Herbert Spencer’s huge impact upon American popular culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has overshadowed the effect that he had upon the development of more specialized discourse. In particular, there has been too little analysis of the ways in which reactions to Spencer’s ideas shaped the development of the social sciences and psychology. In the former Spencer was adopted enthusiastically – by ethnographers and early sociologists - as the source for evolutionary cultural theory. This was not a simple process as there were differing rationales at work: on the one hand, Spencer’s avoidance of biological determinism when writing about social change was particularly appealing to ethnographers as early as John Wesley Powell and as late as Leslie White and Julian Steward; on the other hand, early sociologists, such as William Graham Sumner and Lester Ward, tended to read Spencer as a Darwinist so that he would appear to be a biological determinist.

Psychologists were less receptive to Spencer than their social science colleagues, and their attitude towards him chiefly depended on whether they felt able to read him as a materialistic philosopher who advocated Darwinian competition, or whether they rejected his work completely for not doing this. William James adopted the first strategy and laboriously re-configured Spencer’s psychology so that it resembled social Darwinism. William MacDougall, with more scholarship and less humanity, took the second strategy and threw aside Spencer’s ideas as useless for the construction of a psychology of racial determinism. John Dewey avoided both these strategies because he saw Spencer as a benign combination of science and liberal humanitarianism that would allow for the creation of a scientifically-based ethics. This sort of Spencerianism would avoid explaining human behaviour and development solely as a series of responses to competitive scenarios.

In both the social sciences and psychology, Spencer’s writings became a reservoir for evolutionary ideas that were often opposed to each other. He could be seen as an exponent of a materialistic and competitive Darwinism, he could function as a straw man whose arguments had to be rejected before evolutionary science could proceed, or he could be admired as a the liberal inheritor of the humanitarian science of the enlightenment. Spencerian language was contestable, but, nonetheless, it became a lingua franca for academic debate.