New book on 'the most misunderstood libertarian'

The Most Misunderstood Libertarian - Online Library of Law & Liberty - Alberto Mingardi:

September 28, 2015 - "To the surprise of many, scholarship on Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) has flourished in the last few years. A towering figure in Victorian Britain, Spencer was all but forgotten after his death. His works, which taken together form a 'Synthetic Philosophy,' seemed alien to 20th century academics in an age of meticulous specialization. Also his commitment to individual liberty and (seriously) limited government has not been too common in the discipline that he helped establish, sociology.... Spencer may be routinely included among the forerunners of modern libertarianism but it is rather uncommon to find a contemporary individualist thinker deliberately appealing to his insights....

"The paradox of one of the fiercest libertarians ever to be ignored by libertarians emerges vividly from Herbert Spencer: Legacies, edited by Mark Francis and Michael Taylor.... Spencer’s legacy is plural, as the title of this collection suggests, and may have come to us mediated by subsequent developments in different fields. The plural nature of the 'legacies' is stressed throughout, and has multiple dimensions: disciplinary, political, and even geographical...

"Taylor stresses how Spencer goes for voluntary and spontaneous arrangements, not necessarily for institutional settings based on the price system. But this won’t sound particularly controversial or new to libertarians, who, despite the caricature often made of them, understand that not everything in life is tradable at a money price. Their point is more subtle (and Spencerian): that is, top-down government intrusions may retard or altogether stop the spontaneous evolution (or adaptation to new circumstances) of human societies....

"One of the many take-aways of this book is that Spencer was a far more complex thinker than those who only know him as a diabolical 'social Darwinist.' Its essays might, for example, open the eyes of those who still have in mind the Herbert Spencer largely manufactured in the 1940s by Richard Hofstadter in a book that made history as a beautifully written and yet quite misleading tirade. Taylor explains that Spencer never thought that 'social existence involved an unrelenting struggle for survival in which the richest were the most successful and the poor should go to the wall.' He quotes Thomas Leonard’s important study on the Hofstadterian myth....

"Francis, who like his co-editor cites the Leonard monograph, also makes clear Spencer’s commitment to pacifism: 'Spencerians believed that imperial conquest might have been a natural phenomenon when employed by ancient states, but was an archaic activity in modern times' and a most immoral one. The thread running through all of Spencer’s works is the idea that society progresses toward the minimization of violence, which had been needed at earlier stages of civilization....

"This book may convey a sense of Spencer’s true understanding of complexity.... His magnificent The Study of Sociology (1873) would be a relevant work for those interested in the proper role of the social sciences and their limits, if only they read it....

"If I had any quibble about this impressive collection, it would be that the propensity to consider The Man Versus the State as 'just' a political pamphlet causes the contributors to overlook that this is perhaps the first work whose arguments are truly centered around the notion of unintended consequences. All in all, though, Herbert Spencer: Legacies may foster a better understanding of this seminal thinker and raise yet more interest in his underappreciated writings."

Read more: http://www.libertylawsite.org/book-review/the-most-misunderstood-libertarian/
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Herbert Spencer's view of charity

"Charity Is in Its Nature Essentially Civilizing": In Defense of Herbert Spencer | Cato @ Liberty - Trevor Burrus:

April 17, 2015 - "Spencer writes with the peculiar verve of a 19th-century British intellectual, coming from the same milieu as anthropologists who would blithely discuss the 'savage and uncivilized mongoloid and negroid races.' Similarly, Spencer would insouciantly attack the lazy, shiftless, and incompetent.

"Post-modern relativism makes us balk at these absolute terms. In modern politics we tend to think more about the conditions into which people are born rather than their personal responsibility. Discussions of the 'deserving poor' and 'undeserving poor' are now largely uncouth.

"But to Spencer, as to most 19th-century political and social theorists, the distinction mattered. Like many modern libertarians and conservatives, Spencer was very concerned that profligate and indiscriminate assistance for the poor would incentivize bad behavior. Although many on the left loathe the idea that welfare can create bad behavior, most people understand that concern. To anyone who’s ever had to cut off ne’er-do-well friends or family from further charity in order to help them out, those concerns make sense.

"Viewing society as something like an organism, Spencer thought broadly about how laws and policies could either encourage or discourage certain behaviors. As a Lamarckian – someone who believes acquired traits are heritable – he was concerned that those bad behaviors would be transmitted down through the generations. His end goal was an affluent society based on voluntary interaction in which sympathy for fellow men thrived. If the government did too much to encourage certain types of harmful behavior, then Spencer feared that, in the long run, the pain and suffering would be greater.

"What types of harmful behavior? Spencer was surely against the cronyistic businessman who prefers to use government to extract from taxpayers rather than building an honest business that adds to the sum total of wealth in society. In a system that cultivated such people, the doctrine of 'survival of the fittest' would mean that 'the fittest' were cronies rather than honest businessmen. Under his view of social evolution, the cumulative effect of such crony-supporting policies would be a society in which innovative entrepreneurs are replaced by cronies who lack creativity and pluck and do business with an army of lobbyists. Laws that perpetuate such cronyism would be 'acts of parliament to save silly people,' to use a Spencer quote cited by Millhiser.

"Similarly, Spencer would also oppose the person who resides on the dole without working, the kind of person the British press, in particular, loves to highlight. Spencer believed, not irrationally, that facilitating such behavior will only breed more of it. Most importantly, in the long run there will be great suffering in societies that massively facilitate such behavior, whether it is cronyism or welfare dependency.

"Does this mean that Spencer wrote seemingly hard-hearted things like 'widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life and death?' Yes. To Spencer, the laws that categorically try to prevent such suffering would only result in long-term suffering. For those who refuse to help themselves, and for those who persist in patterns of bad, self-destructive behavior, it is true that he thought many should be allowed to die. Again, however, this belief is not as radical as it sounds. Both law and charity can only do so much, and human beneficence can only be stretched so far for those who are unwilling to change their behavior. Ask a social worker how much patience he has for the clients who don’t even seem to be trying, whether they are heroin users or morbidly obese diabetic smokers. 'I can only do so much,' the social worker would probably say. But for those willing to change their behavior, or at least to try, Spencer had great sympathy.

"He also believed that laws that try to solve suffering merely reorganize the goods of society without solving the underlying problem, namely, the conditions that produce and exacerbate poverty. As he wrote, 'If it gives enough to some who else would not have enough, it must inevitably reduce certain others to the condition of not having enough. And thus, to the extent that a poor-law mitigates distress in one place, it unavoidably produces distress in another.'"

Read more: http://www.cato.org/blog/charity-its-nature-essentially-civilizing-defense-herbert-spencer
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No, Herbert Spencer did not advocate genocide

Will the Real Herbert Spencer Please Stand Up? | Cato @ Liberty - Trevor Burrus:

April 13, 2015 - "In a hit piece on Rand Paul posted on ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser has taken guilt by association to new heights, and, in the process, fundamentally misrepresented the views of Herbert Spencer.

"In 'Rand Paul’s Favorite Philosophers Think Poor People Are "Parasites,"' Millhiser attempts to connect Rand Paul to 19th-century classical liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer.... Millhiser offers no direct evidence that Rand Paul himself is a fan of Herbert Spencer.... Despite this bit of journalistic malfeasance, Millhiser marches bravely forward with further misrepresentations about Spencer’s ideas.... Millhiser is joining a long, if not admirable, tradition of people misrepresenting Herbert Spencer’s ideas in order to attack proponents of capitalism. As usual, those critics are wrong about what Spencer himself actually wrote and believed.

"Modern misrepresentations of Spencer can be largely traced back to Richard Hofstadter, famed historian and dogged opponent of capitalism.... In Social Darwinism in American Thought, Hofstadter, a one time member of the Communist Party, uses a type of warmed-over Marxism to argue that Americans embraced the idea of 'survival of the fittest' because 'dominant groups' were 'able to dramatize this vision of competition as a thing good in itself.' Herbert Spencer, Hofstadter argues, was at the heart of this transformation. Fast-forward seventy years and through countless misrepresentations by people like Millhiser, and Spencer is now nearly synonymous with the idea of 'social Darwinism,' that is, the idea that social programs and government actions to help the worst off should be rolled back in order to cleanse the race of undesirables....

"Millhiser calls Spencer’s philosophy 'genocidal libertarianism'.... Spencer’s most notorious statement, that if someone is 'not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die' is dutifully trotted out by Millhiser as an example of Spencer’s monstrous beliefs. As with most critics of Spencer, he ignores the opening sentence of the next paragraph: 'Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated.'

"Like most libertarians, Spencer was a big believer in private charity. As George H. Smith wrote over at Cato’s Libertarianism.org:

Spencer opposed coercive, state-enforced charity, but he favored charity that is voluntarily bestowed. As a matter of justice, one should not be forced to help others; but as a matter of personal or religious ethics, one may be obligated to help others ...  he observed that it was becoming more common for the rich to contribute money and time to the poor, and he praised this trend as “the latest and most hopeful fact in human history”....

One must read Spencer’s extensive treatments of poverty and the poor to appreciate fully the outrageous misrepresentations of his critics. That Spencer was offended by such lies is dramatically illustrated by the fact that he broke off a close friendship of some forty years with Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”), after Huxley had written that, according to the Spencerian individualist, a poor man should be left to starve because charity interferes with “survival of the fittest.”

In reply to this accusation of “reasoned savagery,” Spencer wrote: “For nearly fifty years I have contended that the pains attendant on the struggle for existence may fitly be qualified by the aid which private sympathy prompts.”

"Spencer also believed that beneficence was an essential element of an advanced and evolved society.... '[T]he highest form of life, individual and social,' he wrote, 'is not achievable under a reign of justice only; but … there must be joined with it a reign of beneficence.' To this end, he devoted large parts of his Principles of Ethics to arguing that a fully evolved society would need more than merely the 'avoidance of direct and indirect injuries to others,' it would need 'spontaneous efforts to further the welfare of others.'"

"This little post is only the latest attempt to correct the record on Herbert Spencer."

Read more: http://www.cato.org/blog/will-real-herbert-spencer-please-stand
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Spencer and the anti-militarist libertarian heritage

The Anti-Militarist Libertarian Heritage - Reason.com - Sheldon Richman, Future of Freedom Foundation:

September 21, 2014 - "With the United States on the verge of another war in the Middle East — or is it merely the continuation of a decades-long war? — we libertarians need to reacquaint ourselves with our intellectual heritage of peace, antimilitarism, and anti-imperialism. This rich heritage is too often overlooked and frequently not appreciated at all. That is tragic. Libertarianism, to say the least, is deeply skeptical of state power. Of course, then, it follows that libertarianism must be skeptical of the state's power to make war — to kill and destroy in other lands. Along with its domestic police authority, this is the state's most dangerous power. (In 1901 a libertarian, Frederic Passy, a friend of libertarian economist Gustave de Molinari, shared in the first Nobel Peace Prize.)

"Herbert Spencer, the great English libertarian philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th century, eloquently expressed radical liberalism's antipathy to war and militarism. His writings are full of warnings about the dangers of war and conquest. Young Spencer saw and cheered the rise of the industrial type of society, which was displacing what he called the militant type. The industrial type was founded on equal freedom, consent, and contract, the militant on hierarchy, command, and force. Yet he lived long enough to see a reversal, and his later writings lamented the ascendancy of the old militant traits. We have a good deal to learn from the much-maligned Spencer, who is inexplicably condemned as favoring the 'law of the jungle.' This is so laughably opposite of the truth that one couldn't be blamed for concluding that the calumny is the product of bad faith....

"He starts by pointing out that the 'parent' country's government must violate the rights of its own citizens when it engages in colonial conquest and rule. Spencer advocated just enough government to protect the freedom of the citizens who live under it ... and he claims that the money spent on colonies necessarily is money not needed to protect that freedom.

"Spencer proceeds to demolish the argument that foreign acquisitions increase the wealth of the parent society, as though such acquisitions are analogous to voluntary trade relations.... He invokes the law of comparative advantage to argue that the parent society loses, not gains, when the government coercively creates artificial foreign markets for products the society can't produce as efficiently as others can.

"As for those on the receiving end of colonial policy, Spencer was blunt: 'We … meet nothing but evil results'."

Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2014/09/21/the-anti-militarist-libertarian-heritage
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