Abstract
Ever since the great revolution which produced modern science, there has been a hope that a science of society would be created on a par with the sciences of nature.1 This new science of society, it has been supposed, would make use of the concepts, principles, theories, and methods of the physical and biological sciences. In this presentation2I shall explore some attempts to achieve this goal in relation to the body politic and, more generally, the organismic conception of the state.
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Notes
The research on which this chapter is based has been generously supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation of New York City. In making this acknowledgement, I should like particularly to take cognizance of the sympathetic and enthusiastic personal support given to me by the Foundation’s president, Mr. Alan McHenry.
This presentation draws heavily on two chapters (ch. 1, “An Analysis of Interactions between the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences”; ch. 4, “The Scientific Revolution and the Social Sciences”) from a book I have edited, The Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences: Some Critical and Historical Perspectives, published in 1993 in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993). My contributions to this volume have been published as Interactions: Some Contacts between the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 1994) and have appeared in translation as Scienze delia Natura e Scienze sociale (Rome/Bari: Editori Laterza, 1993).
See, notably, David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague/ Paris: Mouton, 1971; and Judith Schlanger, Les Métaphores de l’Organisme (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1971).
Some published results of this research, in addition to the work cited in note 2, include my forthcoming book on Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995); “Newton & The Social Sciences, with Special Reference to Economics, or, The Case of the Missing Paradigm,” in Natural Images in Economic Thought: “Markets Read in Tooth and Claw,” ed. Philip Mirowski (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and “Analogy, Homology, and Metaphor in the Interactions between the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences, Especially Economics,” History of Political Economy 25 (1993) supplement: 7-14, volume edited by Neil de Marchi.
William Harvey, An Anatomical Disputation Concerning the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Living Creatures, trans. Gweneth Whitteridge (Oxford/London: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1976), p. 3.
Ibid.
Ibid., from the translation by Kenneth J. Franklin (Oxford: Black-well Scientific Publications, 1962).
From “The Prologue to the Reader,” in John Halle, comp., A Very Frutefull and Necessary Briefe Worke of Anatomie, or Dissection of the Body of Man …, with a Commodious Order of Notes, Leading the Chirurgien’s Hande from all Offence and Error … Compiled in Three Treatises (lLondon: Thomas Marshe, 1565), published as part of A Most Excellent and Learned Worke of Chirurgerie, Called Chirurgia parva Lanfranchi…, (London: Thomas Marshe, 1565). See Hale, Body Politic.
The difference between the status assigned to the heart by Harvey in his two major work— De Generatione and De Motu cordis — is set forth by Gweneth Whitteridge, William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood (London: Macdonald; New York Elsevier, 1971).
The Anatomical Exercises of Dr. William Harvey …: The First English Text of 1653, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: The Nonesuch Press, [1928]) ch. 17, p. 115.
Ibid. In De Motu cordis Harvey was almost exclusively concerned with the function of the heart as the primary agent producing the circulation and not with the question of whether the heart comes into being in the embryo before the blood. In various works, and notably in the De Generatione animalium, Harvey made it plain that the blood appears in the development of the embryo before the heart or the liver or any other organ. On Harvey’s views concerning the primacy of the heart, especially the difference between Harvey’s and Aristotle’s positions on this topic, see Whitteridge, William Harvey, pp. 227-235.
John Aubrey recorded that William Harvey, in his will, “left his old friend Thomas Hobbes 10 pounds as a token of his Love”; see Oliver Lawson Dick, ed., Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Edited from the Original Manuscripts (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949; reprint ed., Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 133.
Many studies of Hobbes have taken cognizance of the fact that he based his system to some degree on the new physics of motion, but less attention has been paid to his use of Harveyan physiology. Hence, my presentation of Hobbes’s use of the natural sciences stresses the biomedical basis of his political thought rather than his use of mathematics and the physical sciences. There are many presentations of the thought of Hobbes, among them Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Birth and Its Genesis, trans. from the German manuscript by Elsa M. Sinclair (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1936; reprint ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Thomas A. Spragens, The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes (London: Croon Helm, 1973); and M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics (London/New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). Also David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Tom Sorell, Hobbes (London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986-“The Arguments of the Philosophers”); Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1989-“Past Masters”); and Frithiof Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’Mechanical Conception of Nature (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1928). There is much to be learned from two volumes by C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Especially important in the present context is an essay by J. W. N. Watkins, “Philosophy and Politics in Hobbes, ” Philosophical Quarterly 5 (1955): 125-146; expanded into the book, Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1965; 2d ed., 1973).
The writings of Hobbes have been collected in two sets —Sir William Molesworth, ed., The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 11 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839-1845; reprint ed., Aalen [Germany]: Scientia Verlag, 1966); Sir William Molesworth, ed., Thomae Hobbes malmesburiensis Opera philosophica quae Latinae scripsit omnia, 5 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839-1845; reprint ed., Aalen [Germany]: Scientia Verlag, 1961). There are also articles on Hobbes in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 15 vols. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937), vol. 4, and the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968). The quotation comes from English Works, 7: 470-471.
English Works, 1: viii (“Epistle Dedicatory”).
On the “mechanical philosophy, ” see R. S. Westfall, Force in Newton’s Physics: The Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century (London: Macdonald; New York: American Elzevier, 1971); also William R. Shea, The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of René Descartes (Canton [Ma.]: Science History Publications, 1991).
Hobbes’s Leviathan, his major work, is available in many editions and reprints; among them the Pelican Classics edition, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968). The most recent edition, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), has indexes of subjects and of names and places and a concordance with earlier editions. The quotation is from the Tuck edition, p. 3.
For details, see “The Scientific Revolution and the Social Sciences” in Cohen, ed., The Natural Sciences & Social Sciences.
See Leviathan, Tuck ed., eh. 29, pp. 228-230.
English Works, 3: 29.
Hobbes is a particular subject of attack in Harrington’s major work, Oceana, cited in note 24 below.
R. Tawney, “Harrington’s Interpretation of his Age,” Proceedings of the British Academy 27 (1941): 199–223, especially p. 200.
H. F. Russell Smith, Harrington and His Oceana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), ch. 8; Theodore Dwight, “Harrington and his Influence upon American Political Institutions and Political Thought, ” Political Science Quarterly 2 (1887): 1-44. This subject is explored further in my Science and the Founding Fathers.
Charles Blitzer, An Immortal Commonwealth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 160–169, and 210-279. This is the best informed and most authoritative work on Harrington; a convenient list of Harrington’s publications is given on pp. 337-339. A useful, briefer presentation is given in Michael Downs, James Harrington (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977). Harrington’s Oceana is available in a number of current editions: John Toland, ed., Works: The Oceana and Other Works (London: 1771; reprint ed., Aalen [Germany]: Scientia Verlag, 1980); S. B. Liljegren, ed., James Harrington’s Oceana, Edited with Notes (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1924 —Skrifter ultgivna av Vetenskaps-Societeten i Lund, 4; reprint ed., Westport [Conn.]: Hyperion Press, 1979).
Toland, Works, p. 403; also Blitzer, Immortal Commonwealth, pp. 89-108.
Ibid.
Oceana, Liljegren ed., p. 13; Toland ed., p. 36. See Blitzer, Immortal Commonwealth, p. 99. On p. 110 of Oceana (Toland ed.), Harrington compares the Council of Trade to the Vena Porta.
Oceana, Liljegren ed., p. 149; Toland ed., p. 149.
Ibid.
Blitzer, Immortal Commonwealth, p. 99.
Toland ed., p. 560.
Ibid.
Ibid.
See I. B. Cohen, “A Note on Harvey’s ‘Egg’ as Pandora’s ‘Box,’” in Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham, ed. Mikulas Teich & Robert Young (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 232–249.
See F. J. Cole, Early Theories of Sexual Generation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930).
Toland ed., p. 470.
Ibid.
William Harvey, Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals, trans. Gweneth Whitteridge (Oxford/London: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1981), ch. 47, pp. 214–215.
Ibid., ch. 51, p. 241; quoted from the 1653 translation, as given in Kenneth D. Keele, William Harvey: The Man, the Physician, and the Scientist (London: Nelson, 1965), p. 185; also William Harvey, Anatomical Exercises in the Generation of Animals, trans. Robert Willis, in The Works of William Harvey (London: The Sydenham Society, 1847; reprint ed., New York/London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965), p. 235.
Keele, William Harvey, pp. 183-186. See Gweneth Whitteridge’s summary in the introduction to her translation, p. liii.
For an account of Harrington’s use of the “punctum saliens” in a political context, see my chapter 4, “The Scientific Revolution & the Social Sciences, ” in The Natural Sciences & Social Sciences.
See ch. 11 of Rousseau’s Social Contract.
Translated in Allen Ritter & Julia Conaway Bondanella, eds., Rousseau’s Political Writing (New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), p. 61.
An alternative translation, made by G. D. H. Cole, is published in Charles M. Sherover, ed., Annotated Edition: The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right by Jean Jacques Rousseau (New York: New American Library, 1974).
Adam Smith to Lady Frances Scott, 15 October 1766, in Ernest Campbell Mossner & Ian Simpson Ross, eds., The Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977; reprint ed., Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987—The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. 6), p. 120.
On the significance of the circulation of the blood in the economics of Quesnay, see Vernon Foley, “An Origin of the Tableau Oeconomique, ” History of Political Economy 5, (1973): 121-150.
Nicolas-François Canard, Principes d’Économie politique (Paris: Biusson, 1801), summarized in Claude Ménard, “The Machine and the Heart: An Essay on Analogies in Economic Reasoning, ” Social Concept 5 (1988): 81-95, esp. p. 82.
Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 498.
David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), p. 181.
John Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1861), p. 285.
John Lubbock [Lord Avery], Scientific Lectures, X vols. (London: Macmillan, 1879), 4: 137.
See Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 45. According to Mayr, the “term ‘homologous’ existed already prior to 1859, but it acquired its currently accepted meaning only when Darwin established the theory of common descent. Under this theory the biologically most meaningful definition of ‘homologous’ is: ‘A feature in two or more taxa is homologous when it is derived from the same (or a corresponding) feature of their common ancestor.’”
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: James Munroe & Co, 1836); H. D. Traill, ed., The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1896-1899; reprint ed., New York: AMS Press, 1969), 1: 172. See Frederick W. Roe, The Social Philosophy of Carlyle and Ruskin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1921); also Hale, Body Politic, pp. 134-135.
Hale, Body Politic, p. 135.
Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Lehre vom modernen Staat, 6th ed., 2 vols. (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1885–1886), the first volume of which was translated into English as Theory of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892); Psychologische Studien über Staat und Kirche (Zurich/ Frauenfeld: C. Beyel, 1844). Bluntschli was also author of a widely used reference work, Deutsches Staats-Wörterbuch (Stuttgart/Leipzig: Expedition des Staats-Wörterbuchs, 1857-1870).
Selections from Bluntschli’s Psychologische Studien über Staat und Kirche (pp. 54, 86-87) are quoted from the translation in Werner Stark, The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 61-62.
Ibid.
Paul von Lilienfeld, or Paul de Lilienfeld, or Pavel Fedorovich Lilienfeld-Toailles, or Pavel Fedorovich Lilienfel’d Toal’ (1829-1903) published a book in Russian on the elements of political economy in 1860 under the pseudonym Lileyewa. This was followed by a first version, in Russian (under the initials P. L.), of Thoughts on the Social Science of the Future in 1872; a five-volume German version of this work, Gedanken über die Socialwissenschaft der Zukunft (vols. 1-4: Mitau: E. Behre’s Verlag, 1873-1879; vol. 5: Hamburg: Gebr. Behre’s Verlag; Mitau: E. Behre’s Verlag, 1881). Later works include La Pathologie sociale (Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1896); and Zur Vertheidigung der organischen Methode in der Sociologie (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1898). See, e.g., Otto Henne am Rhyn, Paul von Lilienfeld (Gdansk, Leipzig, Vienna: Carl Hinstorff’s Verlagsbuchhandlung, [n.d.]; Deutsche Denker und ihre Geistesschöpfungen, ed. Adolf Hinrichsen, vol. 6). For further bibliography related to Lilienfeld, see Howard Becker, “Lilienfeld-Toailles, Pavel Fedorovich, ” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 9: 474-474.
La Pathologie sociale.
Translated from Paul von Lilienfeld, La Pathologie sociale, p. 59.
Ibid., pp. 59-60.
Although “fallacy” is often used in a narrow technical sense to denote a flaw (or type of flaw) that “vitiates a syllogism, ” a primary meaning in every dictionary I have consulted (Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford English Dictionary—suppl., Oxford English Dictionary — 2d. ed.; Concise Oxford Dictionary—6th ed.; Webster’s New International—2d & 3d eds.) is a “misleading argument” or a delusion or error, or some unsoundness or delusiveness or disappointing character of an argument or belief. The American Heritage Dictionary gives as the first meaning: “An idea or opinion founded on mistaken logic or perception; a false notion”; other meanings include “the quality of being deceptive” and “incorrectness of reasoning or belief.” The only example given is a “romantic fallacy, that Shakespeare was superhuman.” This example displays features in common with two frequently encountered uses of “fallacy” today: John Ruskin’s notion of the “pathetic fallacy” (in which inanimate objects are supposed to have human emotions) and W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s “intentional fallacy” (overstressing the author’s intentions in assessing a literary work). These usages are somewhat similar to Alfred North Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”
J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 178; see Herbert Spencer, “The Social Organism, ” Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, 3 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883), 1: 287-289.
Herbert Spencer, “The Social Organism, ” Essays, 2: 277-279, 283-286.
Herbert Spencer, “Specialized Administration, ” Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, 3 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1896), 3: 427-428. Theodore Porter suggests that Spencer may have had his tongue in cheek when writing about the engineering schools as a “double gland, ” but a sense of humor was not a primary characteristic of Spencer’s prose style. For an understanding of Spencer’s thought, including his drawing upon analogues and homologues from the biological sciences, see Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), one of the few studies in which the author has attempted so to steep himself in the literature of the period that he can interpret Spencer’s ideas (and those of others) in terms of the standards and currents of thought of those bygone days.
Walter Cannon, “Relations of Biological and Social Homeostasis,” The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932; reprint ed., 1939), pp. 305-324.
Ibid., p. 309.
Ibid., p. 314.
Walter B. Cannon, “The Body Physiologic and the Body Politic,” Science 93 (1941): 1–10.
Ibid.
Ibid. Cannon had in mind the writings of certain extremist organicists, of whom Albert Schäffle is an outstanding example. See Stark, Fundamental Forms of Social Thought, and Cohen “An Analysis of Interactions between the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences, ” in The Natural Sciences & Social Sciences.
Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1968), ch. 3, pp. 101n, 102–103.
The analogies used in economics by Jevons and Walras are introduced below; for more information, see Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); also my own paper, “Analogy, Homology, and Metaphor in the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences.”
See Stark, Fundamental Forms of Social Thought, pp. 156-160; also H. C. Carey, The Unity of Law; As Exhibited in the Relations of Physical, Social, Mental, and Moral Science (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1872), pp. 116-127.
See my article “Newton and the Social Sciences” in Natural Images, ed. Mirowski.
On the dependence of neo-classical economists on rational mechanics (including energy physics), see Mirowski, More Heat than Light. See the valuable discussion of these topics in Claude Ménard, “The Machine and the Heart: An Essay on Analogies in Economics Reasoning, ” Social Concept 5 (1) (December 1988): 81-95.
An example of this kind of error in the use of a biological analogue or metaphor (in the controversy between Armen Alchian and Edith Penrose) is discussed in my article, “Analogy, Homology, and Metaphor in the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences.”
See Stark, Fundamental Forms of Social Thought, pp. 73-74.
Mary P. Mack, Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748-1792 (London: Heinemann, 1962), pp. 275–281.
See Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans, under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey & Alan Tyson (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–1974), 19: 228. Two decades later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud noted further that “the inexplicable phenomenon of consciousness arises in the perceptual system instead of the permanent traces.” For references to this topic, see Standard Edition, 5: 40 and 18: 25. The editor (John Strachey) notes that this distinction had already been made by Josef Breuer.
See Freud, “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’ ” Standard Edition, 19: 228. This mechanical analogue served two functions often found in the use of analogues: (1) to many to make his earlier hypothetical conjecture seem reasonable enough for him to set forth his ideas in full, and (2) to make his difficult concept of the structure of memory understandable and thus acceptable to the psychoanalytic community.
Donald H. Kaplan, “The Psychoanalysis of Art: Some Ends, Some Means,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 36 (1988): 259–302, esp. p. 260.
Poetics, 1457b, 1459a, 1458a. For a brief but incisive history of the uses of metaphor from antiquity to the present, see Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), introductory chapter.
There is a large and ever-growing literature on metaphor and also on rhetorical aspects of science. On the age of the scientific revolution, see Peter Dear, “Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society, ” Isis 76 (1985): 145-161; Steven Shapin, “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology, ” Social Studies of Science 14 (1984): 487-494. Also Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Alan C. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1990). Also Marcello Pera, Scienza e Retorica (Rome/Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1991); M. Pera & William R. Shea, eds., Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric (Canton, [Ma.]: Science History Publications, USA, 1991); Peter Dear, ed., The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). On metaphor in general see Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962); Johnson, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (cited in the previous note); Arjo Klamer, ed., Conversations with Economists (Totowa, [N.J.]: Rowman & Lilienfeld, 1983); Donald N. McCloskey, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Andrew Ortony, Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge/London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). This topic also appears in discussions of economics, notably in Mirowski, More Heat than Light.
James I, “Speech of 1603, ” in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), p. 272; see Hale, Body Politic, p. 111.
Metaphor was a lively topic of discussion at two recent conferences relating to the development of economics. The first (held at Duke University in April 1991) had special reference to Philip Mirowski’s More Heat Than Light; a volume of proceedings edited by Neil de Marchi appeared in 1993 as a supplement to volume 25 of History of Political Economy. A conference, organized by Philip Mirowski at Notre Dame on “Natural Images in Economics, ” is published in Natural Images, ed. Mirowski.
See Hale, Body Politic, pp. 99-102.
“Speech in Star Chamber 1616, ” Political Works, p. 343; see Hale, Body Politic, p. 111, n. 19.
See, on this subject, Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897), vol. 1, part 2, § 1, “What Is a Society ?”; § 2, “A Society Is an Organism.”
See, further, my “Analysis of Interactions between the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences, ” in The Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences.
René Worms, Organisme et Société (Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1896).
René Worms, Philosophie des Sciences sociales, 3 vols. (Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1903), 1: 12.
In discussing the causes of his having altered his point of view, Worms assigned primary importance to the ideas of Ernest Haeckel and the recent discovery of the relative discontinuities among cerebral cells, which he said is “the glory of Golgi and Ramón y Cajal.” He also pointed to E. Metchnikoff’s research on phagocytes, which had indicated new aspects of cells, even to the extent of suggesting that cells may exercise an art or even a science in defending themselves against their enemies. In short, Worms said, his sociological critics had undermined his former overly simplistic view of the social organism, while the advances of the bio-medical sciences had radically altered the scientific base on which his earlier organismic sociology was founded, primarily by enlarging the knowledge and understanding of the life and functions of the cells of which living organisms are made. In the present context, the details of the differences between Worms’s two treatises are of less interest than the very fact that in each of these works the social analogues drawn from the life sciences were direct reflections of the rapidly changing current state of biological and medical knowledge.
See my “Analysis of Interactions between the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences, ” in The Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences, §1.6.
Albert Schäffle, Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers: Encyclopädischer Entwurf einer realen Anatomie, Physiologie und Psychologie der menschlichen Gesellschaft mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Volkswirthschaft als socialen Stoffwechsel, 4 vols. (Tübingen: H. Laupp’sche Buchhandlung, 1881), 1: 327, 329; translated in Stark, Fundamental Forms of Social Thought, p. 68.
The purpose of the Notre Dame conference (referred to in note 86) was a critical assessment of the thesis of Philip Mirowski’s More Heat Than Light, primarily that neoclassical economics was founded on the “metaphor” of rational mechanics cum energy physics. See my article, “Analogy, Homology, and Metaphor in the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences.”
See W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 5th ed. (1911; reprint ed., New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965), p. 105.
Similar sentiments were expressed by F. Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on The Application of Mathematics to The Moral Sciences (London: C. Kegan & Co., 1881); for details see my “An Analysis of Interactions between the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences, ” in The Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences.
Léon Walras, “Preface to the Fourth Edition, ” Elements of Pure Economics or the Theory of Social Wealth, trans. William Jaffé (Home-wood [II.]: Richard D. Irwin [for the American Economic Association & the Royal Economic Society]), 1954 Home-wood [II.]), p. 4
Ibid., pp. 47-48.
Léon Walras, “Economique et Mécanique, ” Bulletin de la Société vaudoise de Sciences naturelles 45 (1909): 313–325; translated, with a commentary, in Philip Mirowski & Pamela Cook, “Walras’ ‘Economics and Mechanics,’” Economics as Discourse, ed. Warren J. Samuels (Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer, 1990).
Claude Ménard, “The Machine and the Heart: An Essay on Analogies in Economic Reasoning, ” Social Concept 4 (1988): 81–95, p. 84. Here, according to Ménard, Walras “also defines the properties of general equilibrium for traded goods, services and money.” This is “the infamous ‘Walras Law,’ based upon the example of uniformly accelerated motion in celestial mechanics, invoking the equation of constraint between mass and acceleration.”
In a scholarly study of Walras’s economic ideas in relation to Mirowski’s analysis, Albert Jolink denies “strenuously” that Walras’s economics theory “slavishly imitates physics”; see Albert Jolink, ‘“Procrustean Beds and All That’: The Irrelevance of Walras for a Mirowski-Thesis, ” which appeared in 1993 in History of Political Economy, as referred to in note 86 above. Jolink cites evidence that Walras had little or no understanding of energy physics before 1906, and he concludes that even after 1906 it is doubtful whether “Walras had any understanding at all concerning a proto-energetic metaphor.”
On this topic see Mirowski’s More Heat Than Light and also my article “Newton and the Social Sciences” in Natural Images, ed. Mirowski.
This table is available in Vilfredo Pareto, Sociological Writings, ed. S. E. Finer, trans. Derick Mirfin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 106-107. It is reproduced in Bruna Ingrao, “Physics and Pareto’s Economics, ” in Natural Images, ed. Mirowski; and also in my “Analogy, Homology, and Metaphor in the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences.” I wish to thank Bruna Ingrao for bringing Pareto’s table to my attention. See further Bruna Ingrao, “L’Analogia meccanica nel Pensiero di Pareto, ” in Pareto oggi, ed. G. Busino (Bologna: II Mulino, 1991).
Irving Fisher, Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926).
Mack, Jeremy Bentham, p. 264.
See Giuliano Pancaldi, “The Technology of Nature: Marx’s Thoughts on Darwin, ” in The Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences.
This episode and its significance are discussed in I. B. Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), suppl. § 14.1.
For details see my “Analysis of the Interactions between the Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences, ” in The Natural Sciences & the Social Sciences, and, especially, Camille Limoges’s chapter 10 in the same work.
See Lawrence Badash, “The Completeness of Nineteenth-Century Science, ” Isis 63 (1972): 45–58. James Clerk Maxwell, in his inaugural address at Cambridge University, said “that in a few years … the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements [of the great physical constants] to another place of decimals”; A. A. Michelson published in 1898 his prediction “that most of the grand underlying principles [of physical science] have been firmly established.”
Alfred Marshall, “The Present Position of Economics” (1885), an inaugural lecture given after his election to the professorship at Cam bridge, printed in A. C. Pigou, ed., Memorials of Alfred Marshall (London: Macmillan & Co, 1925), p. 154.
For Virchow, the concept of the “cell state” was particularly significant because there was always a close parallel between his “biological views and his liberal political opinions.” See Irwin H. Ackerknecht, Rudolph Virchow: Doctor, Statesman, Anthropologist (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1953; reprint ed., New York: Arno Press, 1981).
Virchow, we may note, was not the only nineteenth-century biologist to use social analogies in scientific discourse. Thomas Henry Huxley made use of a social analogy in describing the sponge, which— he said—represents a kind of sub-aqueous city, “in which the people are arranged about the streets and roads, in such a manner, that each can easily appropriate his food from the water as it passes along.” This is an example of the use of analogy to illustrate a scientific concept, making such a concept easier to visualize or to understand.
See Owsei Temkin, “Metaphors of Human Biology, ” in Science and Civilization, ed. Robert C. Stauffer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), pp. 167–194, especially p. 175.
Ibid., p. 175. On this point, see further Ernst Hirschfeld, “Virchow, ” Kyklos 2 (1929): 106-116.
Howard Becker, “Lilienfeld-Toailles, ” pp. 473-474.
Gertrude Lenzer, Auguste Comte and Posititivism: The Essential Writings (New York/Evanston: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 191, taken from The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans, [and condensed by] Harriet Martineau (London: Longmans, Green, 1853), book 5, ch. 6.
Ibid. Comte also wrote that a consequence of “the admirable axiom of Broussais” is that “it destroys the old absolute distinction between health and disease”; see Auguste Comte, The Foundations of Sociology, ed. Kenneth Thompson (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), p. 141, based on Auguste Comte’s System of Positive Polity, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1848-1854), 2: 367-382.
Translated from Lilienfeld’s La Pathologie sociale, pp. 20-21.
Ibid., p. 21.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (Brighton, [Sussex]: Harvester Press, 1980), p. See, on the subject of this, Bryan S. Turner, “Sociology and the Body, ” chapter 2 of his The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984)
Louis Wirth, “Clinical Sociology, ” American Journal of Sociology 37 (1931): 49–66.
Lawrence J. Henderson, “Physician and Patient as a Social System, ” New England Journal of Medicine 212 (1935): 819–823. This essay is reprinted in Bernard Barber, ed., L. J. Henderson on the Social System: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), a work introduced by an informative and insightful editor’s foreword.
See Keith M. Baker, Condorcet, from Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 348–349, 368-369.
On Malthus’s views, see the informative introduction in Anthony Flew, ed., An Essay on the Principle of Population and A Summary View of the Principle of Population (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970); and also Anthony Flew, Thinking about Social Thinking: The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), ch. 4
David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations, ” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary 2 vols. (Edinburgh: R. Fleming and A. Alison for A. Kincaid, 1742), 1: 376.
Catherine Gallagher has observed that Malthus effectively “occludes the possibility of using the healthy body to signify the healthy society”; see her essay on “The Body Versus the Social Body in Malthus and Mahew, ” chapter 3 in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher & Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), especially p. 85.
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Cohen, I.B. (1997). The Body Politic before and after the Scientific Revolution. In: Theerman, P.H., Parshall, K.H. (eds) Experiencing Nature. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5810-7_1
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