In this symposium we are aiming to do for Herbert Spencer what has been done for Charles Darwin in various reception studies in the past. The topic fits nicely into the overall theme of the Congress, “Knowledge at Work,” especially with its emphasis on communication and sites of knowing. The symposium will focus on how Spencerian ideas were disseminated and communicated around the globe, primarily in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The participants will discuss both which ideas were disseminated in a particular region of the world and how they were communicated.

Especially after 2009, it is clear that the name most readily associated with evolutionary theory is Charles Darwin. Given Darwin’s immense reputation it is easy to forget that Spencer, in his time, was almost as famous as Darwin. The theories of the two were often conflated. But Spencer’s evolutionary theory, based as it was on Lamarckian modes of thought, was quite different from Darwin’s. Since Darwin’s theory of natural selection did not become fully accepted until the 1920’s, Spencer’s Lamarckian form of evolution still had scientific legitimacy into the early decades of the twentieth century. In the last few decades of the nineteenth century Spencer was read across the globe, from New York to Damascus, from Tokyo to Cape Town. Spencer was the first international public intellectual whose views on psychology, religion, sociology, ethics, education, and biology were listened to by a large and devoted audience. Spencer’s attempt to synthesize all knowledge in a gigantic system of knowledge, based on evolution, captured the imagination of readers all over the world.

Although we know a great deal about the reception of Darwin in many countries around the world, and we know that the global sales of Spencer’s book were significant, there have been few qualitative studies of how Spencer was received worldwide. The papers will cover the dissemination of Spencer’s ideas in India, Russia, the Middle East, China, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Italy, Scandinavia, and France. Since we are attempting to construct a global history of Spencerism we have avoided an emphasis on western contexts.