Herbert Spencer: The Tripartite Model

Spencer’s enterprise was to lay the foundations for psychology and sociology as scientific disciplines through evolutionizing, focusing on both human individuality and sociality. His basic epistemological/methodological framework of living nature was a tripartite model: the changing interrelations of the changing interactions between organism and environment, and the changing effects they induce. I explicate its main sources, components, and accompanying conceptual cluster—complexity, hierarchy, and plasticity, and distinguish between Spencer’s and Darwin’s ‘evolution.’ Drawing upon this framework I elucidate the entangled roles of individuals and collectivities in three works: The Principles of Biology, the two editions of Principles of Psychology, the Principles of Sociology, and some essays. In Principles of Biology (1864–67), Spencer elaborated on the tripartite model, positing a novel concept of biological individuality as being a consequence of evolutionary processes rather than a foundational unit in the description of living nature. His evolutionary framework based on Lamarckian heredity and its living entities, anachronistically put, manifested extensive phenotypic plasticity and tangled and nested hierarchies and required complicated classifications and developmental histories. Deploying the tripartite model, Principles of Psychology (1855, 1870/72) refashioned the assumptions of contemporary human sciences through evolutionizing them, intentionally blurring the demarcation between biological heredity and social/cultural/psychological inheritance, positing hybrid categories. The edifice could be coherently sustained (as universal) if the underpinning of hybridizing became collectivist, while the rhetoric—political, ideological, and scientific—remained individualistic. I apply similar tools to Principles of Sociology, especially to society as ‘superorganism,’ and relate to his use of ‘race.’