Late Nineteenth Century Lamarckism and French Sociology1

Snait Gissis Tel-Aviv University

The transfer of modes of thought, concepts, models, and metaphors from Dar- winian and Lamarckian evolutionary biology played a signiªcant role in the mergence, constitution, and legitimization of sociology as an autonomous discipline in France at the end of the nineteenth century. More speciªcally, the Durkheimian group then came to be recognized as “French sociology.” In the present paper, I analyze a facet of the struggle among various groups for this coveted status and demonstrate that the initial adherence to and subsequent abandonment of “the biological” played an important, but complex, role in the outcome of that struggle. Furthermore, the choice of biological model, whether Darwinian or Lamarckian, had repercussions on one’s position in that cultural ªeld. The outcome of the “battle” between René Worms’ group that supported and contributed to the Revue Internationale de Sociologie (RIS) on the one hand, and Emile Durkheim’s group and those committed to the L’Année Sociologique (AS) on the other—from which the Durkheimians emerged victorious—was due not only to internal scientiªc factors, but also to a particular juxtaposition of developments within sociology and anthropology and their relation to and interaction with French culture and politics at large. 1. The topic of this paper has been treated with much greater depth and detail in a book I have been writing on transfer between biology and sociology. The present paper is a slight elaboration of a lecture bearing the same name, given in December 1998 at the Eighth Sloan Foundation Workshop on “The Nature and Limitations of Historical Knowl- edge about Scientiªc Objects and their Investigators” (Jerusalem). I am very grateful to The Sidney Edelstein Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine for a fellowship grant during 1997–1998, which afforded me the time for this research, and to the French Government for a summer grant in 1998, which enabled me to spend valuable time in French libraries. List of Abbreviations: AIIS: Annales de l’Institut international de sociologie; DTS: La division du Travail Social; L’Année: L’Année sociologique; Règles: Les règles de la méthode sociologique ; RIE: Revue internationale de l’enseignement; RMM: Revue de métaphysique et de morale; RP: Revue Philosophique; RIS: Revue internationale de sociologie

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“...[L]es questions sociales...leur appliquer exclusivement les procédés sévères de la science....N’est -ce pas là ce qu’il faut faire pour l’organisme social, comme on l’a si bien fait déjà pour l’organisme humain?” René Worms, “Notre Programme,” Revue internationale de sociologie (1893), vol. I, no. 1

“...[L]e domaine de la sociologie est encore bien mal déªni....la science, parce qu’elle est objective, est chose essentiellement impersonnelle, et ne peut progresser que grâce à un travail collectif.” Emile Durkheim, “Préface,” L’Année sociologique (1898), vol. I

1. Introduction The emergence and establishment of sociology in France as an autonomous discipline was a protracted and contested process at the turn of the twentieth century. My paper addresses one aspect of this process: the rivalry between Emile Durkheim and his group—who gathered in the late 1890s around the journal L’Année sociologique—and René Worms and those associated with the Revue internationale de sociologie.2 The story of the conºict has been often told, and I do not offer a particularly novel analysis of the two communities. However, placing the particular history I wish to elucidate in the context of the emergence of sociology and of contemporary evolutionary biological models—and focusing on the interrelations between social thought, biological thought, and the politics of culture— yields a fresh reading of certain key texts, and also new insights into disciplinary formations There existed a complex reciprocal exchange of concepts, models, and metaphors between evolutionary biology and emerging sociology, and these proved crucial for their establishment as scientiªc disciplines. The 1890s are crucial to our understanding of these complex and often tortu- ous relations between the two domains in France. As I shall show below, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, biology played a vital role for sociologists, molding their programs, methods, practices, and even their self-image as scientists. Late nineteenth century social thought has often been viewed as domi- nated by Darwinian Evolutionism. Yet Lamarckian Evolutionism was at least as signiªcant for contemporary sociology.3 Moreover, the very existence of supposedly two contrasting “kinds” of evolutionary theories, dis-

2. I shall not elaborate though on the category or “race.” 3. I presented these arguments in my Ph. D. thesis on “E. D. Durkheim as a Founder of a Scientiªc Discipline: On an Image of Science at the beginnings of Sociology in France,” Tel Aviv University, 1996.

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tinct in their “socially translated” presuppositions (and implications), helps explicate the complex relationship between social-political Weltan- schauung and the adoption of a speciªc scientiªc stance.4 Indeed, evolutionary biology in late nineteenth century France played a constitutive rather than a merely heuristic role in the emergence and establishment of sociology. The contemporary cultural ªeld witnessed a tense rivalry between groups competing for the coveted status of “French Sociology” in general, and the “Sciences de l’Homme” in the universities in particular. Several groups within well-established disciplines, such as history or philosophy—or within newer ones, such as anthropology and psychology—sought a dominant position. They strove to establish new positions and degree tracks in the universities, or to form new educational institutions to cater for sociology. The strife for hegemony caused a scramble for dominance, or at least a more conspicuous presence in the world of journals, and the “weaving” of supportive political networks. The Durk- heimians emerged victorious from this struggle and left an indelible impact on sociological (and anthropological) thought. Here, I shall only discuss certain aspects of the French “ªrst generation struggle,” in which concepts, models, metaphors, and analogies from evolutionist biology played a crucial substantive (and not merely rhetorical) role. But their role in the very constitution of sociological theories and their methodological underpinning was even more signiªcant. They helped draw the boundaries of the new discipline and delineate its uniqueness vis-à-vis other “social” disciplines.5 Sociologists drew on Lamarckian or Darwinian evolutionism as a “reservoir” for concepts and models for

4. Darwin’s Origin was ªrst translated (with a heavily ideological introduction) by Clemence Royer in 1862. Another translation of the Origin into French appeared in 1864, diverging in the principal terms. From the single direct quote in Durkheim’s work it is hard to tell which edition he had actually read, assuming that he read it sometime in the mid-eighties. Later editions emphasized much more of the Lamarckian mechanisms than the ªrst one. 5. My assumption here is that metaphors are tools of cognition in the process of mapping one conceptual domain on to another. This process is crucial when new ªelds emerge, new theoretical vocabulary and tools are developed, and interact with already existing ones, or when the scientiªc ªeld is “reproduced” for new generations of scientists. Metaphoric transfer establishes both similarity/suitability and a difference between two domains. The “logic of transfer” depends on the cultural-scientiªc context of that transfer, on whatever appears “plausible” for speciªc individuals, and does not appear “arbitrary” to their audiences, since both groups are based on social-institutional practices. The character of this migration had changed between the 1870s and the 1890s. But it could take place only within a cultural context that allowed for the assumption that there is a fundamental cor- respondence between organic nature and social life, between the mechanisms of development, primordial units and types of lawfulness in both domains. Thus sociologists could present their emerging ªeld as fundamentally similar and yet as uniquely distinct.

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many reasons, including how contemporaries interpreted the political- ideological implications of both theories, and what their academic and cultural status was. My analysis of the battle between the Durkheimians and Worms’s supporters demonstrates that the recourse to Lamarckian theory was indispensable for the Durkheimians’ predominance. My narrative encompasses both the contexts of the scientiªc communities and of the cultural ªeld at large. It hinges upon a delicate juxtaposition of changes in scientiªc theory—biological and sociological—and cultural-political changes.

2. The role of the evolutionary matrix in social thought During the second half of the nineteenth century the migration of ideas was predominantly from biology to the emerging discipline of sociology and to the more established one of anthropology. Also looming large was the progressivist worldview that left its traces in terms such as “the evolution of civilization, culture and mind,” and subsumed the organic universe under a law of necessary advancement, within which human progress was regarded as having more speciªc traits, to be described by social thought. The role assigned to the “scientiªc method,” as enabling the advancement of knowledge is, I believe, another indication of the tenacity of “progress.” The fundamental assumptions of Lamarckian transformism (seemingly rejected by early nineteenth-century biology) continued to inform the speciªc research programs of French, German, and British biology (Conry 1974; Lenoir 1982; Bowler 1984; Desmond 1992). The diffusion of Dar- win’s work via Spencer was integrated into a progressivist framework that had been partially formed on the foundations of Lamarckian evolutionism (e.g. Chalmers’s Vestiges) and transformed the progress/evolution discourse. The radical signiªcance of the concept of natural selection was thus attenuated (Young 1971; Bowler 1988; Nitecki 1988, historical part; Richards 1992). Thus, within the framework of the so-called Darwinian model in sociology and anthropology, explanatory teleological arguments and linear conceptions of progress became prevalent. Authors drew comparisons between differing “levels” of “progress” in societies and pointed out the cor- respondence between a society’s “location,” its degree of social complexity, and its cultural production within an hierarchical evaluative scale. These “locations” overlapped with anthropology’s racial distinctions. The fre- quent usage of the phrase “survival of the ªttest,” either explanatorily or metaphorically, did not blunt this scaling into ineffectiveness, as it was translated into a social-political (and racial) idiom of competition among various collectivities, rather than individuals. The arena for such competition could be termed “capitalism,” “imperialism,” or “the battle of civili-

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zations.” Moreover, some of the available models of recapitulation were grafted upon this hybrid, aiding social Darwinists to emphasize the self-fulªllment of individuals in “progressing” collectivities. One of the most noticeable cultural reactions to this trend, coupled with Darwin’s inability to account for heredity, was the gradual rise into prominence of Lamarckian biological theories not only in France but also in United States and to some extent in Britain. These theories dwelt on the gradual transformation of the whole species (“transformism”) as an indispensable component in the process by which complexity was reached, i.e., a developmental rather than a selectionist mechanism. Direct adaptation to the environment on the basis of trait and habit formations was a core factor in this mechanism. The subsidiary notion of degeneration had arisen within this conceptualization.6 Paradoxically, one of the principal cultural agents of diffusion had been Herbert Spencer, who had an enor- mous impact in France until the late 1880s. “Evolutionary progress” became an all embracing meta-narrative serving as an overpowering conceptual underpinning for the development of the new “Sciences de l’Homme.” The gradual renewal of Lamarckism in France after the 1870s was, at least partially, due to that process.7 This meta-narrative also supplied sociology with a matrix for the formulation of theories on the constitution of modern society, the genealogy and the functioning of its institutions, and the evolution of social institutions. Though modern society was virtually the sole object of investigation in sociology, the evolutionary matrix enabled practitioners to utilize materials relating to past and present western and non-western societies in constructing a single continuous narrative. The “activating mechanism”—either Darwinian or Lamarckian—was claimed to be scientiªc for it was presented as a variation on (or a continuation of) methods used in biology. The presumed continuity of method was based, at least tacitly, on an assumed fundamental similarity in objects. The basic and primary unit of most sociological theories was the individual. Yet sociological theories with Lamarckian leanings tended to allot greater signiªcance to the collectivity, especially when analyzing the constitutive role of cultural inheritance and social memory.8 However, any attempt to divide the choice and

6. Theories of degeneration assumed that environmental adaptation was totally hereditary. 7. Only in the mid-nineties did French Lamarckists adopt the term Neo-Lamarckism, which originated among their American counterparts at that time. See Moore (1979). 8. This seemed to tie in with an emphasis on the continuous gradual change of the species through acquired, inherited characteristics rather than change of individuals within a populational approach.

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use of evolutionary matrix along clear-cut ideological lines is doomed to fail at this early stage. The main theoretical assumptions of Lamarckism received and integrated into social thought of the relevant period were three: 1. The central role of environment (external and internal milieu of the organism) in the process of adaptation. This was often interpreted in two major ways: First, it was interpreted as a facet of a hard-core biological determinism that overruled whatever effects education and social amelioration of environment could have. The capabilities of the individual were then conceived as merely a reºection of the conditions of existence of the species and thus bindingly hereditary. Biological determinism allowed for the ap- plication of concepts of biological purity to race, to class (Stocking 1968; Nye 1968, 1975, 1984; Hirst 1973, 1975; Harvey 1983; and Fenton 1984) and even to culture—seen as an extension of the hereditary mechanism of the nation. The second interpretation involved the role of environment, namely the weight of the formation and the transmission of social and cultural functionally adaptational patterns such as habits, customs, traditions—thus highlighting the role of education and social amelioration. 2. The “perfectibility theme” in Lamarckism was interpreted as an evolution from less to more complex structures, forms of organization, and relations between structures and functions; and as a guarantee for progress. I argue that it was employed in the nineties to offer another cultural perspective within Lamarckism. A recurrent objection to Darwin in the late nineteenth century was that if one took random variations seriously the fracture in the lawfulness of nature, and consequently in the meaning of human progress, became irre- mediable.9 But those accepting the basic notion of evolution wrote a great deal on how moral behavior depended on the individual’s “free will” and on the compatibility of free will and evolutionary theory. Three comments are in order. First, one of the reasons for this supposed compatibility meted out by Lamarckians was the signiªcance of the perspective of perfectibility both globally and in human societies. Second, there was an interesting division among the Lamarckians of those decades between those who thought that the perspective of perfectibility applied to all human groups and those who differentiated between white and other races. Third,

9. Using Bowler’ formulation for the radical element in Darwin that was rejected by most contemporaries, will elucidate this point: “Evolution must be thus regarded as a pattern of haphazard branching, with the branches constantly diverging further apart and redividing where possible; no branch can represent the goal towards which all the others should be moving, nor can the stages in the evolution of one branch be used as a hierarchy against which the progress of others can be measured” (Bowler 1988, pp. 8–9).

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the ideological mood of both Left and Right in France was generally col- lectivist rather than individualist, but Durkheim was alone in insisting onthe methodological and epistemological (but not ontological) priority of the collectivity. Neo-Lamarckism, as then understood, offered a double perspective on ethics and on society at large, which Darwinism could not. The former emphasized the overall importance of the milieu in shaping present and future generations through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, with “habit” as a major explanatory mechanism. This implied the possibility of shaping the future: present social reforms could be be- queathed as prospective biological traits to be further elaborated in future societies. The seeming determination of the present by the past was one consequence of such thinking, the other being the molding of the present in light of a projected utopian future. This is where “free will” was expressed. “Random variations” were conceived as a capricious, arbitrary freedom, and the past as a constraint, which could be ameliorated through focused reforms. Hence, a better perspective on the future is what Lamarckian perfectibility offered. It provided the Third Republic supporters enough room to present their biological model as providing the scientiªc underpinning for both conserving/preserving national traditions and for initiating novel reforms. The preoccupation with “the future perspective” was manifested in Durkheim’s insistence in DTS on the need to shun teleological explanations but not to shy away from the very horizon of human telos. This, I believe, explains the resistance of French Lamarckian biologists to Weismann, who challenged the very mechanism of Lamarckian inheritance-acquired characteristics. Given the strong contemporary interlacing of biological and moral-political assumptions, the implications of ceding this would have been devastating. In certain circles, such as members of the Anthropological Society that cooperated with Worms, “the future perspective” was discarded from their view of other races. For Lamarckians, the changes that could stem from perfectibility were feasible only on the level of collectivities because though characteristics are inherited by individuals, they are effected and inherited as social habits. Thus “the futurity” of Lamarckism was wholly dependent on it being a social rather than an individual construction. Only thus understood could it be meaningful for ethics and for morality. 3. The inheritance of acquired characteristics, interpreted to mean that socially formed (and reformed) patterns of both social and biological behavior and traits were biologically transmitted to future generations. Like their fellow biologists, social thinkers failed to inquire what sort of patterns and traits were distinct enough to be passed on biologically (see also Darden 1994; K. Fristrup 1994). Thus, late nineteenth-century Lamarckism was interpreted within the political discourse of the Third

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Republic as providing a scientiªc, and a philosophical underpinning to republican ideology of secularism, social solidarity and interclass cooperation. The emerging Solidarism, which borrowed heavily from biological and bio-social works with Lamarckian leanings, was an attempt to imple- ment such goals, based on the Lamarckian emphasis on the role of adap- tively useful acquired patterns of behavior transmitted generationally, e.g. mutual aid and cooperation. The 1880s and early 1890s were years of economic recession and solidiªcation of class differences. In local and general elections of the early 1890s the socialists gained political power amid strikes and harsh labor conºicts, broadening their electorate from trade unions to bourgeois intel- ligentsia. Moreover, during these years profound debates took place on the nature of the relationship between individuals and the centralized state, the nature of social protection, as well as the connection between citizen- ship and social rights and the republican political ideals. Many Lamarckian texts that interpreted society blurred deepening class differences and attempted to “naturalize” the call for cooperation rather than conºict. In Britain, too, Darwinism—mainly in its early Spencerian interpretation—was understood as supplying a conªrmed scientiªc basis for a liberal (“radical”) political and economic ideology, such as its position on state non-interference.

3. French Positivism The “positivistic threads” were a signiªcant factor10 in enabling the emergence of sociology in France thanks to their role in the cultural ªeld of the Third Republic.11 From the 1840s there had been a process of transforming Comte’s positivism from a philosophy to a “religion.” His works were presented as closely-knit corpus, and rejection of any one was tantamount to discarding the whole. After 1870 there occurred a separation between second-generation disciples and “church members,” while the process through which positivism turned into a general Weltanschauung was accel-

10. See Marjolin (1937); Eros (1955); Charlton (1959); Hughes (1959); Legrand (1961); Charlton (1963); Simon (1963, 1965); Fletcher, intro. to Comte, (1974); Paul (1976); Rébérioux (1975); Elwitt (1986); Barral (1978); Petit (1978); Chevalier (1981); Sutton (1982); Schmaus (1985); S. Turner (1986); Fabiani (1988); Lepenies (1985); Petit (1998); and Brooks (1998). 11. In addition, it should be noted that many of the participants in the contemporary debates also shared a common ground by virtue of being former students of philosophy, and more particularly in partaking in the spiritualist heritage of Victor Cousin. See Brooks (1998) in particular; also Logue (1983); Fabiani (1988); Paul Vogt (1976, 1979, 1982); also S. Turner, ed. (1993); Karady (1976, 1979); and Ringer (1992).

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erated. The new credo was that philosophy, methodology, moral attitudes, and recipes for reform, of both society and individuals, should be derived from science alone. Positivism rested upon a ªrm belief that the uniqueness of science as the epitome of all knowledge, assured a single and uni- tary “scientiªc method,” which still allowed a certain singularity to each discipline. Utilizing this method—empirical or inductive but always ra- tional—assured the objectivity and the universality of science and its ac- cumulative progress. Biology and physics were seen as the principal components of that process. The former, with its mode of explanation in terms of structures and functions, was perceived as appropriate for organic life in general, including social life. Evolutionism was central for the new strands of positivism and imparted such concepts as “organization” and “the milieu of the organisms,” as well as the Darwinian framework. Central to this worldview was the belief that social and political reforms were to be grounded in scientiªc knowledge. This manner of welding science and society effected a belief in the possibility of remolding social human nature. The conviction became prevalent among the elites that supported the Re- public, and as a result this diffuse “positivism” turned into a more generalized “cultural sieve.” This “positivist sieve,” in turn, inspired the far-reaching educational and social reforms of the regime.12 Similarly the effort to formulate and constitute a “civic morality” was perceived by the new elites as an ideological battle to defend “science and rationality,” “reason and conscience.” In the transfer from medical science to social and cultural discourse, several distinctions—between the normal and the pathological, illness and health, diagnosis and prevention—proved fundamental though controver- sial. These distinctions formed the core of the emerging “medical model” in political and cultural discourses of the 1880s and 1890s, and their rhetorical structure gave a semblance of conceptual unity to the debates on the future of France (Zeldin 1977; Barrows 1981; Nye 1984; Elwitt 1975, 1986; Charle 1987; Perrot ed. 1990 [vol. IV]; Duroselle 1992; and Gay 1984–95).13 The changing meaning of the distinction between the normal 12. Before World War I France was the only European country with a complete separation between religious and secular education and a free elementary education obligatory-for-all, including moral education. The educational reforms of the early nineties resulted in a general increase in the number of universities and of university students, and implemented a policy of giving scholarships to graduates who would become high school teachers. 13. An extreme case in point is the successful reception and diffusion of Hygienist ideology from the late eighties on. Not only did the medical model affect political discourse, but political discourse turned certain scientiªc problems into more central ones, more wor- thy of investigation than others. See Zeldin (1981); Nye (1984); and Latour (1984).

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and the pathological had been transposed into the various human sciences in France14 and played a signiªcant role in Durkheim’s early writings on modern society, especially in his ªrst three books (DTS 1893; RMS 1894–95; and S 1897). From the late 1880s the ruling classes initiated an intensive search for a new social-republican ideology, a general national-reformist alternative to the socialist and Marxist approaches, as well as to that of the inºuential bloc of right wing economic liberalism. This new ideological framework was sought after on the backdrop of a deep economic crisis, and was ex- pected to provide scientiªc justiªcations for solidarity and for political and social legislation in a period of widening class divisions. It resorted not to the physical model (associated in contemporary thought with mechanisms) but to biological (relating to organisms) and medical models. Needless to say, the new framework protected mainly the privileges of the new (republican) elites.

4. Analysis of the “battle” between Durkheim’s group and Worms’s group

1. Durkheim’s Theoretical Position Contrary to received views, Lamarckian evolutionism in its various forms was deeply embedded in both the political and the cultural discourse of the period. Furthermore, a great deal of what has been interpreted as Dar- winian cannot be understood without a “Lamarckian subtext.” Such Dar- winian themes as “the battle for life,” “intra-species competition,” “survival of the ªttest,” and “natural selection,” for example, were interpreted as applicable in some manner to the study of history and society.15 They were understood to promote human progress and aid legitimizing either demand for reform or the existing order. The proponents of these Darwinian views considered themselves materialists. However, the vehicles for such interpretations were in many cases taken from the Lamarckian vocabulary of “adaptation,” “milieu,” “perfectibility,” and “inheritance of acquired characteristics.” It is within this context of transfer and transposition from the discipline of biology, and Lamarckian evolutionism in particular, I argue, that we should interpret Durkheim’s work—as a theoretician, a founder of a re- 14. While Canguilhem argued that its main diffusion was inside medicine, particularly in the controversy between the two dominant psychiatric schools of Nancy and Salpatriere, Foucault argued that its range was over the entire gamut of “the Foucauldian disciplines.” 15. A somewhat similar position had been aptly argued concerning the reception and the later integration of Darwinism among biologists in France in an earlier period by Conry (1974, 1983). For the later period see Persell (1999), and from another angle and for mostly Britain and Germany see Bowler (1983, 1988).

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search collective, and as a head of a novel emergent discipline—during this period. Moreover, Durkheim’s innovative claim to explain the individual and society in social terms was to a signiªcant extent possible by the sophisticated manner in which fundamental tenets and terms of Lamarckian evolutionism were transposed to the domain of society. This he did under two modes: one strategic—in which models and metaphors were used rhetorically to legitimize the emerging discipline as a science or a novel discourse—the other theoretical—where the models and metaphors were used to construe theory and method as well as suggest strategies for further work. The following cases will serve to illustrate the distinction. The strategic theoretical mode: Durkheim’s main argument was that a history of forms of social life was a necessary component just as a history of forms of life in biology had been. Consequently, he incorporated sociology among those sciences that dealt with “forms of life.” These were posited as equivalent in signiªcation to “forms of organization,” thus implying a methodology of “the whole versus its parts.” Life in both signiªcations (social and biological) depended on the association of components, on their organization and structure. It could not inhere in any separate component alone. Rhetorically, therefore, whatever was legitimate in biological reasoning was legitimate in sociological reasoning on social life. The distinction between the living and the non-living within biology could serve to distinguish the subject matter of sociology from other disciplines, and draw its boundaries as a new discipline (Introduction to the 2nd edition of DTS). The theoretical constitutive mode: Durkheim’s discussion of what should be considered the elementary unit of society—the “protoplasme social, le germe d’où seraient sortis tous les types sociaux” (DTS, p. 149)—was parallel to the contemporary discussions by Lamarckians (in obvious contradistinction to Darwinians) in search of the most elementary unit from which all life had evolved. Given Durkheim’s Spencerian and Lamarckian presuppositions that homogeneity was prior to and conditional for heterogeneity, and given his presupposition that the collectivity was prior to the individual and conditioned the individual, this “protoplasme” had to be a homogenous group, i.e. an aggregate with no internal differentiation. Durkheim was fully aware that this was a hypothetical unit, a construction needed in order to draw the complete outline and genealogy of a series. In biological theorizing this methodological device was employed only when the other links in the series had already been delineated (a familiar procedure which had been afªrmed by Bernard and often resorted to by Darwin especially in The Descent of Man). Durkheim’s series, however, was yet to be constructed. Nevertheless, he deemed such a hypotheti-

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cal construction, analogous to the Lamarckian biological one, as theoreti- cally necessary, in order to posit an evolutionary tree with its accumulating social traits and patterns. Furthermore, Durkheim’s thought, I argue, can be better understood methodologically as an evolving construction of classiªcatory social continua. These were differentiated by time scales and by whether they reºected individual or collective attributes, and they evince the deep impact of Lamarckian evolutionism on Durkheim. One such important continuum relates to “habit,” a central concept in any Lamarckian scheme, whether biological or social. “Habit” is intimately connected with Durkheim’s whole theory of what is a social fact and how societies develop and function. The continuum is between reºective conscious acts that are informed by intentions, motives, or reasoning, and those that are the result of non-reºective behavior. Another continuum, and perhaps the most important one in Durkheim’s social theory, is the social continuum between acts-and-states of individuals and those of collective institutions.16 The variety of social life revealed a movement from states of acting and be- having and from states of thinking and feeling which were transient and unstable, and which were applicable for short periods to individuals or to limited segments of the collectivity—to patterns that were solidiªed for longer periods of time and ultimately became ªxed and permanent. These patterns could be transmitted over the generations, were always typical of the entire collectivity, and were reºected in the social behavior of an individual. Durkheim called this process “crystallization,” which I interpret as an effort to establish a continuity between the practices, beliefs, and emotions of individuals and persistent collective patterns and institutions and their material products, also an integral part of that continuum. The distinction between crystallized social institutions and the processes of con- solidation of social phenomena related to the position of phenomena along the social continuum.17 The patterns were the “crystallization” of continua

16. I have found only two interpretations which are close in some way to my conception: (1) Jean Claude Filloux (1977) though Filloux proposes an interpretation based on “levels of reality” which are different from each other, and which are related to each other as cause and effect; and (2) Jeffrey Alexander (1982). Alexander suggests that it is possible to conceive of the entire social order as a transition from sensations to structures, but only on condition that we clearly differentiate between Durkheim’s ªrst book, DTS, which appears to him as objectivist and instrumentalist, and his other writings. In Alexander’s opinion, Durkheim’s other writings quickly lead to an idealistic and voluntaristic view, and only on the basis of this is it possible to postulate that sort of view of the social order. Then, too, Alexander postulates a difference between the infrastructure and the superstruc- ture. See also Giddens (1971). 17. My reading is based on Durkheim’s own use and its implications (all emphases are mine): In writings before RMS: “Ainsi se forment les moeurs, germe premier d’où sont nés

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of phenomena into an “institution” that could place constraints, impose obligations, and even coerce.18 Most sociological and ethical theories as- sume that “doing” involves a speciªc individual who is the “doer” or “the owner of the doing;” Durkheim’s unique position was that the “real owner” was a collectivity, and the “doer” was a social group. This assumption served as a methodological lever in discarding explanations given in terms of motives, intentions, meanings and ends of individual doers, and for transposing the concept of causality from the natural sciences to sociology, as another move in the effort to establish sociology as a scientiªc discipline. As many argued, Durkheim’s novelty was in positing a new paradigm:19 “The causes of social phenomena are internal to society” (RMS, p. 119 [my translation]). Thus, he was not a straightforward bio- sociologist like many other social thinkers of the period, including Spencer. Rather, the force of the gradually emerging paradigm and its claim to academic-and-cultural legitimization resided in the assertion that it was a science. Indeed, the speciªc needs of constituting a scientiªc discipline had an indelible impact on its rhetoric and on its theoretical and methodological presuppositions. At the same time, ideological—i.e. political and moral—commitments put constraints on both the choice of object, on the methodology, and on the range of possible disciplines that could be candidates for reservoirs of scientiªc transfer. The scientiªc context of the emergence of sociology was molded by sciences perceived as paradigmatic in the cultural ªeld of the period, as an example to be emu- lated and a system of philosophical and ªeld-speciªc method and practical rules delineating the boundaries of relevant concepts and legitimate questions. Though physics still served in that role for sciences in general biology, and evolutionary biology in particular, was prominent in the cultural ªeld.

successivement le droit et la morale. ...End’autres termes c’est comme une cristallisation de la conduite humaine. Or, les phénomènes économiques tout comme les autres sont susceptibles de se cristalliser,” (La morale en Allemagne, p. 40); Leçon d’ouverture, SSA p. 105. See also ibid, p. 215, DTS p. 29; ibid, p. 84, RMS, p. 14; ibid, p. 14 fn. 1. “ Elle (la vie sociale) consiste alors en libres courants qui sont perpétuellement en voie de transformation. Mais . . . elle présente cette particularité que, sans cesser d’être elle-même, elle est susceptible de se cristalliser.....Leshabitudes collectives s’expriment sous des formes déªnies . . . elles constituent un objet ªxé. . . . Ces pratiques ne sont que de la vie sociale consolidée, il est légitime . . . d’étudier celle-ci à travers celles-là.” (RMS 44–45) “Nous n’admettons pas...qu’il y ait un point précis où ªnisse l’individu et où commence le règne social. ...”S, p .353, note (1). 18. See RMS, intro. A, pp. viii-ix; ibid p. 4–5; ibid, p. 6; ibid, p. 14, ibid, p. 27–29. 19. I use the terms “paradigm” and “paradigmatic” in a generalized, rather than strictly Kuhnian way.

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2. Durkheim’s Lamarckism in Context The role of biological models, analogies, and metaphors in late nineteenth-century discourse was crucial for the Durkheimians initial victory. As the worldview of “Evolutionism” turned into a meta-disciplinary tenet, it colored the rhetoric and the epistemic assumptions of other disciplines and imparted an almost homogeneous appearance to many sciences. In broad terms, during the last two decades of the 19th century it was nearly impossible to ªnd in France social discourse that did not use biological-evolutionary rhetoric, with or without a medical one. Therefore the questions to ask are which evolutionary scheme “Darwinian or Lamarckian?” and whether the purpose was to legitimize a social order of inequality (social, racial, cultural) or to legitimize its reform, even revolution? Modes of transfer can either be distinguished by function, or by the nature of the act of transfer—e.g. whether there is a complete ontic identity between the objects of the model and the modeled. This is also the case for the transfer of conceptual and analytic tools from one ªeld to another, when the accompanying coherence found in the original ªeld is not modiªed. This kind of transfer was characteristic of one section of French Anthropology during the period under review. Recall that soon after Broca’s death the Paris Anthropological Society broke into two sections, one of which had a standing predominantly in the biology and medicine faculties. In the late 1880s George Vacher de la Pouge and his disciple H. Muffang were among the conspicuous ªgures of this section. Both combined evolutionary Darwinism with a conception of heredity, based on biologically justiªed inequality that was considered to be empirically vali- dated through craniometrics. The categories of “society” and “culture” were reduced to their biological components. The biological category of “race” played there an important role. Moreover, believing that the process of natural selection was hampered and even disrupted by society, they preached positive and negative eugenic policy (Leclerc 1972; Taguieff 1984; Clark 1984; Bernardini 1997). Another mode of transfer consists in the direct trafªc of assumptions, explanatory mechanisms and terminology from the realm of organisms to that of human societies. In this mode the inner logic of the model is kept within the modeled (Durkheim called this “analogical”), and some prominent ªgures in contemporary European bio-sociology, such as Gumplowicz and Von Lilienfeld employed this mode (see the French editions of Gumplowicz 1885 [republished 1905], [1883] 1893, 1898, in Worms’s series; Von Lilienfeld 1896 in Worms’s series). As both had legal and philosophical education, the central role of the biological model in their work can be attributed to the deep impact of Darwinism, via

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Spencer, on the Continent during the 1870s and early 1880s. Durkheim had criticized such modes of transfer in reviewing those works.20 Already at this early stage, he attempted to disentangle the sociological from the biological, and to deªne legitimate uses of the biological reservoir in sociology. What he criticized mildly in the 1880s was totally rejected the following decade: speciªcally, the direct transfer in which biological and social organisms were discussed identically. René Worms’s writings in the 1890s can be seen as a continuation of this tradition of direct transfer. But Durkheim, too, was no exception in this period. He used the rhetoric of evolutionary biology to don a scientiªc garb to his work and to the new discipline. The particularity of Durkheim’s use of “the biological” may be summa- rized as follows: Unlike many contemporary sociologists, who were Dar- winian bio-sociologists with a Lamarckian subtext, Durkheim was a straightforward Lamarckian evolutionist. His position throughout the 1890s was that while society should be explained by social categories, the conceptual tools for this analysis were to be mindfully borrowed from another science. The particular transposition suggested by Durkheim was such that the role of the transposed (concepts, models, metaphors) in sociology could be analogous to the role of the original in relation to the general discipline of evolutionary biology. Transposition thus became a process that produced organization of phenomena and categories of meaning, and even induced a causal regime in the new ªeld. Durkheim’s transposition of the concept of physiological division of labor is a case in point and will be discussed below. Self consciously, Durkheim advocated a two-layered practice. On the one hand a transposition that changed the referents, and dissolved the coherence of the original model, and on the other, a procedure through which the singular aspects of sociology were made conspicuous, particularly those in which the transposition stood out. He invested great efforts in drawing ªne distinctions between this practice and other modes of transfer he deemed legitimate, in order to present the new ªeld of scientiªc sociology as autonomous—with its object distinct from that of biology, its unique methods, and its clear-cut boundaries, i.e. legitimate problems and modes of explanation. Discussion of biological transfer often served as a theoretical stage for the problematization of new objects. Thus, Durkheim criticized the direct transfer of “natural selection” and

20. See list of early reviews by Durkheim in PR and RMM. “[c]es métaphores et ces analogies avaient leur avantage aux débuts de la science; Suivant une expression de Spencer, ce sont d’utiles échafaudages, mais qui nos masque la réalité. N’est-il pas temps de leur jeter à bas pour nous mettre en face des choses?” (Review of Schaefºe, RP 19, 1885, p. 99).

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“intraspecies battle for life” to society on methodological grounds, but was bothered by the implicit presupposition of the methodological and the epistemological priority of individuals in the Darwinian conception of the intra-species conºict. He held that social conºicts could not and should not be described, nor analyzed in these terms, but only through the action of social and cultural mechanisms that were based on the collectivity as the basic unit of sociological analysis. Durkheim could not apply a Darwinian evolutionary model for several reasons, including his reading of it as incompatible with his political and moral views—his assumptions concerning the bonds among humans and the nature of moral solidarity in societies and his rejection of any conception of intra-species combat. Nor would he accept the consequences of random variations, as he understood them, for the concept of causality. During the 1890s he referred to this only once: The hypotheses of Darwin, he wrote, “overlook the essential element of moral life, that is the moder- ating inºuence that society exercises over its members . . . wherever there are societies, there is altruism because there is solidarity” (pp. 197, 174). Darwin is actually mentioned three times in the DTS: once in conjunction with “densité” (chap. 6, book I), and twice in connection with the “lutte pour la vie” (chap. 2, book II) and “La division du travail social” (chap. 5, book II). In the ªrst case, the chapter as a whole discusses organic solidarity—which in Durkheim’s work is a characteristic of modern societies—in the context of how societies evolve from simple to complex, and how the ties of dependence and autonomy among members change from “mechani- cal solidarity” into “organic” ones. The account in DTS of societies’ formation is a multi-layered one. On one level a “mechanistic,” causal explanation, in terms of sheer volume and density of people, is given as the cause of the emergence of division of labor. The latter, in turn, is the ground for modes of solidarity. Yet on another level it seems that “moral density”—the nature and intensity of relations among these people—is what counts. In both explanations there is a self-conscious effort to avoid teleological explanations, in accord with Dar- win, and yet to graft the concepts of the economy of the organism and the solidarity of the parts of the organism on that of the social division of labor. In the chapter dealing with the causes of the progress of the social division of labor, Durkheim also seems to follow Darwin, for he argues that “que la concurrence entre deux organismes est d”autant plus vive qu’ils sont plus analogues” (p. 248). The expression “la lutte pour la vie” had been used by Durkheim and others in the following sense: the battle of an organism to adapt to an environment has other aspects besides survival amid a dearth of resources. The context of survival is one in which each organism struggles by itself,

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not simply as part of the intra-species battle. Here Durkheim parted way with both Darwin and contemporary French social Darwinism, and the result is that the existence of society attenuates rather than sharpens any competition. In other words, Durkheim goes a long way toward a social analogy to the Darwinian position on the division of labor—physiological is to social as the resulting divergence of characters is to specialization. In both cases competition is attenuated. But Durkheim considers the Dar- winian mechanism to apply to distinct individuals within a population, and he considered the aggregate and the mechanism it is involved with as a collectivity by which it attains its speciªc characteristic form of division of labor, solidarity, adaptation, and survival. Hence, it is precisely because of the relevance of the entities in question—individuals or collectivities and their mutual interactions—that the analogy between the social and the biological cannot be maintained if the Darwinian mechanism is assumed to hold. Thus though the paragraph sounds “Darwinian,” in fact it should be understood within a strongly Lamarckian subtext. Indeed, the discussion of Darwin in DTS should be interpreted in accordance with Conry’s (1974) position that Darwinian mechanisms of selection and competition were understood within the Lamarckian/Neolamarckian conceptual framework of the “economy of the organism” and the “independence and solidarity of the anatomical elements.” The various elements of the organism maintain a certain “solidarity” which helps the organism at large to adapt to its environment. This accounts for external as well as for internal adaptation. Durkheim actually discusses not the survival of the individual but the survival of the collectivity. The conclusion is clear: “la concurrence ne peut pas déterminer ce rapprochement (between differentiated activities of individuals), if faut bien qu’il ait préexisté. Il faut que les individus entre lesquels la lutte s’engage soient déjà solidaires et le sentent, c’est-à-dire appartiennent à une même société” (pp. 259–60). Furthermore, the use of “the economy of the organism” allowed Durkheim, before DTS, to oscillate between two signiªcations of adaptation: a biological (heredity) and a cultural (heritage). In DTS he espoused a complete transposition of the “economy of the organism” into the social realm. The solidarity called “organic” enhances the features that belong to this mechanism. Social division of labor—Marx is the unacknowledged protagonist—is not the cause of the evolvement of society from one type of organization/solidarity to another. It is perceived as a result of collective life and is not its grounding. Durkheim argued “de même encore, à l’intérieur de l’organisme, ce qui adoucit la concurrence entre les différent tissues c’est qu’ils se nourrissent de substances différentes. Les hommes subissent la même loi...”(p.249). Later he adds: “la division du travail est donc un résultat de la lutte pour la vie; mais elle en est un dénouement

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adouci. Grâce a elle, en effet, les rivaux ne sont pas obligés de s’éliminer mutuellement, mais peuvent coexister les uns à côté des autres” (p. 253). Clearly, then, while Durkheim’s argument resembles a Darwinian one, it ends up as a Lamarckian one. His move describes the creation of the division of labor not as the result of competition among disparate individuals but as a process in which the collectivity is directly involved. Conceding functions among parts of the collectivity as a result of the interactions between individuals and the collectivity yields a division and coordination of functions among the various performers in that collectivity. Hence Durkheim can extend the use of “division of labor” far beyond the economic aspects it usually connoted in order to describe the complexity of social life (pp. 252–253). He hoped thereby to achieve a strictly causal (in his words “mechanistic”) explanation of social life, which as a by-product would be capable of explaining the production of social harmony. In chapter 5, book II, Durkheim discussed the same phenomena in terms of collective consciousness and culture. Deviating from the general design of the book to explain social life along biological models and metaphors, Durkheim presented there the argument on competition and division of labor in order to further emphasize the manner in which the mechanisms of the social are distinct from the biological—the former regarded open and ºexible while the latter is determined and ªxed. I would construe his argument as follows: even when the (neo-Lamarckian) biological model of the division of labor in the economy of the organism is adopted, a model which is the best approximation for describing and analyzing social life, there still exist signiªcant distinctions between the social and the biological. All the more so had he adopted the Darwinian mechanism. Durkheim was an enthusiastic reader of Espinas’s early work Animal Colonies21 as well as Perrier’s The Transformism and Animal Colonies and the Formation of Organisms. Perrier has been considered by some historians as a Darwinist and by others as a Lamarckian (Conry 1974; Roger and Blanckaert 1979; Bernadini 1997; Persell 1999). But even when considered as a Darwinist, Perrier cannot be understood without an explicit Lamarckian subtext. He and Espinas were inºuenced by the French zoolo- gist Henri Milne- Edwards,22 and adopted two of his tenets: the nature of

21. See Espinas (1877, 2nd edition 1878) (based on his 1874 doctorate thesis), Perrier—see also 1879, 1881a (second edition 1898), 1881b and 1888. Of interest to the general renaissance of historical Lamarckian studies, was the erection of Lamarck’s statute in 1909 at the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, when Perrier was its head. Lamarckism sur- vived at least until 1914 as a viable research program for biologists, and to a large extent as a social-political agenda. 22. Particularly Milne Edwards’s (1844), where his discussion of the physiological division of labour appeared and his (1858). Of great importance to the persistence of

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the physiological division of labor and the relative independence of the various elements composing the organism. Following Lamarckian assumptions, Milne Edwards maintained that the degree of differentiation and specialization among the elements of an organism expressed the degree of its cohering enhancement. Thus, more complex organisms had more successfully adapted themselves to their external milieu and achieved a better equilibrium in their internal milieu. He termed this as “the economy of the organism.” The combination of partial autonomy of individual elements and mutual coordination and cooperation in the whole organism23 presented adaptation and survival as a solution to problems of internal organization. The cohesion of the elements in the organism was seen as a model of biological solidarity. Milne Edwards’s son, Alphonse, had continued in his father’s path and wrote the reformed textbook of biology of the 1880s, which became compulsory reading for all licensed philosophy students.24 Durkheim was undoubtedly familiar with this textbook, for many of the examples used in his writings during the 1890s were evidently drawn from it. He certainly availed himself of these Lamarckian conceptual tools, but in his theory both explanandum and explanans were social. Thus, transposing the differentiation in the economy of the organism into the division of labor was called “the law of gravity of the social world” (ibid, p. 333 fn.1), while the empirical measure of its differentiation in a speciªc society was considered an index for the complexity of that society. Durkheim presented the process of evolution25 as developing from the inside out, taking place in the internal milieu, while external forces (other societies) played their role. He excluded explanation or description based on biological heredity reasoning: an occurrence of either biological or sociological primary process of adaptation-to-environment resulted in a certain practice, a social pattern. It would be transmitted as habit and custom through processes of socialization and acculturation. Adaptation of indi-

Lamarckian worldview were also parts of his (1867). The “Leçons” have had immense inºuence on the new generation of biologists-Lamarckists who tried to turn their own research into a narrowly speciªc laboratory work. 23. In Claude Bernard’s late work “Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux” (1878) we read: “L’organisme complexe est un agrégat de cellules ou d’organismes élémentaires, dans lequel les conditions de la vie de chaque élément sont respectées et dans lequel le fonctionnement de chacun est cependant subordonné à l’ensemble. Il y a donc à la fois autonomie des éléments anatomiques et sub- ordinations de ces éléments à l’ensemble morphologique, ou, en d’autres termes des vies partielles à la vie totale” (pp. 354–6) 24. M.A. Milne-Edwards (1882). 25. I believe he used “evolution” quite often as a polysemic term, meaning either development or transmission or both, depending on the context.

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viduals could be understood only within their culture—a sociological equivalent of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Thus the molding of individuals in DTS, and even more so in Suicide, was social-cultural and not either biological-individual or psychological-individual. Through the division of labor as a mechanism of change, the moral and civilizing practices and beliefs of societies could change, thereby transforming the individuals. For Durkheim (as for Lamarck) changes and transformations applied to all members of a particular group, for they were considered as identical as far as the relevant social trait was concerned.26 Another striking example of Durkheim’s Lamarckism is the reasoning that informed his appreciation of modern society. As mentioned earlier, high degree of differentiation and speciªcation in the division of labor was considered typical of modern society. It resulted in a complex social stratiªcation and a sophisticated economy. Socially, it produced complex networks of relations of interdependence among individuals; smaller units in such society changed their structures when joining into larger units.27

26. Though during the eighties and the nineties “organism” was widely used in sociology (as well as in political discourse) there may be another aspect of Durkheim’s usage of it as a necessary component in his argument about the relations between individuals and collectivities. By claiming that the relations between individuals and their collectivity could be viewed, in some of their aspects as analogical to those of the parts of the organism to its to- tality he thought to have provided a semblance of observability to the collectivity. (Note that he insisted much more on the very partial use of this analogy to individuals, and ad- monished against any literal understanding of it). For most of his contemporaries individuals were conceived to be epistemologically at least the real entities, and thus the observable ones. The reality of the collectivity was often conceived as secondary, deriving from the reality of the individual and thus unobservable on its own. Durkheim’s usage purported to make the collectivity epistemologically “real,” in a sense to construct its “visualization” at a time when the visibility of investigated Nature had become a signiªcant scientiªc issue. Two new kinds of experimental knowledge, the geological and the biological emerged during the nineteenth century, which provided for “modes of observability” differing from the physical one. This “observability” was of utmost importance to Durkheim as his basic sociological unit had been the collectivity. The manner in which the legal system of a society was posited as the index of its solidarity pointed to his acute awareness of the difªculties of “observing a collectivity.” Suicide was intended to achieve precisely this difªcult observability by turning the causes of suicide into socially-culturally dependent ones, observable by employing statistical methods. 27. Right from 1888 on, Durkheim analyzed in great detail what constituted modern societies, in what ways did they differ, especially morphologically, from previous societies, and the kind of social solidarity which was ideally possible in this society.” “Solidarity” signiªed both social cohesion, collective identity and a certain combination of attachment, dependency, commitment and responsibility in the relationships among individuals. The principal features of modern complex society of “organic-solidarity” were the following: society was distinguished by intensive multilateral relations and communication among its dense and voluminous population; there was an ever growing differentiation and specialization in the division of labor. These resulted in a centralized state, to be balanced by mu-

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According to Durkheim, this situation gave a greater measure of freedom and autonomy for each individual, for the multiple webs were not overlap- ping. Individuals were not situated in any single totally determining net- work. Modern society produced thereby a new type of solidarity—an organic one. Contrary to many sociologists of his time, such as Ferdinand Toennies, Durkheim regarded such complex societies to be more viable, stronger, and more integrated than traditional simple and homogenous societies. In Durkheim’s work the evolutionary assumptions played an important role, for they served as the foundation of his theory on the formation of modern societies. I should point out yet another mode of employing the assumptions of Lamarckian biology, this time in order to delineate the boundaries of sociology in contradistinction to biology. A transposition from one science to another can be effected by assuming that there exists a similarity between two ªelds. However, in the case of transposition from the physical and biological sciences to the social sciences this need not rest upon an actual similarity between the two domains, or the two groups of objects compared, but upon contemporary cultural and scientiªc discourse. The similarity in our case “was revealed” when “the model worked,” enabling sociologists “to conceive more than they could currently say” (Harré and Martin in Mial 1982). In the delineation of boundaries such constructed similarity could, in another context, be revealed as its opposite. This particular “mechanism” of metaphor—similarity and distance—was used by Durkheim to delineate the boundaries of the new discipline. He contrived a hiatus, a gap of dissimilarity, between the two disciplines, which could not have been constructed unless similarity had been formerly assumed. In his books of the 1890s Durkheim pointed out to a group of differences singling out sociology. Their common feature was that the object of biology was characterized as being absolutely determined, while the object of sociology was presented as partially undetermined and relatively ºexible (with a different “logic” in the sense of types of order and relations such as those between functions and structures). This distinction served to differentiate between what could and could not be transferred over the bound- ary erected between biology and sociology. The Lamarckian evolutionary reservoir was a signiªcant resource for Durkheim and his group, but it became superºuous by the turn of the twentieth century.

tual inºuences between the various diversiªed units of society. In such a society there was neither homogeneity of beliefs nor in practices (which served as the underpinning of collective identity in traditional societies). Penal law was restitutive rather than retributive. Traditional religions were in decline in the modern organic-organized societies, as they became more and more secularized.

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The particular Durkheimian mode of transposition created a certain common familiarity among those who accepted it. It turned them into members of a working research community, in which each member could presume that the rest had a speciªc interpretive competence for these particular usages, and which expressed a common Weltanschauung. Members of this community, however, had much more in common than a mere in- terpretative competence—e.g., their explicit interest in constituting a new discipline and their being its principal representatives. Yet this inter- pretative competence was simultaneously a vehicle for a shared feeling of cohesion that united them while excluding others, and an expression of it. Following the publication of L’Année sociologique, and the alignment around Dreyfus Affair, new means of forging the work-collective became available (Sperber 1992; Sperber and Wilson 1995; see also on the formation of collectivities Gilbert 1992, chap. VII).

3. The Durkheimians and L’Année sociologique Durkheim taught pedagogy and sociology at the University of Bordeaux from 1887 until 1902, when he ªnally received a position at the Sorbonne. Gradually, there gathered around him some ten to twenty people, most of them young and, by virtue of their background, quite distinct. Of this group 25% were Jews and 30% Protestants, mostly from the middle and low middle classes—scholarship students of the new republican system of education (Clark 1973; Lukes 1973; Geiger 1975; Vogt 1976; Weisz 1979; Tiryakian 1979; Nandan 1980; Besnard 1983; Karady 1967, 1974, 1983; Logue 1983; Muccchieli 1998). With this work- collective Durkheim founded the journal L’Année sociologique. The journal was to be regarded as an action “in the world.” Its division into sections according to academic ªelds was a new formulation, and the presence or absence of a section was indicative of a reorganization of the ªeld as a whole. The Durkheimians were not so naive as to believe that their re-mapping the ªeld would immediately triumph, but they did expect that a reshufºing of old academic divisions would ensue, creating a new space for sociology. The seemingly academic polemic had far-reaching implications understood by rivals: Durkheim had presented sociology as a solid foundation for a new morality, to substitute various religious and otherwise non-scientiªc “mythologies” (e.g. “Rôle d’universités dans l’éducation sociale du pays,” Congrès international de l’éducation sociale 1900, Alcan 1901, pp. 128–138). The main thrust of the Durkheimian effort was to turn sociology into an indispensable component of the moral education program for secondary schools. Making sociology an obligatory subject for the “aggregation” and a permissible subject for writing the

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thesis for the license would furnish numerous teaching posts and university courses for its degree students. L’Année sociologique was published by Felix Alcan, the (Jewish) pub- lisher of all of Durkheim’s writings as well as the Revue philosophique, known for its support of positivism, science, and social reform. L’Année appeared from 1898 until 1912 annually during the ªrst ten years and thereafter about every three years. Each volume was 500–800 pages long, had about eight to ªfteen authors, and included one to three original essays (slightly less than a third of the overall volume). The other articles con- sisted of book reviews. Reviewing was in three forms: long analyses, short ones and brief notes; about two thirds of the overall number of reviews were devoted to non-French publications, mainly from Germany, Britain, and the USA. Most of the reviews were written by two or three authors and were further edited by Durkheim. L’Année claimed to represent the state of the art in social science: each volume included a general introduction and, during the ªrst few years, each section opened with a programmatic preface by the section’s editor, explaining the nature of the ªeld and its place in the universe of the social sciences. L’Année was meant to produce simultaneously a disciplinary de- marcation and its internal speciªcations. The internal division of the critical reviews posited a new mapping, bringing certain topics into prominence and relegating others to semi-obscurity. This mapping was a continual process of revision and change throughout the years of publication. The ªrst issue included a small section on anthropo-sociology, edited by H. Muffang, accompanied by a note in the introduction to the volume that indicated the objection of the editors to the positions expressed in the section, and provided the editors’ reasons for its inclusion. The section disappeared in 1902, and thereafter subsections alluding to a variant of bio-sociology, bio-anthropology, or bio-criminology disappeared. The relevant publications were subsumed under headings denot- ing solely cultural-social connotations. Socio-cultural terms were produced to redeªne and redraw the boundaries of phenomena previously deªned and discussed with the help of apparatus drawn from biology. Members of the Durkheimian group also contributed review articles, and essays to other journals, invariably to undermine the theoretical and methodological foundations of evolutionary Darwinist/organicist sociology. The ªrst, and perhaps the easier target from the point of view of power relations in the academic and cultural ªeld, was René Worms. The rivalry between various competing groups, speciªcally that between Durkheim, Worms, and other bio-sociologists intensiªed the late 1890s. The process by which Durkheim emerged victor—and founder of “French sociology,” was due, to a large extent, not only to internal scientiªc devel-

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opments, but to a particular juxtaposition of developments in biology, sociology, anthropology and French culture and politics at large.

4. René Worms and the Revue internationale de sociologie Besides being a normalien Worms had a most versatile education—law, political economy, philosophy, and natural sciences.28 His family was well placed both in the academy and in law. He was remarkable for his intellectual brilliance and ºair, and for his enthusiasm in establishing varied institutions to advance the cause of sociology. In 1893 he launched the annual Revue internationale de sociologie (RIS), assisted by Nowicow, as well as founded the Institut international de sociologie, in which no studies in the ordinary sense were ever conducted, but it became the institutional framework for organizing international congresses in sociology. Worms endeavored to make the Revue and the Institut prominent by inviting well- known ªgures to participate. No proper chair of sociology in any French university existed, and few elsewhere. But there was a genuine need for organizational frameworks that would create a professional esprit de corps, with the concomitant hierarchies and tokens of honor. Worms’s initial supporters included Espinas, Tarde, Jacques Bertillon, Emile Cheysson, Charles Gide, Gabriel Monod and Theodule Ribot, as well as Gumplo- wicz, Menger, Marshall, Toennies and Simmel. At least one prominent member of the social sciences circles from Europe and the USA contributed to each of the ªrst issues of the journal, and contributors usually became members of the Institut which, indirectly, helped ªnance the publication of the congresses by membership fees. Worms was secretary general of the Institut until his death, the only post in the Institut with executive powers. Worms also distributed the positions of vice-presidents to en- hance the Institut’s prestige. Schaefºe, Tylor, Lilienfeld, Kovalevsky, Buisson, Tarde, Espinas and even Woodrow Wilson all served as ofªcers. But as a consequence, the more established disciplines—law, economics, philosophy and even anthropology—were better represented in the journal and the Institut than sociology. Nonetheless, the RIS was the ªrst French journal dedicated solely to sociology or the social sciences, save for the publications of the Le Playist group. Until then, most sociology articles were published in the Revue philosophique, edited by Ribot, or other economic and philosophical journals. Worms tried to attract people from a wide range of disciplines, and he was quite successful for a while. In 1895 he founded the French branch of the International Congress of Sociology, as well as the Paris Society of Sociology. The latter became the forum for a 28. See Sorokin (1928); Clark (1968, 1973); R. Geiger (1981); Lepenies (1988); Bernardini (1997); and Mucchielli (1998).

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regular exchange of views, structured on the Institut, with honorary positions as means of co-optation, and Worms as its secretary general. As the society had to rely on local people, most of whom were otherwise engaged, its main audience was amateurs and lay public. Hence, its purported aim was never realized, as the minutes published in the RIS after 1899 amply testify. Worms also reached an agreement with Giard and Briere, an established publishing house that issued books in law, the life sciences, and medicine, becoming the editor of a large collection of monographs on the nature of sociology which also included translations, writings of non French sociologists from peripheral European countries. Thus empowered, Worms set himself to the task of editing a journal, and of organizing a congress every three years. But in contrast to the impact of the debates fea- tured in the Revue and the Annales, relatively little is known of the nature of the actual interactions that took place at the congresses, and it is difªcult to asses their importance. Indeed, this was so even for contemporaries. Those invited were noted ªgures in the humanities (and not just in the social sciences), perceived as capable of making a special contribution toward the gradual establishment of sociology. Discussions seem to have been rather short. Until the turn of the century meetings were more the forums for unrelated lectures than topical congresses. Right from the start, there was a conspicuous lack of coherence, and the participants, so contemporaries observed, rarely engaged in creative dialogues and serious debates (Clark 1967, 1973; Geiger 1981). Also in Worms’s profuse, often brilliant, and polemical writings one cannot detect the concentrated theorizing effort of Durkheim’s work.29 This should be compared to succeed- ing, generative more “professional,” conferences of sociologists, in which the state of knowledge in the ªeld was summed up, and bounded questions discussed. Important indicators of the general “cultural economy” of the period are the number of journals published, the inter-journal debates, and the assessment of the programmatic statements and actual practices of their founders. From the late 1880s, a large number of journals with some interest in the human sciences, or with general cultural concerns were launched, in addition to many short lived political journals and other ephemeral social sciences publications.30 The hectic activity of institution

29. I rely here on Worms’s main publications in his journal during the relevant years. 30. A short list will illustrate this: 1885, Archives de l’Anthropologie criminelle et des sciences pénales (medicine légale, Judiciaire. Statistique criminelle Legislation et Droit); 1886, Annales de l’école libre des sciences politiques; 1887, Revue d’Économie politique; 1890, L’Anthropologie; 1890, L’Année philosophique; 1890, L’Année criminelle; 1891, Annales de Géographie; 1891, Revue mensuelle de l’école d’anthropologie; 1892, Revue Universitaire; 1892,

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building carried with it all the characteristic features of a would-be- discipline. Worms relied principally on French non-academic sociologists and on members, academic or otherwise, of neighboring disciplines, especially law and anthropology. He did not seek the endorsement of existing non-sociological academic institutions. But he did try to involve government ofªcials in his congresses, by granting them honorary positions. In addition, Worms lectured in various Law faculties, offered occasional Cours Libres at various universities,31 and slowly rose in the hierarchy of governmental service. At every opportunity he advertised his earnest conviction that special faculties for the social sciences should be established, since sociology could not (and should not) become part of humanities.32 Worms’s publications during the 1890s can be read as a modiªed continuation of evolutionary organicist output with a general Darwinian lean- ing of the late 1870s and the early 1880s. Like most contemporaries, Worms resorted to the “medical model” vocabulary, without any change of terms, i.e. by direct transfer, in a manner similar to the one he used with the evolutionary biological reservoir. There one could ªnd even ontic over- lapping.33 Worms clearly accepted Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences, particularly the role of biology as the provider of rules, methodology, and a framework of natural laws for the study of sociology. In this sense, his was a straightforward Comtean enterprise in an age when positivism had become diluted. However, contrary to Comtean positivism, he had been try-

Mouvement social; 1893, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale; 1893, Archives d’Anthropologie criminelle et de psychologie normale et comparée, 1893 Revue internationale de sociologie; 1894, L’Année psychologique; 1895, L’Année biologique; 1898, L’Année sociologique; 1899, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine; 1900, Revue de Synthese; 1900, Notes Critiques; 1904, Jour- nal de Psychologie normale et pathologique. Most of the new journals were founded either to in- augurate novel approaches and new emerging disciplines which could not ªnd venue in the then existing journals, or as a result of internal developments, redrawing the boundaries of groups which could formerly coexist. Numerous historians have endeavored to convey the uniqueness of the French scene in the latter part of the nineteenth century as far as media availability and freedom of the press were concerned, (See Belanger et al. 1969; Zeldin in his many-volumed history; Nye 1975, 1984; Tilly 1974, 1986; Elwitt 1986; see also Rioux 1991) and the intensity of both the intellectual and cultural ferment with the sense of urgency. 31. Clark attributed Worms’s failure to get a university post mainly to the fact that the university system was founded on patronage clusters. 32. Free courses were given at various universities, and enabled faculties to offer the more general public as well as university students courses they did not wish, as yet, to in- corporate into the curriculum, but felt obliged to offer in response to demand for the newer ªelds of knowledge. This was particularly true of the social sciences as extra university institutions sprang up to fulªll the need. See May Dick and H. Hauser. 33. On this see particularly Tarde’s criticism at the congress section devoted to organicism: (AIIS, Vol. IV. 1897) where he strongly objected to direct transfer from biology. His early objection to Darwinism had already been voiced in 1884.

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ing to use the then prevalent psychological model as well. Hence, his primary entities, methodologically and otherwise, were individuals (see, most conspicuously, Philosophie des sciences socials, vol. I, chap. 1, sec 1–2, 1903). On the cultural-ideological plane, Worms intended to provide a sociologically based, and biologically justiªed, agenda of a modiªed reformist economic liberalism. Like most contemporaries, he considered the scientiªc knowledge of society a necessary prerequisite to any societal change. Many contributors to the Revue regarded themselves as guardians against insurgent socio-Marxism, which was seemingly based on a similar biological model. Late in the 1890s Worms resorted to the well-publi- cized “economic mutual societies” as a case in point for his agenda,34 and later the verbal modiªcation of social-Darwinian organicism, reinforced by a dash of solidarism, became widespread among organicist collaborators of the Revue. Only few staunch Darwinians, such as Grasserie, did not budge from their position. Grasserie emphasized heredity as a major conceptual tool in sociological analysis, but projected “the battle for existence” to the military and economic planes of both international and individual combat.35 Worms, together with certain collaborators of his journal, tended to view “progress” and “evolution” as coextensive. Only in the ªrst volume of his Philosophie des sciences sociales he distinguished between the two (pp. 148–154). Thus, the “Battle for existence” was considered as a self-evident component of “Progress.”36 Worms’s Organisme and société (1896) best presented his views on the relationship between sociology and biology during this period, though earlier Worms had written several essays on sociology and its relationship to law and political economy. The book stands out as unabashed exposition of Worms’s organicist sociological position—though his later Philosophie des sciences sociales (1903–1907) contained certain modiªcations, rhetorically at least, of this position. Three features of Organisme and société are relevant here: its close and de- tailed parallelism between biological and social organisms; the (social) Darwinist thread that runs through it concerning the central role of competition and combat (“concours, concurrence, lutte, guerre”) in the interactions among of individuals as well as among societies; and that the basic units of analysis are discrete, or more precisely a plurality, of separate or-

34. Thus he substituted “adaptation” for “natural selection” and “competition.” This substitution was derived mostly, so it seemed, from the popular writings of Le Dantec, as in his (1899). 35. Raoul Guerin de la Grasserie (1839–1914) a legal ofªcial who was treated as a wel- come contributor to RIS. 36. See his 1896 book “O & S,” but such assumptions were also implied in a lot of his writing throughout the 1890s and in his book reviews.

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ganisms. Worms claimed that “society” was the object of the new ªeld of knowledge (in the same Comtean positivist tradition that he shared with Durkheim other contemporaries, that a science is constituted by its differing objects and common method). Yet “society” in some sense was for him a derivative signiªcation of “organism,”37 the primary one being that of single individuals,38 he named it (after Spencer) “supra organism” (p. 9). Biology provided the emerging discipline of sociology with both the analytic categories and the modes of practice necessary for what Worms perceived to be its main tasks: how to observe social facts, classify them, and how to derive laws on the basis of these classiªcations (Intro. to O & S). Worms referred to Spencer, Perrier, and Espinas, yet his implicit model seemed to have been that expounded by Paul von Lilienfeld, who availed himself of biological divisions of sub-ªelds and of the notion of organism as a direct analogue in constituting his vision of sociology and its sub divisions.39 Worms, however, sought to preserve at least a semblance of the uniqueness of sociology vis-à-vis biology, and he strove to make this apparent by discussing the features of individual human organisms that differentiated them from the non-human ones, especially the rapid rate of human evolution in light of the “universal battle for life” (see section II, chap. 3). The parallelism between human and other biological organisms also found its way into other aspects of Worms’s analysis of human aggres- sive and competitive behavior. Thus, although Worms’s statements on the nature of imitation resembled those of Tarde’s or even LeBon’s, the “battle” context, both among individuals and among nations in which “imitation” is used, and the mechanism described, derive directly and self consciously from biology. Arguably, his choice of economic activities as basic in social phenomena also related to his strong emphasis on combat and competition in the social world, parallel to the one found in any organis- mic environment. The change in Worms’ position on parallelism and combat in the Philosophie des sciences sociales is interesting, as he strove for a modiªed position in which biology would still serve as the basis of sociology, but the latter would be much more distinct. Thus, he recommended that sociologists keep up with developments in biology, and even have some laboratory experience (pointing to Espinas as a model to imitate), while empha-

37. This position is modiªed in the later book PSS 1st volume, published in 1903 (e.g. chap. 3, sec I). 38. E.g.: “Pour composer une société, il faut des unités dont chacune ait déjà la valeur d’un organisme” (p. 28). 39. E.g., see p. 304 and the general plan of the book.

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sizing that the basis of sociability was psychological.40 The modiªcations of Worms’s position on the three issues mentioned before, parallelism, combat, and the role of individuals, are very much along (late) Spencerian lines, at a time when the latter no longer served as role model for socio- biologists. Worms was certainly searching for a way to legitimate scientiªc sociology and institutionalize it both at the university level and in the lycées and colleges.41 When the Revue and its afªliated institutions were ªrst established, they created a forum for multiple positions in the yet unstruc- tured ªeld of sociology, and an opportunity for French members to en- counter some of the most prominent foreign ªgures of the broader ªeld of social sciences (see Worms’s opening article in Annales I 1895, especially sec. III).42 But Worms failed to mobilize any members of the two Le Playist groups, and he received no cooperation from the Durkheimians. Consequently, he ended up with a medley of French contributors to the journal and enrolled members of the Institut. Given Worms’s brand of bio-sociology it was not surprising that imme- diate collaboration was established with other bio-sociological groups in France. Most conspicuously, with one of the anthropological sections related to the Ecole d’anthropologie, whose implicit polygenist assumptions and explicit evolutionarily deterministic hereditarian views—regarded as Darwinian—seemed compatible with Broca’s craniological tradition. While the anthropologists who gathered around the École du Muséum had gradually separated anatomical measurement from ethnographic research, they clung to the “biological” as proof for the scientiªc status of their ªeld and its location in the faculty of medicine. In the gradually changing discourse into a social Lamarckian one, this particular group was on the defensive, and its collaboration with Worms afforded it a new lease

40. See especially PSS vol. I, chap. I, sec. II, e.g.: “[D]’une part l’activité sociale repose sur l’activité biologique, dont elle est l’expansion et dans laquelle elle trouve ses impul- sions originaires; et d’autre part, l’existence sociale réagit sur l’existence individuelle . . .” (p. 18), or the claim that the organic world forms the distinction and transition between the inorganic and the social (p. 22). 41. He was constantly writing on this topic, right from his introduction and essay on sociology in the ªrst issue, down to an organized written debate 1899 (1900, The international congress on teaching social sciences): Enquête sur l’introduction de la sociologie dans l’enseignement secondaire. 42. Geiger’s distinction between the two institutions is very much to the point: The Congress hosted until after the turn of the century mostly participants from less developed countries, with hardly any professional activity, together with a sprinkling of famous names. The journal seemed to fare better. The appearance of L’Annee sociologique and other sociological publications abroad affected the RIS.

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of life and an opportunity to reach beyond the limited audiences of biological anthropology—principally in the life-sciences and medical faculties and the specialized revues establishing the new sub-discipline of “anthropo-sociology,” a racial biological mode in the discourse on modern society. Vacher de la Pouge43 and H. Mouffang were among the more prominent ªgures in that circle. This racist tendency was further enhanced in the Revue with the publications of three essays by Le Bon, advocating and propagating racial inequality.44 The socio-anthropology group made available to Worms their institutional quarters for his regular activities and the collaboration invested Worms’s enterprise with the desired legitimization as an acknowledged science. Another group which joined Worms on account of its afªnity with generalized biologism was composed of positivistically-inclined exiled Rus- sian intellectuals. It was a rather heterogeneous group45 including: the venerable Eugene De Roberty, whose earlier work had been an attempt to integrate biosociology into the more orthodox positivism (AIIS 1901); Paul Von Lilienfeld; Jacques Novicov who had been a philosopher, an organicist, and a Lamarckian; Maxime Kovalevsky (Pitrim Sorokin’s teacher), perhaps the sole empirically inclined member in that group, who conducted anthropological-sociological research on the Russian peasantry and on the economic structure of rural Russia.46 Three eminent ªgures from the academy participated throughout the 1890s in the Revue on a more or less regular basis; the historian of the working class Emile Levasseur,47 the historian of labor and education Henri Hauser, and the anthropologist Charles Letourneau, a specialist on southeast Asia. They dealt with core issues of contemporary political and social agenda, such as workers’ rights and colonial enterprises. Another participant was the sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who offered the most serious intellectual alternative to the Durkheimians.48

43. Vacher de la Pouge (1854–1936), was closely allied with Topinard, and from 1886 on also published under his auspices. He published 3 articles in RIS between 1893–95. 44. See Taguieff (1990–91); Nye (1975); Moscovici (1981); Barrows (1990). 45. See also Sorokin (1928); Tort, Geiger (1981): “Les luttes entre sociétés humaines et leur phase successives.” Jacques Novicow’s (1829–1919) book, was published in Worms’s series in 1896: earlier, in 1893 he put forth a liberal position but with distinct Darwinian undertones. 46. M.M. Kovalevskii (1851–1916). 47. Emile Levasseur (1828–1911). 48. All of them published also outside RIS. Their professional identity was established outside the Revue and was hardly affected by their participation in it. As for Tarde, (see also Clark 1969, 1973; Geiger 1981; Moscovici 1981; Van Ginneken 1992; Mucchielli 1998), he had many publications in the Revue (seven essays, and book reviews etc), he actively

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There were no clear methodological or ideological questions underlying the activity of the Revue, or directing the editor’s choice of material. Nor was there an agreed object—e.g., “society” or “race”—for the new discipline. In the absence of any deªned sociological framework within which positions could attain meaning, and as a consequence of the plurality of research ªelds and worldviews covered in the journal, the Revue failed to convey a mapping of the discipline of sociology, or offer an alternative structuring of views in it. Worms’s conception of sociology, its range and boundaries, was “organizational” rather than theoretical. He viewed it as a loosely structured enterprise of collecting and organizing social facts, from individuals to races. The category of social facts subsumed the various structures of institutions, classes, and regimes. Worms’s “social facts” were divided and categorized in accordance with prevailing divisions. Facts were to be gleaned, described and compared under the Darwinian-evolutionary organicist perspective. No clear criteria were applied. It almost seemed as if all human and social sciences could be included, whether through their data-collecting or through their organizing methodologies. What remained unclear to contemporaries, however, was the unique role of sociology in that all-inclusive vision. Nonetheless, though there existed no underlying theoretical cohesion in Worms’s journal, the RIS could have offered a space for dialogue and debate Worms certainly attempted to create such a space, with the RIS, the congresses, and the book series he edited. His efforts proved only partially successful in the congresses, given the deep heterogeneity and rigidity of the participants. Declarations substituted for fruitful controversies even in focused sessions. Conversely, most authors in the book-series were organicist sociologists.49 The RIS issues became increasingly bulkier. During the ªrst year the journal was issued bimonthly, and then monthly. Numerous issues were prefaced by a short programmatic essay by Worms. No internal content division was attempted and articles were published in the authors’ alpha- betical order, according to custom. Review articles of books and periodi- cals were quite short. After 1899, between a quarter and a third of each issue was devoted to the minutes of the Paris society of Sociology. The quota of “original essays” varied from almost half in the beginning to less than a

participated in Institut’s congresses, especially before he was nominated to an academic post at the College de France—1900. 49. Because of lack of relevant materials it is almost impossible to try to draw a thor- ough sociological or even a political proªle of those around Worms’ institutions. Most collaborators were well established professionally and older (with the exception of Worms). Jewish and Protestant participation was at a much lower percentage and the original status of the parents’ families was higher than in the Durkheimian milieu.

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third at the turn of the century. A striking feature of these papers was their immense length, often in two to three installments. No distinction was made between historical research, methodological and philosophical statements, or original sociological work. RIS included a “chronique,” consisting of reports on events deemed relevant for the social sciences as an investigation of modern society—social movements, workers organiza- tions, and feminist conferences from around the globe. Also included were a section on sociology’s gradual process of legitimization and institutionalization—publication of new journals and the establishment of new chairs—and, after 1896, a section of critical notes on contemporary French culture, mainly on theater. In 1898 the section of book reviews was greatly enlarged and in the following year an expansive coverage of the meetings of the Paris Sociological Society was also added. Following the appearance of the AS a striking change occurred in the structure of the RIS, a marked increase in the number of book reviews, ar- ranged in subsections according to areas of inquiry in the social sciences, accompanied by a growing number of reviews of publications by “non-sympathizers.”50 Although the division into sections was not strictly adhered to, there was an effort to provide a rival mapping of sociology to that of the AS. The majority of the reviews until 1905 related almost ex- clusively to French publications. Thereafter, original essays by American authors, and reviews of American publications, were published, with a noticeable dwindling of non-peripheral European authors. This was probably due not only to the appearance of new venues in those countries, but also to the growing political tensions in Europe. After the turn of the century, most of the more blatant biological transfer essays, both by sociologists and amateur social thinkers, came from the East European periphery. Surely, then, the very existence of the RIS and of the Institut51 provided a signiªcant space for airing positions on sociology, and their presence enriched the range of available theories and methodologies. They also provided much-needed venues for periphery authors who lacked such resources in their own countries. Finally, they provided a signiªcant and persistent voice in the cultural ªeld of turn of the century France, which was identiªed neither with the Left nor with the Nouvelle Sorbonne, and which called for the legitimization and institutionalization of sociology.

50. The principal sections of RIS in those years were: general sociology and philosophy, mental and social pathology, methods in sociology and in social evolution and economics. In 1903 a section on statistics was added, and in 1904 one on political juridical and pathological sociology; from 1908 on a “domestic section” was included. 51. Both RIS and the Institut operated regularly until the 1914 war. The RIS was not published during 1916–18, but resumed its appearance immediately after the war.

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5. Contextualizing the Battle between the Groups Undoubtedly Worms was Durkheim’s most formidable rival for the position of founder of French sociology. One way to undermine Worms’s enterprise was to adopt a completely different strategy, and attack Worms’s feeble platform rather than the plethora of institutions established to promote it. The Durkheimians never participated in any of the activities organized by Worms,52 and attacked his bio-sociology in varied ways. Thus, in his pronouncements on the nature and state of sociology Durkheim never failed to attack “the institutionalizing fever.”53 Offering no recogni- tion, the Durkheimians fought ferociously, mostly in the philosophical pe- riodicals of the era. Most later attacks on Worms and on his brand of sociology, which called for a complete separation of sociology from biology, were led by Durkheim’s disciples and collaborators, not by Durkheim himself. Instead, Durkheim offered several programmatic essays on the nature of sociology, in which two features were constant: a refrain, “sociology exits, it has a method and an object” and a reconstructed genealogy of sociology as a means of legitimization. His reconstructed history always included an analysis of the state of the discipline; an insistence on the need for autonomy; a call for coherent theory making and a work-collective; and a demand to strictly adhere to explaining the social solely by the social. The attacks touched on two principal objections: a methodological one—voiced mainly by Bouglé and Lapie—that sociology and biology must be separated if the latter were to become an autonomous science, and that sociology must be also disentangled from the psychological threads that had been interwoven with biology. A political objection, expounded by Bouglé and Simiand, attacked bio-sociology because its political implications undermined the fundamental tenets of democracy, especially that of equality.54 Noteworthy is the tacit assumption that science served as the underpinning of democracy in the Third Republic. Moreover, Organicism, especially in its Darwinian variant, was represented as ignor- ing any collective social responsibilities that individuals might have. Ne- glecting these responsibilities would result in the failure of the projected educative role of sociology in the Republic.55 52. With the exception of Dukheim’s reply published in RIS 1989 VII. 53. E.g. the programmatic 1895 essay, translated from Italian in Karady (1976) Vol. I. 54. The title of Bouglé’s thesis, published in 1899 was on “Les idées égalitaires.” 55. Bouglé developed the consequences of this argument in his 1904 book: La democratie devant la science. First is Lapie’s short essay, in RMM (1895), on the state of sociology, followed by Bouglé’s (1896); Simiand’s essay on the state of sociology in RMM 1897, also indirectly and in a more popularized manner his essay in Revue de Paris (1897), Bouglé’s comments in his “Démocratie et Anthropologie” in RMM, Bouglé’s paragraphs on biological sociology in the introduction to the section on General Sociology in L’Année ªrst volume, Bouglé’s attack on organcisim in Revue philosophique, (1900), another essay of

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The inclusion of a section on anthropo-sociology, edited by Muffang (who was not only a member of the Ecole d’anthropologie but perceived as a representative of the Worms group), could have been part of a bounding strategy that was typical of the Durkheimians’ activity in the cultural ªeld at large. The inclusion of this section corroborated the scientiªc claims of the journal and of the group, and enhanced their status as objective hosts, since the whole ªeld of sociology was thus represented. But Durkheim’s “warning” in the same volume of the danger of racial reductionist essentialism, particularly in anthropo-sociology, obviously undermined the very enterprise included there. The relentless onslaught on Worms could not by itself ensure a Durkheimian victory. The Durkheimians succeeded because the “battle” was an important component of a larger context, both political and scientiªc. Contextualizing the episode necessitates gathering the disparate threads against the general background of the evolutionary paradigm and of the concept of progress in the second half of the nineteenth century. When doing so, certain components move to the foregrounds: the constant transfer from the biological to the social; the reception and diffusion of Darwinism in France and its implications for social sciences: the particular role of Lamarckism in both biology, the social sciences and the political discourse; the intellectual ferment and educational reforms of the late 1880s and the 1890s, the gradual crystallization of groupings of sociologists, exempliªed by the communities around the Revue and the L’Année in the 1890s; and the growing rivalries among them in the gradual process of legitimization of sociology as a new discipline. The Durkheim-Worms rivalry was certainly signiªcant for sociology, but it was not the only one. As noted above, Durkheim’s sociological works of the 1880s and 1890s employed a sophisticated form of transposition from a Lamarckian evolutionary model, on which the concept of “the economy of the organism” had been grafted. But the focus of the Durkheimians’ polemics with Worms was not, in fact, on the actual use of biology in sociology, but rather on the modes of usage, on the particular biological models to be de- his in the same journal (1901). In between these one should insert the general discussion at the Congress of Worms’s Institut following Novicov’s lecture on organicism (AIIS 1898 and Novicov (AIIS 1899), Novicov’s reply to Bouglé’s (1900) in RP, Espinas’s essay in RP (1901), to which Bouglé reacted in his second (1901) essay in RP. In 1904 Bouglé published his impressive book La démocratie devant la science. Tarde (1895, 1896) in two essays criticizing the organicism and Darwinism of De Greef and Von Lilienfeld in RP, and on Worms in 1897 in AIIS ( Tarde also criticized the “biological criminology—an open letter to Bianchi, “Biologie et Sociologie” in Archives d’anthropologie criminelle in 1894. But Tarde’s and the Durkheimians points of view are quite different. Mauss and Fauconnet (1901); see also Vogt (1979).

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ployed, and the sociological and culture-related conclusions to be drawn from such usages. The content and tenor of these polemics changed mark- edly by the turn of the century. A parallel difference can also be found in Durkheim’s own stance concerning the usage of biological models. Nor was Durkheim alone in this attack. Tarde, who published in RIS, criticized the simplistic organicism of Worms, while the Lamarckian (physical) anthropologist Manouvier, criticized Vacher de la Pouge (see 1899). True, Worms attempted to adjust the RIS to conform to the emerging model of L’Année, but the nature of his initial project, and consequently the features of the group that gathered around his institutions, rendered such effort futile. Most of Worms’s enterprises dwindled to a shadow of their former size soon after 1900. Some of his prominent collaborators “re- canted”, by modifying their bio-sociologist positions on direct transfer, the Darwinian model, and organicism. Also, many contributors from the periphery gradually found suitable venue for their work in their own countries. Finally, by 1910 mounting nationalist tensions within Europe further curtailed the number of well-known European ªgures in Worms’s camp. Durkheim and Worms competed for the position of “provider of moral ideology” for their age. The dissemination of their positions was directed towards different audiences among republican elites. Relevant in this context is the fact that the younger generation of the 1890s did not grow up with the traumatic memories of the 1870 Commune, but with the socialization into the new republican nationalism and with an admiration for the sciences. For them, socialism was just another doctrine, not at all threatening, in fact quite appealing given the prolonged economic slump of the 1880s and 1890s. Toward the end of the century the political and the cultural ªelds went through a fast and drastic process of polarization due to the Dreyfus affair.56 “L’Affaire” has been regarded in recent histori- ography (Charle 1990) as the constitutive event of the French intelligen- tsia, whom Clemanceau called the “intellectuals.” From the mid-1890s, and more acrimoniously so following the publication of Zola’s famous “J’accuse” in early 1898, the “Affaire” sundered French society and more

56. The ªrst trial of Dreyfus, in which he was convicted took place in 1894; the ªrst revelations concerning the “Dossier” became public in 1896, the ªrst petitions appeared in 1897; Zola’s famous article “J’accuse” appeared in the beginning of 1898; a manifesto signed by many prominent ªgures appeared immediately after that; in February 1898 Zola was convicted in court, after which Bruntière wrote his article against the intellectual Dreyfusards. See Lukes (1973, p. 347); Filloux (1977 p. 138 fn. 2); it was then that Durkheim wrote his article against Bruntière’s attack on the intellectuals. See Filloux (1977, particularly p. 138–40); Clark (1973); Charle (1990); Strenski (1998).

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speciªcally the French cultural ªeld, polarizing the embattled camps as never before.57 It proved the catalyst for the emergence of a new French right, which professed a virulent nationalism and a racist anti-Semitism, and anchored its scientiªc justiªcation (if one was needed) on current bio-anthropology and the new anthropo-sociology. There emerged a new anti-scientiªc and anti-civic mood among anti Dreyfusards,58 who vented in attacks on positivism, on the democratic procedures as integral components of it, and on universities at large. Yet, biological acculturation was common to all parties. It therefore became meaningful and important to ask which evolutionary model was used, and which social-cultural translation applied to the events at hand. The new political and cultural divisions, therefore, were transferred to the arena of the emergent discipline of sociology. They led to an ideological opposition between those who employed Darwinist-organicist models (and made use of the biological- cultural category of “race”) and those whose usage of biological models was more mediated, and whose social political positions were translatable into the solidarist-Lamarckist idiom. The years of rift had united many members of the new elites of the Third Republic in political and civic action, and established novel contacts. These intensive years should certainly be viewed as a collective awakening and solidiªcation of a new intellectual community. The Durkheimians, having been very active during those years, developed wide-ranging nets of acquaintances with Dreyfusards in power and with many socialists. Their political activities brought their emerging discipline to the attention of a wider public. Paradoxically, the Dreyfus Affair revealed not only the strong nationalist emotions of the anti-Dreyfusards, but also the patriotism of the Dreyfusards, and the case for the defense of individualism.59

57. Charle (1990, pp. 63–4). The polysemic nature of the new term “intellectuals” hid the actual division within it between those who regarded themselves as a closed elite, engaged in a battle against the forces of the new regime and its program of social and cultural change, and those who allied themselves with the Republic with a capital R. 58. This mood had gradually accumulated a deeply ingrained hostility to the Republic, its educational reforms an its scientiªcally based ideology, for these were conceived as a threat to “traditional national values”. Ferdinand Bruntière, formerly a Darwinian positivist who converted in 1900 to Catholicism, was the editor of the Revue des deux mondes. He published in the beginning of 1895 an essay on what he termed “La Banqueroute de la science,” Figaro (1895); (see also his other essay in Revue de deux mondes, “Apres une visite au Vatican”). 59. Beside Durkheim’s famous essay in reply to Bruntière’s “L’individalisme et les intellectuals,” (1898), see also the written debate launched by the Revue Bleue in 1904, in which divergent ªgures such as Fouillée, Barrès, Tarde, Monod, Guinon, Hervieu, Durkheim, Langlois, Boutroux, Séailles, Henri Poincaré, Faguet and others had sent a statement on “L’élite intellectuelle et la démocratie”; See also Eugene Weber (1971); Lukes (1973b); Nye (1984).

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A contemporaneous development in biology also became relevant. The publication of Weismann’s work (Weismann 1883, 1885, 1888, in Weismann 1891–92; see also Farley 1982) and the gradual realization of the implications of his theory for biology and for the transfer from biology to other spheres, made the differences between rival camps in biology acute. A Lamarckian reading was no longer possible for a Darwinian.60

60. To put it very schematically in a nutshell: During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century inheritance was conceived as an aspect of development, a self-evident product of reproduction. For Lamarck issues that are considered today as separate issues: reproduction, inheritance and transmission were largely conceived a single matter. Thus physiological and evolutionary adaptation was considered as one and the same thing. The change came with Darwin’s epigenetic theory, and his pangenesis theory of inheritance. It explained the basic generational continuity in terms of biology and physics. Inheritance was conceived as an aspect of growth, for the phenomenon of reversion was a source of utmost interest to Darwin. Thus he coined the term “latent gemules” by which a distinction was drawn between transmission and development. Heredity meant the transmission of gemules, development meant the traits that are transmitted and are actualized. Galton adopted Darwin’s distinction between latent and non latent gemules and decreed that only that which is not “actualized,” and is latent, could be transmitted to the next generation. Weismann in fact conªrmed Galton’s restrictive view and adopted the idea of “Somatic expression” coupled with transmission to the next generation. He separated two kinds of cells: germplasm—the material of inheritance, and somatic cells—which have only part of the above, and thus do not transmit to the next generation. Without going into the ªne details of the mechanism Weismann devised it is important to say that for Weismann inheritance was part of development, though in a very restricted sense, as belonging to the germplasm. According to Weismann, there was no need anymore for the hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, for under his hypothesis the natural selection mechanism, the supplier of random variations, sufªced. Thus there could be no adaptive connection between the information included in the germcell and the environment. For the Lamarckians this meant that no elements of responsibility, activity could remain. They thus posed the issues of use and disuse, of degeneration, of instincts, and of family geniuses as problems that Weismann’s theory could not provide satisfactory answers for. Perhaps the most relevant debate to French Lamarckism was that between Spencer and Weismann, as a result of which Weismann further complicated and modiªed his theory to a signiªcant extent. However, the two basic problems mentioned above, could ªnd no solution even in the modiªed and worked out version. See Weismann (1891–2); Spencer (1890, 1893–4). R. G. Winther has recently argued (2001) that in fact Weismann’s position was much more complicated than the one presented by biologists and historians of biology since the nineteenth twenties, and that “Weismann always held that changes in external conditions, acting during development, were the necessary causes of variation in hereditary material. For much of his career he held that acquired germ plasm variation was inherited” (p. 517). However, in further developing this generalized thrust of his argument the author divided Weismann’s writing on the topic into four periods. The one between 1885–1891(relevant to my argument) is then named: “phylogenetic externalism.” He argues that ONLY during this period did Weismann hold that the germ plasm was spatially separate, and also that there was no mechanism by which to transmit the change in soma to the germ plasm, and thus the impossibility of the inheritance of acquired somatic variation (pp. 526–28). Further- more, the article hardly deals with the reception of these views by contemporary biologists

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From the mid-1890s there occurred a sharp polarization of the French community of biologists into Neo-Darwinians and Neo-Lamarckians. A plethora of publications on Lamarck (Landrieu 1909) ensued: his Philosophie zoologique was republished after dozens of years of neglect; honorary events, related to matters that even then were deemed remotely connected with the Lamarckian heritage were staged. The predicament of French Lamarckian biologists became more acute, for they upheld a strictly empirical view of what could be regarded as scientiªc work. The task of providing empirical proofs for their hypotheses became increasingly more difªcult as the Weismannian approach had been widely received. Biologists, especially those with deep ideological commitment to the republican solidarist ideology, or involved in political activities, found it impossible to accommodate these ªndings with what they considered to be the social consequences of the new theory. Two of the thorniest issues involved giving up the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and accepting the absolute separation of heredity and environment. Consequently, they devised intricate mechanisms to enable them to continue their experimental scientiªc work without adhering to Weismann’s hypotheses. The defensiveness of the Lamarckians became visible in both professional and semi-popular journals. The scientiªc status of French Lamarckian biologists thereby suffered gradual, but constant, erosion both internationally and at home. It was a clear case in which the social context contributed to the shaping of both the problématique and the methodology of science. (Roger editor in Revue de synthèse 1979; in R. Persell 1999; Delage 1889, 1895, 1903; Giard 1889a,b, 1890, 1904; Lanessan 1901, 1914; Le Dantec 1897, 1899 [second edition in 1908], 1900, 1902). The intensiªcation of nationalist sentiment in France is relevant to this internalist narrative. So is the French position in the imperialistic global scramble for territories and the deep French neurosis since 1870 concerning Germany (Digeon 1959; Weber 1971). Many German texts published in the 1890s couched in a Darwinist idiom, advocated German hegemony and the right to build an empire of its own. After thirty years of intensive government-led industrialization, Germany in the last third of the nineteenth century had become the major economic power within Europe, while France found itself in that period quite isolated politically. Natu- rally, toward the end of the century one ªnds numerous articles in French papers drawing comparisons between the state of economy, education, the sciences, and especially of the birth rate in Germany and in France. (Donzelot 1979; Ronsin 1980; Tomlinson 1985; Bardet and Le Bras 1988,

and bio sociologists, and thus leaves one in the dark as to how had contemporaries understood Weismann’s position and the subtle changes in it.

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vol. III). Hardly surprising, then, that Weismann was often depicted as a German menace to French biological research. Another perspective involved the heated polemic over which discipline was best suited to analyze modern society. The underlying source of anxiety for the already established disciplines was the emergence of sociology, and the subsequent competition for academic resources. Economists, political economists, jurists, philosophers, psychologists and many prominent historians took part in this ongoing discussion in journals and public forums. One of the more far reaching results of the debate was that sociologists were compelled, willy-nilly, to delineate the boundaries of their discipline more sharply, mark the object and method of sociology from that of other disciplines, and constitute sociology as a discipline with its own unique epistemic assumptions and rhetoric. This led to a noticeable de- crease in the transfer from “non-social” disciplines, and to a noticeable change in the vocabulary of the legitimizing rhetoric. Parallel with the drawing of boundaries with biology the Durkheimians embarked on another form of bounding: the sociologization of the Human Sciences. This was carried out by recurring mappings of the social sciences in the l’Année sociologique. Furthermore, in order to distance sociology from its most closely related rival, philosophy, and at the same time divest philosophy of its authoritative position in the system of higher education, they annexed to sociology some of philosophy’s traditional topics- epistemology, ethics, morals, and then religion and education. The Durkheimians thus moved away from Lamarckian biology when, in any case, employing such transfer would have been but of little value in their struggle for legitimization and academization. However, just as their victory seemed close at hand, the overall changes in the cultural mood became menacing. By the 1910s there occurred a confrontation between the proponents of secularization in education, the rise of sociology under the banner of science and rationality, and the claims of the centrality of the individual, and those hostile to these assumptions. These dissenting voices drawn from the arts, philosophy, psychology, and philosophy of science, cast doubt on the unity of the individual, on the status of scientiªc knowledge, on the meaning of “objectivity” and on the role of rationality in culture and in social life (e.g. H. Massis and Alfred de Tarde (Agathon) 1911, 1913; Leguay 1910, chapter on the “Nouvelle Sorbonne”; Parodi 1920; P. Lassere 1924; Parodi 1925; H. Massis 1931; L. Herr 1932; H. Bourgin 1938. Also: Andler 1932; Hughes 1959; Shattuck 1968; Stock 1971; Clark 1973; Lukes 1973; Zeldin 1979; 1980; Lachance 1982; Weisz 1982; Lepenies 1988; G. Motzkin 1990; Rioux 1991; Ringer 1992; Ross 1994; Mucchielli 1998).

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After having been generally recognized as “French Sociology,” the Durkheimians strove to establish themselves in the universities. Their initial success spawned the malice of right wing Catholic intellectuals. They were depicted as the epitome of the modern rationalist spirit of the Re- public, the symbolic rulers of the new reformed Sorbonne. Contempo- raries perceived higher educational reforms as a battle between literary and scientiªc-sociological worldviews. The New Sorbonne (with Durk- heim!) was pitted against the Collège de France (with Tarde and Henri Bergson). The opposition to this reform came from several quarters: a. Traditional Catholics who objected that theology had been abol- ished; b. Members of the upper classes who feared the perceived leftist tendency of teachers and students; c. Humanists who resented the perceived victory of the scientiªc spirit and the banishment of intellectual brilliance, attributed to Lavisse, Lanson and Durkheim; d. New nationalists who viewed reforms as the German triumph over the “Latin Spirit”—like Charles Péguy, who regarded sociology as expressing “the spirit of the age”; e. Members of the “L’Action Française” who became very active at the turn of the century, and for whom “reason” was a superªcial phenomenon and “man” essentially an emotional being. L’Action Française and other nationalist groups posthumously co-opted the ªgures of Renan and Taine to the right-wing pantheon of traditional French culture and depicted sociology as the embodiment of a democrati- zation process that threatened true France (Geiger 1977). Sociology was presented as the principal discipline of the new Republican university system, and of secularized educational reforms, and it was further maligned as having achieved its position only due to its members’ in- volvement in Dreyfusard politics. These attitudes permeated all cultural discourse, not just the political one (Massis 1911, 1913; Barrès and Maurass [1888–1923] 1970; Barrès 1897; Curtis 1958; Clark 1973, 1979; Lukes 1973; Sternhel 1972, 1978; Leppenies 1988; Thom in Bhabha 1990).

5. Conclusion Durkheim employed a social rhetoric that combined contemporary social ideas with models and metaphors taken from biology or physics, and from medicine. In addition he employed statistical methods of research in a way extraordinary even for his time. Most conspicuously he used this rhetoric

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to acquire general-cultural legitimization for the newly founded discipline. Durkheimian sociology in its ªrst stage offered a science of society as a foundation for a new morality. Its projected image of science was one of the main sources of power of the new discipline. The drive to become scientiªc deªned the modalities according to which the new discipline drew its boundaries and became established. This drive also shaped the overall strategies and particular means used to gain cultural and academic acknowledgment and legitimization. Durkheim’s image of science became not only an inseparable component of his methodological position but also a constitutive element of the body of the new science. It played a major role in the fundamental strategy of constitution: positing the new inquiry as a science, outlining a genealogy for the new ªeld of studies; distin- guishing it from other ªelds of science, and pointing to its scientiªc methodology. It was presented as a shibboleth setting it apart from every other social or psychological inquiry of the period, thus turning it into a radical critique of other inquiries. At an early stage the adoption of sophisticated transposition from Lamarckism played an important role in the success of Durkheim and his group in carving for themselves a new space in the cultural ªeld. Later, the bounding of sociology as an autonomous discipline, distinct from any transfer from biology, was undertaken at the backdrop of the political and cultural context of the Dreyfus Affair. It was instrumental in making them seem as the most suitable for the role of “French Sociology,” because it presented them as scientiªc by the very act of bounding at a moment when the scientiªc status of the organicist-Darwinist social paradigm was tottering, and when the line which divided Lamarckian biology from republican politics in French biology was itself gradually being blurred. But this did not mean that social thought and sociological activities at large had thereby become biology-free. The outcome of this web of juxtaposed factors, was brought about in two stages: ªrst Lamarckism, translated into the moral ideological idiom in Durkheim’s sociology gained the upper hand over Worms’s Darwinian organicism, This came about when the political cultural circumstances and the internal developments in French biology were favorable.61 But almost immediately thereafter the pressures on the emerging discipline to distance itself from other disciplines that were culturally perceived as close to it, resulted in the disappearance of Lamarckian models from the forefront of Durkheim’s sociological works and programmatic declarations. Thereafter cultural-anthropological mate-

61. Soon there after, a successful attack helped the Durkheimians to gain the upper hand over racist anthropo-sociology—a confrontation I have not dealt with here.

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rials became predominant sources. Durkheim’s research turned more and more away from the problématique of modern society. At the height of the battle between Neo Lamarckians and Neo Darwinians in French biology Durkheim and his group were already moving somewhere else.

References a. Durkheim’s works referred to in the text Critical Reviews from 1885 to 1893: 1885. “Schaefºe, A. ‘Bau und Leben des sozialen Koerpoers: Erster Band.’” RP xix: 840–101. 1885. “Fouillée, A. ‘La propriété sociale et la démocratie.’” RP xix: 446–53. 1885. “Gumplowicz, Ludwig ‘Grundrisse der Soziologie.’” RP xx: 627–34. 1886. “Les Etudes de science sociale.” RP xxii: 61–80. 1886. “De Greef, Guillaume ‘Introduction à la sociologie.’” RP xxii: 658–63. 1887. “La Philosophie dans les universités allemandes.” RIE xiii: 313–38, 423–40. 1886. “Guyau, M. ‘L’irreligion de l’avenir.’” RP xxii: 658–663. 1887. “La science positive de la morale en Allemagne.” RP xxiv: 33–58, 113–142, 275–284. 1888. “Cours de science sociale: leçon d’ouverture.” RIE XV: 23–48. 1888. “Introduction de la sociologie de la famille.” Annales de la faculté des Lettres de Bordeaux: 257–281. 1887. “Suicide et natalité: Etude de statistique morale.” RP xxvi: 446–63. 1888. “Le programme économique de M. Schaefºe.” REP ii: 3–7. 1889. “Lutoslawski, W. ‘Erhaltung und Untergang der Staatsverfassung nach Plato, Aritstotle und Machiavelli.’” RP xxvi: 416–22. 1889. “Tönnies, F. ‘Geminschaft und Gegesellshcaft.’” RP XXVII: 416–422. 1893. “Les principes de 1789 et la sociologie.” RIE xix: 450–56. 1893. “Note sur la deªnition du socialisme.” RP xxxvi: 506–1. 1893. “Richard, G. ‘Essai sur l’origine de l’idée de droit.’” RP xxxv: 290–95.

Works from 1893 on (1893) 1930. De La Division du Travail Social. Paris: PUF. (1894–5) 1937. Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. Paris: PUF. 1895. “L’enseignement philosophique et l’agrégation de philosophie.” RP xxxix: 121–147. V. Karady, Textes III. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975.

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