I: An individual and his personal culture
A portrait of a private man
The longing for passion
The problem with women
Spencer's feminist politics
Culture and beauty
Eccentricities : health and the perils of recreation
II: The lost world of Spencer's metaphysics
The new reformation
Intellectuals in the strand
The genesis of a system
Common sense in the mid-nineteenth century
From philosophy to psychology
III: Spencer's biological writings and his philosophy of science
On goodness, perfection and the shape of living things
The meaning of life
Science and the classification of knowledge
IV: Politics and ethical sociology
Spencer's politics and the foundations of liberalism
The 1840s : Spencer's early radicalism
Sociology as an ethical discipline
Sociology as political theory
Progress versus democracy.