One of his more famous books is actually a compilation of independently-written essays, packaged together under the title The Man Versus the State. Spencer had written each of the essays previously, and had published each of them separately in periodicals. Their juxtaposition as single book is therefore somewhat misleading, and in fact, various editions of the book contain different sets of essays, so that one may find two quite different books if one obtains two different editions of The Man Versus the State.
It is worth stressing that the word 'liberal' has meant very different things, even mutually exclusive things, over the course of time. Recall that Adam Smith, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill were all understood as liberals, yet represented very different lines of thought, and that all three of them, in addition to differing from each other, differ greatly from twenty-first century American politicians who are liberals; those American politicians, in turn, differ from British liberal politicians of the same era.
Spencer proposed that, as the atoms from which society is constructed, individuals of good character would form societies which promoted justice and welfare. If the individuals did not have good character, the society would not, and could not, enjoy justice and welfare. Good character, in turn, results from social structures, not from governmental institutions or regulations. Spencer viewed those proposals, advanced by socialists and liberals during the second half of the nineteenth century, as vain and useless illusions. Legislation would not improve the character of the individual human, and without such character, society will not improve. Spencer wrote:
There seems no getting people to accept the truth, which nevertheless is conspicuous enough, that the welfare of a society and the justice of its arrangements are at bottom dependent on the characters of its members; and that improvement in neither can take place without that improvement in character which results from carrying on peaceful industry under the restraints imposed by an orderly social life. The belief, not only of the socialists but also of those so-called Liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them, is that by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.
Note that Spencer, although himself a liberal in one sense of the word, is opposing those who are calling themselves liberal in a different sense of the word, and who have used that word in fact as the name of their political party. Spencer sees that if the socialist trend succeeds in creating the command economy, the state ownership of property, and the regulatory bureaucracy it desires, that personal freedom will disappear along with the right of ownership.
The larger the regulatory apparatus, the more power is directed to the leaders of government, instead of to the voters. This creates the opportunity and the temptation for such leaders to amass more power to themselves, instead of protecting the individual voter's powers. As the complexity of the bureaucracy increases, any sort of senatorial discussion becomes ensnared in endless details, among which can hide plots for centralizing power in the hands of a sort of oligarchy among the government's technocrats - whereby the 'technology' in 'technocrat' is not confined to electronics and physical machinery, but rather includes also the techniques of manipulating complex legislative and bureaucratic processes.
The urge to nationalization - to the government's confiscation and ownership of property, with minimal or no compensation to the rightful owners - will become irresistible, inasmuch as such ownership would finalize control over means of production, of transportation, and of communication. In the mind of the socialist, this would allow the government to make more "progress" in terms of redesigning the economy - hence the term 'progressive' - redesigning the economy in ways which are allegedly better for everyone, but in ways which would inevitably limit and reduce individual liberty. In the name of getting a bit closer to some imagined utopia, personal freedom is sacrificed: but in the process, one has gotten closer to nothing, because the socialist paradise does not exist; or rather, one has gotten closer to the next governmental demand for the citizen to surrender yet one more bit of his liberty.
The concrete example, in Spencer's case, is the railroad system in Britain. Developed, funded, and built entirely with private-sector funds, it had materially benefitted everyone. One need not ride the train, or send freight by means of it, to enjoy the economic benefits which it bestowed upon England. Yet the socialists demanded that the government should seize the railroads, and exclusively own and operate them.
Although the nationalization of the railroads had not yet happened when he wrote, Spencer foresaw that the socialists would look for crucial points in time, when the crisis of the moment would cause the public, which otherwise retained a bit of wisdom, to consent to nationalization. After Spencer's time, the British government did indeed go on a streak of nationalizing various industries, using wars and economic downturns as those moments to attack. In 1916, the beverage industry was nationalized; in 1942, the electrical generating utilities; and in 1948, the railroads.
A disciplined army of civil officials, like an army of military officials, gives supreme power to its head — a power which has often led to usurpation, as in medieval Europe and still more in Japan — nay, has thus so led among our neighbours, within our own times. The recent confessions of M. de Maupas have shown how readily a constitutional head, elected and trusted by the whole people, may, with the aid of a few unscrupulous confederates, paralyse the representative body and make himself autocrat. That those who rose to power in a socialistic organization would not scruple to carry out their aims at all costs, we have good reason for concluding. When we find that shareholders who, sometimes gaining but often losing, have made that railway-system by which national prosperity has been so greatly increased, are spoken of by the council of the Democratic Federation as having "laid hands" on the means of communication, we may infer that those who directed a socialistic administration might interpret with extreme perversity the claims of individuals and classes under their control. And when, further, we find members of this same council urging that the State should take possession of the railways, "with or without compensation," we may suspect that the heads of the ideal society desired, would be but little deterred by considerations of equity from pursuing whatever policy they thought needful: a policy which would always be one identified with their own supremacy. It would need but a war with an adjacent society, or some internal discontent demanding forcible suppression, to at once transform a socialistic administration into a grinding tyranny like that of ancient Peru; under which the mass of the people, controlled by grades of officials, and leading lives that were inspected out-of-doors and in-doors, laboured for the support of the organization which regulated them, and were left with but a bare subsistence for themselves. And then would be completely revived, under a different form, that régime of status — that system of compulsory cooperation.
Spencer accurately predicted the aggressiveness with which the government would seize private property. He would have been encouraged to learn that, starting in 1993, the railways began to be privatized; the British government sold them off in bits. The was done under the leadership of Prime Minister John Major of the Conservative Party, who was following the pattern set by his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps most surprisingly, Major's privatization of the railroads was continued by his successor from the Labor Party, Tony Blair. Thus the Labor Party that nationalized the trains in 1948 under the leadership of Clement Attlee would be the same Labor Party that finished the privatization process between 1997 and 2003 under Tony Blair.
