Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (1820 to 1903) was an English philosopher, sociologist and political theorist who set out in his ten-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy to unify biology, psychology, sociology and ethics under the single principle of evolution. He coined the phrase survival of the fittest and defended a thoroughgoing classical liberalism, most pointedly in The Man versus the State of 1884. Born at Derby, the only surviving child of a Methodist nonconformist schoolmaster, he was educated almost entirely at home, worked as a railway engineer in his early twenties, and from 1848 supported himself in London as a sub-editor of The Economist. He never attended a university or held an academic post, living from his books and investments. His books outsold those of any other philosopher of his century, though his standing collapsed after the First World War. He died at Brighton in 1903.