Abstract

The essay analyzes Spencer’s foundation of social science on the biological paradigm as a political project, whose aim is to establish the illegitimacy of both State’s intervention, and collective action. The discussion of his conception of the individual helps highlighting the political character of the general doctrine of evolution in the light of the lot it assigns to those who are excluded from it – the unfit – and those who are condemned not to evolve – workers and women – whose social positions reveal the persistence of domination within voluntary cooperation. Spencer’s evolutionary realism is a strategy of historical exposition aimed both to justify the present of industrial society and to limit the range of future transformations in the name of its past.