#5 Herbert Spencer on War and The Survival of the Fittest

To take a comparatively modern instance, the wars between France and England aided each in passing from that condition in which its feudal divisions were in considerable degrees independent, to the condition of a consolidated nation. As further showing how integration of smaller societies into larger ones is thus initiated, it may be added that at first the unions exist only for military purposes. Each component society retains for a long time its independent internal administration; and it is only when joint action in war has become habitual, that the cohesion is made permanent by a common political organization. This compounding of smaller communities into larger by military cooperation, is insured by the disappearance of such smaller communities as do not cooperate. Barth remarks that "the Fúlbe [Fulahs] are continually advancing, as they have not to do with one strong enemy, but with a number of small tribes without any bond of union." Of the Damaras, Galton says — "If one werft [shipyard] is plundered, the adjacent ones rarely rise to defend it, and thus the Namaquas have destroyed or enslaved piecemeal about one-half of the whole Damara population." Similarly with the Ynca [Inca] conquests in Peru: "there was no general opposition to their advance, for each province merely defended its land without aid from any other." This process, so obvious and familiar, I name because it has a meaning which needs emphasizing. For we here see that in the struggle for existence among societies, the survival of the fittest is the survival of those in which the power of military cooperation is the greatest; and military cooperation is that primary kind of cooperation which prepares the way for other kinds. So that this formation of larger societies by the union of smaller ones in war, and this destruction or absorption of the smaller un-united societies by the united larger ones, is an inevitable process through which the varieties of men most adapted for social life, supplant the less adapted varieties. Respecting the integration thus effected, it remains only to remark that it necessarily follows this course — necessarily begins with the formation of simple groups and advances by the compounding and re-compounding of them.

Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology: Vol. 2, 1895 Edition

Mr. Martineau speaks of the "survivorship of the better," as though that were the statement of the law; and then adds that the alleged result cannot be inferred "except on the assumption that whatever is better is stronger too." But the words he here uses are his own words, not the words of those he opposes. The law is the survival of the fittest . Probably, in substituting "better" for "fittest," Mr. Martineau did not suppose that he was changing the meaning; though I dare say he perceived that the meaning of the word "fittest" did not suit his argument so well. Had he examined the facts, he would have found that the law is not the survival of the "better" or the "stronger," if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival. Superiority, whether in size, strength, activity, or sagacity, is, other things equal, at the cost of diminished fertility; and where the life led by a species does not demand these higher attributes, the species profits by decrease of them, and accompanying increase of fertility. This is the reason why there occur so many cases of retrograde metamorphosis—this is the reason why parasites, internal and external, are so commonly degraded forms of higher types. Survival of the "better" does not cover these cases, though survival of the "fittest" does; and as I am responsible for the phrase, I suppose I am competent to say that the word "fittest" was chosen for this reason. When it is remembered that these cases outnumber all others—that there are more species of parasites than there are species of all other animals put together—it will be seen that the expression "survivorship of the better" is wholly inappropriate, and the argument Mr. Martineau bases upon it quite untenable. Indeed, if, in place of those adjustments of the human sense-organs, which he so eloquently describes as implying pre-arrangement, Mr. Martineau had described the countless elaborate appliances which enable parasites to torture animals immeasurably superior to them, and which, from his point of view, no less imply pre-arrangement, I think the notes of admiration which end his descriptions would not have seemed to him so appropriate.

Herbert Spencer ‘Mr. Martineau on Evolution’ [First published in The Contemporary Review , for June, 1872.]

MGH: Herbert Spencer is perhaps the most controversial social scientist, very popular in the 19th century but widely condemned in the 20th century, and generally consigned (usually without having been read) to the category of unacceptable ‘Social Darwinism’. Paradoxically, nonetheless, Spencer was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. As Jonathan H. Turner has argued in an exciting chapter in Mark Francis and Michael W. Taylor’s edited volume Herbert Spencer Legacies (Routledge 2015), Spencer was the unrecognized influence behind much functionalist and evolutionary theorizing in the second half of the twentieth century. As Turner goes on to say: “Sociology has mined all veins of genius in the classical period of its canonized figures so there are only dusty rocks left, but in Spencer there is still gold, if one is willing to go prospecting.” One of the objectives of Social Science Files is to mine for that Spencer gold.