Herbert Spencer, the Radical

Aside from Darwin, the writer most commonly associated with evolution in Victorian Britain, and the country’s most famous living philosopher, was the individualistic Herbert Spencer. Spencer certainly seems an unlikely altruist, but it was the influence of his writings, including his Data of Ethics (1879), that did most to guarantee the wider dissemination of the language of altruism from the 1870s onwards. This chapter explains what altruism meant to Spencer; how he used it in his attacks on the brutality and hypocrisy of British imperialism; how it led many readers, to his great frustration, to identify him as a disciple of Comte; and how he finally dropped the term as it came to be associated with socialism. Spencer’s combination of altruism abroad and egoism at home made sense as two sides of his resistance to political and ideological movements which he thought represented the ‘New Toryism’.