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WorkHerbert Spencer

The Study of Sociology

Serialised from the first issue of a magazine founded largely to carry him, and later the book a Yale president tried to stop a professor teaching.

by Herbert Spencer527 passages held

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First published
(aged 53)
Original language
English

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Overview

It was owed to a book series and what appeared first was a magazine serial. Spencer had agreed to write it for the International Scientific Series; he ran it in the Contemporary Review at home and, in the States, in Popular Science Monthly — which Edward Youmans had founded in 1872 in no small part to get Spencer in front of American readers, and whose first issue, in May of that year, led with this book's opening chapter. The serial finished on the first of October 1873, and only then was the volume allowed to appear. The subject is whether there can be a science of society at all, and most of the book is spent on the reasons for doubting it. A chemist is not made of the compounds he studies; a student of society is inside his own subject, formed by its class arrangements, its religion, its patriotism and its schooling, and each of those, Spencer argues in turn, systematically bends what he is able to see. The remedy is not neutrality, which he thinks impossible, but knowing the direction of one's own bias. Behind the caution sits the positive claim: societies grow, differentiate and integrate as organisms do, which means institutions have an order of development and cannot be legislated into existence out of turn. That was read, correctly, as an argument against confident reform. It also made the book the one American teachers reached for. William Graham Sumner set it for his students at Yale, and the university's president Noah Porter tried to have it withdrawn. The fight ran through 1879 and 1880. It became one of the first American disputes over what a professor may put in front of a class.

Key concepts

What does the social-organism analogy mean in The Study of Sociology?

The social-organism analogy means that society develops through the coordination of interdependent parts rather than through a designer’s plan. Spencer compares social growth with organic growth: institutions differentiate as society becomes more complex, while integration holds their activities together. In 1873, this analogy supported his resistance to treating legislation as a substitute for development.

What do differentiation and integration explain in Spencer’s account of social evolution?

Differentiation explains how social functions become increasingly specialized, while integration explains how those specialized functions remain connected. Spencer uses the pair to describe growth as a double movement: institutions acquire distinct roles, yet depend on one another within the same society. The terms therefore describe social development, not a programme that political reformers can impose.

Why does Spencer treat social complexity as a problem for causal explanation?

Social complexity makes causal explanation difficult because institutions and inherited beliefs affect one another, while the investigator belongs to the society being explained. A chemist can separate compounds from personal loyalties; a sociologist cannot so easily separate inquiry from class arrangements, religion, patriotism, and schooling. Spencer therefore treats sociological method as a problem before it becomes a body of conclusions.

Why does Spencer make sociology examine its own conditions first?

Sociology must examine its own conditions first because its investigators bring society’s assumptions into the act of studying society. Spencer’s 1873 book begins with this obstacle rather than with a catalogue of social laws: class, religion, patriotism, and schooling can direct attention before evidence is assessed. Methodological self-criticism becomes the price of making causal claims about social life.

Themes of the book

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

Can Society Be Studied Scientifically?

Can an investigator examine society without being shaped by it? The answer determines whether sociology can make causal claims, or whether every explanation merely repeats the observer’s inherited assumptions.

Spencer begins from a problem that chemistry does not share: the observer of society has been formed by the very arrangements he hopes to examine. In The Study of Sociology he argues that class position, religion, patriotism, and schooling bend judgment before evidence can correct it, so sociology needs disciplined self-knowledge rather than a fantasy of neutrality. The serial appeared in 1873, but its warning remains methodological: identify the direction of bias, then test causal claims against it. Observation is never innocent.

  • sociology
  • epistemology
  • methodology
  • bias
  • social science
  • scientific method
  • science
  • rationality
  • psychology
  • cognition
  • human nature
  • causation

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Growth Before Reform

Do societies develop through an order that political will must respect? If institutions grow by stages, reform cannot simply impose arrangements that social development has not prepared to sustain.

Against the hope that social science could simply copy the procedures of the natural sciences, Spencer places societies among developing forms: they grow, differentiate, and integrate as organisms do. That analogy gives history explanatory force, because institutions acquire an order of development rather than appearing whenever legislators desire them. The consequence is political as well as methodological. His account resists confident reform, treating premature legislation as a failure to understand social causality. Development sets limits.

  • social evolution
  • evolution
  • biology
  • complexity
  • history
  • historiography
  • social structure
  • determinism

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Who Gets to Teach Society?

What happens when a theory of society enters the classroom and challenges inherited loyalties? The dispute over Spencer’s book made authority over education part of the question of sociological knowledge.

The book’s argument left the classroom as a political site. William Graham Sumner set it for Yale students, while president Noah Porter tried to have it withdrawn; the dispute continued through 1879 and 1880. Spencer’s concern was therefore larger than the training of researchers: who may teach a science that challenges patriotic, religious, and institutional assumptions? The controversy made sociology’s method inseparable from authority, education, and public policy. A theory of knowledge acquired consequences.

  • governance
  • bureaucracy
  • political philosophy
  • authority
  • education
  • nationalism
  • public policy
  • ethics
  • justice
  • altruism

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Within this work

passages held
527
distinct concepts
858
by passages held, corpus-wide
#141

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: “social evolution” and “sociology”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 93 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
social evolutionsociology11
social changesocial evolution9
causationsocial science6
causationsociology6
causationsocial evolution4
epistemologysocial science4
causationepistemology3
epistemologysociology3
religionsocial change3
religionsocial evolution3
religionsociology3
social changesociology3
causationeducation2
causationsocial change2
educationsociology2
causationreligion1
educationreligion1
educationsocial change1
educationsocial evolution1
epistemologyreligion1
epistemologysocial change1
religionsocial science1
social changesocial science1
social evolutionsocial science1
social sciencesociology1

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.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 1873 The Study of Sociology you are here EN
  7. 1876 The Principles of Sociology

    Three volumes over twenty years, resting on an apparatus Spencer had to build and pay for before he could write them: the Descriptive Sociology tables, which he abandoned before the last volume appeared.

     EN
  8. 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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