Herbert Spencer
English philosopher and sociologist (1820–1903), born in Derby into a dissenting, self-taught family that gave him an unconventional education free of religious dogmatism, working as a railway engineer and journalist —he served as an editor at The Economist— before devoting himself fully to a totalising philosophical project: the System of Synthetic Philosophy, ten volumes written over nearly forty years that aimed to unify all the sciences —biology, psychology, sociology, ethics— under a single universal evolutionary principle, applicable to the physical universe, living organisms and human societies alike. He coined the concept of 'survival of the fittest' —a term Darwin himself adopted in later editions of On the Origin of Species— before and independently of the theory of natural selection, and extended it unreservedly to social life: for Spencer, social evolution is a natural process of progressive differentiation and complexity, from homogeneous, coercive militant societies to complex industrial societies based on voluntary cooperation, which the state should not hinder through artificial intervention. His work Social Statics (1851) and later The Man versus the State (1884) defended a radical individualism and a deep distrust of any legislation restricting individual liberty, including state aid to the poor, which he considered counterproductive to society's natural selection. This application of evolutionism to politics and economics, known as social Darwinism, served to justify the most radical laissez-faire and social inequalities as 'natural', making him one of the most widely read and influential —and later most rejected and controversial— thinkers of the entire Victorian era, both in England and in the United States, where his prestige surpassed even Darwin's for decades.