Think you know Herbert Spencer? Look him up in, say, "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy," and besides supplying his dates (1820–1903), the entry calls him an "English evolutionist, father of sociology, and self-appointed philosopher." Self-appointed, I suppose, because Spencer claimed he read few books, especially not those he disagreed with, explaining that they gave him a headache. A classic Victorian eccentric, he is probably best known for coining the phrase "survival of the fittest," a notion that greatly appealed to captains of industry such as Andrew Carnegie.

Mark Francis, in his iconoclastic, "Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life" (Cornell University Press, 434 pages, $45), argues that the great man is not at all what he has been represented to be. The clinching scene of this intellectual biography is Spencer's appearance at Delmonico's, the famous New York City restaurant, where, on November 9, 1882, 200 of his admirers gathered to honor Spencer with a farewell banquet capping off his only American tour. Spencer told his American acolytes there was too much emphasis on the "gospel of work" — a direct blow to Carnegie and his ilk. Now it was time, he said, to emphasize the "gospel of relaxation."

The audience was in a state of shock, but Spencer was not attempting to be provocative. He had come to believe that overwork had ruined his own constitution, and that the evolutionary progress he believed in should lead to a world where people worked less and lived for pleasure, especially aesthetic enjoyment.

Looking ahead, Spencer saw an opportunity to level with sympathetic listeners. Or as Mr. Francis puts it, "Since he was addressing Americans, who he had mistakenly assumed liked to hear the truth, he had spoken more plainly than usual." Indeed, as the author painstakingly documents, Spencer was not a social Darwinist at all.

So why has Spencer been so poorly understood?His self-mocking irony, especially in his autobiography, has gone undetected by those who still read him, in the main social scientists not known for their sense of humor. Spencer's reputation, and the modern understanding of him, would have been quite different, Mr. Francis suggests, if literary critics had taken up the nuances of Spencer's prose. And it is hard to refute this point once one learns that Spencer's favorite reading was Lawrence Sterne's outrageously satirical "Tristram Shandy."

Although Mr. Francis does full justice to Spencer's ideas — indeed certain chapters turn into rather tedious rehearsals of 19th-century sociology, theology, and politics — Spencer the man is delightfully present when Mr. Francis provides subtle readings of Spencer's courtship of George Eliot, his love of playing with children, his hypochondria, and his penchant for hydropathy. Spencer was a kind of Prufrock figure, afraid to plumb his own emotions — he withdrew from Eliot, even though she was prepared to marry him. His autobiography was a kind of object lesson that implied, "Don't do as I have done." With women, in particular, Spencer the bachelor never had the strength to "force the moment to its crisis."

Although Spencer could have taken his place among the eminent Victorians ridiculed by Lytton Strachey, Mr. Francis presents a much more complex man, living long enough to recant many of his early, confident notions about the human psyche and its perfectibility.

Aside from the value of Mr. Francis's study as a fresh view of how Spencer's ideas developed, his book also represents an attack on the way academics have specialized knowledge, thus a disservice to someone as protean as Spencer. "Writing about Herbert Spencer had made me aware of the narrowness of academic disciplines," he notes in his preface. Without knowledge of Spencer's "authorial intentions," of the way he "lived his philosophy," his ideas, in themselves, seem "uninspired and disconnected."

Intellectual biography can be problematic because it makes for an awkward conflation of narrative and textual analysis, but in Mr. Francis's hands it becomes a rewarding re-creation of his subject and of the world from which he emerged.… (more)