Persistent optimism and recurrent skepticism: Herbert Spencer and the United States (Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London)

This work concerns the influence of Herbert Spencer's ideas on the United States in the post-Civil War nineteenth century. This study uses a history of Herbert Spencer's reception in the United States as a way to enhance the reading of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London, using them, along with Spencer's reception, in order to offer an insight into the economic, intellectual, and philosophical climate in the United States from 1865 to roughly 1905.; I claim that the three writers in this study suffered profound anxiety at the social consequences of Spencer's ideas. I do not argue that these reactions are rational or even necessarily consciously acknowledged, but the reactions are present in their work. I will show the paradoxical relationship Norris, Dreiser, and London had with Spencer's ideas. The novelists hastened the decline in popularity of Spencer's thought because, while they found his attempts to unify human knowledge appealing, they inevitably found his philosophy unsatisfactory in its ability to convey actual human behavior. My overall point here is that novelists have different interests in creating imaginative fiction from philosophers and sociologists who offer comprehensive and empirical explanations for human behavior. The novelists were interested in some of the same questions that Spencer asked. However, they came to fundamentally different answers from him and his followers.; Spencer's impact on America in this period was immense and varied. He influenced economic, legal, political, sociological, and scientific thinking. Spencer's followers typically used evolutionary theory to support their own views of society. Therefore, one of the lessons of Spencer's popularity is that people clothe their intuitions with the fancy dressing of empirical science. Spencer's evolutionary teleology offered comfort to an American populace still wounded from the Civil War, both explaining and reinforcing Americans' initial faith in laissez-faire economics.