Social Statics

A Supreme Court justice reached for this book in 1905, in the course of losing an argument with it. Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissenting after the Court struck down a New York law limiting how long bakers could be made to work, objected that the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr Herbert Spencer's Social Statics — a line that has outlasted almost everything inside the volume it names. What John Chapman had published in 1851 was a moral science built on a single rule: every person may claim the fullest liberty compatible with the like liberty of everyone else. Spencer then walked that rule through the institutions of his own country and let it cut wherever it fell. State education, the poor law, established churches, colonies and public sanitary regulation all failed the test, each of them because compulsion takes from one person, on his account, a freedom another keeps. Under the argument sits a theory of human beings slowly adapting to social life until coercion becomes unnecessary. The date matters: the book appeared eight years before Darwin's Origin of Species, so the evolutionary confidence in it is Spencer's own and borrowed from nobody. It found its readers among the philosophic radicals and the free-traders, and it succeeded in a way nobody had expected — enough to move its author out of trade journalism and into literary London, where G. H. Lewes asked him to write for the Leader and the friendship with George Eliot dates from those years. He never abandoned the rule. He did edit the consequences: the revised edition he approved in 1892 no longer contained the chapter in which he had argued that a citizen may ignore the state entirely.