6. Classes and evolution
The relationship between individualism and inequality can only be successfully theorized with knowledge of the historical circumstances within which sentimental, religious and cognitive individualisms developed. Without this grasp of history and contingency, we would not be able to understand why sentimental individualism in the UK, but not in the USA, was closely related with nineteenth-century anti-slavery. Nor would we understand why American, but not British, sentimental individualism was associated with educational expansion and reform. We now move on to extend our grasp of the relationships between individualism and inequality from anti-slavery and education to the division of labour.
Adam Smith believed that we tamper with the division of labour at the cost of damaging prosperity and that, on its own, the division of labour produced little of the inequality he saw in eighteenth-century British society. Smith thought it was the way that people understood and shaped their relationship to the division of labour that was the cause of inequality. WN included a powerful critique of the cognitive individualism which used the differences in the talents and efforts of individuals to explain inequality. He also pointed out that cognitive individualism’s assumptions about the freedoms that individuals enjoyed were deeply flawed.
Modern misrepresentation of Smith might easily lead us to believe he wrote nothing about the class system of his time, or saw it as a type of social structure that would be swept away by the operation of free markets and replaced by healthy individual competition. In fact, Smith was an astute observer of the British class system and knew very well that it continued to prosper even as the influence of markets increased. He did not think that the division of labour was responsible for its persistence, however. For example, the division of labour was not responsible for the widespread perception that the working class were good for nothing but menial tasks, for which they deserved little respect, whereas skilled workers and professionals had characteristics which deserved better pay and higher status.
Much of this is already implicit in Smith’s contention that most of the tasks required by the increasing division of labour were (ever more) undemanding and in his repeated assertion that much education and training had little do with what was actually required in work. His scepticism about the claims to particular necessary skills extended beyond the skilled trades and he had a fairly jaundiced view of the level of skill required in almost all professions, including those of university professors. Moreover, rather like Owen, he did not think there was anything but minimal differences between people’s abilities, even when it came to the most extravagant talents such as those possessed by opera singers and dancers (Smith [1776]2005: 93).
Smith did not think class was produced by the division of labour but he knew other people were all too ready to believe it was. He thought their credulity arose from some very common human failings which made them blind to the actual requirements of the division of labour and the way these were fulfilled. The tenets of cognitive individualism convinced people that inequality in the class system was a consequence of the way competition between individuals aligned the requirements of the division of labour with differences in the talents and aptitudes of individual human beings. For Smith, these tenets were rooted in almost universal characteristics of human nature which led people to misapprehend their world in a systematic way and to find evidence to support their mistaken assumptions at every turn. They concluded that people were rewarded with riches and esteem because they were talented, or tried hard. They imagined that there was nothing stopping any individual accessing these same riches and esteem if they had the necessary talents and put in the required effort. They concluded that failure was the result of the laziness, ineptitude or mediocrity of the individuals concerned.
Smith thought that the characteristics of human nature which led people to find evidence that supported the tenets of cognitive individualism everywhere they looked, amounted to deeply-regrettable human failings akin to the vanities described by religion (particularly Protestant Christianity). Chapter 3 mentioned that Smith regretted our abiding admiration for the rich and famous and the egotism this seemed to fuel amongst the rich and famous themselves. His regret was partly explained by his conviction that such admiration led to individual unhappiness, but he went on to make admiration of worldly success the foundation for a theory which explained why people consent to an unequal social system. From our present vantage point, we can see that, in contrast to feudal inequality, the class system required popular acquiescence and often enthusiastic approval. Smith’s theory made an important contribution to understanding this new, ideological basis for inequality in a society which had been transformed by individualism.
In a few pages of WN, Smith ([1776]2005: 87–96) elaborated on what he understood to be an insight into human nature into the kernel of a critique of the British class system which still has validity today. Their susceptibility to admiration and egotism meant people who enjoyed riches and success always considered that they deserved them. They would not have been able to think this if they had believed their success was the result of circumstances outside their control. Their propensity to admire success therefore predisposed them to think they had succeeded because they had won a free and fair competition between individuals in which their peculiar qualities, and perhaps virtues, had proved to be superior. In this way, cognitive individualism explained away inequalities, such as those which featured in the class system, but at the same time it rendered invisible the real sources of inequality.
Chapter 3 described the way in which Smith identified a major cause of inequality in the willingness of parents to buy their sons access to better-paying jobs by investing in education and training. The tasks the jobs entailed did not really require this investment but expensive education and training erected a barrier which kept out poorer competitors and therefore kept up wage levels. The inequality produced by these higher wages was not caused by differences in talent. If anything, the reverse was true: differences were being manufactured to create inequality which would benefit the few who could make their children appear to be particularly talented or knowledgeable. Chapter 3 also explained that this was the point at which the losers in the class system were identified as capable only of the regular jobs created in huge numbers in the modern division of labour. These jobs required no, or very little, skill and were therefore open to competition to all which resulted in constant downward pressure on wage rates. Since they had no money to invest in the transmission of privilege to their children, the poor were forced into these lower-paying jobs in each successive generation, making it seem as if they were fitted for nothing better.
According to Smith, a certain level of investment in education and training got your name into the draw which determined who rose to the top of the (lucrative) professions, but what happened after that was down to luck. People were no more likely to recognize this than they were to recognize the role of the conscious and deliberate transmission of privilege in the creation of class differences. They were loath to believe that luck played such a defining role because they were committed to admiring riches and success, including, where possible, their own riches and success. By ignoring their good fortune, they were able to make it seem plausible that getting to the top of a profession was the result of competition between individuals in the same way that (so they also believed) initial access to professions was determined by competition between individuals. Cognitive individualism was blind to the role of luck in determining success: those who did not rise to the top of the professions had only themselves to blame, just as did all those who could never have entered the professions because of their lack of education.
If there were large swathes of society which never succeeded in individual competition, this demonstrated how inadequate these individuals were. Thus, the absence of working-class professionals demonstrated that members of that class were only capable of menial jobs. What was more, the free and fair competition between individuals had recognized the virtues of the upper classes and this amply confirmed they deserved all the admiration, indeed the deference, of others. While this sounds very British, there was also the paradoxical truth that people’s beliefs about class were founded in the idea that the labour market was a free and fair arena for competition between individuals regardless of their class origins. This is easily recognizable as a fundamental assumption in the American Dream, however we have learned that this idea was not coined by Adam Smith but treated by him as a social phenomenon which required explanation and criticism.
Already, in the eighteenth century, Smith could see that the idea of a classless competition in which individuals competed with each other helped to produce a society mired in class and, at the same time, allowed people to accept, even welcome, the inequality and subordination that this entailed. For example, people were blind to the mechanisms that ensured the working class were kept in their place and privilege was passed on from one generation to the next. Far from seeing the working class as disadvantaged by their lack of access to the education required by the professions, people were convinced that such education would be wasted on the working class who would never (for the most part) be fit for anything but menial work.
Smith’s views on the role of cognitive individualism in the creation of the class system must come as a surprise to anyone who believes that Smith taught that competition between individuals was a part of the market alchemy which distributed resources (including people) to their most productive uses. Of course, he thought competition helped to increase prosperity and was better for most people than rent-seeking behaviour (like that of the guilds or the Catholic Bishops – see Chapter 3). Policy should not support the kind of artificial barriers which prevented labour moving to satisfy demand and reduce prices (of labour and the goods it made) because this would damage prosperity. But it was no part of Smith’s theory that the market increased prosperity by sorting individuals into the roles where they would be of most use by hosting a competition between them.
According to Smith, the market moved relatively undifferentiated labour power around the economy, rather than assigning variously talented individuals to their appropriate places in the division of labour. Labour power was only relatively undifferentiated because there were some undeniable differences between the various trades and professions. A lawyer might make a poor cooper but the point was that one lawyer or cooper was not that different to the next one and any minor individual differences that might exist would not explain the different patterns of employment or remuneration. Compared to these insignificant individual differences, the class system was a major influence on inequality.
For example, many people might have, or be capable of acquiring, the skills of entertainers but snobbery about making a living in this way reduced the supply of people who were willing to do it. Opera singers were well paid because so few people who possessed their talents were prepared to endure the loss of honour that followed when they displayed them in public in order to make a living (Smith [1776]2005: 92). It was the class system that made it look as if these were rare skills when in reality they were much more common. The silver lining was that the work that was shunned by the majority offered a route to riches for some individuals. People who were otherwise condemned to relative poverty had found a gap in the armour of the class system, which was created by the rejection of such ways of earning a living by those who would not sacrifice honour for riches.
This is not to say that the poor would always sacrifice honour for money. The human desire for esteem extended from impecunious philosophers to penurious sailors. There were more members of both occupations than we might expect from their poor rewards and, at least for the sailors, the considerable hardships and dangers involved. The attraction was not pecuniary but the chance of honour, glory or recognition. In fact, this pattern was a common product of the class system, extending to the more lucrative professions like the law. People were so keen to chase esteem that the numbers of well-paid and esteemed lawyers were far outnumbered by those who had abandoned the law or clung on even though they had failed to make a living at it.
In the twentieth century, something very similar happened to entertainers and sports stars when they became more generally esteemed than earlier cohorts of these occupations had been. Now NBA basketball stars and professional soccer players were frequently held up as examples that proved the truth of the basic assumptions of cognitive individualism. It was said that their astronomical pay reflected the eagerness of the public to appreciate individuals with such rare talents. Smith would not have been surprised at this transformation since he did not think that snobbery about acting, singing and dancing for a living would necessarily endure forever. Yet, he said that if ‘public opinion or prejudice ever alter with regard to such occupations, their pecuniary recompence would quickly diminish’, since then there would be much more competition for these jobs (Smith [1776]2005: 93).
In contrast to the eighteenth century, we may now esteem entertainers, however, at first sight, Smith’s prediction that their rewards would diminish because of massively increased competition appears to have been confounded. This impression is only supported by estimating the net worth of those at the very top of their professions, however. Once we take into account the many thousands of aspiring, and subsequently disappointed, pop stars, models, sports and film stars, we begin to get an idea of the average returns to these occupations. When the top of these occupations began to attract high esteem as well as high pay, they attracted thousands more hopefuls than could possibly earn a living wage. The current situation is analogous to the one which Smith believed was occupied by the lawyers of his day.
For every successful lawyer, there were 20 failed students of law or impecunious lawyers. These proportions are wild underestimates for the equivalent ratios of failed Hollywood actors, NBA stars and professional soccer players, but the effect on average rewards is in the same direction. In Smith’s day, there were fewer poor entertainers because the profession was disreputable and so they were all rewarded well. When basketball and soccer became as honourable as practicing law, even people with the most prodigious talents failed to make a living this way. Yet, thousands were prepared to take the risk because, as Smith said of eighteenth-century young men, their ‘natural confidence’ in their own capabilities combined with the glamour of the prize to seduce them. Thus, both participants and observers in these competitions continued to validate the assumptions of cognitive individualism. Even though the prejudices of the class system appear to have been revolutionized, it remained the case that inequality was explained and excused by putting down to individual competition what was in reality the result of strategies to perpetuate privilege or good fortune.
The top lawyers of Smith’s time were well paid, despite the carnage amongst the competition, and Smith theorized that this was more likely to happen the more access to these top spots was dependent on luck. He saw one of the causes of big differences in pay between one profession and another as ‘the probability or improbability of success in them’ (Smith [1776]2005: 87). The more entry to, and subsequent success in, a job resembled a lottery, the more money that the lucky minority who succeeded would get paid. Each entrant to the lottery backed themselves to win and, just as in any ordinary lottery, they did so not in the face of any rational calculation of their chances, but in ‘the natural confidence which every man has, more or less, not only in his own abilities, but in his own good fortune’ ([1776]2005: 9). In order to entice many more to buy a ticket than could possibly win the lottery, the prize had to be big, but that might mean simply sufficient hopes of honour to risk your life on ([1776]2005: 91–2).1 For young volunteers at the start of a new war, their ‘romantic hopes make the whole price of their blood. Their pay is less than that of common labourers, and, in actual service, their fatigues are much greater’ ([1776]2005: 94).
Smith thought it was perfectly understandable that the people who won such games of chance would rather see them as games of skill in which their superior talents had been rewarded. They were only too ready to believe that succeeding in this kind of lottery ‘is the most decisive mark of what is called genius, or superior talents’ ([1776]2005: 92). This was what people thought of Smith’s leading eighteenth-century lawyers, and it is also what they think of stars in a variety of high-revenue sports and of extravagantly-rewarded CEOs (Streeck 2014). It is one of the favourite saws of neoliberalism that CEOs are as well paid as sports stars because of their rare talents, but Smith would undoubtedly refer us back to the lottery in order to explain their astronomical rewards. He might also compare CEOs (or hedge-fund managers) to the Catholic Bishops of his day, who managed to maximize their monetary rewards and their public esteem through rent-taking because their place in the hierarchy kept their numbers small and guaranteed exclusivity. Rather than recognizing their luck, they congratulated themselves on their superior talents and expected admiration and deference from others.
As already remarked, it takes little imagination to see Smith’s analysis and criticism as equally applicable to the notion of the American Dream as it was to the eighteenth-century British class system. For example, Smith’s point that people have the sort of irrational faith in their own chances of success that we are used to seeing amongst inveterate gamblers is routinely evidenced by US polling data, which show that, in spite of their knowledge of the odds against them, people nevertheless expect to succeed. They also accept personal responsibility for their (more or less inevitable) failure. Even after the onset of the Great Recession, 2011 Pew polling reported that 68 per cent believed that they were in control of their economic situation and the same proportion said they had achieved or would achieve the American Dream (Pew Trust 2011). Evidence that this optimism held despite seemingly more clear-eyed knowledge of inequality in American society was provided by the same poll, and a host of other polls which showed majorities thinking that the American Dream no longer held true for everyone (e.g. Blake 2014).
It is a testament to the power of cognitive individualism that such apparently contradictory views can be held simultaneously. The key is the ‘presumptuous hope of success’ documented by Adam Smith, together with retained faith in competition between individuals as the determinant of this success. This faith, so evident in public opinion polls, has also been shared by America’s prominent public intellectuals. For example, the notion that the astronomical pay of basketball players was a good example of the way American society rewards exceptional individuals who give the public what they want, was common to American philosophers apparently as far apart as Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin (Freeman 2010; also see Spicker 2013). Despite being the more liberal of the two, Dworkin shared the assumption of cognitive individualism that people should be held responsible for their choices. Samuel Freeman echoed Adam Smith when he concluded from a survey of Dworkin’s thinking that ‘the concepts of personal responsibility and holding people responsible for their choices do not justify using markets and market contingencies as a benchmark for determining permissible inequalities and just distributions of income and wealth’ (Freeman 2010: 947).
The American claim to be a class-free society took hold at the end of the nineteenth century. The earlier American ideology that had animated the Common Schools Movement was replaced by an economic individualism which made John Dewey despair. In Chapter 7, we will see how industrialization helped to bring about a change in the character of cognitive individualism which made it much more influential than religious or sentimental individualism. This new, more influential cognitive individualism was able to usurp the moral power of sentimental and religious individualisms in a much more effective way than straightforward utilitarianism ever had. This was not simply the result of industrialization, urbanization and immigration, however. It also relied on a diffusion of the ideas of another British thinker, Herbert Spencer.
Like Paine and Owen, Spencer was extraordinarily important in his time: ‘the world philosopher of the late-nineteenth century … He was especially idolized in the United States, where he had many more followers than Darwin or Marx’ (Francis 2007: 8). In Britain, he had a louder voice in liberalism than J.S. Mill and by some distance he was the leading English philosopher of his time. Across the world, there were many who thought him the greatest thinker in history but, rather like Owen, Spencer was prone to change his convictions (Francis 2007; Taylor 1992). This makes for plenty of room for debate about what he actually said and the two main secondary sources I use in this discussion did not even agree on whether Spencer was a theorist of individualism. For Francis, the biographer, he only (latterly) had a ‘tincture of individualism’, but for Taylor, the historian, writing about Spencer’s influence on other political thinkers of the time, he was the leading light of nineteenth-century individualism. Taylor saw The Man versus the State (MVS) (Spencer [1884]1960) as ‘[t]he chief document of Individualism’ and ‘Spencer was simply the leading philosophical spokesman for a significant and influential late nineteenth-century political ideology’, namely individualism (Taylor 1992: 4).
MVS, published in 1884, argued that the British Liberals and Tories were in the process of swapping sides. The Tories used to be the party clinging on to legislation that advantaged their wealthy, landowning constituency but now it seemed the Liberals (amongst whom Spencer counted himself) were following suit. Spencer did not mean by this that the Liberals were amassing laws to protect the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie. The problem was, rather, that the Liberals were building up legislative protection for the working class. For the most part, the legislation he had in mind was exactly what the sentimental individualism of reformers like Paine and Owen had demanded: laws on education and welfare and laws which curbed market excesses through regulation. According to Spencer, liberalism should not be about passing laws to make it possible for all individuals to enjoy the freedoms presently only enjoyed by the privileged and wealthy. Its only purpose was to dispense with legislation and it did not matter whether this was the Corn Laws that had protected the landed interest or later factory reform which protected the working class. In this light, Spencer and his allies were the true liberals arguing for a return to core principles and their opponents within the party, ‘the radicals’, were traitors to the cause.
Taylor (1992) suggests that Spencer’s argument was convenient for the industrial bourgeoisie who had already joined the elites that were powerful enough to have laws made in their interests. Unless Spencer seriously proposed scrapping their legislation, he was encouraging them to kick over the gaming table just at the point the dice might turn against them. When Spencer wrote about scrapping laws in MVS, the vast majority of examples he gave were not the protections enjoyed by the bourgeoisie but the laws extending some small protections to the working class. We can readily understand the radicals’ argument in favour of extending the liberties of modern industrial democracy down through society, but Spencer and his allies – who Taylor called the individualists – thought that it had always been the state that stood in the way of liberty. This was as true at the end of the eighteenth century as it had been a century earlier when Paine had targeted the laws that favoured monarchs and aristocrats.
Spencer thought the only legitimate sphere for state action was the pursuit of equity and justice (see below), but when they aspired to improve society in any other respect law-makers were blindly wielding clumsy and dangerous weapons. They were not clever enough to understand the effects of the policies they made because those effects took a long time to appear and the most important of them were often unintended, perhaps the opposite of what the legislators meant to happen (Taylor 1992). There was also a natural process of amelioration going on all the time which was much better left alone, especially by legislators. Spencer believed that evolution was changing how human beings thought. Experience was turning them away from warlike and competitive modes of thought and behaviour and – eventually, but not yet – into beings who could co-operate with and care for each other. For Taylor (1992), it was this natural, evolutionary process of social amelioration which helped Spencer out of the bind of trying to portray himself as a liberal when arguing for the status quo. For Francis (2007), it was the importance of this process to Spencer that should make us wary of describing him as an individualist.
When Spencer saw our evolutionary journey taking us from a past in which all life was cheap to a future in which we would be capable of treating other people as individuals like ourselves, he was describing a change in the beliefs human beings had about each other. Spencer insisted that it was our beliefs that underpinned our perceptions and our rules for behaviour and his expectations for evolution could be summarized as the hope that, through experience, humanity as a whole would become converted to sentimental individualism. In other words, it was because there were not enough sentimental individualists around at the end of the nineteenth century that any attempt to legislate in accordance with sentimental individualism would be doomed to fail.
Of course, we have already seen that Robert Owen also recognized that sentimental individualism was in short supply but he thought the problem could be solved by sustained efforts to grow the right kind of characters. For Spencer, sentimental individualism was a nice idea but absurdly ahead of its time, and therefore doing more harm than good. This proved to be one of the most powerful notions that Spencer bequeathed to American cognitive individualism, but there was more to Spencer’s American legacy than the intellectual ballast for the dismissal of ‘bleeding-heart’ liberalism. Spencer also provided intellectual underpinning for the idea of the classless society and the American Dream.
American usage of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ refer, respectively, to a government’s liberality and stinginess with taxpayers’ money. Describing how, in 1887, Bruce Smith defined the new uses of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, which were to become so familiar in US politics in the twentieth century, Taylor (1992: 263) ascribed Bruce Smith’s approbation of conservatism to Spencer’s individualist ideas. Committing to Spencer’s theories meant arguing against big government while defending the status quo and this sounds like an introduction to the internal tensions of conservative politics in the USA. It was, however, bleeding chunks of Spencer’s theories that crossed the Atlantic rather than the full, sometimes confused and contradictory, corpus. Indeed, one large organ of Spencer’s body of theory was altogether left behind: his evolutionary utopianism. Americans largely ignored the fact that Spencer was talking about a process of evolution that had replaced God and in which our wills and desires were of no account and democracy was an irrelevant side-show. As a result, they confused his utopian hopes with a description of them and their American democracy.
Spencer’s theory of progressive improvement through epochs was perhaps like Hegel’s theory but entirely without God: blood-thirsty militarism was followed by industrialism and then some kind of utopia. There is disagreement on how we should characterize this utopia, with Taylor referring to ‘dreams of a distant anarchistic Utopia’ and Francis describing Spencer as a ‘utopian individualist’. Earlier, it was suggested that it might even be better to conceive of it as a sentimental individualist utopia in which human character had been transformed. In contrast to Owen’s utopian dreams, this was the result of evolution rather than human contrivance. Whereas for Owen character formation was all about rational, scientific intervention for the good of all, Spencer had evolution firmly in charge.
Spencer was one of those opponents Owen found most hateful: those who thought there was no help for the poor because their character could not be redeemed by human intervention. Just like them, Spencer thought the poor may as well die and this would be better for everyone because they could not be helped. Our minds were not blank slates and the development of character could not be rushed. To transform degenerate human beings into the benevolent and altruistic denizens of an anarchist utopia would take many generations (Taylor 1992).2 Later in his life, Spencer gave up his earlier belief that civilization brought superiority, recognizing that those who were civilized were often more virtuous (for example, honest and gentle) than those who forced civilization upon them. Evolution was now seen not as a linear process of perfecting human nature but as a correction to the damage wrought by competitive militarism in which life was cheap on the simple morality that had survived throughout the previous generations (Francis 2007). It might be best to think of these qualities as instincts improved by use. They were used amongst indigenous people and then, later on, in industrial society where they appeared to be very similar to the virtues admired by Smith and Paine: the altruistic sentiments, self-help, prudence, responsibility, love of justice, of property and liberty (Taylor 1992).
To bring about the industrial society Spencer could see all around him, humanity had gradually given up the dog-eat-dog attitudes of militarism because those who did best now were adapted to do well in industry rather than in military conflict and intimidation. Since co-operation and peaceful interaction were the keys to success in industrial society (Francis 2007), Spencer’s vision of the future shared some of the co-operative features of Owen’s utopia. The individual benevolence which people had to practice if character was ever to be transformed would be developed in collectives. Spencer thought they would be voluntary but such associations for mutual assistance, mutuality and co-operation were essential for the nurturing of benevolence and sympathy and other more elevated capacities. Long before the promised utopia, there would be opportunities for voluntary action in industrial society, including for charitable ends, as the state withdrew (Taylor 1992). Americans were inclined to take this as validation of their own, existing society.
There are themes in Spencer’s work that we have repeatedly encountered in the discussion of both cognitive and sentimental individualism. For example, as in Smith and the early works of Paine, the development of commerce and the division of labour made people capable of, and anxious for, self-government. Spencer acknowledged that the old military (monarchical) societies required government, for example when the population had to be forced to provide products or labour to the armed elites that ruled them. In industrial society, people were spontaneously co-operating because the division of labour meant this was necessary. People knew they were mutually interdependent and did not need coercing any longer.
In military societies, status determined subordination: serfs or peasants had to give up goods or labour to nobles and monarchs. In commercial society (Paine) or industrial society (Spencer), status could be replaced by contract. If society hung on to status too long, it could not make a timely transition to contract and this hindered the development of a more complex division of labour. Spencer taught that, as long as the state backed up contracts with the law, it could leave any other task of government to industrial organization. This would allow people to evolve ethically and shed their martial attitudes.
Not only would people no longer think life was cheap but they would start to develop many of the virtues that Smith and Paine talked about, including the commitment to freedom and justice, to respect the claims of others and their rights to property, and a stronger desire for independence would replace the duty of obedience. Spencer’s ‘law of equal freedom’ often served as a sort of shorthand for the ethical condition that Spencer thought evolution was bringing about. We have already encountered this ‘law’ under other guises, for example Durkheim’s moral individualism: it simply means I get as much liberty as I can conducive to just as much liberty for everyone else (Taylor 1992).
When we encountered this idea, it was as a morality built on the core belief of human equality within sentimental individualism. Spencer was not persuaded that people were equal but he confidently predicted that they would come to believe that they were. Rather than being based on his own belief in equality, his law of equal freedom derived from his science: evolution was equipping people with the characteristics that would make them want to apply the law of equal treatment to all their actions. If allowed to do this – i.e. the state did not get in the way with its disastrous law-making – then utility, and particularly happiness, would be maximized. In fact, an all-persuasive law of equal freedom would be a good sign that utopia had been achieved (Taylor 1992). Indeed, in Social Statics (1865) Spencer seemed to promise a state of evolution in which we should all be so highly evolved that we would need no government at all. When this is compared to Bentham’s stipulation that utility maximization might require limitless state intervention, we can see again why it was the legacy of Spencer (and not Bentham) that played a crucial role in the development of American cognitive individualism (Taylor 1992).
It is important to understand why Spencer thought that character would change over time through experience. Competitive, selfish and aggressive traits would die out because they would no longer be worth inheriting: rather than ensuring survival and worldly gain, they might land you on the gallows. As industrial society developed, the desirable moral characteristics – including respecting the rights of others, self-reliance and prudence – proved to be so helpful to one generation that they were passed on to the next and subsequent generations. Spencer thought that ‘socialistic’ legislation would interfere with this process because it would prevent the right characteristics being as helpful as they ought to be. Without that legislation, people who did not acquire the right characteristics would fail to thrive, as would those who inherited their characteristics, thus these characteristics would disappear because such traits were a poor fit with the society developing around them (Taylor 1992).
It might help to point out that Spencer had two different conceptions of the ‘survival of the fittest’, a phrase he is usually said to have coined.3 In military society, it really did entail the elimination, or at least the ruthless exploitation, of the weak by the strong. In an unmistakeable example of use inheritance, war-like characteristics ensured survival. Spencer hoped we had seen the last of militarist society and in industrial society strength was irrelevant. The fittest were simply those best adapted to a society in which the less martial and more virtuous characteristics helped people to prosper. Unlike their predecessors in industrial society, those who survived and prospered would, quite understandably, want to help those who were unfit. They should however forbear because ‘true beneficence will be so restrained as to avoid fostering the inferior at the expense of the superior’ and so
[i]f left to operate in all its sternness, the principle of the survival of the fittest, which, ethically considered, we have seen to imply that each individual shall be left to experience the effects of his own nature and consequent conduct, would quickly clear away the degraded. (Spencer 1893, cited in Taylor 1992: 88)
Survival of the fittest did not require those who survived to grind down and eliminate the poor but simply to avert their gaze while those afflicted with the wrong sort of character failed to reproduce and disappeared from the face of the earth.
Housing and education can be used as examples to help us understand the policy implications of this programme of eugenics. According to Spencer, there was no point in improving the housing or education of the poor in the hope of changing their character because their character had been shaped by generations of deprivation. The next generation would still inherit their parents’ characteristics and what was needed was for the lessons of experience to pass to succeeding generations in the shape of altered nerve fibres. Environment shaped character but only through the race, not the individual in one or two generations, so it was pointless giving the poor education or decent houses because they lacked the character needed to appreciate the new conditions. Setting out to reform character by education, for example, was a were of time, as was amply evidenced by the fruitless efforts of the Christian church to do just that (Taylor 1992). What was required instead were ‘sentiments responding to the requirements of the social state – emotive faculties that find their gratification in the duties devolving to us’ (Spencer 1864, cited in Francis 2007: 119).
This acquisition of sentiments would be postponed if social reform removed or perverted the link between behaviour and consequences. Of course, homilies against misplaced benevolence had currency from biblical times, but here Spencer brought scientific legitimation to the idea that state intervention prevented character from developing. These ‘demoralizing effects of government’ were exemplified by the welfare provided by the Poor Law which Spencer called ‘a kind of social opium eating’, in which ‘extravagance has been made habitual by shielding [the poor] from the sharp penalties extravagance brings’ (Spencer, cited in Taylor 1992: 125). Similarly, Spencer thought the old-age pensions mooted from the 1890s would increase improvidence and decrease self-control. Like Edmund Burke (see Chapter 1), he also argued that such state intervention deprived private individuals of the opportunity to exercise beneficence. The suffering caused by removing a safety net such as the Poor Law would be worth it because its replacement by voluntary help would encourage self-help and altruistic sentiments at the same time (Taylor 1992).
The policy implications that Spencer drew from his analysis could be detached from their scientific legitimation. Once we take away the underlying theory of evolution and use inheritance, we are left with some familiar arguments against welfare benefits. So, mistaken ideas like the Poor Law prevented the inheritance of useful characteristics from happening by encouraging improvidence and enabling the improvident to ‘multiply’, but opposition to the Poor Law did not require a belief in use inheritance (Spencer [1884]1960: 34). Nor was a commitment to evolution required in order to believe that relieving poor children encouraged the production of fatherless children as a kind of meal ticket. This sort of criticism of British welfare legislation had been commonplace since at least as far back as Burke (and people made the same criticisms of Owen’s proposals for ‘home colonies’ for paupers) and could be held to without having the slightest notion of evolution changing character. This removed any obstacle to the policy objections of Spencer’s theory crossing the Atlantic: American cognitive individualism could be reinforced by Spencer’s ideas without going to the inconvenience of acquiring a belief in evolution.
If American cognitive individualism chose to ignore the idea of use inheritance and the theory of evolution, it was at liberty to misread Spencer: as condoning economic competition as a means for moral improvement. This entails the very mechanism Spencer argued had passed into history with military society. According to Spencer, the strong were no longer the cause of the weak failing to prosper; indeed, though this would put a spanner in the works of evolution, they would be much more likely to want to help those who were failing to thrive. It was because Spencer did not see struggle for survival as the key to progress in modernity that Francis (1992) declared Spencer no individualist. If individualism was taken to mean individual competition, Francis could argue that Spencer thought we had reached a point where people were no longer improved by individualism. Indeed, competition might now threaten progress and prevent the state from developing in the way it should. By the same token, since Spencer was exported to the USA shorn of any reference to human evolution, American cognitive individualism was free to interpret Spencer as the great advocate of economic competition as a mechanism for the moral improvement of humanity.
For Spencer, any interference in evolution, for example laws which might give the working class limited protection against exploitation and the worst living and working conditions, was bound to backfire. Evolutionary theory showed the folly of designing policy from a belief in the equality of human beings. Rather than raising people to the level at which they could benefit from individualism, such well-meaning policies would multiply the poor and prolong their misery. Truly compassionate government let evolution winnow out those who were not well adapted to living with capitalism. In fact, all government intervention impeded the moral progress that was the key to evolution and was best served by leaving people free to make their own choices and enjoy, or endure, the consequences. This in turn required Spencer’s ‘law of equal freedom’ under which ‘every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other man’ (Spencer 1865: 94).
Spencer’s ideas changed and reinvigorated American cognitive individualism in a way that allowed the USA to leave behind the combination of cognitive, sentimental and religious individualism which Higham called the ‘American ideology’. Readers of MVS were instructed to observe the ‘unparalleled progress of the United States, which is peopled by self-made men, and the recent descendants of self-made men’. This was in stark contrast to stagnation on the continent of Europe where self-made men were scarce (Spencer [1884]1960: 169). These feelings of admiration were mutual. America was an ideal environment for the synthesis between Spencer’s ideas and American individualism, which sowed the seeds for the twentieth-century popularity of neoliberalism amongst voters.
This was acknowledged by Albert Jay Knock, an important figure in early (mid-twentieth-century) neoliberalism, who influenced Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand, amongst others. Knock wrote the introduction to the 1940 Caxton edition of Spencer’s MVS and in it he represented himself as one of the last few intellectuals clinging to Spencer’s truths in a global sea of ‘Statism’. Knock said that the recent (1932–39) history of the USA, for example progressive taxation, replicated the British slide into Statism (1860–1884) that Spencer had railed against. The battle to enshrine Spencer’s principles in Britain had been lost but Knock believed it was not too late for American individualism to hear Spencer’s call to arms. Knock is sometimes described along with Hayek, Von Mises and Milton Friedman as a libertarian conservative but his reverence for MVS suggests why the term ‘neoliberal’ eventually stuck. It contains Spencer’s most trenchant defence of his claim to represent the liberal tradition and his certainty that it was the radicals and the Liberal Party that had deserted the tradition. The idea of a revived or resurgent liberalism which preserved the tradition pervades the essays in MVS and if we had to wait until 1938 for the term to be coined, Spencer had already explained why this particular neologism was most apt.
The world’s ‘greatest living philosopher’ confirmed everything Americans hoped was true about their country, even if they were not actually convinced of its divine inspiration and destiny. For example, Spencer said there were scientific reasons the American Constitution should have prioritized negative freedom and why Americans were right to be circumspect about changing it. Moreover, Spencer’s theories provided scientific reasons for thinking that the USA was more of a utopia than any other country on earth. Many Americans believed that the wish to found a utopia on American shores had animated American history from the original settlement through the Revolutionary War to the present day. However, for Americans who did not believe in God’s investment in their nation, the need for further validation was pressing. In Spencer’s theory of history, society evolved ‘from a custom-bound, hierarchical society based on relations of status and subordination to the open, free, progressive society of classical liberalism with its voluntarily assumed social relations’ (Taylor 1992: 167). Most Americans thought themselves citizens of that open, free and progressive society and already in the sort of social equilibrium Spencer described in First Principles (1867).
In many of its citizens’ estimation, America was already infinitely closer to a utopia of individual freedom and fully developed morality than were the countries of Europe with their bloated, undemocratic governments. Spencer’s predictions about the pace of change in human society seemed overly pessimistic. It had taken barely a couple of hundred years to get the USA to its current state, so evolution could simply be omitted from his theories. There need be no slow progress towards a distant utopia via further extension of personal liberties and the shrinking of the state. American enthusiasts thought the point was to defend the liberties they already had and they agreed with Spencer that any hint of socialism would put progress in reverse and return society to the various degrees of un-freedom associated with militarism (Spencer [1884]1960; Taylor 1992). The warnings Spencer gave in MVS about socialism’s inability to resist militarism and the unimaginable horrors of communism would help Americans gird their loins to defend their utopia for generations to come. They were, after all, holding the hopes of the human race in their hands (Francis 2007).
A less self-confident America might have lacked the temerity to put itself in place of Spencer’s utopia and ignore the contribution of evolutionary theory to his ideas. In fact, the altruistic values of Spencer’s anarchistic utopia had little in common with those of American individualism. His speech at a banquet in his honour in New York in 1882 made it plain that the USA had a long way to go before it could claim to possess the values of a truly advanced nation. The most obvious proof of this was the American obsession with work. With the transition from military to industrial society, work had replaced fighting but this was far from the end of the story. Once nature had been tamed, the work ethos would lose its grip and humanity would discover that ‘life is not for work, but work is for life’ (cited in Francis 2007: 105).
Spencer declared ‘the average conduct, under the pressure and excitement of social life as at present carried on, is in sundry respects repulsive’ (Spencer [1884]1960: 57) and his idea of fully evolved human beings over-lapped with Robert Owen’s. He shared Owen’s expectation that less and less work would be required of people in the future but in Spencer’s case this expectation was underpinned by evolutionary theory. Even laying aside the centrality of the work ethos, there was probably little of American individualism that appealed to him. For example, he had no sympathy with a utilitarian moral philosophy and he thought it bizarre to admire selfishness when so much aesthetic pleasure resulted from caring for the feelings of others. The evolution of human beings required increasing self-restraint which unnecessarily restricted opportunities for pleasure, particularly sensual pleasures (Francis 2007).
Omitting evolution also allowed American individualism to finesse the fact that Spencer’s anarchistic utopia was meant to supersede capitalist society (Francis 2007), but substituting capitalism for the forces of evolution made little practical difference to the policy implications which American individualism could glean from Spencer’s writing. Knowledge of Lamarckian use inheritance and the increasing complexity of all organisms, including human institutions, produced infallible scientific predictions of human behaviour, and ought to guide all of our policies and political activities, but it suggested that laissez-faire was the best policy (Taylor 1992). This was obviously true for the economy and for social policy, although less obvious in respect of justice and equity (see below). The same policy conclusions could also be reached without the science. According to Spencer ([1884]1960), human beings were inherently unpredictable and, because there was no telling what the effects of a particular policy would be on their behaviour, it was better to leave well alone. Laissez-faire was therefore the only safe recipe for all public policies, including those which affected the workings of the economy. Spencer was not above claiming at the same time that laissez-faire was good for prosperity, but cognition (as opposed to science) suggested that the main problem with interfering was that we could not tell the effect of policies on people’s characters.
The scientific injunction to laissez-faire may have simply reinforced policies which Spencer could have arrived at on the basis of cognition alone, but it brought a degree of confidence in the process of policy analysis that cognition (with its emphasis on the unpredictability of policy intervention) could not justify. Science had no such doubts: it told us what certainly would happen if we interfered with use inheritance and increasing organic complexity and the severity of these consequences meant that there really was no alternative to laissez-faire. This confidence was transferred to American individualism, even though it omitted Spencer’s evolutionary theory.
A halo of certainty, as captured in the maxim There Is No Alternative (or TINA), was to become one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century neoliberalism (Streeck 2014), but it was derived from the same intellectual error that was implicated in some of the most horrific events of that century. As I explained in The Demoralization of Western Culture, totalitarian systems in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union drew on science to inform politics. It was the Nazi certainty that the party served as the instrument of evolution, and the Soviet certainty that the party served as an instrument of a science of human progress, that led in both cases to immorality of the most extreme kind imaginable (Fevre 2000a). It is just as well that American individualism neither needed, nor had room for, Spencer’s evolutionary theory but the certainties it took from the traces of evolutionary theory in Spencer’s rhetoric were dangerous enough.
In my earlier work, I argued that to make human feelings of no account was a characteristic of totalitarianism of all kinds. This was what happened when science was used to push aside sentimental sense-making in the twentieth century and this is precisely what Spencer was doing when he argued that, as moved as he was by the suffering of the poor, there was no alternative to letting evolution take its course (Francis 2007). American individualism took the same stance but with capitalism acting as evolution’s amanuensis. In the process, it laid the foundations of a neoliberalism that was a far cry from nineteenth-century laissez-faire. According to Andrew Ure (1835), for example, the people who imagined feelings were hurt were themselves deluded as when, for example, they imagined that children did not enjoy as well as profit from their labour in the factories.4 Similarly, the ideologues of the Manchester School saw capitalism as productive of the best of all possible worlds.5 None of these apologists and enthusiasts for capitalism believed, with Spencer, that the only possible road to human progress entailed untold human misery.
Adam Smith was dismissive of the idea that market forces, rather than luck and the class system, were responsible for inequality, but Herbert Spencer trusted in them to do the work of evolution. He was convinced that intervention in markets would obstruct the human evolution which would eventually produce a society ordered by the principles of sentimental individualism. However, the only means to this earthly paradise was to allow cognitive individualism free rein since it was self-interest that would lead to the adaptation to market forces (through use inheritance) that was necessary to develop human beings fit to live there. Unlike Smith, Spencer thought the market cultivated virtue and many Americans could recognize this, and other convictions, in their own ideology. Spencer’s philosophy seemed to them to suggest that America represented the future of all human societies and any attempt at an alternative route to the summit was bound to end in disaster. This dogma endorsed the atrophy of compassion and a much crueller American individualism was now in the making.
1. Some abolitionists went on to campaign against the state lottery.
2. And ‘a future state of human perfection … could be achieved only over the course of many generations and as a consequence of the misery of the idle, the improvident, and the destitute’ (Taylor 1992: 130).
3. Used in MVS (Spencer [1884]1960: 110, 138) but also in The Principles of Biology (Spencer 1864).
4. Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), p. 299.
5. The Manchester School included prominent abolitionists and promoted the universal benefits of free trade. For example, the working class as well as the manufacturers were supposed to benefit from the repeal of the Corn Laws.