INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



We have already said that Spencer saw how succession by in- 

 heritance was a principle of social stabiHt}^ while succession by 

 fitness or efficiency was a principle of social efficiency.^ Yet in his 

 references to periods of social crisis when the principles of stability 

 are challenged, when the forces tending towards a higher and hence 

 more efficient level of organisation struggle openly with the forces 

 of conservatism, he shows all the typical middle-class fear of super- 

 session. He can even compare such upheavals with a gangrenous 

 disease.^ Just as in m.orbid changes, putrefactive dissolution may occur, 

 so in "social changes of an abnormal kind, the disaffection initiating 

 a political outbreak implies a loosening of the ties by which citizens 

 are bound up into distinct classes and sub-classes. Agitation, growing 

 into revolutionary meetings, fuses ranks that are usually separated. . . . 

 When at last there comes positive insurrection, all magisterial and 

 official powers, all class distinctions, all industrial differences, cease: 

 organised society lapses into an unorganised aggregate of social 

 units." A revolutionary might have reminded Spencer that not all 

 dissolutions are morbid, that in the metamorphosis of insects, for 

 instance, though there may be a histolysis, it is but the prelude to a 

 new and more beautiful form of organisation. 



Spencer and his Contemporaries. 



The contradictions in Spencer's sociology appear again when we 

 examine a few of the controversies and discussions in which he 

 engaged. One of the most famous was that with the American soci- 

 ologist Henry George. In Spencer's first book, Social Statics,^ it was 

 contended that the alienation of the land from the people at large 

 had been inequitable, and that there should be a restoration of it to 

 the State (the incorporated community) after compensation made to 

 the existing landowners. "In later years," he wrote,* "I concluded 



trations," lie says (PS, 11. 751), "worked by taxes falling in more than due proportion 

 upon those whose greater powers have brought them greater means, will give to citizens 

 of smaller powers more benefits than they have earned. And this burdening of the better 

 by the worse, must check the evolution of a higher and more adapted nature." It is 

 almost incredible that Spencer could have taken business success as his criterion of a 

 high and adapted nature. "The diffusion," he says (loc. cit.), "of political power un- 

 accompanied by the limitation of political functions, issues in communism. For the 

 direct defrauding of the many by the few, it substitutes the indirect defrauding of the 

 few by the many: evil proportionate to the inequity, being the result in the one case 

 as in the other." An invitation to think out just what this means obviates any other 

 comment. 



1 PS, II. 264. 2 pp^ p_ ^^,_ 3 (London, 1850.) * A, II. 459. 



