The degradation of the analytic-synthetic method in Herbert Spencer’s sociology

Introduction

Not much is known about those components of science – hypotheses, theories, concepts, questions, methods, procedures, technical objects, instruments – which instead of magnifying its effervescence and grandeur, weigh it down by their undesirable tenacity that sometimes prefers to go unnoticed. While the ‘death’ or, occasionally, the ‘obsolescence’ of ‘scientific objects’ and their ‘concepts’ have aroused some interest among historians and philosophers of science, processes of decay and degradation in the sciences remain largely overlooked. ¹ One would thus agree with Auguste Comte when he observed, in 1841, that the ‘spectacle of destruction’ inspires ‘philosophical repugnance’ (Comte, 1841: 508) . . . To choose Herbert Spencer’s sociology, his ‘method’, to describe the phenomenon of degradation is to choose a complex case. But to elucidate it is to reveal at least some of the ingenuity for which the processes of degradation at work in the sciences might be admired.

Spencer did quite a lot to make his readers believe that there is a method in his philosophical system. The impressive System of Synthetic Philosophy is perfectly ordered: each of the four main disciplines it covers is approached by an initial section devoted to the ‘data’ (The Data of Biology, The Data of Psychology, The Data of Sociology, The Data of Ethics), after which the ‘inductions’ are presented (The Inductions of Biology, The Inductions of Psychology, The Inductions of Sociology, The Inductions of Ethics). Specific studies on phenomena belonging to selected research areas follow – in the field of sociology, on which we will be hereafter focusing in the present text, six sections are thus devoted respectively to ‘domestic relations’, ‘ceremonial institutions’, ‘political institutions’, ‘ecclesiastical institutions’, ‘professional institutions’ and ‘industrial institutions’. The systematic use of an inductive-deductive method seems therefore to emerge from the table of contents of the System, which, precisely as a system, comes markedly close to the form that could be expected to emerge from the observance of the Whewellian principle of ‘consilience of inductions’. ² In other words, Spencer seems to be using the particular sciences that his work embraces simply as independent grounds for validating the hypotheses (and above all the hypothesis of evolution) set out as early as in his 1862 First Principles.

The aim of the present paper is to show that this somehow commonsensical interpretation of Spencer’s method does not hold water. I will suggest instead that it is the analytic-synthetic method, that is, the method that some two centuries earlier Thomas Hobbes had prided himself on having introduced into ‘civil philosophy’, that finds in Spencer’s sociology one of its last expressions. Not in its best shape though: it will be argued that Spencer’s sociology provides us with a striking illustration of the degradation of a method that was badly damaged by its sociological modernisation.

This somewhat unorthodox, but ultimately simple thesis is complicated by the fact that it may not be immediately clear what is actually meant by ‘method’. This is a serious philosophical problem on its own in which, in addition, sociologists of scientific knowledge have significantly intervened by pointing out the unsystematic features of the scientific practice they study in an empirical fashion. Let us put it therefore clearly from the outset that the purpose of the present paper is not to reconstruct Spencer’s way of doing sociology, his actual research-practice being out of our reach. Instead, it is concerned with Spencer’s texts. It is thus obvious that the degradation of analytical method cannot consist in any worsening of the method’s application (for, adequate or not, such ‘application’, if there is one, would concern scientific practice). One can also be sure that the concept of degradation, however intuitive it may be at this stage, cannot avoid implying an act of comparison. Now practices having been put aside, it is necessarily with the analytical method’s prescriptions that Spencer’s own performance needs to be compared. And his performance has to be, again, a prescription, even if not necessarily having the form of a systematised ‘method discourse’.

Herbert Spencer, who did not formulate any articulated methodological doctrine, attests rather straightforwardly to the inappropriateness of tying all prescription to methodological doctrine. ³ But there is no need to engage in Spencerian Studies in order to cast off such a restrictive conception that seems to have been definitively ruined since the ‘new’ history and sociology of science turned its attention to the role of material, social and literary technologies (Shapin and Schaffer, 2011) upon which sciences rely. The idea that rules and regularities of the ‘scientific game’ speak from multiple sites ⁴ is nowadays widely accepted. The efforts of the present study to identify such prescriptions scattered in Spencer’s texts do not strive to surprise anybody.

Backed or not with an explicit method-doctrine, scholarly texts too deliver a ‘method discourse’: they present knowledge claims, support them with justifications and seek to eliminate alternatives (Suppe, 1998). Preserving the method from confusion with scientist’s practice allows recognising its essentially interactional character. In the analysis that follows, a method will be regarded as a regulatory device that prescribes the type, nature and extent of counter-arguments the potential critics are authorised to call up, and that nourishes the ‘scientific game’ by the sense of which one allows oneself to be carried along. ⁵

The case study of Spencer’s method in this paper pursues two main goals. Firstly, it is intended as a contribution to the epistemological study of Spencer’s work (the sociological part of it, as expressed mainly in his Principles of Sociology), the result of which will be to substantially alter the picture of how Spencer’s sociology ‘works’. Second, Spencer’s case is presented here as an example of a largely unnoticed phenomenon the significance of which in the dynamics of science, studied mainly by historians and philosophers, has so far been unrecognised – namely, the degradation of the scientific method. More generally, the account of the erosion of the analytic-synthetic method this paper provides can be understood as an invitation to consider other cases of ‘degradation’ of scientific elements that challenge their own rejection and survive, be it only temporarily, attempts of their dismantling.

The method of dealing (or not dealing) with Spencer’s method

The recurrent accusation that Spencer’s work is ‘ideological’ has made it seem more suitable for socio-historical than epistemological analysis, which accordingly remains scarce. The meaning of the accusation has nonetheless varied over time, and if for some it eventually pushed Spencer’s philosophy beyond the reach of epistemological scrutiny, it has also had a damaging impact on those examinations of Spencer’s work that continue to seek to understand its epistemic pattern. The few observations that follow do not in any way represent a historical overview of attempts to understand Spencer’s work methods. They merely indicate Spencer’s drift beyond epistemological relevance. Many implicitly assume that in order to restore this relevance, Spencer’s scientificity needs first to be rehabilitated; here I argue that this assumption is overmuch inhibiting.

When, in his Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Émile Durkheim criticised Spencer for substituting ‘ideological analysis’ for the ‘science of realities’, his judgement was based mainly on methodological considerations. Durkheim believed Spencer’s empirical research to be subservient to preconceptions that engaged with empirical facts only for the sake of illustration. For him, Spencer’s approach was ‘ideological’ in preferring the ‘development of ideas’ to the insights that unfettered empirical work could provide. Notwithstanding his apparent empiricism, according to this view Spencer did not succeed in advancing his sociology beyond the ‘ideological phase’ that Durkheim believed all sciences needed to pass through (Durkheim, 2007: 15–31).

This judgement would reverberate down the generations, and not only among Spencer’s detractors. Although trained in the school of Spencer’s sociology, Charles H. Cooley, for example, did not hesitate, on the centenary of Spencer’s birth, to recall Spencer’s curious intellectual self-sufficiency and to draw attention to the fragility of Spencer’s working methods:

[Darwin] collected facts and drew a theory from them, while Spencer spun a theory from any material he happened to have and collected facts to illustrate it. Hence, in spite of his ingenuity, he was far less original, less solid, less truly the man of science than his contemporary. The inquiring young man will not long remain content with Spencer if he has any gift for direct observation. He will presently discover that the light which seems so clear is not daylight but an artificial illumination of a theory; that the array of facts are but illustrations of the theory; and that the assertions do not stand the test of real life.

(Cooley, 2000: 12)

Such criticism, levelled against a man who honoured the facts to the point of inducing in even sympathetic readers impatience with the profusion of his empirical observations, is devastating. ⁶ That Spencer’s use of empirical material became so unavoidable an issue in the secondary literature must be seen as an indelible stain on his scientific reputation – a reputation that is all the more exposed to question because this methodological infirmity seems to work in favour of the political agenda that Spencer never sought to conceal.

The criticism of Spencer pointing the finger at his particular treatment of empirical material has therefore smoothly flowed into the denunciation of the ‘ideological’ character of his work, understood this time in its more customary political sense. A relatively recent text (2003) co-authored by John Holmwood and Maureen O’Malley for the Handbook of Historical Sociology, offers a profound elucidation of this conflation (Holmwood and O’Malley, 2003). Questioning the foundations of Spencer’s binary typology of societies – an issue that we will discuss later in some detail – these authors go beyond the usual comments on Spencer’s curious management of empirical observations and argue that there was nothing random about the way Spencer used his data:

Spencer is notorious for discarding many items that provided counter-examples to his classifications with the justification they were “incidental” rather than “essential” pieces of evidence, or for accepting travellers’ narratives with little substantiation simply because they fit the typologies (. . .). These failings are part of a bigger problem, in which sociological typologies are derived from a priori categories and ruled by a developmental logic (. . .). The whole scheme becomes simply a template to be applied to the historical record.

(Holmwood and O’Malley, 2003: 45)

The two types of society that Spencer distinguishes – military and industrial society – were thus in no way generated from duly analysed empirical data. Holmwood and O’Malley argue that Spencer instead organised his typology around freedom, a value said to be particularly close to his heart (military society finding its principle in coerced cooperation, industrial society in spontaneous cooperation). This highly politicised principle also imposed a hierarchical order on this simple classification and an implication of progress on social dynamics (history naturally pushes societies toward the industrial type): ‘The key functionalist question Spencer asked throughout his evolutionary analyses was, therefore, not “how does it function to achieve order?”, but, “how does it function to achieve freedom?”’ (Holmwood and O’Malley, 2003: 44)

Spencer, the great proponent of radical liberalism (The Man versus the State published in 1884 can be read as one of its manifestos), is thus ultimately perceived as an ideologue in his ‘science’. One might then say that it is no surprise that he disappeared from the intellectual scene that he had dominated so utterly for over three decades, just at the point when political liberalism faded away and ‘the somewhat messianic mood of optimism from 1860–1880s England’ dissipated (Becquemont and Ottavi, 2011: 26). ⁷

Here we come very close to Spencer’s eviction from the subject matter of epistemology – a routine act of demarcation maintenance one might say, succinctly illustrated by the classic French ‘historical epistemologist’ Georges Canguilhem. To observe that reading Herbert Spencer was certainly never a priority for Canguilhem, and that one might well question his degree of knowledge of Spencer’s work, would be irrelevant in this context. For the point is precisely the decision that for an épistémologue, Spencer is not good to think with. Let us first consider Canguilhem’s general view, which does not depart much from what has been said earlier:

Following Spencer’s path of thought in the progressive development of his work, it appears that von Baer’s biology first, then Darwin, provided him with a scientific guarantee for an engineering project in nineteenth-century English industrial society: the legitimization of free enterprise, of corresponding political individualism and of competition. The law of differentiation ends by supporting the individual against the state. But, if it ends there explicitly, it may be that it began implicitly there.

(Canguilhem, 2000: 42)

Canguilhem was clearly not much impressed by Spencer’s synthetic philosophy; he regarded its biological language as largely unconvincing. Seen in this light Spencer was invoked by Canguilhem to provide substance for his conception of ‘scientific ideology’, understood as a ‘discursive formation that pretends to be a theory’ while its unreality ‘reveals itself by the fact, and this very fact alone, that a [true] science will essentially establish itself in [its] critique’ (Canguilhem, 2000: 35). Any scientific ideology must perish – and indeed, Spencer’s will perish: ‘an ideology disappears when its conditions of historical possibility have changed’ (Canguilhem, 2000: 43).

Although not astounding at first sight, this claim is paradoxical in the context of Canguilhem’s attempt to include ‘scientific ideologies’ in the realm of the expertise of epistemology. Latour (1996) rightly observes that Canguilhem’s position is here stubbornly ‘asymmetrical’. Scientifically deficient because ‘ideological’, Spencer’s ‘philosophy’ eventually slides out of reach of epistemology and lends itself instead to the sociological type of explanation. When he erases the question of how a scientific ideology is ‘dismissed’ in favour of the search for the causes of its retreat, Canguilhem the épistémologue capitulates.

In the face of the plentiful expert examinations of Spencer’s thought in the secondary literature, Canguilhem’s assessment might seem rather marginal. It is remarkable, however, for its almost punitive exclusion of Spencer’s philosophy from the scope of epistemology on grounds of scientific impurity. Correspondingly, when the scientific nature of Spencer’s method becomes the paramount issue even among those who agree to give it closer consideration, the end result is the serious impoverishment of the epistemological analysis. ⁸

Valerie A. Haines’s 1992 paper on ‘Spencer’s Philosophy of Science’ is the only study of Spencer’s general methodology to be included in the four-volume Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, compiled by J. Offer in 2000 (Haines, 1992). This has enhanced the visibility of Haines’s claim that Spencer would have adhered to the ‘canon of good science’ that William Whewell, John Herschel and John Stuart Mill are said to share despite their differences and even personal quarrels. According to this canon, science is a hypothetical-deductive system based on principles that can be described as follows:

[T]he whole of natural philosophy consists entirely of a series of inductive generalizations, commencing with the most circumstantially stated particulars, and carried up to universal laws, or axioms, which comprehend in their statements every subordinate degree of generality, and of a corresponding series of inverted reasoning from generals to particulars, by which these axioms are traced back into their remotest consequences, and all particular propositions deduced from them; as well those by whose immediate consideration we rose to their discovery, as those of which we had no previous knowledge.

(Herschel quoted in Haines, 1992: 131)

Haines argues for a ‘pro-scientific interpretation’ of Spencer’s philosophy, in contrast to those who identify ‘metaphysical principles’ in the two great universal laws that he formulated – the law of the persistence of force and the general law of evolution. ⁹ Haines is categorical on this point: it is as hypotheses supported by the ‘joining of deductive proof with inductive proof’ (Haines, 1992: 134) that these basic laws are uncovered. To back up her line of argument Haines eventually turns to Spencer’s sociology, asserting that the condition for the latter’s being complete is that it seeks not only to reach proximate-causal explanations, but also to explain these in a non-metaphysical way, that is, through ultimate causal explanations.

Significantly, Haines offers no in-depth analysis of the Principles of Sociology, or Spencer’s other sociological texts. And in a way, she does not need to do so. Her characterisation of Spencer’s sociological modus operandi at the end of her study is not driven by the aspiration to understand Spencer’s sociological work; instead, it is hostage to Haines’s exclusive interest in the scientific character of Spencer’s general ‘method’. Sociology’s goal of generating empirically verified laws of ‘co-existence and sequence’, its empirical commitment, its selection of hypotheses on the ground of their agreement with observations, and its use of Mill’s methods when searching for causes through comparison of social institutions, are said to be the principles forming the ‘sociological rules’ that ‘logically follow’ from the general conception of good science (Haines, 1992: 139). It is conceivable that they do, but how does this explain Spencer’s sociological texts? Does Haines speak about some sociology other than the one Spencer’s written work delivers?

Symptoms of another method

One simple move immediately frees us from the belief that Spencer’s method, if used properly, is unproblematic: this is to accept the existence of the first 450 pages of The Principles of Sociology. The systematic neglect, not to say refoulement, of the whole Part I of this work is a significant anomaly. ¹⁰ The ‘primitive man’ who – under the heading of ‘sociological data’ – is the sole object of these long pages would appear to be an obvious contravention of Spencer’s alleged argument that ‘lawful relations can be discovered only through the systematic study of empirically observable phenomena’ (Haines, 1992: 139). Instead, the silent and persistent sidelining of this part of Spencer’s sociology has turned it into a mystery.

The very idea of theoretically constructed ‘primitive man’ is the first sign that Spencer’s full method hasn’t yet been properly understood. No less puzzling, and pointing in the same direction, are two other features of his sociology: The first is the curious historical dualism that, against the background of an a priori continuous evolutionism, frames the history of man in terms of two types of historically and morally hierarchised society. The second is Spencer’s intriguing use of the survival of the fittest principle that he makes intervene far beyond the explanations of how the evolution actually proceeds.

The hostile appropriation of the analytical method

The ‘symptoms’ identified above (the theoretically constructed ‘primitive man’, the dualistic classification of societies, and the particular use of the survival of the fittest principle) would not deserve their name if they were grouped together simply because they conflict with common views of Spencer’s sociological work. ²⁰ It is possible, however, to embrace them in a structure that can give each of them a precise place in the grammar of Spencer’s sociology. A degree of unorthodoxy is a price worth paying.

When Haines sought to show that Spencer’s philosophy was guided by the hypothetico-deductive method, she deliberately offered a pro-scientific reading, defending Spencer from the charge of ‘metaphysics’. However, when hypothetico-deductivism is presented in too general a form (which Haines adopted in the interests of conciliation), then ‘metaphysics’, if we wish to stick to the expression, can perhaps sneak in. We propose the hypothesis that Spencer’s Principles of Sociology actually expresses a scientific model with an equivocal status and indefinite age. The analytic-synthetic method, dominant in the British life sciences through the first half of the 19th century (Elwick, 2007), and solemnly introduced into the field of social science by Thomas Hobbes some 200 years earlier, seems to us to make more sense of the Principles of Sociology and its apparently enigmatic aspects than the general paradigm of hypothetico-deductivism. At the least, this new interpretative frame manages to absorb some of Spencer’s ambiguities – signs not of his personal intellectual shortcomings or even ideology, but of the dynamism of the cognitive norms with which he was surrounded and which he was furthering in his own way.

This idea is certainly counter-intuitive. To anyone who knows how unimpressed Spencer was by the famous but outmoded philosopher of the social contract and Leviathan, their possible alliance, however distant it may be, must sound utterly improbable. ²¹ Only a relatively small number of references to Hobbes punctuate Spencer’s work, and they are almost all negative. ²² As early as in Social Statics (1851), Spencer subjected (mainly Rousseau’s) contractualism to a ‘battery of fatal objections’ (Spencer, 1851: 200–202) which would be re-used, with a few additions, 30 years later in The Man Versus the State (Spencer, 1884), this time in order to attack Hobbes in particular, guilty of excessive state paternalism and a fanciful philosophical anthropology.

The conflict appears indeed profound. By placing constraint (the modus vivendi of military society) anterior to contract (industrial society), Spencer’s sociology separates what Hobbesian contractualism once united, and emancipates the contract as the functional double of coercive power. Newly conceived as two alternative techniques able to guarantee cooperation between individuals, and hence the integration of society, constraint and contract could now be ordered on a time axis. In this way, Spencer’s sociology devises a release from Leviathan, the Mortal God (Hobbes, 1651a: §13, 114) whom Hobbes could see no real way around. Because of the growing affirmation of the contract regime, the state – as the embodied constraint and pillar of ‘military’ social organisation – would be doomed to extinction. For Spencer the sociologist, Hobbes had told only half the story.

Yet it is not unprecedented in the history of science for the correction of a theory to actually confirm it in some of its fundamental aspects. Hobbes sought recognition as the founder of a ‘civil philosophy’, which he wished to render scientific by adopting for it an analytical (analytic-synthetic) method inspired by the ‘geometers’. ²³ Spencer, for his part, never acknowledged any methodological debt to Hobbes, nor did he claim anywhere – with one important exception, which we shall discuss later – that he used analysis as a working method. In spite of all that – this is what our hypothesis claims – he formally reproduced (or, perhaps, just re-produced), albeit with important distortions, Hobbes’s pattern.

It is important to state clearly right away that Spencer does not scrupulously imitate Hobbes’s approach, and it is far from my intention to present him as a disciple of Hobbes. Given the uncertainty of the contours of the Hobbesian analytical paradigm, to make such a claim would need historical evidence that is not in the focus of this paper. As much as the commentators agree that Hobbes’s approach is analytic (analytic-synthetic), its precise characterisation, its purported geometric source, and the relationship between the prescribed method (developed notably in De Corpore) and its inscription (to be sought in Leviathan for instance ²⁴ ) continue to be matters of debate (Sacksteder, 1980, 1982, 1988; Talaska, 1988a, 1988b). Although for all these reasons accepting Hobbesian ‘analysis’ as a point of reference may seem problematic, it can still be found convenient to rely on a ‘model’ that has the advantage of a historical primacy (with regard to social philosophy), a high degree of explicit theorisation, and a field of application that it shares with Spencer’s sociology.

It is mainly in his De Corpore (Hobbes, 1655) that Hobbes provides a theory of the analytic-synthetic method and thereby offers himself and others an epistemic norm, based on the geometrical paradigm deemed fully rigorous, to be judged and through which to judge. ‘Analysis’ is characterised in this work as reasoning from a supposedly true proposition, or from an unknown but given object, whose ‘efficient cause’ is sought so that a reconstructive movement can be undertaken. ‘Analysis’ proper, also equated to a process of ‘subtraction’, is thus always followed by ‘synthesis’, which is conceived as demonstrative, and as such also as a ‘teaching method’. Hobbes sees this two-step process as the only truly rigorous procedure through which all philosophy, and thus also the examination of human affairs can be rendered scientific (Weinberger, 1975).

We might wonder whether the indeterminacy in which the terms of addition (for synthesis) and subtraction (for analysis) are left is not, after all, preferable to the false clarity of another conceptual pair with which the analytic-synthetic approach is usually associated: that of decomposition and recomposition. Although these are not terms that Hobbes would have used, he sometimes seems to get very close:

Everything is best understood by its constitutive causes. For as in a watch, or some small engine, the matter, figure, and motion of the wheels cannot well be known, except it be taken insunder and viewed in parts; so to make a more curious search in the rights of states and duties of subjects; it is necessary, I say, not to take them insunder, but yet that they be so considered as if they were dissolved; that is, that we rightly understand what the quality of human nature is, in what matter it is, in what not, fit to make up civil government, and how men must be agreed amongst themselves that intend to grow up into a well-grounded state.

(Hobbes, 1651b: xiv)

This famous portrait of a philosopher imitating the mechanic trying to understand the workings of a clock has the indisputable merit of aptly conveying the idea that decomposition followed by recomposition – which cannot be realised without a rule for its progression – produces knowledge. To consider the material, the figure and the movement of each piece, is to better know the clock, which ceases to be a ‘black box’. Yet, suggestive and accessible as it may be, the metaphor is inevitably unconvincing to the reader of Hobbes’s civil philosophy. For in reality, civil society ‘dissolved’, and even a civil society only considered as if it were dissolved, does not resemble a dismantled engine awaiting the good will of its repairman to be recomposed.

In Leviathan (Hobbes, 1651a), man in his original condition is not presented as a mere component of the state among others, but as the origin of civil society, its principle. Deprived, by the subtractive analysis, of his civil society, the original man (in fact, men) is driven to reconstruct it by an internal necessity, indivisibly psychological (as for what impels the synthesis) and logical (as for the rule of deduction it is governed by). This inner spur is obviously lacking in the scattered wheels and springs of a clock. ²⁵

This spontaneous movement towards society is actually something we meet again in Spencer’s narration. With a distance of 200 years the similarity between men in their natural state as imagined by Hobbes, and primitive men as reconstructed by Spencer, might at first sight seem amusing rather than significant. ²⁶ It is, however, amusing and significant. And it is also somehow perplexing because of the way the original man is reached by the one and by the other. For the first acts of their plays obviously diverge in nature. In Hobbes’s Leviathan, the analytical movement proper is not recorded: according to Hobbes, only the synthesis demonstrates and merits presentation. ²⁷ By contrast, it is tempting to seek in Spencer’s laborious reconstruction of the nature of primitive man a long demonstration carried by the principle of the survival of the fittest, in charge of selecting comparatively advantageous human qualities and ensuring their progeny. Instead of explaining progress, this principle is mobilised by Spencer as a key to the History that he needs to read backwards. A generator – quite undisciplined in fact – of hypothetical facts that anthropological observations were called upon to verify (or, at any rate, not to hinder), the principle of survival of the fittest gives Spencer’s analytical movement (going ‘back’ from political society to its constitutive elements) an appearance of rigour to which Hobbes did not aspire. This did not save Hobbes from criticisms, however, some of them becoming famous:

Finally, all of them, talking incessantly about need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride, transported to the state of Nature, ideas that they had taken in society; They spoke of the Savage Man and they painted the Civil Man.

(Rousseau, 1755: 132)

Although Spencer tries hard not to fall into the same trap as Hobbes and the ‘Philosophers’ that Rousseau repeatedly blames for their anachronisms, his primitive man pushes him to follow a Hobbesian scenario: In the ‘beginning’ man trembles with fear of his fellow human beings, living or dead, and this fear drives him, despite his inherently anti-social nature, to build a society. ²⁸

The point is worth underlining: The two authors share more than converging accounts of first men; they share the same starting point for what comes next, that is, the ‘historical’ reconstruction (synthesis) of society. This identical epistemological status that they accord the original men is far more remarkable than their common misanthropy.

In 1651 but also in 1874, the same starting point gives birth to History: the inception of (social) evolution with Spencer, the history-like demonstration with Hobbes. In both cases, the (re)construction of society and the state is irresistible, governed as it (supposedly) is by two rules of synthesis: the compelling deduction triggered by man’s desire for self-preservation (Hobbes), and the law of evolution to which every organised system is subjected (Spencer).

The need for a rule to govern the movement of the synthesis is something implied by Hobbes’s clock metaphor, if only tacitly. Even the task of repairing a disassembled clock requires a good mechanic, that is, someone who knows in what order the spare parts need to be pieced together. A rule of this kind will typically be provided by the manufacturer’s instructions, or the clockmaker’s experience, indicating the sequence of ‘additions’ to be made. In another context, the same idea appears when, in the Leviathan, the synthesis is likened to a causal chain (Hobbes, 1651a: §17, 31) or, in De Corpore, to a series of syllogisms. ²⁹

Spencer begins by following the Hobbesian path: with his ‘militant’ type of society, he reaches the point attained by Hobbes two centuries before him, that is, an oppressive state and a dominated citizen. And he does so through a deductive style of reasoning not dissimilar to that of Hobbes. The category of military society, which analytically precedes that of industrial society (see above), constitutes in fact a first logical response to the problem posed by the fundamentally asocial primitive man. On at least one occasion, Spencer put it bluntly: ‘the nature of the organization which accompanies chronic militancy, [is] capable of being inferred a priori and proved a posteriori to exist in numerous cases’ (Spencer, 1882: §547, 568). ³⁰ In a word, the specific nature of primitive man requires the first society to be coercive. Contrary to all appearances, then, continuity is not really interrupted between the ‘data’ and the ‘inductions of sociology’, which when radically separated reduce primitive man to a mere prologue to Spencer’s properly sociological enterprise.

However, when Spencer offers human history a second act, he clearly departs from his compatriot. The introduction of the new historical stage, the ‘industrial society’, constitutes the major correction that Spencer brings to Hobbes’s philosophy of history. For according to Spencer, coercion does not remain the eternal principle of social organisation. As evolution advances, man, solitary and selfish at the outset, is susceptible to change:

But if the process of evolution which, unceasing throughout past time, has brought life to its present height, continues throughout the future, as we cannot but anticipate, then, amid all the rhythmical changes in each society, amid all the lives and deaths of nations, amid all the supplantings of race by race, there will go on that adaptation of human nature to the social state which began when savages first gathered together into hordes for mutual defence – an adaptation finally complete.

(Spencer, 1896: §853, 598) ³¹

This is why evolution, whatever its principle should be, must allow man to free himself from constraint (which constitutes the principle of the military type of society), and to build a world founded upon contract (the basis of the industrial type of society). Since primitive man is poorly equipped for social life, his first socialisation can only be forced. ³² Paradoxically, however, his aptitude for living in concert with his fellows derives precisely from social life itself, which transforms him to the extent that he can be freed from coercion and left to his new nature.

It is significant that this extension of Hobbesian ‘history’ cannot be attributed simply to Spencer’s advantage in being able to observe two additional centuries of human history. Industrialism, as we have pointed out above, does not lend itself to apprehension through direct and immediate experience – modernity is not self-evident! The industrial type of society has ‘its traits so hidden by those of the still dominant [militant] type, that its nature is nowhere more than very partially exemplified’ (Spencer, 1882: §562, 603).

Thus, behind the appearance of a maturing sociological empiricism, there is in fact a much older epistemological regime the disaggregation of which becomes clearer with every unauthorised move. The ‘dissolution’ of the society, the characterisation of the elementary, and the ‘recomposition’ of the social totality, are conspicuous signs of an analytic-synthetic approach. Yet how to account, on the same basis, for the second act of recomposition, resulting in the society of the industrial type?

This ‘correction’ to Hobbes’s philosophy of history – that is, the design of an (ideally) post-state society – is in fact coupled with Spencer’s most important departure from the Hobbesian epistemological model. For it is easy to see that a synthesis that restores the society previously removed by ‘subtraction’, insofar as it is stimulated by the uncontainable deduction, cannot overstep by its own forces the limits of its first saturation (achieved, in this case, by Leviathan). In his own version, however, Spencer gets beyond this limit by invoking the ‘contrast’ that evolution, with its serene pace, is called to carry out. Let me quote at greater length the passage we already referred to with regard to the a priori inference of the militant type of society:

Especially is the nature of the organization which accompanies chronic militancy, capable of being inferred a priori and proved a posteriori to exist in numerous cases. While the nature of the organization accompanying pure industrialism, of which at present we have little experience, will be made clear by contrast [my emphasis]; and such illustrations as exist of progress towards it will become recognizable.

(Spencer, 1882: §547, 568)

We should thus resist the first impression that the law of evolution plays the role of a rule of progression to which Spencer resorts in order to push forward the synthetic movement of his sociology. He does not substitute one rule of synthesis for another. By teaming up more than one principle of inference (deduction, contrast), he actually removes any consistent rule from the synthesis, and so in effect adds to the refoulement from which the analytic-synthetic method suffers under his empire, its erosion.

Analysis/synthesis in the Principles of Psychology

In The Principles of Sociology Spencer never refers to the analytical method in any explicit way. While the analytic idiom may occasionally come to the surface (for instance when he characterises primitive man as de-civilised, or presents social phenomena as the result of combinations of internal and external factors), these instances are only episodic and their significance indefinite. The hypothesis of the existence of an analytical background in Spencer’s sociology must therefore seem incongruous, and even more so given that historically analysis was coupled with a political philosophy as distant as it was possible to be, in spirit, from Spencer’s convictions.

Yet there is no doubt that the analytical approach was part of Spencer’s ‘official’ epistemological repertoire. Indeed, the first edition of The Principles of Psychology (Spencer, 1855), delivered some 20 years before the first volume of The Principles of Sociology, reveals Spencer’s adherence to the analytical paradigm in a strikingly direct way. A comparison between the first release of the book in 1855 and its second edition, fundamentally – and in the context of the present inquiry very significantly – revised and expanded in the early 1870s, will be particularly revealing in the context that is ours. For it can be shown that Spencer eventually made significant efforts to diminish the role played by analysis in this work, at the time that he was opening himself to a new epistemological norm. At the very moment that he was preparing The Principles of Sociology, he deliberately played down the use of analysis as an overall epistemological precept presented as governing his reasoning in The Principles of Psychology.

In the simplicity of its structure, the 1855-edition of The Principles of Psychology pays tribute to the analytic-synthetic method that shapes this work throughout. Its very architecture, which we shall compare below to the arrangement of its revised version, is worth consideration:

This very straightforward arrangement of the first edition will be dramatically restructured and completed in the second edition, published in two volumes in 1870 (Spencer, 1870) and 1872 (Spencer, 1872). ³³ Over about 15 years The Principles of Psychology had doubled in size, passing from 630 to 1278 pages. Nonetheless, this expansion did more than rejuvenate the original text, which had been rather poorly received in its first version – deservedly so perhaps, as Spencer conceded at the time of its publication that it was incomplete, inconsistent at times, and devoid of the summary and conclusion that his poor health, as he also confesses in the preface, prevented him from writing. His ‘new and important’ (Spencer, 1855: v) theories, he thought, required nevertheless prompt publication.

Some 20 years later Spencer still fails to find the time to write a regular conclusion, but he finds enough force to make the book evolve qualitatively as well as in bulk. Although the two ‘analyses’ and the two ‘syntheses’ constituting the 1855 edition continue to find a place in the revised structure, their status and significance significantly alter:

Two things stand out immediately when the 1855 and the 1870/72 editions of the Principles of Psychology are compared. The first is the obvious adjustment of the structure of the 1870/1872 version to the organisation of Spencer’s other works from the same period, specifically the Principles of Biology published few years earlier (vol. I: 1864, vol. II: 1867), the slightly later Principles of Sociology (1874–1875 for the first volume) and, finally, the Principles of Ethics (1879–1892). In the second edition of his Psychology, Spencer’s decision to devote the first two parts of the work to ‘data’ and ‘inductions’ suggests, in context, a systematic methodological commitment to the inductive approach. ³⁴

A second observation is equally straightforward: the new edition reverses the order of analysis and synthesis. Rather than trying to determine whether or not this reversal is unnatural, it seems more convenient to examine its impact on the way that the ideas in the different sections are to be interpreted. In fact, the effect is considerable, as we shall see.

In 1855, the four chapters of ‘General Analysis’ served as a prologue to general epistemology (considered by Spencer as a specific psychological subfield), but also as a preparation of the ground for the future rational psychology. The purpose of the ‘general analysis’ was then to find a criterion for distinguishing between true and false beliefs:

To gain the strongest conviction possible respecting any complex fact, we either analytically descend from it by successive steps, each of which we unconsciously test by the inconceivableness of its negation, until we reach some axiom or truth which we have similarly tested; or we synthetically ascend from such axiom or truth by such steps. In either case we connect some isolated belief, with a belief which invariably exists, by a series of intermediate beliefs which invariably exist.

(Spencer, 1855: §7, 28–29)

Here the analytic-synthetic approach is explicitly prescribed by Spencer, who sees in the decomposition of the ‘complex fact’ an opportunity to test its validity step by step as its various components are subjected to the test of the inconceivability of their negation. The identification of the ‘universal postulate’ stipulating that ‘any belief whose invariable existence is proven by the inconceivability of its denial, is a true belief’, as well as the recognition of the way it may be used practically (analysis/synthesis), constitute the most important results of this first part of psychological Principles. With their help, and in order to put them to the test, Spencer proceeds to attack ‘idealism’ and ‘skepticism’, finally arriving at the conclusion that ‘realism’ is ‘the only rational creed; and (. . .) all adverse creeds are self-destructive’ (Spencer, 1855: §13, 59). A rational psychology can thus be founded.

Fifteen years later the situation has considerably changed. Now that the ‘General Analysis’ has moved from the beginning to the end of the book, Spencer has de facto retreated from his explicitly declared adherence to the analytic-synthetic approach. For what could be taken, in 1855, as a profession of faith can hardly retain the function of a general methodological programme when shifted to the next-to-last section of the whole book. Spencer’s campaign against ‘idealism’ and ‘skepticism’ (still motivated by the issue of an access to reality) no longer constitutes a test but the very horizon of ‘general analysis’. The scope of its methodological teachings is thus substantially restricted. And the rest must follow: the search for the ‘universal postulate’ but also the actual analysis (decomposition of complex propositions into simple propositions), are henceforth to be entirely subordinated to this polemical objective too.

But this is not the only sign of Spencer’s disaffection with the analytical method in the second edition of the Principles of Psychology. Consider how, back in 1855, the ‘Special Analysis’ (the second part of the book) was launched, with Spencer re-affirming his fidelity to an analytical approach that had just been developed and tested:

An analysis conducted in a truly systematic manner, must commence with the most complex phenomena of the series to be analysed: must seek to resolve these into phenomena that stand next in order of complexity: must proceed after like fashion with the less complex phenomena thus disclosed: and so, by successive decompositions, must descend step by step to the simpler and more general phenomena; reaching at last the simplest and most general.

(Spencer, 1855: §16, 71)

This time the object to be analysed won’t be, as it was the case in the ‘General Analysis’, a system of ideas but consciousness conceived as intelligence, perception and relations. Through successive decompositions – ‘beset with difficulties’ (Spencer, 1855: §16, 71) – Spencer arrives at what he deems to be a general law of the human mind, applicable to its embryonic as well as its most developed state: ‘all mental action whatever is definable as the continuous differentiation and integration of states of consciousness’ (Spencer, 1855: §104, 333).

In this case too, things significantly evolve over time. The passage quoted above is still included in the second edition of the book, but its force is again qualified. Spencer continues to endorse the analysis ‘without hesitation’, but does so only after noticing its powerlessness when it comes to emotions. These are said to resist clear decomposition, for ‘a sentiment is altogether vague in its outlines, and has a structure which continues indistinct even under the most patient introspection’ (Spencer, 1872: §274, 4). The new first chapter of the ‘Special Analysis’ thus explains the need to limit the scope of the analysis ‘to phenomena classed as intellectual’ (Spencer, 1872: §274, 4).

Let us finally turn to the two ‘syntheses’ newly moved, in 1870, ahead of the two ‘analyses’. For they too have been modified in a significant way. In 1855, after completing his ‘analytical’ chapters, Spencer felt little need to justify the move to the next ‘synthetic’ stage. More urgent seemed to be, in this case, the explaining of the reasons for splitting the ‘synthesis’ in two, the point being that the ‘general’ synthesis could easily give the impression of a digression as it leads the reader out of psychology into biology without any clear connection with the two rounds of ‘analysis’ (general and special) just accomplished. Devoted to the ‘method’, the first chapter of this part provides therefore the rationale for the biological excursus, to which Spencer assigns an instrumental function. Starting from the question of whether there exists a specific process for the formulation of insightful scientific hypotheses (those that contribute most to scientific progress conceived as the achievement of increasingly encompassing generalisations), he arrives at the conclusion that ‘when seeking the most general characteristic of any category, [the policy should be] not to compare the instances contained in it with each other, but to compare them with instances contained in some allied category’ (Spencer, 1855: §109, 347). This idea offers the specific direction of Spencer’s ‘general synthesis’, its raison d’être. The biological detour is meant to support the identification of the general characteristics of psychological life that the ‘special synthesis’, conducted in the fourth and final part of the original text, will try to reconstruct in all their complexity. Reflex action, instinct, memory, reason, emotions (which will be excluded in the later edition) represent different forms of the psychological depicted by Spencer as derived from ‘the simplest elements’ (Spencer, 1855: §166, 486), and progressively reconstructed as effects of the ‘adjustment of internal to external relations’ (Spencer, 1855: §166, 486).

Commenting on the ‘General Synthesis’ reproduced in the Principles of Psychology 1870-version, Spencer claims that compared to its 1855 form, it is ‘in substance unchanged but [. . .] much improved in expression’ (Spencer, 1870: §129, 291). However, nothing is less certain. The pages devoted to the ‘method’ ³⁵ disappear, and so leave the excursus into biology without epistemological justification. ‘General Synthesis’, newly equated with ‘deductive interpretation’, is now said to follow naturally from the prior ‘inductive’ work:

Having in the first part of this work [i.e. in the “Data of Psychology”] contemplated those facts of nervous structure and function which form the data of Psychology; and having, in the part just closed [“Inductions of Psychology”], grouped together the inductions drawn from a general survey of mental states and processes; we are prepared for deductive interpretation.

(Spencer, 1870: §129, 291)

After the ‘data’ and ‘inductions’ garnered in the course of the new parts now preceding the ‘General Synthesis’, the word ‘deduction’ was perhaps to be expected. However, the recycling of the old ‘general synthesis’ visibly needs a more specific starting point:

If the doctrine of Evolution is true, the inevitable implication is that Mind can be understood only by observing how Mind is evolved.

(Spencer, 1870: §129, 291)

It is now the doctrine of evolution (and not the synthetic movement that goes from the simple to the complex) that invites a reconstruction of the mind, and this time a historical reconstruction, although history is here replaced by a journey through different living species. Biology no longer represents a field that can be directly used in the service of psychological synthesis proper; an immersion in biology is necessary because the mind is the end-point of the evolution of life, as a result of a distinctly human strategy for survival conceived as a constant adaptation of the internal relations [of the living organism] to the external relations [those existing in its surroundings] (Spencer, 1870: §168, 374).

This reappearance of the problem of evolution provides us with the opportunity to conclude this short analysis, which was from the very beginning intended just as a temporary digression from Spencer’s sociology. The foregoing observations indicate quite clearly how, from the first to the second editions of the Principles of Psychology, the analytic-synthetic approach loses both generality and exclusivity. In 1855, the entire work was explicitly structured by the analytical method, however loosely defined. Fifteen years later, Spencer chose otherwise than to bring more clarity and rigour to it. Through overall structural changes of his text, he instead proceeded to repress its original analytical framing that he, on the contrary, sought to obscure. Without freeing himself entirely from it, he strove to limit its role not only by discursive means but also by displaying his adherence to the nowadays more fashionable inductive-deductive scientific model. There is nothing to be surprised of that the Principles of Sociology, born about the same time, bear marks of the same epistemological tergiversation.

Conclusion

Herbert Spencer’s sociology can easily be read as a denunciation of the rationalism behind the philosophy of the social contract, which he believes he has tellingly demolished in a single sentence: ‘Society is a growth and not a manufacture’ (Spencer, 1860: 269). However, if Spencer did not spend more than a few pages to his efforts to undermine the foundations of contractualism, he in fact devoted the length of his three volumes of Principles of Sociology to endorsing, albeit concealing, its epistemological model.

Taking the measure of this ambiguity makes it possible to face up to the anomalies that haunt Spencer’s sociology as its commentators have routinely interpreted it. Its classificatory dualism, which marries so badly with Spencer’s commitment to the continuous dynamics of evolution; the primitive man, so laboriously pieced together but invisible for most of Spencer’s readers and without employment for the rest; the unsteady role of the principle of survival of the fittest. All these features of Spencer’s sociology were used in the present study as potentially pointing to its so-far-unnoticed epistemic resources underpinning Spencer’s outward method.

There are good reasons for resisting the thesis that analysis and synthesis structure and unify Spencer’s sociology, and there are even stronger reasons for finding its intertwining with Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy preposterous. The hypothesis that Spencer’s sociology is tacitly structured according to the analytic-synthetic epistemological regime proves its value, nevertheless, in explaining what other interpretations of Spencer’s sociological work neglect or fail to account for. Does Spencer owe his method directly to Hobbes whose political and intellectual influence he strives to clear away? Nothing, in the present paper, allows us to say so. But nothing, one might add, makes asking and answering such a question inevitable, either. Hobbes provided our analysis with a suitable point of reference, which is not in any way necessary to identify as an ‘origin’. Similarly, it is not the appropriateness of Hobbes’s claim to be the first to introduce analytic-synthetic method into social/political philosophy, but its rich development he delivers (let us remember here that the method-discourse makes part of the method once we cease to confound it with the scientific practice), that made reference to Hobbes so valuable. To be sure, the ambiguities of Hobbes’s method cause him vulnerability; and the ‘scientific game’ he invites others to carry on suffers from relative underdeterminations. To affirm that Spencer has taken over all of them would certainly be inappropriate. He can nevertheless be said to have expanded on those he ‘inherited’.

Blurred by the hypothetical-deductive idiom (i.e. made almost unrecognisable to its followers and sceptics), deprived of a rule of its progression (thus giving its adherents and sceptics the freedom to follow and challenge any rule), the analytic-synthetic method finds itself damaged in the Principles of Sociology. It reminds us that the time of epistemological transition was not only a moment of hesitation for the future social science, but also a moment of derangement of philosophy, a phenomenon that can perhaps be observed even more clearly in relation to methods than to concepts (Joly, 2017). It also reminds the historian and the philosopher that the life of science encompasses many lives, some of which may owe their flourishing to those in decline. In Spencer’s sociology the disgraced analytic-synthetic method is being eroded. Spencer’s sociological ‘translation’ of the old philosophical analysis is quietly working on the degradation ³⁶ of the analytic-synthetic method, further opening the door through which the revolution will enter.