Cults of Ignorance

Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget, by Kieran Egan (Yale, 224 pp., $25)

“Spencer is unreadable today,” the literary historian A. O. J. Cockshut has written, “but his immense prestige in his time [1820–1903], which extended as far as Russia, is a clear proof that complete ignorance of human nature will not necessarily prevent a man from becoming an acknowledged expert upon it.” Indeed, Herbert Spencer’s ideological mix of naïve empiricism, laissez-faire Social Darwinism, and faith in inevitable progress swept to great influence in late-19th-century America.