SPENCER, Herbert.

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Social Statics: or, the conditions essential to Human Happiness specified, and the first of them developed. First edition of the first book by the renowned philosopher and sociologist, which "contained in embryo most of his later views" (Ency. Brit.). In the Social Statics, Spencer examined the development of human societies, and the roles of the state and the individual therein, against the framework of a Lamarckian evolutionary theory. In particular, he "was concerned with the 'equilibrium of a perfect society' in the future, rather than the forces (or 'dynamics') by which society was struggling towards perfection in the immediate present (p. 229)" (ODNB). The work reflected "the strain of utopian radicalism in Spencer's thought inherited from his early background: it denied the legitimacy of private property in land, held out equality of the sexes as a moral ideal, and advocated the training of children by persuasion and rational argument rather than discipline and coercion" (ibid.).

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