Principles of Sociology

Abstract

The accomplishments of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) are somewhat paradoxical. He was unarguably one of the most widely read figures at the end of the nineteenth century, a fact easily confirmed by his importance to fields as various as biology, anthropology, sociology, politics, and ethics. But his fortunes quickly changed; even by the early years of the twentieth century, Spencer already carried the image that still regularly haunts him in histories of science – in the words of Chris Renwick, “as a populist amateur whose importance stopped a long way short of the laboratory door.” 1 Despite his having been the first person to extensively use the term sociology in English, his fate is little better in histories of social science, where the credit for the founding of the field usually goes to Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).

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