WorkHerbert Spencer

The Principles of Sociology

The three volumes that divide human history into societies organised for war and societies organised for production, and treat the difference as a law.

by Herbert Spencer2,536 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1876(aged 56)
Original language: English

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Overview

Evidence came first, and he bought it himself. From 1873 Spencer paid assistants to work through travellers' reports, histories and ethnographies and tabulate what different societies did about kinship, worship, war, trade and rank, publishing the result as Descriptive Sociology — an apparatus for a science that did not yet exist. It ruined him on that front: by 1881 he was £3,250 down, and he closed the series. The residue of his estate and three trustees carried it on; the last of its fifteen volumes appeared in 1934, thirty-one years after his death. The three volumes of the Principles — 1876, 1882 and 1896 — are what the tables were for. Societies, Spencer argues, are super-organic aggregates that grow as organisms grow: as they get larger they differentiate, parts specialise, and functions once done by everyone are handed off to organs of their own: domestic and ceremonial, ecclesiastical and professional, political and industrial. From this he draws the contrast the book is remembered for. A society organised for war compels cooperation, subordinates the individual to the whole and rewards obedience; a society organised for production gets its cooperation by contract, and its members hold their own. The two are types rather than stages, and a nation can slide back. The reception went against him almost immediately, and it went through Durkheim, who read Spencer's individuals as calculating egoists; that reading is the one sociology inherited, and recent scholarship argues it misrepresented him. Then sociology stopped reading him altogether. His American publisher alone had sold 368,755 copies of him; in 1937 Talcott Parsons could open a book by asking who now read Spencer, and treat the question as already answered.

Key concepts

What does Spencer mean by calling society a super-organic aggregate?

A super-organic aggregate is a society whose members cooperate without becoming a single living body. Spencer compares social growth with organic growth, but he keeps the comparison limited: societies contain conscious individuals, whereas organisms contain dependent parts. This distinction lets him explain social structure without treating the individual as merely an organ of the whole.

How does social differentiation alter the relation between parts and whole?

Social differentiation divides common activities among increasingly specialised parts of a society. Functions once performed by everyone become domestic, ceremonial, ecclesiastical, professional, political or industrial functions carried by distinct institutions. Growth therefore produces dependence between parts, but it does not erase their separate activity or make society literally identical with an organism.

Why are Spencer's social types not stages in one historical sequence?

Spencer treats social forms as types because societies organised for war and societies organised for production can recur, overlap or replace one another. He does not make production the guaranteed endpoint of history: a nation can move back toward militancy. The distinction therefore describes changing forms of organisation rather than a ladder every society must climb.

Why did Spencer build comparative tables before writing the Principles?

Spencer built the Descriptive Sociology tables to give sociology a comparative evidential base. From 1873, assistants worked through travellers' reports, histories and ethnographies, tabulating what societies did about kinship, worship, war, trade and rank. The Principles then used that apparatus to connect recurring social arrangements with claims about growth, differentiation and governance.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

War, Production, and Social Evolution

What makes a society command obedience rather than secure cooperation by contract? The answer decides whether political power absorbs the individual or leaves members to hold their own.

Spencer treated militant and industrial societies as two recurring forms, not as fixed stages through which every nation must pass. In the first, war concentrates authority, compels cooperation, and subordinates the individual; in the second, production coordinates labor through contract and permits members to hold their own. The three volumes, published in 1876, 1882, and 1896, turned tables assembled for Descriptive Sociology into this comparative argument. Durkheim later recast Spencer as a theorist of calculating egoists, a reading recent scholarship disputes.

social evolution
militancy
industrialism
social organization
specialization
labor
cooperation
authority
political evolution
political authority

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Within this work

passages held: 2,536
distinct concepts: 2,654
by passages held, corpus-wide: #16

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “political authority” and “social evolution”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
political authority	social evolution	49
ancestor worship	religion	48
religion	ritual	43
political authority	social hierarchy	39
political authority	religion	35
religion	social evolution	34
militarism	social evolution	33
ancestor worship	ritual	30
ritual	social hierarchy	30
division of labor	social evolution	29
political authority	ritual	28
ancestor worship	political authority	22
social evolution	social hierarchy	20
militarism	political authority	18
militarism	social hierarchy	18
ancestor worship	social evolution	16
religion	social hierarchy	15
ritual	social evolution	15
ancestor worship	social hierarchy	6
division of labor	political authority	3
militarism	ritual	3
division of labor	militarism	2
division of labor	social hierarchy	2
militarism	religion	2
division of labor	religion	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1851 Social Statics
His first book fixed the political position he defended for the next half-century, and the evolutionary reasoning he tried out here on the poor law grew into a philosophy of the universe.
EN
1855 The Principles of Psychology
Fifteen years on it returned, much enlarged, as a volume of the Synthetic Philosophy — so the edition that carried his psychology to readers is not the one that broke him.
EN
1858 Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative
Read against the Synthetic Philosophy, this is where several of its positions were first stated at magazine length — and where he wrote about music, manners and laughter, which the system had no room for.
EN
1860 Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical
Written for the quarterly reviews between 1854 and 1859, before the synthetic philosophy that occupied the rest of Spencer's life had begun, and collected in 1860. It is his book for parents and schoolteachers rather than for philosophers.
EN
1862 First Principles
Everything else in the Synthetic Philosophy was written to demonstrate the formula set out here, and every later volume argues back to it. Spencer issued it first, when none of what it was meant to govern had yet been written.
EN
1873 The Study of Sociology
It stands in front of the three volumes of the sociology as their introduction, arguing that the science is difficult before any of it was attempted. Much the shortest of his sociological writing.
EN
1876 The Principles of Sociology you are here EN
1879 The Data of Ethics
Ethics was where the whole system was meant to arrive, and this is its opening division — issued alone, ahead of the volumes it was supposed to rest on, and later bound in as Part I of The Principles of Ethics.
EN

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