of purposes in advance of their entry into mutual relations, purposes that must therefore be a property of their constitution as organic things (and in that sense, of their ‘nature’).

For Durkheim, however, Ingold (1986) insists that a society as a super-organism ‘imposes an external constraint on its individual members, overruling and subverting their separate interests to an original purpose – essentially moral rather than psychological – in no way derivable from the general properties of human nature’ (p. 228).

Were Ingold to be read as implying that Spencer denied the claim, advanced within idealist social thought, that being part of a ‘social organism’ presaged a qualitative shift whereby concepts such as the ‘general will’ acquired ontological or moral supervenience, this reading would indeed report Spencer’s position. In fact, though, the nub of Ingold’s criticism is intended to reach deeper, echoing that which Tönnies had expressed in finding Spencer to blur accidental and social unity. However, while ‘mutual relations’, as referred to by Ingold, certainly involved individuals having ‘purposes’ in Spencer’s conception, they also involved the individuals concerned in possessing a social self-consciousness. In an important sense, they have already acquired the ability to be social ahead of the existence of an externally constraining thing called ‘society’. Thus, where Durkheim posits an epistemological rupture in understanding human social life as such, along the lines of idealist social thought, Spencer explicitly does not. This is a key feature which Ingold omits, like Durkheim, Bosanquet, Tönnies and Cairnes. Reason, according to Spencer, has taken us to a knowledge of a ‘self’ and an ultimately unknown ‘not-self’ as a dictum of consciousness, and our experience of relations in something beyond our consciousness of self has given us experience of the consciousness of others and their consciousnesses: a correspondence of thoughts and things has been moulded ‘going through preceding generations’, and which we inherit ‘in the shape of modified organic structures’ (1865: 213). In a society, the life of each ‘unit’ requires some balance of egoism with the interests of others and beneficence:

Were A to be careless of himself, and to care only for the welfare of B, C, and D, while each of these, paying no attention to his own needs, busied himself in supplying the needs of the others; this roundabout process, besides being troublesome, would very ill meet the requirements of each, unless each could have his neighbour’s consciousness. (1873: 183) Indeed in 1859, he detected in his own society ‘a new and better chivalry’

In Spencer’s hands, a society was a special sort of ‘organism’ or organised body, but a society certainly did not specifically require l’esprit collectif before it could be counted as a thing of more substance than ‘a plastic mass’, to be shaped ‘thus or thus at will’ (1884: 137). His nuanced conceptions of ‘super-organic’ evolution and an emerging ‘social self-consciousness’ among cooperating individuals alas registered no interest from Bosanquet, who described Spencer as giving us ‘“a good word” – but a word only – the word “super-organic”’: Bosanquet ([1899] 1920) merely assumed that Spencer’s ‘biological sociology’ was too vulgar to understand ‘the unity of a human commonwealth’ (p. 24).

There is, therefore, a distinction between the social organism regarded as a collectivity and Spencer’s own (legitimate) position that the social organism ‘was an aggregate possessing definite relations which remained comparatively constant while the individuals occupying them changed’ (Taylor, 1992: 165). ²⁵ Spencer’s sociology furnished arguments against collectivist ‘interference’ with the social organism through legislation for positive regulation and direct provision in areas such as education. It supported, however, the growth of an accessible and efficient administration of justice to safeguard well-being against infringements of liberty and to enable the blossoming in each individual of ‘social self-consciousness’ (1873: 291). The message twinned a prospect of gradual, ‘natural’ change with a critique of the counter-productiveness of legislation on social and economic relations infringing the liberty principle. When government does more than protect freedom and administer ‘justice’, it hinders the working, and the evolution (ultimately directional for Spencer), of society. Spencer’s claim that this constituted an interference with ‘nature’ is a deplorable analytical weakness, however, trading on an evaluative use of ‘nature’ when in a descriptive sense each action is as ‘natural’ as another. So too, as Cairnes noted, is his deterministic approach to agency with its denial of freedom of the will. Yet, both features inflicted at worst merely peripheral damage to the legitimacy of his basic ‘social organism’ conception and the fundamentals of his conception of sociality as cooperation.

Conceptions of societies as organisms have commonly been associated with social reformist, authoritarian or Burkean conservative social and political arrangements. This connection is not a necessary one: the social organism idea could be legitimately formulated to point otherwise. This Spencer does, arguing that since social individuals have consciousness, there is in society no social sensorium. Gray (1996) has expounded the coherence of his position:

Spencer enunciated a conception of individualism which was opposed to collectivism, not to social organicism; and he enunciated a conception of social organicism which was opposed to mechanism, not to individualism. The general consistency of Spencer’s position is made clear by the additional facts that his ‘true’ model of individualism was opposed to mechanism, and his ‘true’ model of organicism was opposed to collectivism. At the root of the critics’ misinterpretation of Spencer’s theory was their mistaken assumptions that the ‘opposite’ of individualism was organicism, and that the ‘opposite’ of ‘organicism’ was individualism. The truth is, however, that if there is an ‘opposite’ of individualism it is collectivism, not organicism, and if there is an ‘opposite’ of organicism, it is mechanism not individualism. Spencer consistently developed an individualistic/organicist theory, and consistently opposed it to a collectivist/mechanistic theory.

Indeed, Spencer himself asserted that it was an error to see ‘society’ as a ‘manufacture’ (1884: 136), ‘incorporated humanity’ was not, he emphasised, ‘so much dough which the cook can mould as she pleases into pie-crust, or puff, or tartlet’(1884: 137). A society has a structure ‘which is in a sense organic’ (1884: 136); it was indeed a mistake to see it as ‘a plastic mass’ (1884: 137).

For Spencer, a society – or social organism – was only likely to be stable if it followed, initially implicitly and later explicitly, the law of equal freedom. In the absence of this principle, which provided the sole rationale for governments in the absence of external aggression, cooperation could not survive. A growth in population and a division of labour brought into being nascent institutions or structures with functions to perform, but although these came to frame and enable social life, they were themselves mutable as changes occurred in the activities generated by sociality through spontaneous cooperation and the concomitant adaptation to circumstances. Spencer ([1899] 1911) was also aware that social life could to varying degrees serve to coerce spontaneous cooperation; the essential point of his signature contrasts between regimented ‘militant’ and unforced and cooperative ‘industrial’ types of social life (pp. 567–578). It was the idea of the ‘social organism’, nuanced and multi-layered, and not an ‘abuse’ of the ‘true’ analogy as often alleged, which carried Spencer to this point.

On why Spencer still matters

Having revisited the history of sociological theory as a precondition for retrieving Spencer, the question arises of whether he could still contribute to the development of ‘current systematics’ (Merton, 1968: 38). One answer ensues from a consideration of John Urry’s treatment of Spencer’s social organism as an ‘Aunt Sally’, which proves to be an own goal. In an important study, Urry (2000) portrays sociology abandoning as redundant ‘its central concept of human “society”’ (p. 3): ‘societal’ boundaries have crumbled, with ‘new global flows and networks’ generating ‘a new functional requirement’ for states to ‘regulate their immense consequences’, a globally generated functional requirement which ‘is transforming states’ (2000: 17). Emergent globalism shows ‘constant disorder and disequilibrium’ (2000: 208), with states trying to regulate global providers of services (2000: 198) and the ‘diverse mobilities that transform civil societies and the character of nation-states’ (2000: 195).

Urry (2000) quickly eliminates Spencer from any attempt to rescue from ‘redundancy’ the concept of society for the entirely spurious reason, that his social organism defines the workings of the social body as ‘analogous to those of the human body’ (p. 23). ²⁶ The rejection turns ironic, however, once what is Spencer’s lexicon resurfaces in Urry’s own interpretation of the ‘new’ world order: ‘regulation’, ‘functional requirement’, ‘flow’ and ‘disequilibrium’. Moreover, Spencer’s social organism was not only about structure, morphology and equilibria but also about mobility, mutability, porosity, inosculation and unplanned ordering. Nemesis thus confronts Urry: his analysis of the global whole and the allied refocusing of sociology could be framed, perhaps more expressively, in the spirit of Spencer’s scaffolding, the social organism. Urry’s hubristic conception of Spencer’s thought as the antithesis of his own thesis captures the cost of neglect.

Conceptual matters associated with those troubling Spencer about societies thus remain topical. Sympathetic critical engagement with the historical rather than a mythical Spencer would have fortified Urry’s analysis. My point about Urry, though, may be taken as a preface to a ‘larger’ answer to the question of the continued relevance of Spencer on the social organism which impinges on a more general dilemma of theory. Laland and Brown (2002) have urged that ‘the findings of biology and social science will need to be compatible’ if either is ‘to rate as satisfactory’ (p. 316). If the findings are incompatible, there is something amiss with them. In no aspect of our social lives can it be meaningful to claim we are exempted from acting in accord with laws of nature, provided that they truly are such laws. Although in everyday life and in social theory the world of ‘nature’ is often contrasted with the world of ‘social life’, social life is part of nature. Unique as reflexivity maybe as a feature, it is a part of what there is, nature. Spencer’s realisation of this point makes him a figure of enduring importance to social theory. He avoided any divisive doctrine of human exceptionalism by insisting that a society and the social life it contained formed what he described as an organism, although not in a sense reducible to the form of any single extant type of organism. Sociology and psychology were construed not as reducible to but complementary to biological science in respect of the understanding of societies and their social life and cultural practices.

Spencer insisted also, as discussed early in the section ‘Spencer and the “social organism” in 1860’, on the need to study the actions and reactions between the ‘social units’ themselves, whether acting individually or as members of a community, and the actions and reactions involved in the transformation of the environment and contacts with other societies. ²⁷ Most accounts of what Spencer understood by the ‘social organism’ also omit these dimensions. Within the present discussion, it is possible only to signal a few ways in which attention to this agenda, crucially featuring cooperation, innovation and mutable institutions as hallmarks of social life, might prove of value. Spencer’s work along these lines recognised that in whatever ways existing features of a particular social organism might be said to have been caused, the causes did not of themselves guarantee their survival in a world which, as he generally accepted, was without Design. Spencer’s sociology as set out in his Principles of Sociology presented an ‘evolving’ ‘natural history’ of societies and social practices, sometimes involving elements of a quasi-Darwinian selectionism (which he made use of subsequent to the appearance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in his Origin of Species of 1859). ²⁸ The reality of Spencer’s own perspective on innovation and its sources, and the uncertainty of outcomes, deserves to be revisited sympathetically in the analysis of the history of sociology and as a potentially fruitful complement to recent conceptual work directly or indirectly engaged on enlarging ‘selectionist’ theory to encompass social life. ²⁹ The conceptual work in question includes the development of Darwinian selectionist approaches to the innovation, survival and extinction of social practices, as in Runciman’s (1997) analysis of the descent with modification of forms of economic, ideological and political power (Offer, 2010b), and the theory of rational choice and its outcomes as developed by Coleman (1990). Spencer’s approach may also merit some attention in connection with specific work in evolutionary sociology on gene-culture coevolution in which genetically enabled but not necessarily determined cultural practices and social relations appear to influence natural selection pressure in societies, speeding up or retarding rates of genetic change and generating group selection of a cultural variation as a new pressure (Boyd and Richerson, 1985, 2005; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981; Laland and Brown, 2002).

It may be noted finally that Spencer had views on the difficulties for sociology in understanding ‘social organisms’ which resonate across the decades. Sociology was an especially taxing discipline, demanding a plasticity of mind and breadth of experiences to comprehend cultural diversity (1873: 132–33) and the ‘classes’ and ‘sub-classes’ (1873: 59) into which social organisms may be divided. It was easy to underestimate the myriad complexities of the social organism (1873: 132) and the associated range of freedoms, cooperations and restraints of ‘incorporated human nature’ (1873: 60). He also recognised that ordinary people themselves theorise about their own society, although under constraints: the individual citizen, who is

imbedded in the social organism as one of its units, moulded by its influences, and aiding reciprocally to re-mould it, furthering its life while enabled by it to live, cannot so emancipate himself as to see things around him in their real relations.

Conclusion

Jonathan Turner (1985) believes that in ignoring Spencerian sociology, a great deal of time has been wasted rediscovering it; ‘it would be more efficient to examine it firsthand’ (p. 153). Insofar as the Spencerian ‘social organism’ is concerned, there is merit in this opinion. It is much more perceptive than the judgement that Spencer ‘can rightly be considered to have become a spent force after his death (if not before)’ (Crow, 2005: 67). This article has argued that generations of critics have pilloried Spencer for writing things which he did not write. Instead, his conception of the social organism was in principle a plausible combination into one model of the ideas of spontaneous cooperation and relatively permanent but mutable social structures. For Spencer this was foundational to understanding social life. It was inspired by cross-disciplinary reflection on the cutting-edge biological controversies of the day arising from the apparently boundless diversity of organic forms and physiology. Interpreted within the framework of his ‘transcendental physiology’, Spencer’s ‘social organism’ is rediscovered as a worthwhile contribution to sociology.