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Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology Maggie Studholme Abstract On the basis of a close reading of two early articles by Patrick Geddes, which form the basis of his later approach to sociology, it is argued that Geddes should be reclaimed by sociologists from the geographers and the town planners, as the founder of a distinctive environmental sociology in Britain at around the turn of the last century. Certain of Geddes’ arguments are seen to be comparable with those of Durkheim, in particular, and Marx to a somewhat lesser extent. Moreover, his work contains a distinctively sociological account of the ‘structuring’ of social (and environmental) reality via the creative agency of human beings actively working in a variety of environments. Geddes’ naïve optimism may make him as much Utopian as sociological, but does not invalidate his contribution to the development of a classical environmental sociology. Introduction Interest in the work of Patrick Geddes continues. Yet in spite of a number of books and articles dedicated to his life and work, there seems to be no universal agreement on where he belongs, in an intellectual sense. The titles of works on Geddes give some indication of the difficulty: Biologist, Town Planner, Re-Educator, Peace Warrior, proclaims Boardman (1978); Social Evolutionist and City Planner says Helen Meller (1990); for Robson (1981) and Mercer (1997) he is both geographer and urban planner, while Welter (2002) has subtitled his book: ‘Patrick Geddes and the City of Life’, which seems to hint at an affiliation with Bergsonian vitalism.1 All these appellations have something in them. It is arguable, however, that Geddes’ true intellectual home is neither with the geographers, nor with the town planners, or philosophers – but in another academic discipline to which he aspired, but which rejected him: Sociology. Certainly he developed an early interest in the work of Comte and Le Play, was a founding member of the Sociological Society of London, and a candidate for the Martin White chair in Sociology at LSE (accepted by L.T. Hobhouse in late 1907). Late in life, Geddes was appointed Professor of Sociology and Civics in a newly formed department at the University of Bombay, for a fixed five year The Sociological Review, 55:3 (2007) © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Published by Blackwell Publishing Inc., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148, USA. Maggie Studholme term. In spite of this, the breadth of his contribution to sociology is only rarely acknowledged in Britain by sociologists. This is especially surprising since the emergence, in the last thirty years or so, of environmental sociology. Indeed, it has been suggested on at least two separate occasions that Patrick Geddes deserves to be re-instated as an early founder of environmental sociology (Martinez-Alier, 1987: 98; Meller, 1990: 312–14). As Robson (1981: 198) suggests, Geddes anticipated what has recently become recognised as essential in any approach to ‘environmental management’ – the need for a multidisciplinary approach.Yet in so far as he appears in texts devoted to the history of sociology he is usually presented as having been eccentric (Hawthorn, 1976), amateur (Philip Abrams, 1968), a ‘sociographer’ whose theory made no impact on sociology (Fletcher, 1971); or with having contributed little beyond the development of the survey method (which is mainly attributed to Booth and Rowntree (Mark Abrams, 1951)). A.H. Halsey, who in his recent history of sociology acknowledges that Geddes might have made a positive contribution to the development of a sociology in which ‘much greater emphasis might have been given to environmental forces’ nevertheless fails to devote space to his work (Halsey, 2004: 48). Moreover, a recent paper (Law, 2005) argues that Geddes’ sociology is limited in its relevance for contemporary sociology due partly to his evolutionism, and partly to his ‘apolitical’ concept of ‘sociology as civics’, as well as castigating Geddes for failing to address the work of his contemporaries, Simmel, Durkheim and Weber. This is an unfair assessment, for the following reasons. First, to say that Geddes ought to have addressed the work of particular contemporaries is to impose on early 20th Century sociology a degree of cohesiveness and a shape that it simply did not have. Indeed, the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology were still some half century away from acquiring that label. Part of Geddes’ difficulty, as he presented the paper on Civics before the Sociological Society of London in 1904 (not 1905, as Law suggests), was that he was embroiled in a fierce debate about how to define sociology – at that time almost non-existent in Britain. Of the sociologists Law cites, only Durkheim was formally recognised, internationally, as a professional sociologist. When Geddes’ spokesman, friend and supporter, Victor Branford, in the very first article to appear in the Sociological Papers, drew attention to the sociological work of Simmel, he also cited Tonnies, Tarde, De Roberty, and De Greef (Branford, 1905). Where are the last of these now? Then again, Weber’s work was little known in the English speaking world until as late as the 1930s. The earliest work in English appears to have been a 1933 essay by H.M. Robertson, although this was not cited even by the LSE academic J.P. Mayer in his own essay, On Max Weber and German Politics (1943). Secondly, if commitment to an evolutionary sociology amounts to criteria for contemporary irrelevance, there are many whom we should now similarly abandon, including Marx, Durkheim and Weber themselves, since each retained some commitment to a more or less sophisticated evolutionary worldview.2 Finally, not only is it not obvious why an apolitical stance should 442 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology lead to irrelevance, but a strong argument can be made for Geddes as both an environmentalist per se and as an environmental sociologist. This paper, therefore, is a call to reclaim Geddes as the founder of a distinctive environmental sociology – and not just in Britain. He travelled widely throughout his life and inspired and influenced many people. Fletcher (1971: 834) believed that Geddes’ ideas almost certainly ‘stimulated the growth of’ the classical human ecology of the Chicago school, through his contact with Charles Zueblin, who published a glowing report on the activities of Geddes’ Edinburgh Summer Schools in the American Journal of Sociology (Zueblin, 1899). In fact, Geddes probably took his own ideas to Chicago, since he gave a course of lectures there in 1898 (Meller, 1990: 303). This link should not be overstated, however, since Robert Park, the ‘founder’ of classical human ecology, did not join the Chicago department until around 1914 (part-time), well after both Geddes’ lectures and Zueblin’s departure. Moreover, Chicago sociology was demonstrably social Darwinist in orientation, using biological and ecological concepts and terminology as metaphors (Miley, 1980: 166; Gaziano, 1996: 875). Geddes, on the other hand, was not a social Darwinist (though his position is close to that which Clarke (in her discussion of Darwin’s reception by French social scientists), has called ‘reform Darwinism’ (Clarke, 1984)); he used ecological concepts not as tropes, but to convey what he saw as reality. Park was acquainted, however, with the work of Radhakamal Mukerjee (Mukerjee, 1926; Park, 1926). Mukerjee had met and worked with Geddes in India, and Geddes had written an introduction to Mukerjee’s Foundations of Indian Economics (Mukerjee, 1916; Boardman, 1978: 280). His work owed so much to the influence of the older man that Geddes’ friend and associate Lewis Mumford complained that in spite of having absorbed so much of the master’s thought, Mukerjee failed to acknowledge his sources (Novak, 1995: 245, 306). Thus Geddes’ sociological influence, direct or indirect, was widely spread, making his invisibility in the history of British sociology all the more remarkable. Moreover, given his influence on Mukerjee, whose work Dunlap and Catton, the ‘founders’ of the New Environmental Paradigm in sociology, cite as a neglected early example of environmental sociology (Dunlap and Catton, 1979: 245), Geddes deserves reinstatement as classical ‘environmental’ sociologist as well as ‘environmentalist’ in a fairly modern sense. Geddes was born in 1854, which makes him of the same generation as Durkheim (born 1858). Like Durkheim, he evaded his parents’ aspiration to see their son enter the church, a fact that is often significant in the lives of classical sociologists, and not only because a lack or loss of deeply held religious conviction was a prerequisite for serious engagement with Darwin’s theory of evolution, which formed the starting point for many early sociological theories. It is almost impossible to read about Geddes in a way that does not mix, inextricably, his personal life with his work (see Meller, 1990; Boardman, 1978; Mairet, 1957). Accounts of his childhood, for example, note the positive influence of his family position as youngest son of elderly parents (his retired father had more time to devote to his son’s informal education © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 443 Maggie Studholme than most parents) combined with the freedom of his rural background, on his early propensity for botanical studies. This rural and scientific background contrasted sharply with his experience of the wider world, when he later found himself in London with time on his hands to observe the city around him. It was probably this experience, in combination with his early reading of Carlyle, Ruskin, Spencer and Comte, and (via his teacher, T.H. Huxley), with the work of the French sociologist Le Play, that sparked his interest in the social as well as the natural sciences. From the early 1880s, Geddes made increasing incursions into a nascent sociology, even while he was employed as a teacher and demonstrator of botany at Edinburgh. Given his background, not only is it not surprising that he began from biology, it was also not particularly unusual for a sociologist of this era to have done so. Durkheim himself, in The Division of Labour, explained the mechanics of social change in a way that drew directly on Darwin (Hawkins, 1997: 12; Lukes, 1975: 170; Durkheim, 1933 [1893]: 266). The success of Darwinian biology in drawing a wide range of diverse subjects under its theoretical umbrella meant that sociologists of the late nineteenth century could not avoid engaging with its arguments as they struggled to mark out their own intellectual territory. Geddes was a holistic thinker, although the term itself was not coined until 1926, near the end of his life.3 All things biological and social, natural and cultural, scientific and artistic, theoretical and practical, were, for him, interlinked in basic and essential ways, leading him to transpose the basic biological triad of environment, function and organism, on to the Le Playist formula, place, work and family.4 By the early 1920s Geddes defined sociology in terms of the holistic study of people, affairs and places – a synthetic discipline composed of anthropology, his own brand of economics, and geography – whose object was to catch the flux or moving stream of everyday life, the better to discern its evolutionary direction (Geddes, 1922: 3–4). But Geddes, in common with the other classical sociologists, was concerned not only with an understanding of society and social change, but with social amelioration. His difficulty (or one of them) lay in getting people to understand his vision, which – though it differed only in certain respects from more conventional worldviews – was incomprehensible to many of his contemporaries. Yet the key to understanding Geddes’ life’s work, now as well as then, lies in his use of the concept of environment, worked out in an attempt to redefine economics, as a subject centred on the two way inter-relationship between people and environments while acknowledging the need for conservation of finite resources. Two early papers give the best indication of the subsequent direction of his thought. The first, ‘On the Classification of Statistics and its Results’, was presented at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in instalments between March and May 1881, followed in 1884 by ‘An Analysis of the Principles of Economics’. They form the basis of his subsequent sociology, and in spite of being his earliest works are often more lucid than his later writing, which became increasingly tangled, making his intentions harder to decipher. Thus, although 444 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology two papers may not be a sufficient basis for the re-incorporation of Geddes’ work into the sociological canon – they are an essential prelude to a proper understanding of his later work. The classification of statistics The 1881 paper was an ambitious attempt, heavily influenced by his reading of Comte, to devise a system of classification for the increasing number of social statistics. These needed to be organised and analysed if they were to provide useful information about ‘the social, moral and intellectual condition of a people’ (Geddes, 1881: 4). The system he went on to outline was based on a set of axiomatic statements about societies in their relationship with nature: First . . . a society obviously exists within certain limits of time and space. Secondly it consists of a number of living organisms. Thirdly, these modify surrounding nature, primarily by seizing part of its matter and energy. Fourthly, they apply this matter and energy to the maintenance of their life, i.e. the support of their physical functions. . . . A society may be much more than all this . . . but in any case these four generalisations are obviously true, neither hypothesis nor metaphysical principle being involved. These will therefore henceforth be termed sociological axioms. (Geddes, 1881: 12) These propositions formed the basis of Geddes’ subsequent explanation of the persistence of social activity through time and space, in terms of the production and consumption of life-sustaining goods.5 A complete set of statistics on a given society would provide a detailed picture of a particular moment in the moving flux of history (Geddes, 1881: 8–9) and include detailed information about people (organisms), their occupations (function) and environment. The concept of environment was central in Geddes’ approach to sociology. He used it, in different contexts, to refer to every aspect of human existence – natural, cultural, and built (and even to the internal environment of the body), although he was not always careful to specify which sense of the term he was using at any given moment. Beginning from territory, or physical environment, Geddes wanted to classify and count the quality and quantity of land, water and other natural resources, plants, and minerals, and whether (and how) they were used, wasted, or undisturbed by human agency. Energy was equally important, so its natural sources (the sun, tidal energy, hot springs and volcanic energy) should also be logged. Production methods – the use of natural and human energy to convert resources into goods, efficiently or not, were also to form part of Geddes’ statistical data (Geddes, 1881: 13). About people, Geddes wanted to know birth, death, and migration rates, anthropometric details, and the state of a population’s mental, physical and social health. He also wanted a catalogue of data on occupations (referred to as ‘function’). But rather than just counting how many people were employed, © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 445 Maggie Studholme in what jobs, and what they were paid, Geddes was interested both in the environmental impact of each occupation, and in the importance of the occupational structure for social relations, which he labelled ‘mutual relations’ (1881: 16, and Tables A, B, C, D in Geddes’ own diagram). The difficulty of uncovering the nature of something as nebulous as a ‘relation’, which is impossible to observe empirically, led Durkheim to outline and clarify, formally, his Rules of Sociological Method (1895). Geddes, working more than ten years before Durkheim coined his now famous exhortation to consider ‘social facts as things’, proposed to study ‘mutual relations’ via the social functions of work, categorised not only in terms of the service it provided for other members of society, but also in energy terms. His complex typology of different occupations uses a terminology that looks very odd from a 21st century perspective, categorising service(s) provided by people for people as direct/indirect; cerebral/non-cerebral; aesthetic, intellectual or moral; or coordinating (Geddes, 1881: 16–17). It is easy to be critical of the details of this schema, accustomed as we are to understand the concept of ‘class’ in conventional socio-economic terms, whether we speak of bourgeois and proletariat, middle and working classes or use some other classificatory system. But this is to miss the point. Geddes’ complex typology was grounded not in conventional economics, but in an attempt to formulate an environmental economics, or an energy balance sheet, from which could be read off an appropriate distribution of goods according to the ‘real’ underlying energy needs of people undertaking different social functions (Geddes, 1881: tables A, B, C, D). Geddes realised that his scheme was over-ambitious, but he believed passionately that all this data was necessary for practical social amelioration (Geddes, 1881: 19). He went on to attack the various ‘schools’ of political economists, excepting only Alfred Marshall and Yves Guyot,6 not only for ignoring the importance of conservation in their work, but also for being ignorant of developments in evolutionary theory, psychology and for ignoring historical fact (Geddes, 1881: 21–4). Geddes insisted that his own scheme didn’t really represent any new ideas (although it probably owed somewhat more to Marshall’s Economics of Industry than he admitted) and claimed it was simply a return to an earlier conception of ‘economy’ as household management. Yet it was by no means immediately clear, how all this information, once collected, could be collated and made commensurable. Leaving aside the very big problem of interpretation, it would have needed a very powerful computer, even by today’s standards, to accommodate all the information Geddes thought necessary to social analysis. Yet all these statistics would prove to be necessary to his subsequent account of economics. The principles of economics: physical The 1884 paper was long, and was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in three parts. After this, whenever Geddes insisted on the importance 446 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology of economic analysis in sociology, he had in mind this particular interpretation of the relations between people and resources and the nature of wealth. Economics, he believed could be seen to have three analytically separable but inter-related levels – physical, biological and psychological.7 Beginning from the ‘physical’ level, he argued that economics began from producers and consumers, understood as self-maintaining machines, fuelled by energy from their surrounding environment (Geddes, 1884: 11–12). The first job of economics (which would draw on the sorts of statistics he had outlined in his earlier paper) should be to calculate, for any given moment in time, how much energy was needed to ‘run’ human beings engaged in different activities, and the amount of energy available for this, from all sources, both natural and manmade (Geddes, 1884: 12–13). Geddes referred to resources and energy in their natural condition as ‘potential product’, to the apparatus of production (capital) as ‘mediate product’, and to finished goods as ‘ultimate products’, which could themselves be further subdivided into ‘transient’ and ‘permanent’ products, on the basis that the former (like food and clothing) were quickly used up, while the latter (like buildings, furniture or ‘art’) had more durable qualities (Geddes, 1884: 21; see also 1881: 14). He believed that if energy was used as the unit of measurement it would also be possible to work out how much fuel (food for the workers as well as coal for machines) was wasted by inefficient production methods. This would highlight the fact that often more energy was wasted in production than was contained in the finished product, he said, showing just how inefficient manufacturing processes were (Geddes, 1884: 17). But this was precisely Geddes’ point: conventional economics did not take this sort of inefficiency into account, so that a profit – measured in terms of monetary ‘value’, was made so long as the cost of production at any stage did not exceed the total quantity of finished goods. Geddes argued, however, that such profit was actually ‘the interest paid by Nature upon the matter and energy expended upon her during the processes of production’ (Geddes, 1884: 18). His refusal of monetary calculation at this stage allowed him to focus on what Marx only partially grasped. For Marx, the owners of capital derived their profit from the surplus value of the labour expended by the worker in production. Yet to the extent that the exchange value of an item is produced by the energy expended in human labour, which, according to Geddes, had to be considered in the same terms as the rest of the natural world, but which is not generally calculated as part of the cost of production, the surplus appropriated by the capitalist can be equated with the increased quantity of resources (and especially food) required to keep the worker working beyond the time required to reproduce the necessities of his own life. Geddes argued that if the quantity of finished goods per unit time (as manhour, man-day or man-year) were calculated, it would be possible to work out the amount of wealth collectively owned by the community, and consequently the details of appropriate distribution (Geddes, 1884: 18). Although Geddes did not discuss this in any detail – it is likely that such a distribution would have reversed the usual order of things, with most resources being allocated to © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 447 Maggie Studholme those who expended most energy in their jobs. Ambitiously, Geddes also suggested that this energy calculation be made for all historical periods, to include the total collective production of the entire human race – which he proposed to refer to as its ‘synergy’. This would highlight the importance of conservation, by showing the vast quantities of resources and energy used up by human activity (Geddes, 1884: 19). Dividing up goods into necessities, comforts and luxuries (‘supernecessaries’), and suggesting that the purpose of luxury goods was to stimulate consumers’ senses – ‘gustatory, visual and tactile’,8 Geddes then argued that in civilised societies much production served an ‘aesthetic subfunction’. Yet, if conservation was of key importance, some types of consumption were more desirable than others. Here, rather than attempting to minimise all production in order to conserve resources, Geddes believed that the maximisation of permanent goods was a better alternative (Geddes, 1884: 21). This implied that it would be better to concentrate on producing beautiful buildings and works of art to stimulate the sense organs than to waste resources on the production of luxury food and clothing, which might have the same effect but which did not last long. Beyond this, conservation demanded a reorganisation of production in the interests of efficiency, including waste reduction, the minimisation of friction in transport, and the simplification of trade (1884: 23). Such good housekeeping would increase the social stock of ‘Real Wealth’, which consisted of the total environmental conditions of living; in the aesthetic and cultural value of the man-made environment, as well as in its utility as nutrition or shelter; and in clean air, good light and pure water. Given the appalling environmental conditions in many urban areas during this period, what is surprising is perhaps not that Geddes should calculate wealth in this way, but the refusal of so many others to do so, a point he reiterated in later writings (for example, 1888: 295–6). The principles of economics: biological But human beings were not just machines for the production and consumption of goods. Geddes’ biological principles of economics now defined people as (intelligent, sentient, moral) animals (Geddes, 1884: 24). From the statistical table he had earlier proposed (and very much in line with wider contemporary concerns about the condition of the masses), he now focussed on both qualitative and quantitative issues of population: health, efficiency and education as well as structure (‘racial’ and other physical characteristics). In particular, he wanted to explore the relationship between social activity in environment(s) and evolution or social progress. Complex functional differentiation, or a high division of labour, in contemporary societies was the result of evolution. Individual organisms, whether ants, bees or human beings were ‘modified’ by occupation, heredity, and environment. Although, Geddes suggested, the social advantages of the co448 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology operative division of labour were obvious, there might be disadvantages in biological terms, since the demands of a particular job might affect an individual’s physical health and longevity in either positive or negative ways. When such ‘modifications’ became hereditary, the degenerative impact of particular occupations could be passed on (Geddes, 1884: 26–7). This proposition seems indicative of a misunderstanding of the mechanism of evolution. However, since Mendelian genetics had yet to be rediscovered, and Darwin himself did not understand exactly how evolutionary changes occurred, this is hardly surprising (Mayr, 1991: 33–4; Jones, 1980: 78). In fact, the suggestion that occupational ‘environment’ might have an effect on general health and longevity, and that this might affect offspring, before or after birth – which was what Geddes would subsequently argue (Thomson and Geddes, 1911: 118 and 201), may not be confused at all. That there is continual interpenetration between organisms and their environments at a biological level, each actively changing the other, has recently been reiterated by the biologist Steven Rose (1997: 140). This is an important point. Unlike some among his sociological contemporaries (including Durkheim as well as Hobhouse, who would later become his rival at the Sociological Society), Geddes refused to refute the importance of heredity in evolution. But his was not a single factor theory. Even in 1884 Geddes distinguished between ‘functional environment’, or occupation, and ‘ancestral environment’, meaning heredity, as well as between ‘social’ or cultural environment and ‘natural’ environment. In the natural environment, he thought, the most important factors were food, air quality and light (Geddes, 1884: 27). Human animals might suffer either as a result of the deprivation of food, light, clean water and air, or from excessive consumption (of food), in combination with too little physical exertion. Geddes moralised – along lines with which we are all too familiar today, that degeneration through over-consumption and too little exercise was the most debilitating, bringing about ‘that far more insidious and thorough degeneration seen in the life history of myriads of parasites’ (Geddes, 1884: 28). For ‘progress’ or ‘evolution’ rather than ‘degeneration’ (or mere maintenance) to occur, not only were adequate supplies of food, clean air, and water necessary, but also ‘more and more complex conditions of the environment’. Though Geddes did not explicitly define which of his various senses of environment he had in mind here, he was speaking of social or cultural, rather than natural, environment. Again, Geddes here exhibited his normative bias. Real wealth consisted in the totality of environmental conditions, and not in material or monetary riches.9 He insisted on the ‘evolutionary’ importance of a complex environment as an organic ‘need’ (Geddes, 1884: 28–9). The importance of the ‘aesthetic’ element in production, on which Geddes had placed much importance in his discussion of physical principles, turned out to be that the human senses need stimulus in order to ‘evolve’. It is instructive to compare this assertion with Durkheim’s (1893) discussion, in The Division of Labour, about how new needs are created by the division of labour because people had to work harder when resources were © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 449 Maggie Studholme scarce, since they were in conflict with others doing the same thing. In the process, more energy was expended (there is a ‘great depletion of forces’) so that more energy was then required to replace it (‘reparation must be proportionate to expenditure’). However, it was the nervous system that was most overworked during this process, and it was as a result of this ‘exercise’ that the capacity of the brain increased. ‘That is how’ Durkheim claimed, ‘without having desired it, humanity is found apt to receive a more intense and more varied culture’ (Durkheim, 1893 [1933]: 272–3). These accounts of ‘mental’ evolution are very similar. But there is one crucially important difference. Where Durkheim makes much of the ‘conflict’ over resources as the factor which ‘mechanically’ engenders mental evolution, Geddes emphasises the active, creative production of a more and more complex environment to stimulate the human intellect, and thus bring about social evolution (Geddes, 1884: 29). The purpose of production should, therefore, be the deliberate modification of all sorts of environments in order to fulfil human needs. In the process people themselves would be shaped by their environments, their occupations, and (directly or indirectly) by one another. Production should be seen not as the production of monetary wealth but of particular environmental conditions suitable for particular sorts of social life. Environments or occupations that proved to be unhealthy must be altered or, in extreme cases, given up altogether, in the interests of social progress. Thus any environment (natural, built or cultural) that was lacking in good food, light, air, and water or any productive occupation that polluted or degraded them, should be changed or abandoned altogether in the interests of social ‘health’ (Geddes, 1884: 31) Anticipating Veblen’s similar argument by more than ten years, Geddes commented that the current ‘industrial anarchy’ was the result of the misconceived notion that the purpose of production was ‘ “wealth” in its very variable proportions of maintenance, power over others, [and] personal immunity from function’ (Geddes, 1884: 29; Veblen, 1899). The principles of economics: psychological From people as machines, and people as intelligent, social, evolving animals, Geddes now shifted his focus to consider the structure of human wants and desires (Geddes, 1884: 34). More than individual egoistic ‘wants’, Geddes was thinking of social needs, the satisfaction of which demanded not only sympathy, altruism and cooperation, but an awareness of the social advantages of cooperative behaviour. Though he phrased it differently, Geddes was trying to formulate something similar to Durkheim’s idea of the conscience collective as the basis for social solidarity. Any society with a degree of complexity of the division of labour needed a shared underlying morality, but contemporary social problems indicated that material development was outrunning moral development. Progress towards the physical and biological ideal of synergy in production, therefore, demanded the development of a moral ideal of 450 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology maximum altruism (Geddes, 1884: 36). Geddes had no difficulty postulating the centrality of altruism and co-operation rather than self-interested competition as the motor of social evolution. While it may not have been fashionable, at a time when both Spencer and Darwin were arguing for the centrality of competition, Geddes simply referred (often casually, in fleeting references), to social insects and animals that demonstrated co-operative behaviour, to make his point (see for example, Geddes, 1881: 12; 1884: 11). In the Division of Labour, Durkheim would postulate the existence of three abnormal forms of the division of labour which signalled an unhealthy or pathological social condition (1933 [1893]: 353–95). In his insistence that ‘material’ had outrun ‘moral’ evolution, Geddes anticipated Durkheim’s discussion of the ‘anomic’ division of labour, in which the extreme rapidity of economic specialisation outpaced regulative or ‘moral’ change. Durkheim suggested that this left individuals bereft of any notion of how their own specialised function contributed to the maintenance of the whole, and was thus disintegrative. Among his proffered solutions was the suggestion that some way be found to ensure that ‘the worker, far from remaining bent over his task, does not lose sight of those co-operating with him, but acts upon them and is acted upon by them (Durkheim, 1933 [1893]: 372). Geddes’ solution of moral evolution towards maximum altruism is similar, even if couched in very different terminology, and carrying a distinct tinge of ‘inevitability’. Biological evidence showed, he argued, that species-maintaining behaviours such as co-operation would always triumph over those, such as the ‘iron law of competition’, which maintained only individuals (Geddes, 1884: 36). Geddes went on to suggest that the active modification of the social or cultural environment should be added to that of the natural and physical environment, in the interests of social amelioration, which needed welldeveloped minds as well as healthy bodies. In this way Geddes made education – the production of an environment stimulating for the mind, a key force for social progress (1884: 37–8). Thus did Geddes neatly tie together his physical, biological and psychological aspects of economics as parts of an argument for social amelioration through environmental regeneration and education. It is necessary to note, however, that Geddes had strong views about the contemporary education system, and these became more strident as he aged. Much later, in 1919, he would claim that what was called knowledge was often no more than suitably diluted ‘upper class culture’, and as such had been ‘moderately successful in orienting the minds of “the Populace” to the existing social order’ (Geddes and Branford, 1919: xviii). Moreover, he abhorred the contemporary trend for clearly delineating the boundaries of each academic discipline, which led, he claimed to the construction of ‘Thought Cages’ (1915: 68). Social progress demanded the discovery of new relations between different aspects of things, leading to a new synthesis. Universities, as ‘trustees of the social inheritance’ should not only be more accessible for all, but practical local knowledge should be recognised as of equal value to abstract academic or technical knowledge (Geddes and Branford, 1919: xxv; Geddes and © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 451 Maggie Studholme Thomson, 1931: 1387). Many of his ideas about formal education, in fact, were so far opposed to contemporary trends and beliefs (and actively insulting to those who worked within, rather than outside the system) that they probably hindered rather than helped, both the immediate reception of his work, and his academic career in the longer term. Meanwhile, in 1884, Geddes suggested that his economic analysis, already complex, still needed the addition of a ‘sociological’ analysis and synthesis, for which his economic analysis provided the necessary background (Geddes, 1884: 38). Anticipating criticism, Geddes denied building his argument around his personal ethical principles (of efficiency in production, the conservation of resources, and co-operation and sympathy between people), but insisted on the scientific evidence in favour of these. Moreover, ethics was not an isolated science but involved a generalisation of the findings of the other sciences (Geddes, 1884: 40). As he had argued in 1881, most actions have both an economic and a moral or ethical aspect. Only where what was ethically right or good coincided with logically derived scientific postulates ought that course of action to be adopted, otherwise we might find ourselves drawn into such ethically dubious activities as cannibalism (on the basis that utilising all available sources of matter and energy is efficient). Ultimately, he believed, science and ethics would reinforce one another (Geddes, 1881: 27–30). The theory of civics Geddes’ conception of sociology as ‘Civics’ (Geddes, 1905, 1906) was firmly grounded in this earlier work. It was here that he developed his idea of the ‘region’, which, although (perhaps deliberately) spatially vague, was consistent with his insistence on treating environment, function and organism (EFO) together. Natural and cultural environments differed from place to place, so that it was futile to propose a single national or global solution to social and environmental problems. Each solution must be tailored to the needs of a particular place – its topography, geology, climate, and the culture of its people. In the theory of civics, Geddes’ main development of the EFO triad was the addition of the idea that individual and social consciousness – as ideas and ideals, values, beliefs and desires – was a product of the total environment (natural, built and cultural). Thoughts and dreams, as products of different everyday ‘experiences’ at the level of place, work and folk (or EFO), translated into the creative human ‘action’ that continually re-modelled and modified the surrounding physical and cultural environment. History was a process of continuous human activity in environment, leading to the discovery or development of knowledge, (feelings, sense and experience), to thoughts (emotion, ideation, imagery), and via human institutions (specifically, the ‘cloister’ or university) to further actions. Although his various attempts to represent this idea graphically were unsuccessful (only partly due to their increasing complexity), this is not an especially difficult idea. As Marx put it ‘it 452 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Marx, cited in Giddens, 1971: 41). Geddes’ concept of the development of consciousness as ideas, senses, feelings, emotions etc. into knowledge via interaction with environments of all kinds, leading to further action, simply makes this an explicitly ongoing process, something that Marx would not have denied. That Geddes’ diagrammatic representations were idealistic, showing ‘what ought to be’ rather than ‘what is’ could not have helped his cause in the eyes of his contemporaries (see Geddes, 1906, 1922; Geddes and Thomson, 1931). Reality, as he had already indicated with his reference to ‘industrial anarchy’, was very different from the ideal embodied in the theory. Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is this unintelligibility, not just in his diagrams, but also, increasingly in his writing, that accounts for Geddes’ omission from the history of academic sociology? Certainly Meller (1990: 2) draws attention to the fact that his ideas are not accessible, though Abrams, even while making a similarly negative assessment, suggested that Geddes’ work was worthy of closer consideration than it had at that date received (Abrams, 1968: 114–20, 152). Since then, of course, Geddes has received much attention, but little that amounts to direct engagement with it as sociology. In his own lifetime, Geddes’ intellectual fortune (like his finances) seemed to wane as much as it waxed, and by the end of 1907 sociology had gained an institutional foothold in the British university system that left both he and his supporters outside it. The story of Hobhouse’s appointment to the Martin White chair, and Geddes’ exclusion, is a complex one, and in spite of a number of historical accounts, has yet to be fully explored (but see Halliday, 1968; Mitchell, 1968; Owen, 1974; Hawthorn, 1976; Boardman, 1978; Collini, 1979; Abrams, 1985; Bulmer, 1985; Meller, 1990). Whatever the reasons, however, Geddes’ lack of either presence or support at LSE, for a long time the only place in Britain where sociology was offered at degree level (Fincham, 1975), is significant, since as Edward Shils astutely pointed out, institutions ‘create a resonant and echoing intellectual environment. The sociological ideas which undergo institutionalisation are thereby given a greater weight in the competition of interpretations of social reality’ (Shils, 1971: 762). That institutionalisation can function in this way is evidenced by Fuller’s (2006) account of the ‘hidden biological past of classical social theory’, which, along with an account of more familiar classical theorists, devotes space to the work of another of LSE’s sociological pioneers, Edward Westermarck, while making not a single reference to Geddes himself. Moreover, while applauding Hobhouse for creating a sociology in which social progress requires the transcendence or reversal of ‘evolutionary tendencies’ (Fuller, 2006: 60), Fuller fails to see that the more narrow conceptualisation of ‘environment’ as social and moral that emerged in the idea of orthogenic evolution (Hobhouse, 1901), largely excluded sociological consideration of the ways in which people, however distinctive their ‘human’ nature, necessarily interact with and depend © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 453 Maggie Studholme on the external, physical world. Like Hobhouse, Geddes began from biology. Unlike him, he did not feel compelled to do away with it entirely in the interests of creating an intellectual domain called sociology. His work, between 1881 and 1905, begins from the assumption that people are tied to the natural world in the same way as all other animals. Its novelty, as classical sociology, is that while it at no point refutes the deep interconnections of humanity with nature, or the role of biological heredity, it simultaneously engages with what is distinctively ‘human’ about human society – in particular the importance of human creativity, and of cultural and intellectual ‘inheritance’ not just via education, but also ‘environment’ (in all of the many senses in which he defined it). Meanwhile, Geddes’ invisibility in the history of sociology has meant that others re-thinking the sociological canon in an attempt to re-conceptualise the relationship between humanity and (the rest of) the natural world, have been forced back on the re-interpretation of a mere handful of thinkers. Notably, since Catton and Dunlap (1976) called for a New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), aspects of the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber have all been claimed as examples of an early sociological awareness of the importance of the natural environment (see for example, Buttel, 1986; Benton, 1989; Dickens, 1992). Although these re-interpretations are valuable in their own right, it is especially interesting to see themes raised by Geddes reappear in, for example, Dickens’s (2004) textbook Society and Nature. Unconsciously echoing Geddes’ insistence on the environment–labour-society interaction, the book is subtitled ‘changing our environment, changing ourselves’. Moreover, Dickens unwittingly sets out a broadly similar schematic division of the field into the physical, biological and psychological. Whole chapters are devoted to the transformation of the ‘external’ environment through work, as well as to its commodification (physical); to human consumption and to the ‘internal’ biological environment of the body (biological); and to our changing psychic (psychological) structures. To be sure, the terms of his argument are very different from those of Geddes, writing as he is some hundred years or more into the future not just of societyenvironment interaction, but of sociological theorising itself.10 However, in spite of the century that separates them, Geddes and Dickens represent a strand of sociological thought that embraces a realist understanding of the extent to which the sociological project of ‘human dominion over nature without . . . dominion over each other’ ought not to proceed on a purely ‘constructivist’ basis (Fuller, 2006: 1, 204). Conclusion This paper has had to be selective in its presentation of Geddes’ early work. For reasons of space, I have had to avoid getting bogged down in some of his 454 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology more controversial, difficult, or wrong-headed arguments (but see, for just one example, the section on population in the 1884 paper on Economics). When he is reclaimed for sociology, there will be plenty of time for everyone to engage in the most stringent critique. Nevertheless, I hope to have avoided the hagiography that Law finds in most treatments of his work (Law, 2005: 1.1), while considering it in its own terms, as a contribution to the making of sociology before sociology was properly made. In many ways, it is a brilliant anticipation of much more recent approaches to sociology, with its wide ranging interdisciplinary focus, and its insistence on examining the relationship between people and their environments – not just social and cultural, but also physical, as in the idea of ‘territory’ or region, and natural (via his concern with the resources of matter and energy). In all Geddes’ work there is a wealth of social critique, and a concern with social improvement which is entirely in keeping with the Classical sociological orientation of Durkheim and Marx. For Durkheim, indeed, sociology was to be the discipline, par excellence – best fitted to engage in diagnosis and treatment of societal ills (Durkheim, 1893). That Geddes’ social critique was grounded in an environmentalist concern with conserving resources and improving contemporary urban environments for people, rather than in (what has become) the conventional critique of contemporary political economy as a justification for the exploitation of the masses (as for Marx), or in a refutation of Spencer’s utilitarian sociology (as it was for Durkheim), does not invalidate it as part of a classical tradition. Rather, Geddes’ passionate championship of an actively created environment (built, social, cultural and moral or educational) as a solution for social problems shared much in common with the work of his contemporaries. The institutionalisation of their more narrow treatment of human ‘environments’ as social (or moral or cultural), while excluding the natural did not turn out to be quite right. Moreover, although its terminology may be unfamiliar, Geddes offers us a distinctively sociological account of the ‘structuring’ of social (and environmental) reality via the creative agency of human beings (variously interpreted as machines, animals, or consciously desiring, sensate, intelligent beings), actively working in all their different environments, not only exchanging matter and energy in the process of producing the material things necessary for survival, but also producing and using ideas and theories in a deliberate attempt to improve the conditions of their existence. Even power, as the ‘transformative capacity’ of knowledgeable agents is implied, although Geddes naively did not consider the extent to which the use and abuse of institutional power might adversely affect the possibilities for achievement of his vision. Perhaps the most damning criticism is just this: Geddes paints a ridiculously optimistic picture of what he believed could be achieved by people working together co-operatively to shape their own worlds. He even put these beliefs to the test through actual social practice, living with his wife on the top floor of an Edinburgh tenement, leading other residents to begin much necessary renovations by his own example © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 455 Maggie Studholme (Boardman, 1978: 86–9). No doubt this makes him, as Law has claimed, ‘Utopian’ (Law, 2005: 2.2). Is this sufficient reason for sociologists now to reject his contribution? In any case, to accept Geddes as a (not to say the) founder of environmental sociology is not necessarily to accept his work wholesale. In the final analysis, he was both Utopian and sociologist. And as Levitas (2005) points out, sociologists could do worse than to emulate the utopian method when it comes to envisioning sustainable futures. This involves the imaginary reconstitution of society on the basis of a holistic look at all our ‘systems of production, consumption and distribution – and the structures of desires and wants that accompany them’. If we do not address, as ‘sociologists and citizens,’ the Environmental problems we have ourselves created, ‘our very silences will shape not utopian but dystopian futures’ (Levitas, 2005: 19, 21). University of Bristol Notes 1 Welter notes that Geddes and Bergson were acquainted and shared many ideas in common (2002: 20). 2 Marx had his stage theory of history and a belief in the inevitability of the transition to socialism; Durkheim used volume and density as triggers for social evolution and used mechanical and organic solidarity to distinguish between pre modern and modern societies. Weber’s approach was more sophisticated, but still carried traces of a belief in the inevitability of progress in spite of contingent historical factors, especially in his ‘ideal typical’ representations of, for example, authority and social action. 3 The term holism was coined by J.C. Smuts, in Holism and Evolution (1926). Both Boardman (1978) and Kitchen (1975) record Geddes’ approval of this book. 4 The influence of Le Playist sociology should not be overstated. Geddes was equally influenced by Comte’s work, from which the Le Playists wished to dissociate themselves. 5 Geddes may have taken his axioms largely from the German ‘social energeticist’ Wilhelm Ostwald. Compare Sorokin’s (1956 [1928]: 20–22) account of Ostwald’s work with Geddes’ sociological axioms. 6 The publications to which Geddes referred here are Marshall’s (1879) Economics of Industry and Guyot’s (1881) La Science, Economique. 7 Geddes’ view was similar to that of others engaged in attempting to revise economics, including Frederick Soddy, Stanley Jevons and Wilhem Ostwald (Martinez Alier, 1987). 8 Welter (2002: 15) says that Geddes included only permanent products into the category of super- necessaries, or luxuries. However, his reference to the gustatory senses in 1884 probably indicates that some food (a transient product) should be classified as super-necessary. This point is important, if only because, for all his moralising about over consumption, Geddes was not advocating a wholly Spartan diet, only a wholesome one. 9 It could be argued of course that the latter can be used to purchase the former. Again, this is to miss Geddes point. In any case, as Beck (1992) has amply demonstrated, even riches cannot purchase immunity from environmental risk. 10 In particular, Dickens engages with the Risk society thesis popularised by Beck (1992) and Giddens (1990). 456 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology References Abrams, M., (1951), Social Surveys and Social Action, London: Heinemann. Abrams, P., (1968), The Origins of British Sociology 1834–1914, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Abrams, P., (1985), The Uses of British Sociology, 1831–1981 in Bulmer, M. (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research. Beck, U., (1992), Risk Society:Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Benton, T., (1989), ‘Marxism and Natural Limits: an ecological critique and reconstruction’, New Left Review, 178: 51–86. 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