When John Stuart Mill advertised the eccentric one or few for leadership of Victorian society in 1859, he might have had Herbert Spencer in mind. With his thorough and well-researched ‘intellectual biography’ (p. 4) of Spencer, Mark Francis relocates Spencer as an outstanding philosopher in his time, and rightly shows that Spencer has been enigmatically misinterpreted. Francis emphasizes that evolutionist theory and the concept of liberalism are the key issues in understanding Herbert Spencer. Acknowledging that Spencer was partly responsible for his misinterpretations, Francis succeeds in giving a dense ‘historically nuanced account of his life and ideas’ (p. 328).

In aspiring to ‘create new interpretative pattern where none existed’ (p. viii), Francis might call for slightly too much, but he rigidly contextualizes Spencer's person, his writings, and their change during his life. The book convincingly divides Spencer's life into four main fragments that reflect the artificial construction of his own personality. Part 1, ‘An individual and his personal culture’, traces the biographical background of the ‘private man’ (p. 17) and suggests to use it as a folio with which the publicly constructed Spencer should be read: ‘Many texts can be intelligently read without knowledge of authorial intentions or behaviour, while Spencer's cannot’ (p. 4). This might well be argued for most eminent Victorian thinkers. In Part 2, ‘The lost world of Spencer's metaphysics’, Francis therefore highlights the importance of his religious background and religion in Spencer's writings that he interprets as ‘a reservoir of religious meaning’ (p. 111). Thus when speaking about secularisation and evolutionary theory, one has to read them against Spencer's ‘rationale of creating a new morality and metaphysics with which to replace both orthodox Christianity and materialistic positivism’ (p. 112). Spencer was conceived as the prophet of the mid-Victorian ‘New Reformation’ and the person who could define the new relations between science and spirituality. He substituted Comte's scientific rationalism, which was broadly received in Britain, for a religion of the heart. For him, science was futile unless it served a grand religious aim. His early works clearly state the superiority of moral progress of humanity against intellectual progress (p. 121), responding to an already considerable discussion to grasp spirituality and morality within a merely scientific picture of the universe well before ‘The origin of species’. He played a key role in combining these two different streams of thought and expressed the ‘need for new religious certainties to replace Christianity’ in the worship of the ‘Unknown’ (p. 186).

In Part 3, ‘Spencer's biological writings and his philosophy of science’, Francis traces one of Spencer's major contributions to mid-Victorian thought and the differences between Spencer's and Darwin's ideas on evolution. Spencer's interest in evolutionary theory lay with the structures and processes of biological differentiation of mature species, and not in the evolutionary processes of evolving species. He did not see the famous ‘survival of the fittest’, competition and natural selection as principles that guided current human development, but rather as a description of the pre-industrial past. Spencer, so Francis argues, would not accept that modern individuals would progress in a struggle for survival. On the contrary, he demonstrated that ‘life in general, and humanity in particular, was evolving away a cruel and predatory past’ (p. 329). Therefore the cult of the unknown should serve as a guideline both for social science as a tool and for the development of society.

Analysing his political liberalism, examined in Part 4 ‘Politics and ethical sociology’, Francis depicts Spencer as a genuine representative of independent mid-Victorian political thought. Sharing his contemporaries' resentment against democracy and the value of political participation, he tried to conceptualize liberalism ‘so that it could not be absorbed by democratic politics’ (p. 334). Spencer certainly did not advocate unrestricted individual liberalism, but emphasized ‘the primacy of justice over the individual’ (p. 251). The sphere of the individual should be protected from the intrusions of human society, simply because private life as opposed to work was in itself a gain of civilization. While his utilitarian ideal consisted simply in the absence of pain as leading principle for ‘psychological or political governance’ (p. 335), he severely criticized progress as recycling one of the key doctrines of Christianity in a secular dress. God's Predestination rephrased as renunciation and sacrifice played an important role in calling for the improvement of mankind. However, sacrifice was no longer demanded by a higher being, but the price of progress as the secular God of mid-Victorian society.

Francis has produced an important and intelligent book not only on Herbert Spencer, but also on his political, scientific, social, and religious context in mid-Victorian Britain. In relocating the assumptions about Victorian politics, social science, and evolutionary biology, this work deserves a wide audience, within and well beyond historical scholarship.