That the one-word subtitle of this volume of excellent essays on the nineteenth-century evolutionist is a plural is not without significance. Herbert Spencer's influence has persisted in a multiplicity of different disciplines – psychology, sociology and political and educational theory most notably – and these various legacies are not all mutually compatible, with different elements of his voluminous writings having been adopted and appropriated by socialists as much as by libertarians. Nor do the contributors to this volume all agree on the precise nature of Spencer's thought and its subsequent influences, with, for instance, Mark Francis, one of the editors, making clear his disagreement with the argument of Peter Bowler's chapter that Spencer was a Lamarckian. In fact, Francis, in his introduction, observes, ‘It is my belief that differing opinions of Spencer are to be encouraged on the grounds that I, like Spencer, am a liberal and see debate as both healthy and possibly contributing to the advancement of knowledge’ (p. 10). In this respect, this self-consciously conflicting collection of essays on the globally influential thinker whom Michael W. Taylor has called the ‘world philosopher of the late nineteenth century’ and the ‘first international public intellectual’ (p. 222) is itself eminently Spencerian. But, at the same time, it is a little frustrating for the reader that the editors do not attempt to establish any elements of synthesis between the different accounts of the celebrated author of the System of Synthetic Philosophy. Indeed, Francis's pleasingly feisty and opinionated introduction, in which he berates the likes of E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker for failing to recognize the Spencerian foundations of their own prophetic evolutionism, does not attempt to weave the different chapters together, and, rather oddly, in fact barely even mentions them at all.

There are, nevertheless, a number of underlying continuities running through the various chapters. Most attempt to rescue Spencer's reputation from his conventional casting as what Chris Renwick, in his lively chapter on the intersections of biology and social science, calls the ‘pantomime villain of … evolutionary thinking’, who ‘embodied all the bad aspects of the late nineteenth-century enthusiasm for evolution: a kind of embarrassing relative at the Darwinian party’ (p. 112). This need to cleanse Spencer's legacy of the taint of social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism with which it has been indelibly – albeit unfairly – associated since Richard Hofstadter's classic Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) is felt by pretty much all the contributors to the volume. Similarly, many of the chapters make the point that Spencer's influence on the language and styles of reasoning in numerous disciplines was so profound that it actually goes largely unnoticed. In her contribution, Vanessa L. Ryan quotes the Victorian psychologist James Sully musing that by the time of Spencer's death in 1903 his ‘ideas … had become so largely assimilated into our thought and our forms of speech that we had half forgotten their originator’ (p. 185), and, like Ryan's superb account of Spencer's monumental but largely overlooked influence on the late nineteenth-century novel, many of the other chapters likewise attempt to disentangle Spencer's specific intellectual and linguistic imprints from more generalized discourses of evolution, individualism or progress.

The chapters together cover most aspects of Spencer's expansive intellectual interests. Stephen Tomlinson situates his notably child-centred principles of education as a response to politically charged Victorian debates about the nature of schooling, while Taylor tackles the vexed legacy of Spencer's anti-state theories, which, as Taylor points out, were also embraced by those of the political left who were attracted by his vision of progressive social evolution. Jonathan H. Turner laments how contemporary sociologists, largely ignorant of the nineteenth-century roots of their discipline, are unwittingly reinventing the Spencerian wheel, and James Elwick shows that, notwithstanding Spencer's habitual reputation as an arch-individualist, his actual thinking about organization offered a much more complex account of what constitutes an individual, which, for Spencer, depended largely on the surrounding environment. John Skorupski discusses Spencer's relation to moral philosophy and different traditions of liberalism, while Francis explores the differences between William James's metaphysically inspired and teleological philosophy of mind and Spencer's own secular, historically grounded evolutionary psychology. In the penultimate chapter, Bowler, contra Francis in the introduction, contends, with characteristic subtlety, that while Spencer was never a neo-Lamarckian, he was a Lamarckian of a similar ilk to Darwin, in that he endorsed both selection and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lastly, Bernard Lightman explores Spencer's principal British disciples, Beatrice Webb and Grant Allen, who both subsequently embraced socialism, an apostasy that, as Lightman explains, ‘led to schisms within the Spencerian “church”’ (p. 224).

Herbert Spencer: Legacies continues the very necessary reassessment of the great evolutionist's thought and influence inaugurated a decade earlier by Greta Jones and Robert A. Peel's edited volume Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy (2005). Because of these two collections, as well as Francis's and Taylor's own respective books Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (2008) and The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (2006), Spencer is, at last, being stripped of the misunderstandings and distortions that clung to him for much of the twentieth century.