Herbert Spencer

Born in Derby, England, in 1820, Herbert Spencer became one of the best-known public intellectuals of the Victorian age. Largely self-educated, he worked as a railway engineer and journalist before building a career as a philosopher and social theorist.

Spencer wrote ambitiously across many fields, including psychology, biology, sociology, politics, and ethics. His large-scale project, later known as Synthetic Philosophy, aimed to show how the physical world, living things, the human mind, and society all developed according to broad evolutionary principles.

He was enormously famous in his lifetime, especially in Britain and the United States, and he coined the expression "survival of the fittest" in the 1860s. Although he is often linked with social Darwinism today, scholars still argue about how fairly that label describes his work; what is clear is that his writing left a lasting mark on debates about individual liberty, progress, and the study of society.