The Coming Slavery E-Book

Herbert Spencer

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist.
Politically oriented towards liberal ideas, in his most famous essay, The Man Versus the State (1884) and in particular in The Coming Slavery (published in the same year on the magazine Popular Science Monthly), Spencer attacked William Ewart Gladstone and the Liberal Party for losing its proper mission (they should be defending personal liberty, he said) and instead promoting paternalist social legislation. His main objections were threefold: the use of the coercive powers of the government, the discouragement given to voluntary self-improvement, and the disregard of the “laws of life”. The reforms, he said, were tantamount to “socialism”, which he said was about the same as “slavery” in terms of limiting human freedom.
Spencer defined a slave as a person who «labours under coercion to satisfy another’s desires» and believed that under socialism or communism the individual would be enslaved to the whole community rather than to a particular master, and «it means not whether his master is a single person or society».

Leseprobe

SYMBOLS & MYTHS

HERBERT SPENCER

THE COMING SLAVERY

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: The Coming Slavery

Author: Herbert Spencer

Publishing series: Symbols & Myths

Editing by Nicola Bizzi

ISBN: 979-12-5504-353-9

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2023 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

[email protected]

www.auroraboreale-edizioni.com

INTRODUCTION BY THE PUBLISHER

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression “survival of the fittest”, which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin’s 1859 essay On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.

Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia.

Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27 1820, the son of William George Spencer, a religious dissenter who drifted from Methodism to Quakerism, and who seems to have transmitted to his son an opposition to all forms of authority. He ran a school founded on the progressive teaching methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and also served as Secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, a scientific society which had been founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin.

Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while the members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, particularly those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, vicar of Hinton Charterhouse near Bath, completed Spencer’s limited formal education by teaching him some mathematics and physics, and enough Latin to enable him to translate some easy texts. Thomas Spencer also imprinted on his nephew his own firm free-trade and anti-statist political views. Otherwise, Spencer was an autodidact who acquired most of his knowledge from narrowly focused readings and conversations with his friends and acquaintances.