Abstract

I: An individual and his personal culture -- A portrait of a private man -- The longing for passion -- The problem with women -- Spencer's feminist politics -- Culture and beauty -- Eccentricities : health and the perils of recreation -- II: The lost world of Spencer's metaphysics -- The new reformation -- Intellectuals in the strand -- The genesis of a system -- Common sense in the mid-nineteenth century -- From philosophy to psychology -- III: Spencer's biological writings and his philosophy of science -- On goodness, perfection and the shape of living things -- The meaning of life -- Science and the classification of knowledge -- IV: Politics and ethical sociology -- Spencer's politics and the foundations of liberalism -- The 1840s : Spencer's early radicalism -- Sociology as an ethical discipline -- Sociology as political theory -- Progress versus democracy.