Marx/Spencer

They’re buried directly across from each other in Highgate Cemetery (ashes, in Spencer’s case). I was there a couple of hours ago.

Marx has a big fancy monument that you can’t possibly miss. Spencer’s is more understated, though still fairly hard to miss. We didn’t find George Eliot who is in the same basic area, someone told us.

The Spencer case is interesting. So popular in his own lifetime that he was the first philosopher to sell one million total books, his reputation has plummeted to the point where almost none of us have read any of his books, and wouldn’t even be ashamed to admit it.

But you can see traces of his former reputation in the way that Nietzsche and Bergson take the trouble to mention him seriously (even if only dismissively, in Nietzsche’s case).

I still remember reading Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche translations as a 17-year-old, and thinking that this Herbert Spencer guy must be a big-time player in philosophy, seeing how often he was mentioned by Nietzsche. But then I never heard his name mentioned by anyone again.

And then I read that dismissive line recently, referring to Spencer as “the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic.” Owwww…

However, he at least seems to have performed a valuable pedagogical service at the time in popularizing questions of philosophy and science for the rising Anglophone professional classes of the late 19th century.