Weeding Out the Weak

HERBERT SPENCER, Social Statics: Survival of the Fittest Applied to Humankind (1851)

Like Darwin, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was an English intellectual, although his work concerned philosophy and social theory rather than science. Spencer was one of the earliest champions of what would later be called “Social Darwinism”—the use of the concept of evolution to justify social inequality and to “demonstrate” the racial superiority of people of northern European ancestry. The following excerpt comes from his first major work, Social Statics (1851), which attracted relatively little attention on publication, but contains many of the ideas that would make Spencer one of the most well-known and influential British intellectuals during the 1870s and 1880s.

In common with its other assumptions of secondary offices, the assumption by a government of the office of Reliever-general to the poor, is necessarily forbidden by the principle that a government cannot rightly do anything more than protect. In demanding from a citizen contributions for the mitigation of distress—contributions not needed for the due administration of men’s rights—the state is, as we have seen, reversing its function, and diminishing that liberty to exercise the faculties which it was instituted to maintain. Possibly . . . some will assert that by satisfying the wants of the pauper, a government is in reality extending his liberty to exercise his faculties. . . . But this statement of the case implies a confounding of two widely different things. To enforce the fundamental law—to take care that every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man—this is the special purpose for which the civil power exists. Now insuring to each the right to pursue within the specified limits the objects of his desires without let or hindrance, is quite a separate thing from insuring him satisfaction. . . .

Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind. That state of universal warfare maintained throughout the lower creation, to the great perplexity of many worthy people, is at bottom the most merciful provision which the circumstances admit of. . . . The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many “in shallows and in miseries,” are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence. It seems hard that an unskillfulness which with all its efforts he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artisan. It seems hard that a laborer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence—the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic.

From Herbert Spencer, “Social Statics,” in Liberalism: Its Meaning and History, ed. J. Salwyn Schapiro (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1958), pp. 136-137.