p In a novel from English life in the early 19th century the French writer Andre Maurois wrote that Britain, in her fight against the enlightening philosophy “required of its public schools a sagely hypocritical generation".  [315•8  Positivism, too, fostered a sagely hypocritical generation, for it was shot through with this spirit.

p Characteristically, Spencer made a point of not using the term “progress”, and strove to generalise the available data on the development of organic and inorganic nature and of human society to formulate a concept of evolution opposite to the dialectical understanding of development. Spencer sought to discover the general type of development for all phenomena in animate and inanimate nature and in human life. Concentration, the first mark of evolution as a universal law, was at the basis of the emergence of the Earth and the other planets from a primordial nebulosity, and the development of organisms or historical processes, like the formation of nations from initially isolated tribes. Differentiation, another key mark of evolution, meant transition from 316 the more to the less homogeneous. There was a certain harmony between concentration and differentiation. In society, as in biology, growth led to a change in structure. Spencer supplemented these tenuous laws by means of which he sought to characterise development with a number of others, like the law of the conservation of force.

p The early stages of life in society were dominated by concentration, with the individual being subordinate to the whole. The personality was yet to develop and was, accordingly, subordinate to society. Then came the process of differentiation, giving rise to individualism, with individuals going their own ways. That is the characteristic mark of the epoch of industrialism. Spencer anticipated a third epoch, the harmonious combination of egoism and altruism, a term which, incidentally, was introduced by Comte.

p It will be easily seen that the ideas of bourgeois individualism, which stem from private-property relations, constitute the basis for Spencer’s sociological views. Spencer declares the individual to be the “social unit" which is equal to the biological call, allowing an exception only for primitive times, when the family or the small horde was the unit. The whole of society’s subsequent history had to do with an individual. Spencer safeguarded bourgeois individualism and the system of privateproperty relations against any attacks by claiming that sociological laws were immutable.

p Paul Lafargue summed up the idea which, in effect, completed Spencer’s theory of social evolution: “The bourgeois who proclaim that their takeover of power was the sole moment of social progress in history, claimed that their dislodgement by the proletariat would be a return to barbarism, ’to slavery’ as Herbert Spencer put it."  [316•9  In the second half of the 19th century, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie made an effort to scare their audiences and readers with the prospect of society’s degradation if it were to move beyond the bounds of capitalism. After the bourgeois takeover, the whole of history was to consist only in “improving” capitalism, but not in eliminating it, for that would mean undermining the very “pillars of civilisation" or even of the very basis of human community living. These unscientific theories were dictated to bourgeois liberalism by its fear of the growing strength and consciousness of the working class.

p Long before his present-day followers, Spencer proclaimed communism to be “the coming slavery”, the bulwark of bureaucracy and complained about the excessive costs to society of nationalising the banks, the factories and all the other means of production. Insisting on freedom for the individual, he came down resolutely against social ownership.

p Thus, Spencer put a limit to social progress, claiming that bourgeois social relations had to be everlasting, if the individual was not to be impressed into a new “slavery”.

p Spencer’s book The Coming Slavery (1884) was thoroughly analysed by Paul Lafargue, who reached the conclusion that “Spencer has been misunderstood: he has been erroneously deemed to be an evolutionist because he is in the habit of classifying the facts he deals with in accordance with their outward appearance, never taking the trouble of analysing their intrinsic properties or their external causes and studying the action of the environment on them and their reaction on the environment."   [317•10 

p Lafargue was right in saying that Spencer could not be unconditionally classed as an evolutionist not just because he put a limit to social development. The fact is that Spencer’s whole philosophy was based on agnosticism, and claimed that sciences, including sociology, merely dealt with phenomena whose substance was elusive. But is it possible to produce a theory of the evolution of social forms while declaring the substance of social change to be unfathomable?

p Indeed, Spencer dealt only with a distribution of facts by their outward appearance. In the light of agnosticism one is able to construct no more than a formal theory of evolution. The basic “law” of Spencer’s theory of evolution is transition from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. In accordance with this law of evolution, Spencer classifies societies as simple and complex, as being of the first, second, third, etc., degree of complexity, these stages constituting the differentiation of the social whole. Consequently, the starting point in Spencer’s social evolution is simple, homogeneous and undifferentiated primitive societies. But that is no more than a purely formal aspect. It is, of course, impossible to get the substance of the historical process by means of such “laws”. This question naturally arises: why does social differentiation begin in primitive societies in the first place? Spencer’s metaphysical philosophy provides no answer, and he resorts to the “assistance” of another society which swallows up the first, homogeneous, one and so stimulates the process of differentiation, which is, consequently, caused by an external impulse. This shows up the weakness of Spencer’s whole theory.

p Spencer’s mechanistic theory of equilibrium is a prominent element of his sociology. It was set out in his first major work, which appeared in the 1850s under the title Social Statics. Equilibrium and its disruption depend on the relations between nature and society, between social groups within society and between various societies. The idea of equilibrium and its disruption does not, quite obviously, shed any light 318 on qualitative social changes and ignores them. In effect, the theory of equilibrium provides no explanation for the evolution to which Spencer pays lip service. Why does equilibrium and its disruption promote mankind’s advance, instead of making it mark time—that is a question Spencer never answered.

p There can be no scientific theory of social development until the nature of social ties and their substance have been discovered. Spencer saw society as a greater individual, an organism. Bertrand Russel wrote: “The prestige of biology caused men whose thinking was influenced by science to apply biological rather than mechanistic categories to the world. .. .The conception of organism came to be thought the key to both scientific and philosophical explanations of natural laws.”  [318•11  Spencer also used this concept to explain the laws of social development, resorting to the “prestige of biology”, but the application of biological conceptions to social life, far from excluding mechanicism, in effect merely supplemented it. The result was a crude scheme, in which society was seen as an organism, with its component parts “supplementing” each other. The growing differentiation of the various functions of this organism and its organs was the only content of social evolution. The application of biological terms and conceptions merely put a scientific gloss on such a theory of society.

At the same time, this kind of terminological transfer had a reactionary role to play. Spencer, for instance, applied to social life the concept of natural selection, according to which only the strongest survived, and said that this was beneficial for society. Subsequently, so-called social Darwinism became one of the most reactionary, man-hating trends.