Humanity Poised Between Biology and Ideology

Abstract

To be human is to identify both an animal and an ideal. The clearest precedent for this duplex sense of humanity is the theological discourse surrounding the person of Jesus in Christianity as both ‘Son of Man’ and ‘Son of God’. However, to begin here would be to wade in at the deep end of a problem that has repeatedly if diffusely vexed the social standing of science throughout the modern period. Indeed, if one had to identify two boundary issues for the ‘social sciences’ as a body of knowledge concerned with all and only human beings, they would be race and religion — that is, how we relate to our biological roots and our aspirations to transcend those roots. Clearly whatever we are as a matter of fact, many if not most of us are not satisfied with that as the final word. The first chapter takes this dissonance head on. I begin by laying down the main historico-philosophical markers, which still inform contemporary debates about what it means to be human. Sections 2–5 deal with how these debates have defined the directions that sociology and social policy have taken in the 20^th century. Most notable is the centrality of the welfare state as a battleground for constituting humanity as a biological vis-à-vis an ideological entity, various resolutions of which may be found across the European continent, not least in the ‘national socialism’ of Germany and Scandinavia.