Optimistic liberals: Herbert Spencer, The Brooklyn Ethical Association, and the integration of moral philosophy and evolution in the Victorian trans-Atlantic community.

摘要

The further history has moved beyond Herbert Spencer's ideas the harder it has been for contemporary readers to understand either his thought or his striking popularity, particularly in America. As a result Spencer's ideas and his historical context are badly in need of revision. The work of and his association with the Brooklyn Ethical Association (BEA) offer an excellent subject in which to pursue such a revision. By analyzing Spencer's intellectual background, the structure and beliefs of the American Unitarian community that offered Spencer's ideas a welcoming home, and the activities of the BEA between 1881 and 1891, this dissertation arrives at an explanation for Spencer's popularity and precipitous decline. The explanation has six major components: (1) Spencer's thought was distinctly eighteenth-century rather than nineteenth-century in its origins; (2) his ideas were part of an optimistic liberal current within the broader flow of post-Enlightenment liberalism that was overwhelmed in the twentieth century by pragmatic liberalism; (3) he and his followers and fellows often shared a common Arminian Christian heritage that believed in and looked to progressive human moral development; (4) ethics and human ethical development were at the center of his philosophy; (5) the evolutionism he developed from this background, and which was taken up by the members of the BEA, was based on an a priori belief in a law-bound universal order that was predictable, progressive, and beneficent; and (6) the social and political philosophy, and the reconciliation of individualistic liberalism and traditional conservatism it embodied, failed to resonate in a twentieth century dominated by rising urbanism, industrialism, militarism, and imperialism, in which pragmatic liberalism seemed to offer a better philosophical approach to such modern problems. In addition to providing a reinterpretation of Spencer's ideas and a history of a key group of supporters, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of the trans-Atlantic intellectual community and traces important connections within it in the Victorian era. It also helps to frame the broader evolution debates by showing how Spencerian evolution was adapted and used by Americans late in the nineteenth century.