Social Statics, or The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed is an 1851 book by the British polymath Herbert Spencer.
This granted, it follows that as man has been, and is still, deficient in those feelings which, by dictating just conduct, prevent the perpetual antagonism of individuals and their consequent disunion, some artificial agency is required by which their union may be maintained.
This could be described as a key tenet of so-called Social Darwinism, though Spencer and his book were not an advocate thereof.
Economist Murray Rothbard called Social Statics "the greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written.
"[3] In Lochner v. New York, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dissenting from the Supreme Court's holding that state legislation forbidding bakers from working more than ten hours a day or sixty hours a week violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution by infringing on the individual's liberty of contract, famously wrote: "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics."