CHAPTER VII
ANARCHISM AND SOCIOLOGY: HERBERT SPENCER
Spencer's Views on the Organisation of Society — Society Conceived from the Nominalist and Realist Standpoint — The Idealism of Anarchists — Spencer's Work: From Freedom to Restraint.
hen Vaillant was before his judges he mentioned Herbert Spencer, among others, as one of those from whom he had derived his Anarchist convictions. Anarchists refer not seldom to the gray-headed Master of Sociology as one of themselves; and still more often do the Socialists allude to him as an Anarchist. People like Laveleye, Lafarque, and (lately) Professor Enrico Ferri,[56] have allowed themselves to speak of Spencer's Anarchist and Individualist views in his book, The Individual versus the State. If Vaillant, the bomb-thrower, rejoiced in such ignorance of persons and things as to quote Spencer, without thinking, as a fellow-thinker, we need hardly say much about it; but when men who are regarded as authorities in so-called scientific Socialism, do the same, we can only perceive the small amount either of conscientiousness or science with which whole tendencies of the social movement are judged, and judged too by a party which, before all others, is interested in procuring correct and precise judgments on this matter. For those who number Herbert Spencer among the Anarchists, either do not understand the essence of Anarchism, or else do not understand Spencer's views; or both are to them a terra incognita.
As far as concerns the book, The Individual versus the State (London, 1885), this is really only a closely printed pamphlet of some thirty pages, in which Spencer certainly attacks Socialism severely as an endeavour to strengthen an organisation of society, based on compulsion, at the expense of individual freedom and of voluntary organisations already secured; but not a single Anarchist thought is to be found in his pages, unless any form of opposition to forcing human life into a social organisation of regimental severity is to be called Anarchism. We may remark en passant that here we have a splendid example of freedom of thought as understood by the Socialists; in their (so-called) free people's State the elements of Anarchism would assume a much more repulsive form than under the present bourgeois conditions. And that is just what Spencer prophesies in his little book.
Spencer appeals in this work to his views upon a possible organisation of society better than the present, as he has indicated in The Study of Sociology, Political Institutions, and elsewhere; and we think we ought to permit the appeal and present Spencer's views, not for the sake of Herbert Spencer—for we cannot undertake to defend everyone who is suspected of Anarchism,—but because he is the most important representative of a school of thought which some day or other will be called upon to say the last word in the scientific discussion of the so-called social question, and because we now wish to set forth clearly, once for all, what Anarchism is, in whatever disguise it may cloak itself, and what Anarchism is not, however far it may go in accentuating freedom of development.