Alberto Mingardi has a great article over at Law & Liberty about Herert Spencer's great little book The Man Versus the State.

"Alberto Mingardi is Director General of the Italian free-market think tank, Istituto Bruno Leoni. He is also assistant professor of the history of political thought at IULM University in Milan and a Presidential Scholar in Political Theory at Chapman University. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute. He blogs at EconLog."

Here's a snippet:

"Spencer is dealing with a political context rather different than ours: Victorian England. He was writing in the aftermath of the strong 1880 victory of the liberals in the general election —and out of disappointment for their clear inability to steer the wheel in a direction opposite to the Zeitgeist. Liberalism, Spencer wrote, couldn’t stop the march of ever bigger government and actually cheered for it: it became the “New Toryism,” or so declared the title of the first of the four essays collected in the book."

"Was Spencer right? Was government really getting bigger and bigger? In the 1860s the United Kingdom’s Factories Acts created a basic framework of regulation of the growing industrial system. Spencer mercilessly enumerates the extensions of the Acts, from “regulation for cleansing and ventilation” to the “enforcement of vaccinations.” He witnesses with horror the establishment of State-telegraphy, the Beerhouse Regulations Act and the Sea-birds Preservation Act, the first steps taken in compulsory education, the ever growing industry of granting licenses, et cetera. For those of us that are used to living in a period when the appetite for regulation seems to be never quenched, Spencer’s times hardly look grim: after all, it takes him but a few pages to enumerate the highlights of some twenty years of legislation. Try do that today."

Here's a bit more:

"To assess the degree of liberty individuals do enjoy, Spencer argued, what matters is “whether the lives of citizens are more interfered with than they were; not the nature of the agency which interferes with them.” That we elect our rulers does not necessarily mean that they rule us well, nor that they respect our liberties. The “divine rights of majorities,” he cautioned, are no less a superstition than the divine rights of kings. We are here at the core of a problem political theorists are still struggling with: how to strike a balance between individual rights and majority rule?

"In an era of populist insurgencies, this unresolved question brings a gloomy mood. On the contrary, Spencer’s own evolutionary theory, applied to social matters, was understood as an exercise in optimism. Societies tend to move, he reasoned, from a “militant” towards an “industrial” state. Militant types of societies are hierarchical, top down, simpler: they struggle to survive and expand, and warlike needs and commands trump all others. Industrial types of society are horizontal, networked, complex, they are governed by a web of voluntary contracts and see people pursuing a cornucopia of different goals, in a complex division of labour. Like all organisms, societies move from simpler forms to more articulated ones, in which the parties multiply and better divide labour among themselves. Borrowing a catchphrase from Henry Maine, Spencer thought societies moved “from status to contract”: from stages in which everyone had their place in society set, to stages where people could enter all the voluntary deals they wished for and could accommodate.

"Yet he knew well that societies tend to be hybrid, with elements of both types. If there are strong tendencies driving society in the direction of liberty and freedom of contracts, so there are opposite tendencies too. For Spencer, this is a complex interaction of culture and institutions, the latter depending on the first."

Read it all here…