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Just like the others, Spencer was very intelligent. He was educated at home in mathematics, natural science, history and other subjects; which would eventually lead him to become the most popular theorist. He wasn’t interested in school, and ended up working for a railroad company where he was an engineer and draftsman. When he was done designing for the railroad he began to publish a series of articles that began to indicate his perspective on social and political questions. Eventually he became the subeditor of The Economist and this allowed him to begin his scholarly writing.
Although Spencer was one of the most influential figures in sociology, he was overlooked because of some of his controversial ideas. He looked at society as being something different, and believed that natural and physical laws and processes governed everything, including social order. Many believed that it was Darwin that gave attention to the term ‘evolution’ and also the phrase ‘survival of the fittest.” But in fact it was Spencer, and he believed that only the strong survive.
Spencer’s evolutionary stance led to his most famous idea ‘Social Darwinism.’ With this he projected his theory of biological evolution onto a social plane, emphasizing the importance of similarities between organism and state. He saw evolution as the change from homogeneous condition to heterogeneous. Spencer highlighted four main concepts, growth, differentiation, integration, and adaption, he believed that these concepts could be brought into the context of a developing, and growing society.
This reading was interesting to me because when I attended Iowa Central a couple years ago and took a biology class we talked about Darwin and survival of the fittest. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t Darwin that created that term. We even watched an informational movie on this, and it never once mentioned anything about Herbert Spencer.