This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 3rd,

2004. I'm Caleb Brown.

In the Social Sciences, Herbert Spencer once loomed large.

As Libertarianism.org's Paul Meini details, it's a cruel irony that sociology is largely

viewed as almost purely left-wing, and that Herbert Spencer, someone who contributed to the

birth of sociology, has largely been forgotten.

But there is hope for this former rock-star philosopher.

I spoke with Paul Meaney last month.

A lot of people sort of poo-poo sociology.

Yes.

And libertarians are quite possibly chief among them, which is to say that they don't regard it as substantive or they can't get their heads around parts of it and so they

poo-poo it as some sort of silliness, but you know economics is sociology, right? It is, it's

human interaction in a way that is absolutely worthy of study and

being worthy of being understood and it can be extremely valuable for it to be well

understood.

And for people who love liberty and care about ideas, Herbert Spencer looms pretty large.

Herbert Spencer is an extremely important thinker, especially in relation to sociology,

because he is really one of the people who

help popularize sociology across the globe. Usually conversations about

sociology today and 20th century onwards are dominated by talks about Marx. But really it's actually

classical liberals who are the people who help popularize sociology as a

legitimate academic discipline and I think what's more interesting for

...