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> Spencer and his followers read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species as a justification for unregulated market competition and colonization. Please. I don't know
by briandh 12y ago
> Spencer and his followers read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species as a justification for unregulated market competition and colonization.
Please. I don't know about Spencer's unnamed "followers", but he was not quite what you would call a fan of the colonialism of his day:
> That a government cannot undertake to administer the affairs of a colony, and to support for it a judicial staff, a constabulary, a garrison, and so forth, without trespassing against the parent society, scarcely needs pointing out.
> Moreover, colonial government, properly so called, cannot be carried on without transgressing the rights of the colonists. For if, as generally happens, the colonists are dictated to by authorities sent out from the mother country, then the law of equal freedom is broken in their persons, as much as by any other kind of autocratic rule.
From Social Statics, Chapter 27, Section 1 (available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/spencer-social-statics-1851 http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/spencer-social-statics-185... ).
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y agoThose quotes make it sound like he's perfectly fine with colonialism, just not particular kinds of colonialism.
- briandh 12y agoThe article is referring to a brand of colonialism mentioned, also next to Spencer's name, earlier on: > The philosopher Herbert Spencer famously argued that competition among men for survival was not only inevitable but good. [...] In retrospect, it is easy to recognize his theory of nature as an unacknowledged description of nineteenth-century England... It was only natural that colonial regimes brutally extracted resources from Asians and Africans unable to resist their guns. Those who survived at the expense of others were simply proving their own fitness, and their enemies’ weakness. Or, as I specified in my original comment, "the colonialism of his day".