Course Content
Survival of the Fittest
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Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer
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Moral Actions – Spencer
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Types of Cooperation – Herbert Spencer
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Critique of Communism and Socialism
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Society as a Thing – Spencer and Realism
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Comparative-Historical Method
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Value Free Sociology of Spencer
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Criticism of Herbert Spencer
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Herbert Spencer
    About Lesson

    Spencer and Realism


    Spencer distinguished nominalism (society is nothing more than the sum of its elements) from realism (society is a distinct and separable entity). Spencer advocated realism due to the “permanence of the relationships between component pieces that produce the uniqueness of a whole.”


    People continually see society as an entity because, although being composed of discrete units, the pervasiveness of their interrelationships across the inhabited area implies a certain concreteness in the aggregate of these units. So, Spencer thought of society as a “thing,” but it wasn’t like any other thing except for how its parts are put together, which follows similar rules.

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