The Coming Slavery

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist.

Politically oriented towards liberal ideas, in his most famous essay, The Man Versus the State (1884) and in particular in The Coming Slavery (published in the same year on the magazine Popular Science Monthly), Spencer attacked William Ewart Gladstone and the Liberal Party for losing its proper mission (they should be defending personal liberty, he said) and instead promoting paternalist social legislation. His main objections were threefold: the use of the coercive powers of the government, the discouragement given to voluntary self-improvement, and the disregard of the “laws of life”. The reforms, he said, were tantamount to “socialism”, which he said was about the same as “slavery” in terms of limiting human freedom.

Spencer defined a slave as a person who «labours under coercion to satisfy another’s desires» and believed that under socialism or communism the individual would be enslaved to the whole community rather than to a particular master, and «it means not whether his master is a single person or society».