Patrick Geddes’ Biosocial Science of Civics

Abstract

Reviewing Francis Galton’s Natural Inheritance for the Scottish Leader newspaper in 1890, the Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) observed that when Galton first published on the subject of heredity during the 1860s it had been a time when the ‘Political Economy Club was wont to dine cheerily, thinking their theory of individualism was “approximately perfect”. However, since then, Geddes explained, the Political Economy Club’s ‘pens [had become] rust’ and all had ‘been painfully convinced that we are … members of one another’. It was therefore no surprise, he argued, that Galton’s approach to heredity had changed. ‘Formerly [Galton] was interested’, Geddes wrote, ‘with the conscious pride of an intellectual patrician, himself sprung of the mighty races of Darwin and Wedgwood, in compiling a sort of spiritual peerage’. In the late 1880s, though, Galton had come to insist, Geddes continued, ‘not only upon the fraternity but that it be a large one’.¹ This chapter throws light on Geddes’ comments about Galton’s eugenic research by reconnecting with the position he had staked out in the late nineteenth-century debate about evolution. In so doing, we will see how Geddes, inspired by work he had carried out during the late 1870s and early 1880s, put together a programme called ‘civics’ that was a serious biosocial alternative to Galton’s eugenics in the debates that subsequently took place at the Sociological Society in the early twentieth century.