Download Transformations of Lamarckism

9
Lamarckism and the Constitution of Sociology
Snait B. Gissis
This chapter deals with the emergence of sociology as a discipline in Great Britain
and France during the second half of the nineteenth century, and does so by considering the transfer of concepts, models, metaphors, and analogies from contemporaneous evolutionary biology. Sociology emerged in continued interaction with
this biology. Moreover, this evolutionary biology had a marked Lamarckian/neoLamarckian perspective and emphasis both in France and in Great Britain. Insights
into the relationships between individuals and collectivities, as conceptualized in
the formulation of sociology in these countries, are obtained by analyzing the
interactions and transfers between social thought and Lamarckian evolutionary
theories.
The decades from the 1850s onward witnessed the beginning, and thereafter the
triumphal march, of evolutionism as a metanarrative. Evolutionism appeared in
most fields of knowledge, and became absorbed into the progressivist mode of
thought. It subsumed the organic world under a law of necessary advancement,
within which human progress had specific traits, and left its marks in terms such as
the evolution of civilization, of culture, of mind. After the publication of The Origin
of Species, the diffusion of Darwin’s work was neither “pure and simple” nor a
straightforward matter. Rather, as Peter Bowler has indicated (1983, 1988), it was
culturally integrated into a progressivist conceptual framework which had been
there previously, partially formed from Lamarckian transformist–transmutationist
components (see chapters 2 and 4 in this volume). Darwinian components, including
natural selection, could be and were perceived by numerous biologists as compatible
with Lamarckian mechanisms, within one theoretical framework (see chapters 3 and
5 in this volume). The resulting discourse often had “progress,” “development,” and/
or “the inheritance of acquired characters” as its principal explanatory terms, rather
than natural selection and variations, even though these evolutionary mechanisms
were often present.1 Furthermore, some of the then-extant models of recapitulation
formed a component of this discourse (see chapter 3 in this volume).
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The ongoing debate about the meaning and impact of the processes of industrialization and urbanization was part and parcel of the concerns of the emergent
sociology in the second half of the nineteenth century. The explanation of two sets
of issues was deemed crucial in order for sociology to acquire an autonomous status:
first, how to account for the emerging features of modern society and its novel
institutional, political, and governmental machinery and, by extrapolation, of new
orders in general; and second, how to frame this within a historical narrative. Sociologists had to address four key issues:
1. that of change and its tempo
2. the novel perception of the gaps between classes
3. the apparent stability of the new order and its cohesion
4. the possible use of a “social science-oriented” policy of reform, which would
resonate with current values, symbolic systems, institutions, and laws, that is, current
social imaginaries.
The new social sciences—sociology, anthropology, social psychology, criminology,
economics—that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century were
molded by the natural sciences that were perceived as models, with these sciences
supplying presuppositions, methods, and boundaries. Biology began to assume that
role for social theorizing at midcentury, even though physics was still paradigmatic
for all the sciences. Transfer between fields of knowledge creates rather than points
to already existing similarities. This stipulation of similarities depends on their being
perceived as plausible by the professional practitioners in those fields of knowledge
as well as by their audiences. The transfer of models, metaphors, and analogies from
biology to sociology could take place only within a cultural context which allowed
for the assumption that there was a fundamental correspondence/similarity/analogy
between organic nature and social life, between mechanisms of biological and social
development, and between types of regularities observed in both fields. The success
of the transfer implied that it enabled sociologists to conceive more than they could
otherwise do.
It is within this context that I shall discuss certain aspects of the work of two social
theorists who were profoundly influential internationally and in their respective
countries, Great Britain and France: Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Émile
Durkheim (1858–1917). In important respects their work was part of a general
framework of Lamarckian modes of thought that became significant around the
mid-nineteenth century, and whose impact lasted until the end of that century.
However, it should be recalled that during that period the signification, influence,
and institutional localizations of both “Lamarckism” and “sociology” were in the
process of being formed, changed, and re-formed.
Lamarckism and the Constitution of Sociology
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Herbert Spencer
Spencer’s use of the models, metaphors, and analogies he took from contemporary
biological thought—to which he was a contributor—enabled him to claim psychology and sociology as scientific fields by evolutionizing them.
The 1855 edition of Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology, together with some
of his pre-1858 essays, conveys his views of the processes and mechanisms of evolution and development. The latter were one and the same thing for him, and it was
a top-down phenomenological explanation. His approach did not alter when he
added, somewhat later, a more generalized physical framework, which he hoped
would allow for a universalized, reductionist, bottom-up explanation applicable to
all scientific disciplines (Peel 1971; Jones, Peel 2004; Francis 2007).
For Spencer the “course of evolution” was based on Karl Ernst von Baer’s law
of individual development seen as divergence from an archetype, and thus as an
alternative to linear recapitulation. But just as significantly, it was looked upon as
a process of differentiation and specification, drawing on Henri Milne-Edwards’s
conception of the division of physiological labor in the economy of the organism.
Thus, more complex organisms had more successfully adapted to their external
milieu and had achieved a new and better equilibrium in their internal milieu. The
cohesion of the components of the organism was seen as a model of biological
cooperation and solidarity. Spencer assumed the mechanism of evolution to be
primarily Lamarckian (Corsi P, Gayon J, Gohau G, Tirard 2005).The organic world
was seen as a graded continuity, the evolutionary process was seen as gradual, and
whatever directionality and irreversibility there was in evolutionary change, it
tended toward greater complexification by way of adaptation. In his later work,
though, Spencer did consider the possibility of reversible courses. Spencer’s evolutionary sociology adhered to that view of evolution in The Study of Sociology
(1873), Descriptive Sociology (1873–1881), and The Principles of Sociology
(1876–1896).
For Lamarck, “external conditions,” “force of circumstances,” and similar terms
were posited as the principal cause of change, and they were conceived as solely
physical. Already in 1855, in The Principles of Psychology, Spencer substituted for
them the unified concept of “environment,” which can be looked upon as an equivalent of August Comte’s “milieu” (as can be inferred from Harriet Martineau’s
English adaptation of Comte). This conceptualization was richer than Lamarck’s in
that it included the effect of other living organisms and their spatial distribution (as
already suggested by Lyell), and was extended to include social conditions. Thus, the
environment, whether external, internal, physical, organic, or social, effected changes
directly through adaptation. A predominant role was assigned to the environment
by virtue of “posing problems and difficulties” to the actively reacting organisms.
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Thus, the basic methodological unit was the relationship between environments and
organisms, which Spencer termed “correspondence” in The Principles of Psychology
of 1855 (see Gissis 2005). The mechanisms in the process of adaptation were those
of use/disuse and habit and habituation, that is, they were behavioral in the broad
sense of the term.
The results of the process of the individual organisms’ adaptation—their “functional modifications” (adaptive acquired traits)—were transmitted transgenerationally. This meant that a trait acquired socially or psychologically would be inherited
biologically, just as whatever was acquired biologically could serve as a foundation
for social or psychological processes in a back-and-forth movement between the
social and the biological. The gradual change in individuals of a species occurred in
such a fashion that all members of the group, ignoring individual differences, turned
out to incorporate the same effects. In human societies, experience and behavior
became manifestations of collective hereditary transmission, equally affecting all
possible generations of individuals of the relevant group. What was hereditarily
transmitted was not solely a psychological–cultural pattern, but rather a changed
biological (i.e., a neural) pattern, a pattern which provided the members of the collectivity with modified competences through which their experiences would be
organized, molding the physical and psychological behavior of the individual. Thus
Spencer was not a simple, straightforward individualist, neither in his biology nor
in his social sciences, but rather an ambivalent collectivist-in-disguise. Moreover, as
James Elwick (2007) has shown, Spencer’s model organisms2—common and simple
invertebrates, such as chitons, annelids, hydrozoans—were considered by him to be
compounds of individual units, and thus, I would argue, could be looked upon as
various kinds/levels of collectivities. Topics discussed in biological terms, such as the
relations of parts to wholes, dependencies and interdependencies, individuality and
collectivity, were all applicable to the superorganism, that is, to the social collectivity
and its interdependent institutions.
The utopian dimension of Spencer’s sociological work—the changed ethical
quality of life—is of relevance here. The social enabling conditions for it were
very high degrees of mutual interaction and cooperation, which served as indices of
social evolution. Although in Spencer’s narrative the changes would seemingly
happen to individuals and concerned their happiness, they could become socially
meaningful only when the collectivity at large was affected through a biological–
cultural back-and-forth civilizing process. What made possible the alternation
between the cultural and the biological in Spencer’s sociology, and made room for
psychology as a unique science of the individual, was the role assumed by the collectivity: Spencerian individuals contained the collective within themselves as their
mode of adapting.
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After the publication of The Origin of Species, Spencer included natural selection
as yet another branching evolutionary path, albeit as a secondary evolutionary
mechanism. For Spencer, natural selection attributed causality and agency to the
environment and it operated merely as a constraint. Thus, for him it explained the
survival of existing populations but not the appearance of novelty. Spencer qualified
natural selection’s explanatory power further by stating that it could perhaps be
instrumental in explaining change in lower forms, but certainly not in humans. Thus
he was positioning himself closer to Alfred Russel Wallace’s position in the controversy over the explanation of human cognitive evolution. But, contrary to Wallace,
he did not invoke a nonnaturalist explanation for that. Spencer held this position
on “the survival of the fittest” more or less consistently throughout his life. It became
more explicit in the exchange of essays with August Weismann in the 1890s, in The
Factors of Organic Evolution (1887), and in the revised edition of The Principles of
Biology (1898).
Émile Durkheim
During the last third of the nineteenth century, evolutionary biology, including
Lamarckian transformism, played a vital role, particularly for sociologists in France,
Belgium, and Italy, in molding programs, actual practices, cultural rhetoric, and their
self-image as scientists (see discussion in Conry 1974). In France, from the 1860s
onward, Lamarckian transformism was a significant presence, with Spencer as an
important resource. It was informed by three core tenets: the central role of the
environment in adaptation; evolution understood as a development from less to
more complex; and the inheritance of adaptive acquired traits (see chapter 7 in this
volume). Social thinkers, perhaps like some of the biologists, failed to inquire what
sort of patterns and traits were distinct enough to be passed on biologically. When
discussing Durkheim I am focusing on his work from the mid-1880s until the late
1890s, the period when biology served as a principal source of his models, metaphors,
and analogies (Lukes 1973; Alexander and Smith 2005).
Durkheim’s innovative claim “to explain the social by the social” was made possible to a significant extent by the sophisticated manner in which he transposed
fundamental biological tenets and terms to the social field (see Durkheim [1893]
1984, [1895] 1982, [1900] 1960). He did this in two ways: one strategic—in order to
legitimize; the other theoretical—in order to construct. Society was to be explained
by using social categories, but the conceptual tools were to be borrowed from
another science, evolutionary biology. Yet Durkheim repeatedly referred to the
distinction between the two sciences, the existing biology and the emerging sociology, and uniquely delimited the latter. Furthermore, he demanded that the role of
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the entities transposed into sociology—the biological concepts, models, metaphors—be apposite in the two disciplines. Durkheim invested great efforts, both in
his rhetoric and in his formulation of theory and methodology, to distinguish
between his views and those of others who regarded society straightforwardly
as an organism. He thereby hoped to constitute sociology as an autonomous
discipline.
In the social as well as in the political discourse of the time, “the organism” was
applied to a variety of entities. Durkheim was not a Spencerian-style organicist.
Spencer thought that each individual could be considered as an actual organism,
and society was to be considered as a real “superorganism.” Durkheim used the
“organism” as a necessary component in his argument about the relations between
individuals and their collectivities. These relationships—but not the actual individuals, nor the actual collectivities—could be viewed, in some of their aspects, as analogous to parts of the organism in relation to its totality. He insisted on a very partial
application of this analogy to individuals, and admonished against any literal understanding of it. For most of his contemporaries, individuals were conceived to be
epistemologically the real entities, observable ones. The reality of the collectivity
was often envisaged as secondary, deriving from the reality of the individual and
thus unobservable on its own. Durkheim’s usage of the analogy purported to make
the collectivity epistemologically real, to construct its “visualization” at a time when
the visibility of “Nature” had become a significant scientific issue. He thought thus
to have provided a semblance of observability to the collectivity. Evolutionary
biology was perceived as relying on a partially observable past, which could be
reconstructed by supplementary hypotheses, but no causal mechanism of the present
could be exemplified. To a large extent, the force of the gradually emerging
Durkheimian group and its claim to academic and cultural legitimation resided, for
Durkheim’s contemporaries, in the claim that it was a science which relied on the
emulation of a culturally paradigmatic science, contemporary biology, while it concurrently provided sociophilosophical underpinning to an emerging hegemonic ideology of solidarité-ism.
The particularity of Durkheim’s use of “the biological” was that he was a Lamarckian evolutionist but not an organicist. Like Spencer, he accepted the cluster of
notions related to the role of the environment, the economy of the organism, the
physiological division of labor, coordination, and so on. He transposed the differentiation in the economy of the organism into the social differentiation resulting
from the division of labor in society. Social plasticity meant that when a primary
process of adaptation to the environment occurred, either biological or social, it
resulted in a certain practice, a social pattern. This pattern would then be transmitted as a habit and custom, that is, through processes of socialization and accultura-
Lamarckism and the Constitution of Sociology
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tion. Adaptation of individuals could be understood only within their culture. This
was considered by Durkheim to be the sociological equivalent of the inheritance of
acquired traits. The division of labor as a mechanism of change could induce alterations in the moral, ideational, and civilizing practices and beliefs of societies, and
thereby transform those of individuals. For Durkheim, in spite of admitting variability in populations, changes and transformations applied to all members of a
group, for they were considered to be identical as far as the relevant social trait was
concerned. Durkheim’s transfer from biology can also be exemplified by the reasoning which informed his view of modern society as having a degree of differentiation
and specification in the division of labor. This resulted in a complex social stratification and a sophisticated economy. Socially, it produced complex, nonoverlapping
networks of relations of interdependence and multilevel coordinations among individuals, resulting in complex “organic” solidarity.
I would argue that the consequences of the social translation of the “environment” which were semi-implicit in Spencer became foundational assumptions for
Durkheim. His thought can best be understood as an evolving, at times problematical and contradictory, construction of classificatory social continuities—from individuals to collective formations. This mode of thought can be interpreted as
illustrative of the deep impact of Lamarckian evolutionism. “Habit,” whose meaning
stretched between reflective, conscious acts that were informed by intentions,
motives, and reasoning, and those that were the result of nonreflective, habitual
behavior exemplifies that. Note that Durkheim’s position with respect to habit
paralleled that of Spencer. A version of French neo-Lamarckism (e.g., that of
Edmond Perrier) translated into the Durkheimian idiom served a constitutive role
in Durkheim’s sociology, but it disappeared from the forefront of the works and the
programmatic declarations of the Durkheimians after the Dreyfus affair. Thus, at
the height of the battle between neo-Lamarckians and neo-Darwinians in France
(see chapter 7 in this volume), the Durkheimians were moving elsewhere.
Evolutionary Mechanisms: A Comparative Discussion
Let me very briefly weave together and compare a number of features which mark
the notions of environment, heredity, social plasticity, and social complexity in the
early and middle work of Spencer and Durkheim, exemplifying the particular
enmeshing of evolutionary mechanisms. Within the specific sociocultural and political context of the Third Republic, this enmeshing was instrumental in making the
Durkheimian group into “French sociology.” Spencer’s work had appeared almost
a generation earlier, and this implied that it could not, within the specificities of
British social and political practices, directly effect the establishment of sociology
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there at that time. But such an enmeshing was a significant enabling condition for
its institutionalization in the next generation—that of Leonard Hobhouse at the
London School of Economics.
Both Spencer and Durkheim believed in social plasticity. Both professed some
notion of human progress and assumed an evolving social complexity. Thus, both
looked upon sociality at large, as well as upon specific social formations, as emergent.
Yet both also wanted to have a notion of laws governing the social, though Spencerian laws did not leave any place for contingency, while one could argue that
Durkheim was groping toward a notion of probabilistic laws. Both argued that one
could neither plan nor change society by rationality alone (and in that sense were
overtly non–Enlightenment). This had implications for their notion of progress as
it related to social plasticity (and to evolution). Both strove to keep a balance
between individuals and collectivities within their explanatory framework, in particular in the context of plasticity. At issue was the question whether individuals or
collectivities were to be the fundamental explanatory unit. Spencer focused on how
to understand individuals, and Durkheim, collectivities. For both, the evolutionary
biology of their time (and how they understood it) supplied crucial elements in their
formulation of problematics and in arriving at answers in the social field. Both used
the findings of cell theory of their respective times. Both used some notion of animal
social grouping related to work done by their contemporaneous biologists to illustrate notions of individuals and of collectivities. Both struggled with the question of
how to accommodate Darwinian explanatory mechanisms within some version of
Lamarckism. For both, the inheritance of adaptive acquired traits was central for
the description and explanation of the movement from past states to future ones.
Furthermore, both deployed biological models, metaphors, and analogies, thereby
claiming the social fields to be scientific by evolutionizing them. But concurrently
they also pointed to modes of distinguishing and severing sociology from biology
in order to regard the former as autonomous. The different deployment of evolutionary biology sources by Spencer and Durkheim can be at least partially attributed
to the following:
a. the periods during which each of them worked out his mode of transfer—Spencer
primarily from the 1850s until the mid-1870s, with some changes in his later writings,
and Durkheim in the 1880s and 1890s
b. the differing practices of investigating the social in Great Britain and France
c. whether there had already been professional or scholarly frameworks (institutional or voluntary) for discussing social theory
d. the nature of the cultural field at large—the roles of the ideal of science, of the
scientific method, and of scientifically based social reform.
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As elaborated in previous chapters, the differences and discrepancies among versions of Lamarckism and between those versions and the Darwinism ones were not
clear-cut. This is all the more so when one deals with the practitioners of social
theory of that time and their transfers from the contemporaneous evolutionary and
nonevolutionary biology. Spencer was perceived by many of his contemporaries to
be a Darwinian and, moreover, as a principal agent of the diffusion of Darwinism.
But Spencer was active for over fifty-five years, and at the end of the nineteenth
century he was perceived by neo-Darwinians as a proper Lamarckian. Durkheim
was perceived by one of the major groupings of sociologists at the time as a hybrid
of Lamarckism and whatever they called organicism. Some recent historians of
sociology have dubbed him a Darwinian (e.g., Limoges 1994). I, on the other hand,
believe and argue that he was closest to some version of Lamarckian tenets held by
his contemporaries (Gissis 2002).
To further clarify why this is so, let me elaborate on social plasticity within late
nineteenth-century evolutionism. Any evolutionary framework transferred to social
thought which posited adaptive relations between organisms and environments—
social, organic, physical—could be, and was, interpreted in one of two ways. One
was as a facet of a hard-core biological determinism that would trump whatever
effects social changes of environment could have. The capabilities of the individual
would then be conceived as merely reflections of the conditions of existence of the
species, and thus would be bindingly hereditary. Biological determinists could, and
indeed did, apply this viewpoint to concepts of biological purity such as “race” and
“class.” This more rigid conception of heredity played a significant role in the constitution and boundary formation of the criminology and psychology of the period
as medicalized–biologized disciplines, and in the split among anthropology practitioners in France after Paul Broca’s death. That split was between those who later
came to be known as cultural anthropologists and the physical anthropologists who
remained within the framework of medical schools. The second way was to regard
the role of the environment as central in the formation and the transmission of
social and cultural functionally adaptational patterns such as habits, customs, and
traditions. This approach could therefore highlight “progress” as an open-ended
endeavor. To a large extent it could be identified with “progress” when applied to
humans (including “race” distinctions).
Lamarckism offered a double perspective on ethics and on society at large. It
emphasized the overall importance of the milieu/environment in shaping present
and future generations through the inheritance of acquired characters, with “userepetition-habit-habituation” as its principal mechanism. This implied the possibility
of shaping the future: present changes could be bequeathed as prospective biological or cultural traits to be further elaborated and complexified in the future. The
seeming determination of the present by the past was one consequence of such
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thinking, the other being the molding of the present in light of a projected future.
This “future perspective,” which was associated with Lamarckism in the last decades
of the nineteenth century, was of the utmost importance to those social scientists
who considered the emerging discipline to be interwoven with social reform,
assumed a continuous narrative of humanity/society, and formulated their analysis
of modern society in terms of a progressively complexified division of labor.
However, the implicit possibility of anchoring such a perspective in biology was at
least partially undermined by the Weismannian arguments in answer to Spencer in
the early 1890s (see chapter 6 in this volume), for they were understood as severing
social inheritance from biological heredity.
Concluding Remarks
The evolutionary metanarrative supplied the emerging field of sociology with a
framework in which to formulate theories of the constitution of modern society and
of the genealogy and evolution of its various institutions and their functioning, that
is, of mechanisms of change and of stabilization. Though “modern society” was virtually the sole object of investigation in sociology, the evolutionary framework enabled
practitioners to deploy materials relating to past and present societies (Western and
non–Western) in order to construct a single continuous narrative. Note that degeneration, which was perceived at the time as the opposite of evolutionary progress,
arose within this narrative and not outside it. The mechanisms advanced were
claimed to be scientific, for they were presented as variations or continuations of
those operating in evolutionary biology.
Although the emerging social sciences have been viewed for a long time as having
been molded and regulated by Darwinian evolutionism, I believe that versions of
Lamarckian evolutionism were at least equally significant, particularly in Great
Britain and France. The differences in the choice of an evolutionary framework
stemmed from the concrete societies and national cultures in which the social scientists lived and worked, and were the result of varying interpretations given to
these evolutionary frameworks in the cultural–political discourses of those societies.
I believe that whatever was considered Lamarckism in the late nineteenth century
was deemed congenial to constituting emerging sociology in Great Britain and
France, and therefore to be a significant source. The existence of a variety of interpretations of what “evolution” consisted of, and the fact that these were meaningfully different in their “socially translated” presuppositions and implications, can be
of help in explicating the complex relationship between the sociopolitical worldview
and the adoption of a specific scientific stance. It can also provide a useful historical
perspective on the checkered history of such transfers.
Lamarckism and the Constitution of Sociology
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Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Yemima Ben Menahem and Sam Schweber for their useful critical
comments.
Notes
1. This downward scaling of Darwin’s mechanism to a secondary role was also translated into a sociopolitical competition and/or a “struggle for life” among various types of collectivities, such as states,
nations, or races, rather than among individuals.
2. One can call them model organisms because they were selected as exemplars of widely observed
features of life, were accessible and commercially obtainable, and were perceived as typical, serving as
an index to the group of instances (Ankeny 2001).
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