Dominique Guillo Amy Jacobs

Biology-inspired sociology of the nineteenth century : a science of social "organization"

In: Revue franaise de sociologie. 2002, 43-1. pp. 123-155.

Abstract Biology-inspired sociology of the nineteenth century, at least that of major thinkers such as Saint-Simon, Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim, cannot be understood with reference to an opposition between "mechanical" and "organic" models. It was not based on the Romantic figure of the organism as countervalue to the machine, but rather centered around the notion of organization as it was debated in the discipline of natural history over the first half of the nineteenth century. In the sociological thought of this period, therefore the logic-based theme of classifying organized forms plays a crucial role.

Citer ce document / Cite this document : Guillo Dominique, Jacobs Amy. Biology-inspired sociology of the nineteenth century : a science of social "organization". In: Revue franaise de sociologie. 2002, 43-1. pp. 123-155. http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/rfsoc_0035-2969_2002_sup_43_1_5568

R. franc, social., 43, Supplement, 2002, 123-155 Dominique GUILLO

Biology-inspired Sociology of the Nineteenth Century : a Science of Social "Organization" (*)

Abstract Biology-inspired sociology of the nineteenth century, at least that of major thinkers such as Saint-Simon, Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim, cannot be understood with reference to an opposition between "mechanical" and "organic" models. It was not based on the Romantic figure of the organism as countervalue to the machine, but rather centered around the notion of organization as it was debated in the discipline of natural history over the first half of the nineteenth century. In the sociological thought of this period, therefore the logic-based theme of classifying organized forms plays a crucial role. The originality of the thinkers who, in the nineteenth century, set out to found a science of the social based on biology hardly lies in the correspon dences they established in their thinking between the realities studied by the two sciences. As far back as we can go in the histories of philosophy, litera ture, and popular representations, there is no period for which we cannot find some way or another of relating the two intuitions represented by what, in the nineteenth century, were called, respectively, the "organized body" and "soci ety". From Plato to Hobbes, Aristotle to Comte, Aesop or Saint Paul to Spencer, the metaphor of the organism figures as a commonplace in represen tations of society. There is, however, something pointless in this remark, as in the commonly accepted idea it invalidates: the abundance and success of such comparisons derive precisely from the vagueness of the intuitions, their poorly delimited contours. Depending on the way they are expressed, the play of correspondences, images, associations, and oppositions by which their re spective meanings mutually clarify each other, and despite surface similarities in vocabulary, these intuitions reflect highly diverse representations. In sum, (1) This article is a fully overhauled version of a chapter of my thesis, entitled Les sources et le sens des sciences humaines d'inspiration biologiques au XIXe sicle (doctoral thesis completed at the Universit de Paris IV, 1998). I would like here to thank the editorial board of the Revue Franaise de Sociologie, and Ph. Besnard, R. Boudon, F. Chazel, M. Cherkaoui, C. Debru, and F. Grele for their critical remarks and suggestions. I would also like to thank the Shadyc for its financial assistance for the English version. The content of the article is, of course, my sole responsibility, 123

Revue franaise de sociologie the cognitive spring of comparing society to a biological organism was not discovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and this will in all lik elihood become clear if we undertake to explore that comparison with more "scientific rigor" than has been applied in the past. Indeed, respect for facts and the sovereignty we grant to observation should lead us to abandon, rather than deepen, comparison between two entities so unlike each other in their perceptible properties as the organism and society. In reality, the change that occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth cen tury concerned the nature of the relation to be established between the body and society. What needs to be grasped here are the original ways in which thinkers of that time brought together the intuitions referred to by those two terms and enabled them to communicate with each other. In an attempt to un derstand the power of the metaphor, a widespread current reading has emphas ized the spectacular progress in life sciences that began in the late nineteenth century: biology's accession to the dignity of a science is understood to have moved a part of the intellectual world to adopt and use the "organic model", in opposition to the "mechanical" one, for describing and explaining human phenomena. In this reading, nineteenth-century biology-inspired sociology was led, by nature, to present human groups as totalities into which the indi viduality of the parts was for all intents and purposes melted. There is then understood to be a deep split between these theories, close in fundamental inspiration to German Romanticism, and models that attribute a major place to the individual in explanations of social facts, and that readily make use of "mechanism" analogies. I would like to show here that this interpretation is both confused and erro neous; confused because it continues to blur the issue by implicitly taking for granted the antithesis between machine and organism without considering nor even, it seems, perceiving the heavy implications of polarizing these two realities, erroneous because the central concept around which biologyinspired sociology developed in the nineteenth century was not the organism, if by that we mean the Romantic conception of the living being wherein such beings are opposed to artefacts of human industry. (2) The essential notion on which these discourses were based is in fact organization, as this notion was shaped by debates in natural history and embryonic development that began around 1795, when Cuvier managed to convince his fellow naturalists to make that notion the backbone of zoological taxonomy. As soon as we contemporary observers have freed ourselves of the categor ies that have spontaneously organized our understanding of the past, we are able to see in the thinking of Saint-Simon, Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, and even late nineteenth-century representatives of the organicist approach, all the weight of natural history, and the role played in the development of the science of society by the problem of classifying organized forms. Though in part a vague notion, closely associated with logical thinking on taxonomy and (2) This conception of the living body, which today may seem entirely obvious, is very 124 close to and was probably inherited from German Naturphilosophie.

Dominique Guillo charged with the various meanings that eminent naturalists such as Cuvier, Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Blainville, and Milne-Edwards gave it, or ganization, by which will be meant here (until further specified) what we have when the parts of a whole work to adjust harmoniously to each other, constitutes the pivotal concept of these sociologists' shared understanding of the world. With this in mind we can perceive the contours of a unified intel lectual space. Above and beyond the solid line that we are in the habit of drawing between, say, Spencer's "individualism" and Durkheim's "holism", this thinking is based on a representation of successive levels of the phenomen al world, of which social facts are the most complex level. In sum, biologyinspired sociology of the nineteenth century developed in a context of what I propose to call here the generalized logic of organization. This becomes per fectly clear if we consider the ways these thinkers proposed to classify the sciences. Critical scrutiny of a traditional typology of sociological theories: "mechanical" vs "organic" models Many contemporary syntheses that aim to make the case for "organicist" sociology oppose it to a "mechanistic" understanding whose preferred analogon is understood to be the machine and whose fundamental explanatory principle is interaction between individuals conceived on the model of physi cal-chemical interactions. In one of the most famous works on this theme, W. Stark (1962) distinguished three ways of modeling society and presented "normative", "positive", "secondary", and "extreme" versions for each: first, the model of society as "organism", which affirms the unity of human comm unities; second, the representation of society as "mechanism", which em phasizes multiplicity; and third, the model of society as "process", which combines unity and multiplicity and corresponds to culturalist theories of hu man groups. This antithesis has also been mobilized in monographic studies of au thors, (3) and served as a classifying criterion in many introductory social sc ience texts. In his Introduction la sociologie gnrale, for example G. Rocher (1968, pp. 150-154) writes that "material" models, in the sense used by Rosenblueth and Weiner, come down to "two main types: mechanical and

(3) This is the case, for example, of a recent analysis presented in a book on Spencer of the relation between biology and sociology: "The integration of the theory of natural selection into Spencerian biological principles goes together with a systematic concern, explicitly stressed by Spencer himself, to make biological phenomena explicable by mechanics [...] It is

important to underline this point because Spencer is often thought of as one of the most extremist, systematic representatives of the organicist vision of society." (Becquemont and Muchielli, 1998, p. 153). Clearly for these authors the "organicist vision" of society constitutes a network of representations opposed to that of the mechanistic conception. 125

Revue franaise de sociologie organic models". (4) In his view, these models enable us to move from the simple to the complex, in that they "propose concrete and even tangible real ity as the starting point for developing more abstract thinking" {ibid., p. 151); and, he is quick to add, if these models must be used with caution, this is be cause they can be nothing more than "a mere comparison between two reali tiesthat will always be different and unlike each other" {ibid., p. 154; my italics). In the history of sociological theory, these notions are thus often conceived more or less as categories with defined or definable content. Because they re fer to two realities -the living body and the machine- two tangible entities, we are told, with distinct if not opposed properties, they can be given objec tive meaning. They are subject to rational debate and may serve as criteria for a typology of doctrines. This enables them to be used as terms which may, be cause of the intuitively obvious point they are understood to refer to, enable us to have real knowledge of a given author, to clarify his doctrine, without, it seems, the terms themselves needing to be precisely defined. Their duality and content, we are told, refer to facts, and enable us to order sociological the ories into two broad categories, which can in turn be subdivided to produce a variety of more specific versions. The insufficiency of this typology: what of "organic machines"? Certain indices, however, give us a glimpse of the holes in this grid for ana lyzing theories. First, most of the founding fathers of sociology maintained a clear critical distance from the scientific avatars of German Romanticism, the typical source of conceptions of organism as the antithesis of the machine. In deed, Saint-Simon, Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, and a good number of the late nineteenth-century "organicists" never put themselves under the theoretical patronage of Naturphilosophie. Quite the opposite, these thinkers were visibly wary of this German current of thought, because it ultimately based its expla nations on mysterious metaphysical entities -the "vital force" in biology, the Volkgeist or Sozialpsyche in sociology- that had absolutely no positive value and that linked up with prescientific belief in "final ends". That is mobilized such explanatory entities, according to Comte, indicated the metaphysical state of German philosophy and science. (5) Spencer too proceeded to analyze this type of explanation critically: it denied the morphological, material, and genealogical continuity between natural beings whether living or not, and thus constituted a kind of vestige of fetishism. (6) For his part, Durkheim defended (4) For Rocher, the mechanical model is based on a principle that is attractive because of its simplicity, that of efficient causality, which enlightened minds from the time of the Renaissance are understood to have opposed to "the principle of ends or aims that had long prevailed" before then (1968, p. 152). Organic models, in his 126 conception, were mobilized to "illustrate the interdependence, complementarity, and solidarity among members of society" (ibid., p. 154). (5) On this point see in particular Comte (1975, 40th lesson, vol. 1, pp. 664-746). (6) See, for example, Spencer (1898, pp. 15-37).

Dominique Guillo himself vehemently against any attempt to interpret his conception of social unity and the conscience collective as a continuation of German theories of society as an organic whole. (7) Second, the model of the machine did not, in fact, play the role of theoreti cal antithesis to the organism in these sociologists' texts, any more than it played the role of thematic foil. There is not a single passage in Comte's Cours de philosophie positive where his sociological theory is constructed through systematic opposition of the properties of organisms, whether indi vidual or social, and those of machines or inert bodies. The same is true of Spencer, who, quite the contrary, insisted in all his works on the ultimate, strict, and exclusive dependence on the laws of mechanics for phenomena of all types, including the most complex, such as social phenomena. (8) Above all, what are we to do with the model of the "organized machine" that Saint-Simon used in his theorizing about society? This term was not the pro duct of imprecise thought or expression. It represents a profound theoretical perspective and approach that may be fully seen in a powerful text in which the object of physiology, whether it is concerned with the body or society, is described by means of analogies with the machine: "Physiology, therefore, is the science not only of individual life, but of life in general, of which individ ual lives are only the gears. In every machine, the perfection of the result de pends on maintaining the primal harmony established between all the springs of which it is composed; each of them must necessarily provide its contingent of action and reaction; when perturbing causes detrimentally increase the ac tivity of some to the expense of the others, disorder promptly erupts." (9) (7) See Durkheim (1975c, vol. 1, p. 403): "Nothing could be more inaccurate than to attribute to Schaffle the conception that M. Deploige calls social realism. It came to me directly from Comte, Spencer, and M. Espinas, whom I knew long before reading Schaffle. It is true that M. Deploige suggests that if the term is to be found in M. Espinas's writings, this is because he was 'highly informed about German sociological literature'. [However,] it is certain that he was not familiar with Schaffle when he wrote his Socits animales.'1'' Durkheim responded to Deploige on this theme in 1911 in even more precise terms that leave no room for doubt about his mistrust of the conception of the organism developed in Germany: "Comte's work has had a profound effect on me, quite different from the flabby, indecisive thinking of Schmoller and above all Wagner. Moreover, Comte's influence was preceded by that of neocriticism: it was from Renouvier that I received the axiom that a whole is not equal to the sum of its parts." (ibid., vol. 1, p. 405). It is tempting to see this defense as denial, the deep motive of which was Durkheim's will to free himself from any suspicion of allegiance to Germany at a time when such an attitude could have offended against national patriotic sentiment. Still, as we shall see from what follows, there were, as Durkheim himself affirmed, profound reasons, rather than unmentionable motives, for taking his distance from this component of German philosophy. (8) The mechanics to which Spencer refers corresponds fairly exactly to what is today called classical mechanics. It is based on the principle of "persistence of force" which Spencer discovered in 1858 in William Groves' The Correlation of Physical Forces (see Spencer, 1987, p. 264). Moreover, in this passage Spencer stresses his concern to bring complex phenomena under the laws of physics: "When I wrote The Principles of Psychology three years ago, proposing to interpret nerve-related phenomena as the result of firings along the lines of least resistance, I was already showing my tendency to explain complex phenomena in terms of the latest physical principles." (9) Saint-Simon (1875-1876, pp. 177 and p. 180; my italics), quoted in Schlanger (1995, p. 58). 127

Revue franaise de sociologie For Saint-Simon, the machine analogy, a setup composed of "gears" all working together, made it possible to understand what tied the individual body to the collective of which it was a part. In his eyes, there was no contra diction between the constitutive categories of living beings and those of the mechanism. Expressing social relations in terms of concepts borrowed from the life sciences did not mean abandoning reference to the machine or me chanical physics, and even less developing a new science in opposition to them. As strange as this may seem two centuries later, as violently as it con travenes the categories by means of which we are used to grasping doctrines or reality, there was nothing contradictory or paradoxical for Saint-Simon in affirming that mechanistic functioning was part of physiology. Mechanism, organicism, machine and living being in the traditional typology: confusing concepts with reality If we but attempt to get beyond the usual categories, which cloud from view the exact meaning that notions were invested in the past, we see that the current way of presenting "organicist" theories is based on two implicit, ex tremely fragile postulates. First, such a reading presupposes that the notions of "mechanism" and "or ganism", or "organicism", were well defined and had invariable meaning through history because they refer to two empirically identifiable realities. (10) Indeed, these notions, as their etymology seems to make obvious, are taken as the concepts by means of which, philosophers, biologists, and sociologists a t empted to express the respective properties of empirical machines and living bodies. But this perspective implies fundamental unawareness of the great distance separating the concrete objects in question here, and the very special nature of these concepts. The "mechanism" as it appeared in the course of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical thinking (of which it is em blematic) was a notion through which thinkers worked not to describe as exhaustively as possible a certain category of objects -the machine- but rather to make the machine itself a model of the principle governing all things. They did this by valorizing certain of the machine's properties. We see that the notion has a field of reference that extends far beyond the sphere commonly called "machines"; in fact, in the eyes of these thinkers, as we know, the living body ought to be conceived as a mechanical arrangement or system. Because the way in which the notions of "mechanism" and "organism" are generally treated involves exploring the meaning of normative concepts rather than describing empirical objects, it is hardly astonishing to see that the refer ence points and content of these notions have shifted perceptibly through his tory. The use we make of them today tends to make us forget their original etymological proximity. For a good long time, the organ was the instrument, (10) This is, of course, what Rocher stresses in the passages quoted above. 128

Dominique Guillo the piece, that was part of or served to construct a machine. We can discern a faint echo of this meaning in the word "organist", which, following old usage, designated the person who operated a particular machine, the organ. In that lexical context, the meaning of the distinction between "mechanical" and "or ganic", the intellectual problems raised and referred to by that distinction, and the lines of argument it made possible are quite remote from those we associ ate with it today. "Mecanism " and "organism "; a pair of concepts whose content has regularly shifted over history As J. Schlanger has shown, we have much to learn in this respect from the analysis of the meaning of these notions proffered by G. E. Stahl, a major f igure in the renewal of "vitalism" theories in medicine at the beginning of the eighteenth century. (11> For Stahl, mechanism and organism designated two types of material arrangements that differed in terms of the causes governing their configuration. A pure mechanism was anything that exhibited a tangle of causes aimed at no visible result and producing only "fortuitous cases". (12) A free-flowing river whose banks and course were modified only by the capri cious fluctuations of the low-water level, weather, and the relief of the land; wild terrain bearing no imprint of the hand of man, shaped by the action of multiple "occasional causes"; heaths, forests, inaccessible islands, possibly not without pleasant features but shaped by the chance of unique natural ac tions as they affected these wild landscapes -these in Stahl's eyes were so many typical examples of "mechanisms" (Schlanger, 1995, p. 50). Conv ersely, a river took on an "organic character" when it was channeled, made to flow into pools, regulated by locks, lined with water mills aimed to make use of the river's energy; in other words, when "social, arbitrary ends" modif iedit, ends that could be read in the ordered plan of its new configuration (Stahl, pp. 259-348; cited in Schlanger, ibid., p. 50). Human industry gave the landscape an "organic" character, whereas nature left to its own devices, in all the chance contacts between multiple "occasional causes" (Stahl, cited in Roger, 1993, "organism" was p. 428), any purposeful was a figure material of the production "mechanism". and For the "mechanism" Stahl, in sum, any the chance arrangement whose existence and nature owed nothing to ends pur sued by an external agent. The organ is here the tool, the instrument; that is, the object whose configuration is in harmony with a specific end; it is of course a mechanism, but a very special one given that some intention -the en gineer's or the laborer's- has determined its architecture and movement in view to a specific result. For Stahl, therefore, a watch and a clock that func tioned properly were "organisms" -proportioned to serve an end- whereas when broken they fell back into the state of "mechanism". As Schlanger un derlines, "the organism [for Stahl] is the fundamental tie by virtue of which (11) See Schlanger (1995, p. 50, and more generally, pp. 48-60). On Stahl see also Roger (1993, pp. 427-431). (12) Stahl (1859) quoted in Roger (1993, p. 428). 129

Revue franaise de sociologie the body becomes the instrument -etymologically, the organ- of the soul. And this tie, a crucial mystery of the mechanism in classical philosophy, is a har monic one" (Schlanger, 1995, p. 56). We see that the features attributed to the organism in the eighteenth cen tury -notions of technological mastery; an external, productive agent; the sta tus of artificial creature- contrast sharply with those we customarily, intuitively associate with the word. Spontaneity, authentic naturalness free of any human intervention, the burgeoning of life in virgin territories -all this was implied by the term mechanism, with the following disorienting conse quence: in eighteenth-century thought, the mechanism/organism opposition did not correspond to any distinction between machines and real, living be ings. When an instrument or mechanism functioned, it belonged to the same order of things as the animal body. This conception of things is of course not due to any intellectual negligence, ignorance, or misunderstanding. It didn't take German philosophy for thinkers to be able to realize that the living being reproduced its parts, and itself in the form of offspring, whereas the clock pre supposed the clock-maker. It was just that, since in eighteenth-century thought the way of conceptualizing material arrangements of all orders exist ing in nature was based on the idea of a harmonious correspondence between structure and end, there was no reason to attribute any eminent value to the properties by which real machines differed from real living bodies. There were, of course, differences between mechanisms and organisms, but the two were not subsumed in distinct, ontological orders. (13) (13) This explains how Cuvier, who helped make physiology autonomous in relation to anatomy by describing the organized body as a functional throughout machines" system, his could work, evoke or, occasionally, "animal compare the living body to a clock. Though the French biologist broke with a conception of the mechanism that involved considering the body a sum of pieces whose functions could be deduced, separately, from their form, he made use of the idea of the harmonious working together of the parts of a whole; in other words, a model that could in turn work with the figure of the machine. The same is true of Claude Bernard, despite all that distinguishes his thinking from that of classical biology. If it is true that the social model; i.e., the analogy with society, enabled him to invalidate the procedure by which function was determined through anatomical deduction; i.e., a form of theoretical valorization of technological arrangements, it did not prohibit comparison with the machine, which seems to have retained for the French physiologist all its heuristic power: "The living organism is nothing other than an admirable machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set into action with the help of 130 the most complex, delicate mechanisms. There are no forces that work in opposition or struggle against each other ; in nature there can only be arrangement and disarrangement, harmony and disharmony." (Bernard, 1984, p. 104). It is true that with Bernard, as for Cuvier, the idea of a spontaneously harmonic tie between the form of the organ- instrument and its aim have disappeared. But the language of harmony still served to effect a fundamental partition of the diverses types of material arrangements. It simply shifted focus becoming restricted to discussion of the ties that unite parts and their activities. And in this connection, the living being hardly differs from the machine, except perhaps in degree: both are the product of activities harmoniously adjusted to each other; the living body is simply "more complex", "more delicate", "more marvelous". Far from standing in opposition to the properties of technological arrangements, the living body is a nearly perfect form of those arrangements. As we see, nineteenth-century thought can hardly be understood in terms of any systematic opposition to the figure of the machine.

Dominique Guillo Moreover, this brief overview of the question brings to light the second im plicit postulate of the classifications mentioned above; it exposes, in intaglio as it were, the historical contingency of that postulate, suddenly making it seem less obvious. The notions of "mechanism" and "organism" as they ap pear in contemporary typologies that oppose them are implicitly assumed to express the properties of two contradictory entities, in the Aristotelian sense of that word. This presupposes that real machines and real living bodies are, in and of themselves, two opposed forms of Being, or that they are at least sharply contrasted -an idea without which there would be no reason to con struct a typology based on them. It is this highly intuitive "obvious fact" that is shaken by our review of eighteenth-century thought: machine and living body have not always been considered terms antithetical. Indeed, in contemporary typologies, the opposition of the two realities is postulated, rather than attained through inductive reasoning by systematic comparison. It works as a tacit "obvious fact" which must then deliver up its content to us. In such a context we never reason by drawing up the list of r esemblances and differences between the various types of machines and living bodies to discover, if possible, how they are distinct from each other. Rather we tend to engage in a back-and-forth play of antithetical valorizations, valo rizations that may take very different forms given, on the one hand, the plas ticity with which the two types of reality may be described in abstract terms, and, on the other, the vagueness of the intuition upon which the opposition is based. A polyp cut into segments survives this operation; this moves us to value the persistence of the living whole despite the material changes it has undergone, in contrast to the machine, which stops functioning if we remove one of its gears. Nonetheless, the example of death ensuing after organ abla tion could just as well have led us to valorize the exact opposite properties, properties that do not necessarily stand in opposition with those of a mac hine. (14) Here, thought has moved to describe selectively, in a pre-oriented way, a reality that is in itself quite malleable, and that description seems to substantiate the obvious fact which in fact implicitly shapes and guides it. What is convincing here is hardly the positive value of the differences under lined but rather how they correspond to an antithesis that has been accepted a priori, an antithesis that those differences seem to substantiate and ground in experience.

(14) On this point see Schlanger (1995, pp. 48-49). 131

Revue franaise de sociologie The instability of the criteria and distributions proposed by tenants of the typology It will come as no surprise that the criteria used and distributions proposed in the different attempts to classify thinkers by means of this typology vary greatly from one historian of philosophy to another. (15) Hobbes appears to many as a "mechanistic" theorist of society or the state: (16) did he not com pare man to a machine who, together with those like him, composes a system regulated by material stimuli? (17) And yet the Hobbesian Leviathan is a figure of the state that, as the name implies, is based on an analogy with the living body. The same is true of Kant, who is "mechanistic" for some because of his belief in Newtonian physics (l8) and his philosophy of political liberalism, and typically "organicist" for others because he sees the living body not only as the antithesis of the machine but as the only analogon of human society, or at least of a type of social organization that respects individual liberty. (19> How, then, should we classify Saint-Simon? His theme of social physiology leads us to see him as a representative of "organic" models; (20) yet for him man was "a watch within a clock within a pendulum". (21) And, the way Spencer is treated is the most instructive example of the ambiguity that seems consubstantial with contemporary use of this opposition. It is, of course, difficult not to see Spencerian evolutionism as emblematic of "organicism"; (22) the reference to the living body is so central and insistent in his work. But his concern to deny all real discontinuity between different levels of phenomena has led some commentators to classify him among "mechanistic" thinkers. (23> The case of Spencer is extremely interesting in that his constant reference to organic anal ogies is coupled with an exhalting of political liberty and a sociological the ory that systematically explains social facts in terms of individual

(15) As we have seen, Stark opposed organic "unity" to mechanical "multiplicity". For Rocher, the opposition seems not as strong: the mechanism is characterized by the fact that t follows the principle of efficient cause and rejects final is "organism" causes, basedwhereas on the the idea model of interdeof the pendent parts. Others see here the opposition between holism and individualism; still others that between realism and nominalism. (16) This is the conclusion reached by both Wayper (1965, p. 65) and Rocher (1968, p. 152). (17) See the first chapters of Leviathan. The conclusion given above is that of Macpherson (1962), who describes Hobbes' natural man as an "automaton" made up of an "incorporated system that makes him change movements in response to stimuli from the various materials 132

he uses, and also in response to present or even foreseeable shocks upon him from other materials" (p. 31). This reading has undoubtedly fueled "mechanistic" interprtai tions of Hobbes. p. 152). (18) See, for example, Rocher (1968, (19) See Kant (1985, pp. 1165-1167). (20) Valade (1996, p. 232), for example, puts him in this category. (21) Saint-Simon (1859, vol. 1, p. 175); quoted in Schlanger (1995, p. 52). Gurvitch, for example, refuses to link Saint-Simon's sociological model to that of the biological individual, see Saint-Simon (1965, intro.). (22) See Rocher (1968, p. 153); Valade (1996, p. 232); and Stark (1962). (23) See, for example, Becquemont and Muchielli (1998, pp. 152-155).

Dominique Guillo psychological characteristics. (24) Indeed, in the vision reflected in contempor ary typologies, Spencer's references to the machine and celestial mechanics are often taken as a means of demonstrating the naturalness of individual lib erty, (25) in contrast to the oppressive force that may be found in the "organic" collectivity. Clearly, there is no reality -either machine or organism- that can not serve as analogical support for a valorization of liberty or individualist methodology, regardless of what meanings are given to those terms. It is therefore vain to seek realities that, in substance, in and of themselves, imply or reveal any kind of ideological allegiance or fixed theoretical approach. The opposition promulgated by such typologies, then, works to obscure the history of thought rather than illuminate it. It carries within it a set of surface paradoxes and false difficulties which fade away as soon as we assume that the opposition is not, in fact, an obvious one. We see that the difficulty in which commentators find themselves when faced with the many discourses on society that refer to both the machine and the living body is really just the re sult of an implicit belief that the mechanical/organic antithesis is in the nature of things. (26> It would therefore be profoundly erroneous to see nine teenth-century biology-inspired sociology as an application to social phenome na of the "organism" concept, understood as the antithesis of the machine, or more generally, as a reality that in its essence is not susceptible to the laws of mechanics. To grasp the meaning of what the human sciences borrowed from the life sciences, therefore, we must refocus the investigation on the closely related etymological notion of organization', that is -and this will be clarified further on- what we have when the parts of a whole work to adjust harmoni ously to each other. A major component of standard biological vocabulary -particularly natural history and embryology- "organization" was at the heart of nineteenth-century theoretical debates around how to classify living beings. The points of view mobilized in these debates were of crucial importance, as I hope to show, in constituting a science of man and society.

(24) This is attested to by a passage from his Introduction to Social Science (1875): "Given men who all possess certain properties, an aggregate of such men will possess properties derived from those of the individuals, and these may be studied by a science [social science]." (25) This comes through in Stark's reading of Rousseau. In effect, he classifies Rousseau on the "mechanism" side, along with Pareto and Simmel. (26) This is not to say, however, that the content of this opposition is arbitrary. Even though the distribution of criteria and authors varies, defined problems and stereotypical arguments are mobilized, though rather confusedly. As Schlanger has underlined (1995,

pp. 48-49), "it is not by chance or insufficiency that so many judgments contradict each other even as they directly converge [...] The relation between the two terms is polyvalent; this is what makes for its richness, and yet the meaning of that relation comes from its limits [...] [Indeed,] it is almost irrelevant that the feature by means of which one seeks to distinguish the organism from the machine is attributed alternatively to one or the other term of that relation." What matters is that the different exercises in reasoning take place "within the same argumentative space", through which is actualized, to the delight of contemporary observers, the logical question of the relation between the whole and its parts, 133

Revue franaise de sociologie The notion of organization in the life sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries The break that followed upon Cuvier's studies In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term organization as used in the life sciences (and also in ordinary language) designated the configuration of living bodies. However, though this word was habitually used, it did not become a central concept of biology until Cuvier, continuing Jussieu's work on botanical taxonomy procedures, made it the main principle for zoological classification. (27) At the risk of simplifying a rich and complex history, we can say that up through the eighteenth century most naturalists understood the diversity of living forms as a tight network of resemblances. For many of them, the great "masses" of living beings that the expert eye of the naturalist distinguished from each other were linked through multiple, diverging connections. For Buffon, for example, it was manifest that the "order of quadrupeds" "moved up" through one of its branches to "birds" by means of a gradated series of nuances such as "flying foxes and bats"; extended through another branch via "anteaters and pangolins" to "reptiles", and by yet another through "armadil los" toward "crustaceans", while at another point, through apes, it was raised all the way to man. (28) The image of a regularly composed network of "multi ple affinities" attested to by so many "nuances" and "transitions"; a continous sheet of gradations that realized all the combinations of the infinity of forms that the parts or organs of living beings might take, was related to and rein forced by the authoritative Christian doctrine according to which God trans mitted into nature all the possibilities of Being. (29) The combinatorics of all "traits" would therefore make it possible, according to the naturalists, to draw up the complete table of all possible living beings, thus reproducing the Order that Nature seemed to have put into its realizations; a table in which all ob served animal and vegetal beings would come and order themselves next to each other. And if the naturalist perceived certain breaks between species, this was because the beings that might fill the empty spaces in the table had not yet been discovered or were already extinct. (27) On all these points, see Foucault (1966, pp. 238-245 and 275-292), and above all Daudin's remarkable study (1983), to which Foucault's interpretation owes a great deal. See also Guillo (1998, Part 1). (28) Buffon, Histoire naturelle ties oiseaux (vol. 1, pp. 394-396) discussed in Daudin (1983, p. 169). (29) Religious doctrine alone cannot explain the naturalists' support for the representations they adopted. If at that time they 134 were loath to accept the idea of a hierarchical, unilinear progression up to man (another belief that conformed to Christian theology and which could be found in Leibniz's work or Charles Bonnet's "ladder of beings") this was because these "metaphysical" allegations hardly seemed compatible with the multiple divergent "transitions" available for observation. The naturalists' beliefs thus seem to have been truly independent of both religion and philosophy,

Dominique Guillo Cuvier's first works in the 1790s would upset these taxonomie principles. As early as his first studies, the French naturalist managed to convince his colleagues at the Musum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris to classify animals by their organization. The configuration of living bodies, he explained (1795, p. 4), obeyed principles that rendered certain combinations of organs neces sary-"all animals possessing a heart have branchiae; those without hearts have trachaie" whereas other combinations were prohibited or useless. In this intellectual framework, it was no longer possible to think of the diversity of living forms as the actualization of an exhaustive combinatorics resulting in a perfectly continuous table; certain combinations were impossible chi mera. Above all, representations of life itself shifted; from then on it was be cause the configuration of the body followed a principle of organization that it was meaningful to classify living beings. In sum, starting with Cuvier, any or ganized biological form became classifiable. The rationalist power of the notion of "organization": the unity of the semantic field covered Even though, through the recognition accorded Cuvier's work, some natur alists expressed their support of the empirical value of classification as op posed to the logical coherence of theory, of a flexible method rather than a "body" of imperious principles, the natural history of living beings came more and more to seem, as new generations of researchers joined the Museum, like a science of organization and the avatars of such organization. (30) The matter was sufficiently complex and unexplored to have elicited a va riety of interpretations. To grasp the nature and causes of "organization"^ ex tension above and beyond the life sciences, it is necessary to sketch the contours of the new meaning the notion received and the inquiring associated with it. All else being equal, a notion is more likely to become central when it is vague enough to be both accepted and in a position to loosely regulate re search and ordinary knowledge, and sufficiently precise to reduce tensions among concepts or correspond to what is likely to be a widely shared intu ition. It is not by looking at the different ways naturalists defined organization or by seeking the common denominators of those definitions that we will be able to put our finger on the notion's rationalist power. On the contrary, there is a good chance that by reducing it to a few unanimously shared propositions, we will impoverish its meaning and scope considerably, even supposing such propositions exist. We could perhaps define organization as "the way in which parts are composed", but such a definition fails to restore the notion's new status of principle and does not enable us to grasp the reasons for the suc cess it began to enjoy with Cuvier's work, given that that definition was also valid in the eighteenth century. We need rather to approach the notion as a hub of possible meanings, to grasp its unity not so much through some pre(30) On these points see Daudin (1983b), and the first part of Guillo (1998). 135

Revue franaise de sociologie cise, perfectly delimited semantic content as within the valorizations that a c ompanied it and the ways in which it polarized the life sciences. Through the tensions such notions carry within them, they open up a large space for theo retical positioning, making possible gradations of attitudes and approaches all along the lines of opposition they weave within the theoretical field. They shift the center of gravity of expert inquiry, as it were, bringing new questions to the surface, drawing attention to empirical objects that had been neglected until then, and facilitating new ways of formulating old problems, giving new meanings to notions from the past. The value and success of such notions lies less in their conceptual content or the significance of their empirical referents than in their capacity to organize a meaning-charged space where the ques tions asked and the approaches taken are different, if not opposed; a space in which the notions themselves always appear as the focal point. What is to be restored, then, are the lines of polarization within the notions themselves, the ambivalences they encompass, the difficulties they circumvent and what they enable us to conceive conjointly, and finally the difficulties of which they are the sign, for such notions are more often than not words used to name not things but problems. Morphology and physiology To raise organization to the rank of principle of the living body is to postul ate that that body is a material arrangement the configuration of which is dic tated by a law. With this established, several approaches are possible. Primacy may first of all be granted to form: the body and its components mean to the extent that they are actualizations of a morphological model. As a primitive inflection of being, form is the initial theme on which nature modul atesthe body's constitution. Form is the principle of the production of bodi es; it is repeated in each one. The meaning of a form is not at all to be grasped or explained through determinations external to it; rather it is the form itself, in its unicity and sovereignty, that is the source and norm for the meaning of how parts are composed. This is, of course, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire's model (1830), based on the idea of "unity of level of composit ion" for all animals. But it is also possible to conceive of the way organs are organized as the result of a sum of external demands on living bodies. Here form is no longer a norm; rather it obeys the principle of which it is the material result. These de mands may consist in a sum of architectural constraints imposed by nature on the materials with which animal and vegetal creatures are constructed -in that case we come back by another route to a type or representation that grants pr imacy to morphology. But this option can lead above all to a theory in which the organized body is seen as an arrangement aimed to accomplish an end: one or several activities, for example. Here the organic disposition reflects the set of constraints affecting the functioning of a machine; in other words, a mat erial arrangement aimed at executing a number of purposeful movements. In 136

Dominique Guillo such an approach, a logic tie is systematically established between an activity and the mechanism that carries out that activity. To speak of organization is also to relate the set of organs composing the living body to a sum of func tions or faculties; it is to speak of the living body as an arrangement oriented toward the accomplishing of certain tasks; in sum, it is to establish a perfect correlation or correspondence between a certain morphology or anatomy and a certain physiology. If the entire set of parts composing the living body had not been taken into account, the tie uniting these two levels remained fairly loose. Specifically, this tie was not understood as necessary in the way it would become later. The faculties were, of course, related to specific organs, but the correspondence understood to exist between the two levels was not strong or systematic enough to enable naturalists to see a causal relationship between them, or even a central theoretical relation. In referring all at once to all the parts of body, the notion of organization ensured the synthetic integra tion of the "function" and "organ" levels. For Cuvier, but also for Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and Lamarck, organization designated a way in which parts were arranged so as to produce that extremely general faculty called life. The role and meaning assigned to the term worked to place the body in its wholeness and generality into direct logical relation with an activity. From that point fo rward it became possible, in a much stricter, more rigorous way than before, not only to read a vocation into the material arrangement of living bodies but also and above all to relate the various faculties to their organic seat as cause. And this tie was strengthened by reciprocal application. Organization could thus become the principle of both faculties and actions. In this context, two antagonistic points of view appeared. First, it was pos sible to give logical priority to the organ over the function. Indeed, this was how a significant number of early nineteenth-century naturalists saw it, parti cularly Lamarck, who remained attached to the traditional conception of phy siology as tightly subordinated to anatomy. For these naturalists, it was the mechanistic properties of the parts composing the organized body that made it possible to accomplish the acts by means of which the living being put itself in harmony with its environment. In this conception, mechanisms were added on to each other; there was no such thing as an autonomous physiological to tality. Even if the identity of the function was no longer strictly deduced from the form of the organ as it was in the eighteenth century, as illustrated by Blainville's approach, (31> at least in relation to the activities it made possible organization tended to have an analytic meaning. On the other hand, is was possible to see the configuration of the body as the actualization of a sum of physiological requirements. The table of functions was then logiquely autono mous in relation to organs; functions determined both form and arrangement. Here organization appeared as a constitutive principle of living beings that re-

generation" (31) Ducrotay Museum de naturalist, Blainville, puta forward "seconda conception of organization that gave predominance to morphology over physiology, while

-namely, when that acknowledging it came it was to the notbrainalwaystopossible deduce function from an examination of structure (see Blainville, 1845, vol. Ill, p. 327). 137

Revue franaise de sociologie fleeted the coordination and subordination constraints affecting the activities of their various parts; the predominant theme was the synthetic unity of life. Neither functions nor organs could be added to one another; the complexity of the body consisted not in a sum of mechanisms and faculties but rather in a subdivision into ever more specialized, defined, and interdependent parts. Even though the decisive step would not be taken until Darwin and Spencer, the autonomy that this conception attributed to functions opened up the possi bility of reversing the causal link between an organ's activity and its form. From that point on, form could be conceived as the effect of function, and this in turn permitted the development of the idea that living beings might pro gressively adapt to their environment. Through the new reference to a close correspondence between morphology and physiology, then, the notion of organization came to modify the inquiries and lines of opposition running through the life sciences. The idea of an or ganic anchoring of faculties or activities could from then on be raised to the rank of principle, while the focus of debate gradually shifted toward the ten sion created within the notion of organization itself by the fact that it brought together the two levels: should logical priority be given to structure or func tion? The question itself was extended into a sum of inquiries into the general causes of organization and specific types of organization. Here theoretical op tions (though taking highly diverse forms and varying degrees of emphasis) became polarized between 1) the idea that environment had a determinant role in the nature and production of organized bodies, and 2) the idea that organic arrangements were immutable and that the dispositions of which they were the substrata, were inflexible. In these positions we can already sense the many sensitive issues that would be raised when the object of study became the diversity of human types, particularly when the aim was to assign causes and prescribe remedies for those types among them that were considered pathological. Composite individuality The notion of organization encompasses another tension that makes it both fruitful and fundamentally ambivalent. Once again, the term seems to unite two antagonistic themes, though both are clearly relevant in the attempt to properly assess the phenomenon of life: the living being's individuality and its composition. The living being is an individual; it is a closed entity that au tonomously perpetuates its form and the internal movements that maintain it. In a way, it is the minimum of being; it cannot be divided without its propert ies being eliminated or altered: nature and the role of its organs are intelligi ble only when related to the whole formed by those organs. But the living being is also made up of parts. The organized body is composed of distinct bits, bits that differ from each other in form and activity; the body is the pro duct of their coexistence and their working together. In physiological terms, 138

Dominique Guillo the living being can be analyzed into last fractions, themselves organic and in dividual; (32) more exactly, these are bearers of individuality, as is attested by the borderline case of the polyp cut into segments. And in physical terms, the living being is nothing more than an assembly of chemical bodies brought to gether by the laws governing their "affinities". Synthetic unity or analytic multiplicity may each be valorized in turn. But to speak of organization as principle is to valorize the very tension between the two, by giving it a name that points to a reality where that tension seems actualized. The living being, given that it is organized, is then less what should be conceived on the basis of one or the other of these two categories of notions than on the model of their unity, and this in turn can shed light on the nature of things at the heart of other provinces of being. A vast field of appli cations opened up to the organism analogy and the game of cross-references to society, as is illustrated in a famous example from Kant's Critique of Judg ment (p. 1165). Organization thus designates the very principle of composite individuality or collective totality. By nature, such a schema is readily ex tended beyond the biological body, as well as to smaller entities; it can be ap plied gradually, to the point where it reaches, on one side, the most vast synthetic unity -the universe as an organized body encompassing the totality of being- and on the other, the ultimate analytic entity, that which cannot be partitioned. Given that the notions of whole and part are reversible; given that a being is always part of a totality at a higher level as well as a whole com posed of parts, the real takes the form of a set of successive, ever vaster, and ever more integrated levels. By the ontology it implies, the schema of organi zation thus furnishes a general model of rationality, which, by associating the principles of totality and composition, as Schlanger has shown, ensures the in tegration of knowledge and meaning. Individuality is never completely dis solved by the fact of being composite, nor by being integrated into a greater organized body. In this generalized logic of organization, the relations be tween the different levels are not quantitative, nor do they involve nesting; they are, immediately, relations of appropriateness and harmony. The succes sive levels of being are united by relations of correspondence, expression, in dication; that is, generally speaking, by relations of meaning: "Here are the great, irreplaceable advantages of the idea of the organism, in its most politi cal and social applications. Because, in the organism, presence and end are not distinct, it simultaneously offers knowledge and meaning. In one and the same overture, it makes possible both the scientific approach and contemplat ion of meaning. In the organism, intelligibility bears the watermark of des tiny." (Schlanger, 1995, p. 43).(33> (32) Here we can mention Buffon's "organic molecules" or the discussions in support of nineteenth-century cellular theory. On this last point, see Duchesneau (1987). (33) It will be noted that the type of word "organization" is enables it to symbolize these tensions while also making all sorts of meaning slippage possible in reasoning about it. Without a doubt, the success of the notion is due in part to the ambivalence or ambiguity of the word, able to cover a vast and varied field of reality and, possibly, to constitute the source of enthymematic reasoning, or what Pareto called "verbal proofs". Indeed, organization is one of those words that can just as well indicate a state -the fact of being organized- as a process 139

Revue franaise de sociologie Given this as the basis of the idea of organization, we readily understand why it was so seductive for the human sciences at a moment when the link be tween science and spirituality was beginning to come apart. In sum, through the debates in natural history engaged in the first half of the nineteenth cen tury, organization became a highly abstract notion, rich with various, fine, complex meanings that led thinkers into a field of inquiry capable of being ex ported far beyond the sphere of the living being, to constitute in and of itself a veritable ontology. It was also much discussed in embryology, at the heart of discussions often closely linked to taxonomy, as in the theories of Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire or Baer, which explored the dynamic meaning of the term. In ef fect, organization can be conceived not only as the principle of a state of matt er, but also as the principle of a process of complexification at work either in nature -there are gradations in the complexity of the organization of different living forms- or the individual, in the course of its embryonic develop ment. (34> More specifically, it was immediately, intimately associated, in these two fields of application, with a logic issue with which we do not spon taneously associate it today: classification. Whether it was a matter of disti nguishing the different stages of an organized body's embryonic development, listing and identifying the different forms of organization manifested in living bodies, or representing an organized universe made up of distinct levels and sublevels themselves organized and capable of being ranked from the simplest to the most complex, the notion of organization in the nineteenth century bore with it the question of taxonomie ordering. And this twofold content played a fundamental role in nineteenth-century biology-inspired sociology.

-the successive stages by which a being becomes organized. The notion may therefore be variously invested with static and dynamic meanings. The projecting in time of relations of logical succession, something that nineteenthcentury naturalists, anthropologists, and sociol ogists frequently did, is to be related in part to the double meaning of the word organization. The power and perhaps the origin of the analogy between organic functions and human labor, established by the notion of division of labor, derive from the perfectly symmetrical duality that characterizes the meaning of the word "division": it can describe both a society in which tasks are divided up and the process that led to such a state. The argument about state can thus serve as rhetorical support for a justification of the existence of process through history. By slightly displacing the meaning of the terms, we also see that the notion of organi zation can be used to describe both an action 140

and a product. It designates both a certain material object -in natural history, this was the "areolar tissue" that living bodies were made up of- and a force at work in nature, whether that force is internal or external to the living creature. Thus not only can the word designate, by turn, an sensate object, an activity, and more generally, a principle; but through these ambiguities it works to render indistinct the ideas of form, movement, and end. These ambiguities and ambivalences should surely be seen as a sum of advantages that"organization" give the word a rationalist power. In any case, is clearly endowed with a variety of possible meanings and a rhetorical force for greater than "organism". (34) On eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the development of organized forms, see Canguilhem, Lapassade, Piquemal, and Ulmann (1962).

Dominique Guillo The place of "organization" in nineteenth-century sociology A word invested in ordinary language with twofold meaning If the new meaning of the notion of organization, together with the rich sci entific issues surrounding it, were communicated immediately to the nascent social sciences as well as making their way into ordinary discourse on society, this was because, if we follow the Dictionnaire historique de la langue franaise, (35) the word had been used for a long time to designate modes of association within human collectives. To take an example from among theor ists of society, Saint-Simon often used it quite explicitly in this sense. Comte also used it, unambiguously and starting with his first studies, as is attested by his Plan des travaux scientifiques ncessaires pour rorganiser la socit, published in 1822. For these thinkers, the word did not exclusively pertain to biology. At the end of the eighteenth century, then, organization referred to two dif ferent things -the living body and the social group- not only from the per spective of their perceptible properties but also the abstract properties attributed to them; the theory within which, implicitly, they were described. In its application to social phenomena, the word could actually designate an association created ex nihilo from legal rules. Remarkably, the word is to be found several times in subtitles at the head of the "Projet de rglements" drawn up just after the French Revolution by Paris naturalists intending to overhaul the institution in which they worked. We see that the word whose bi ological meaning the scientists of the Museum would soon place at the core of their thinking, also referred quite naturally for them and their contemporaries to the idea of a human collective in which activities are adjusted to each other by a set of legal rules. At the end of the eighteenth century, it seems, the two meanings -biolo gical and social- had thus been attached equally strongly to the word, and neither of its two usages, in the minds of those who used it, seemed metaphori cal. The relation of one to the other was not that of literal to figurative meani ng. This suggests, without really being the cause, that the fact that it was the same word certainly facilitated if not elicited the bringing together of the two meanings, opening a new path, drawing a specific slope line for the age-old "organic" metaphors used in reference to social phenomena. At the very least we can affirm that the transfer of the concept did not necessitate importing a new word into the vocabulary used to describe social phenomena. The word already existed in ordinary language before the notion was explored, debated, enriched within natural history, and it already had a twofold meaning. It was therefore ready to serve as a channel for the rich resonances, images, and analogies that were to come; above all, it was ready to elicit the mutual inflec tions of meanings that it received in the two fields where it was applied, or to (35) See the entry "Organe" in Rey (1992). 141

Revue franaise de sociologie unify those meanings through research into the possible abstract properties shared by its two referents. Theory-of-society 's conceptual borrowings from the life sciences Here we must do justice to a tenacious commonplace. Though it is true that it was in natural history that the notion of organization acquired considerable relief and semantic richness and became a truly scientific category; and true that the first sociologists openly took inspiration from the theories, argu ments, and methods that naturalists brought into relation with that notion, it would be sacrificing to a naive legend to believe that through this transfer so cial phenomena became related in unequivocal, unmediated fashion to biolo gical reality; that sociology was a kind of copy of the real relations among bio logical phenomena as grasped with growing precision by the life sciences. It was rather through a word bearing twofold meaning that the two intuitions -or perhaps the two phenomenal spheres to which the word refers- were brought into dynamic relation with each other. This is true not only for ordinary language. The naturalists could have used such a word, one with two distinct referents in ordinary language, without the second meaning -the sociological one- intervening in the biological defini tion or the reasoned arguments which that word mobilized. We can note a few ambiguities, metaphors without real effect on the substance of thought. But as Henri Milne-Edwards' views attest (1851, pp. 35-38), based as they were on the notion of the division of labor and directly inspired by political economy, to describe the living body, naturalists occasionally made explicit use of the analogy with society; that analogy was at the very heart of their reasoning. And it was no incidental, peripheral metaphor. It was not simply a matter of the unconscious breadth or symbolic charge of scientific vocabulary (Limoge, 1994). Crucially, the analogy with society constituted one of the overtly inten tional hinges of their arguments. Of course, not all the different uses of the analogy were equally legitimate; a number of fallacious arguments proceeded out of what was clearly rhetorical use of the comparison, <36) whereas others were just as clearly fruitful. But what must be noted here is that through the place the naturalists assigned to certain notions, such as Milne-Edwards' idea of the "the physiological division of labor", not just a word but also a concept was imported into the life sciences -a concept which became, moreover, the object of substantial debate in the economic and social sciences. In this regard, Milne-Edwards was no isolated case. In the sharp debates around the question of the living being's individuality, the nature of analyti cally"last" biological components, and more particularly, the controversy that in the nineteenth century opposed partisans and opponents of cellular (36) On the conditions of epistemological validity of the organicist analogy, see, for example, Schlanger (1995, pp. 166-174). 142

Dominique Guillo theory, the analogical reference to society was a frequent rhetorical and theo retical resource. (37) In sum, even though the debates among the Museum naturalists that ensued after Cuvier's first studies constitute a decisive moment in the history of the notion of organization and the constellation of concepts gravitating around it; even though the life sciences were the place where that notion became a truly scientific, and heavily debated, category, "organization" had its own meaning for the social sphere and a privileged role of analogon quite symmetrical to those that historians of scientific thought much more readily attribute to it in the sphere of biology. recurring notion in nineteenth-century sociology Not only was organization invested, in common as in scientific language, with this twofold meaning; not only did it serve as a vector for analogies link ing one phenomenal field to the other, but nineteenth century theorists seek ingto give discourse on society the status of a positive science presented organization as the central notion of their doctrines, however these differed from each other in other ways. The biology-inspired model of social organi zation seems to have constituted the very heart of Saint-Simon's sociological thought, for whom society, as an organized composite, could and should be the object of a true physiological science: "Society is hardly a mere agglomer ation of living beings, [but] a truly organized machine, with all of the parts contributing in different ways to the functioning of the whole." (Saint-Simon, 1965; my italics). (38> Comte (1975, p. 55) made organization the criterion for determining the primary subdivision of the phenomenal world, dividing it into two main cate gories: "Contemplation of the entire set of natural phenomena at first leads us to divide them [...] into two broad main categories, the first comprised of all phenomena that are rough bodies, the second all those that are organized bodi es. However one explains the differences between these two sorts of beings, it is certain that all phenomena that take place in rough bodies, whether me chanical or chemical, may be observed in living bodies, plus a very special or der of phenomena, what are properly called the vital phenomena, those that involve organization.'" [Comte's italics]. Comte was, of course, clearly referring to biological organization in the sense used by naturalists, doctors, and anthropologists. Nonetheless, he also used the notion to qualify the set of phenomena that it was the task of "or(37) On this point see Canguilhem (1989, pp. 43-80). (38) It can be added that Saint-Simon used the word to qualify society, the body, and the analogies that brought the two together: "Human organization, like that of animals and plants, does not develop equally or at the same time as all the parts in such a way that at every period of existence all organs exhibit among themselves the same degree of development." (1965, p. 61). 143

Revue franaise de sociologie ganic physics" to study. He divided "organic physics" into two main sections: "physiology proper, and social physics, founded on the first" (1975, p. 57). In other words, social phenomena all involved organization in that they pro ceeded in part out of specific biological dispositions linked to the type of rela tions that existed between individual members of the same species; that is, in general terms, related to sociability. But these were also facts of organization in an analogical sense. For Comte, vegetal, animal, and social bodies were "organic systems" constituting an ascending "series" whose final term -hu man society- was the most complex of the "organisms" and the one whose parts manifested "the most complete" consensus (p. 119). Society and living body were both composed of parts that continually exercised "mutual actions and reactions" on each other. These "necessary relations" {ibid., p. 109) be tween parts were constitutive of the consensus that characterized both indivi dualand social life; they were properly the object of what Comte called "static analysis", which studied from a positive perspective the organ or the organized body as "apt to act" (ibid., p. 33). The specific type of relations manifested by each body, whether an individual or a society, additionally made it capable of a number of defined movements, which were properly the object of dynamic analysis, subordinate to the static variety. <39> Dynamic analysis examined the organism as "effectively acting" (ibid., p. 33). This general distinction corresponded to that in biology between anatomy, which studied organization in the concrete biological sense, and physiology, which was concerned with functions and life. And in "perfectly analogous" fashion, sociology was to be broken down into a sort of "social anatomy", correspond ing "at bottom, to the positive theory of order that can only essentially consist in a permanent, just harmony between the diverse conditions of existence found in human societies"; and a "dynamic study of humanity's collective life", which "necessarily constitutes the positive theory of social progress" (ibid., p. 110). In sum, if we accept the definition of organization as the comp osition of parts working together through harmonious mutual action to per petuate the existence and movement of the whole they compose, this is indeed the central notion of Comte's sociology, in that this sociology follows the general principles of the method and doctrine defined by "organic philoso phy". The same is true of Spencer's sociology. Not only was it based on a type of anthropology that associated categories, types of reasoning, feelings, and more generally psychological types -Spencer spoke more readily of individua ls' "characters"- with biological dispositions rooted in corporal "organiza tion" (40), but organization was raised to the rank of general principle governing the constitution of individual and collective beings alike. This is, in fact, the only point that, in the last analysis, was shared by the living body and (39) This was particularly dynamic study of the social p. 1 1 1 ). (40) These, at least, are that Spencer draws from 144 the case for the organism {ibid., the conclusions his "objective psychology". He also defined a type of subjective psychology that was not naturalist, in which, reasoning, for example, no longer appears as fact, but norm (see 1875-1876, pp. IX-X, and above all ch. VI).

Dominique Guillo society. Thus, despite the ambiguity of the title of a chapter of Principles of Sociology -"A society is an organism" (ch. II)- the British sociologist, after a detailed presentation of the abundant similarities between biological and so ciological aggregates, was careful to stress that he "repudiate[s] the idea that there is a special analogy between social and human organisms" (1878, p. 192). "A society is an organism" thus does not mean that a society is, in formal and material terms, a living being in the biological sense, nor that it has any particular resemblance to this or that living being. It means rather that societies belong to the very general category of organisms; in other words, ag gregates that all obey the principle of organization. On this theme, Spencer's conclusion is sharp and eloquent: "The only point in common that I recognize as existing between the two types of organisms is their organization and the principles that regulate it." {ibid., p. 192; my italics). Despite the profound differences separating Spencer's evolutionism from the diverse variants of "organicism", (41> Durkheim's sociology, at least as it is formulated in The Division of Labor in Society and the Rules of the Sociologi cal Method, is also based on a biological analogy whose theoretical core is the notion of organization. The word recurs regularly in the first of these works to describe social reality, whether this be societies as a whole or social sub groups. (42) Making use of the naturalist Edmond Perrier's conclusions in Col onies animales (1898), (43) Durkheim described the process of evolution in societies as a continual movement of differentiation affecting their organizat ion, analogous to the process that could be observed in the animal kingdom. He did not hesitate to use the word "organization" to designate the structure of segmentary societies, while reserving the word "organic" for societies whose solidarity was based on the differences among and strong interdepen dence of members. <44) Durkheim's modeling of the process by which labor is divided was itself closely linked to the concept of organization, enriched by the debates it had undergone in biology, as is attested to by Durkheim's refer(41)1 am alluding here to the late nineteenth-century current of thought that this word ordinarily designates. It was indeed a current, rather than a doctrine or school, as there were often no real, organized exchanges among its representatives, whose scientific as well as political views, moreover, often diverged. As Geiger has shown (1981, pp. 345360), the scholars associated with this current failed to develop strong enough institutional ties and a sufficiently homogeneous body of doctrine to construct any real program of research, at least not one strong enough to resist the French school of sociology developing around Durkheim. Among the most important representatives of late nineteenth-century "organicism" we can cite Schaffle, Gumplowitz, Lilienfeld, Novicow, Worms, and Greef. (42) See, for example, Durkheim (1986, p. 167), where the author refers to "social and political organization", or page 307, where he mentions "the organization of castes", (43) Perrier's observations and theoretical discussions of the problem of the living being's individuality had strong resonance at the time for the whole of the intellectual community. Of all naturalists and biologists, Perrier, in this text, was by far Durkheim's main reference, Though the fact has been largely ignored or forgotten, Perrier's thesis were a major influence on Durkheim's own in The Division of Labor in Society. (44) "In organic as in social evolution, the division of labor begins with the use of frameworks of segmentary organization, but later breaks free of them and develops autonomously." (Durkheim, 1986, p. 169; my italics). 145

Revue franaise de sociologie ences to the works of Wolff, Baer, and Milne-Edwards (p. 3) (See Limoge, 1994). Even a quick examination of texts by Espinas, Lilienfeld, or Worms (45) supports this observation, though in the thought of these last two authors and that of late ninteeenth-century representatives of "organicism" in general, the identification of human collectives with living bodies was pushed to such an extreme that organization loses the status of highly abstract concept and, with it, the breadth and scope it had received in natural history and physiology. For these authors the word designated a set of tissues, fluids, vessels, bones, and organs that were to be found identically, concretely, in the material configura tion of society. Sociology as the final term of a "generalized logic of organization" Merely noting the insistent presence and important place of the word orga nization in nineteenth-century discourse on society does not mean we have demonstrated that with that word we have grasped the fundamental notion around which the nascent science of society was developed. Indeed, such a word constitutes a sufficiently broad and undefined lexical bridge between the two orders of reality of which it is the sign to make possible extremely diverse reciprocal references, cross-references, and correspondences, not to mention analogies that are very far removed from each other. The intense vagueness surrounding the meaning with which the word was invested could ruin the unity, and with it the operative centrality, that can be attributed to the notion. Above and beyond the fact that the same word is used, there may in fact be a fundamental divergence between the conceptions to be found in the cloud of theories developed by the sociologists just mentioned. It is also possible that the relative undefinedness of the meaning attributed to the terms "organized body" -a body endowed with organization- and "organism", together with their common etymology, mean that one could use one or the other of them fairly indifferently, or at least it prevented thinkers from seeing the duality of these denominations as an index of a profound theoretical fault line perhaps blurred by usages that do not always seem to respect it. Still, as soon as one looks at these texts in the light of the notions and in quiries borrowed from natural history and embryology, it is clear that nine teenth-century biology-inspired sociology gravitated around the notion of organization in the sense that the term had received in the natural sciences, and that sociology cannot be interpreted as applying to social phenomena the concept of "organism" understood as the antithesis of "machine" or, more generally, as a reality that in its essence escaped the laws of mechanics.

(45) See, for example, Espinas (1878); Lilienfeld (1896); Worms (1896 and 1899). 146

Dominique Guillo Delimiting thefield ofthought evoked by the notion ofsocial organization What we find immediately in the classification of the sciences proposed by the sociologists under discussion is the principle of a fundamental harmony between the different regions of Being. The world, a great organized body composed of organized parts, could, according to this configuration, be seg mented into distinct but homogeneous, successively integrated levels and sublevels. This approach was made possible by the close association between the themes of organization and classification, association which sociologists, particularly Comte and Spencer, repeatedly affirmed had its origin in the prin ciples of natural history. In accordance with the general meaning conferred on taxonomy since Aristotle, distinctions between different categories of objects were always to be made within a genus; in other words, difference was always played out against a background of identity or same. Therefore, to classify types or levels of organization within the universe as the naturalists did, one had to presuppose the universe's primary harmony. In fact, for these sociolo gists all portions of the world shared the fact of being phenomena, manifestat ions whose deepest nature was hidden from us but which could at least be seen immediately through the aspect of unity. All the thinkers hitherto mentioned thus insisted on the ontological conti nuity linking social to physical phenomena by way of vital phenomena. There were notable differences, of course, on the question of the methodological ne cessity and even epistemological possibility of applying laws established at each of the phenomenal levels to those of the level just below, and particu larly on the possibility of explaining social facts by means of psychological or biological laws. For Spencer, for example, the continuity of processes by which the most complex phenomena had been engendered by the simplest ones through evolution meant that the separations between astronomy, geol ogy, biology, psychology, and sociology were "purely conventional" (1987, p. 265). (46) For Comte, on the other hand (1975, vol. 1, p. 55), "we observe in living bodies all the phenomena, whether mechanical or chemical, that take place in rough bodies, plus a highly special order of phenomena, the vital phenomena proper''' (my italics). Likewise, in social phenomena one observed "first the influence of physiological laws pertaining to the individual, and, in addition, something particular that modifies the effects of those laws and that has to do with the action of individuals on each other" (my italics). The condi tions of social life "modify the action of physiological laws" in such a way that it becomes impossible to give a positive explanation of social facts by treating them "as a pure deduction from the study of the individual" {ibid., p. 57). Finally, Durkheim, surely more radical still than Comte, at least in the

(46) "Groups of astronomical, geological, biological, psychological, and sociological phenomena obviously form a set of phenomena that are dependent on each other, their

successive parts having been engendered one by the other over imperceptible gradations and their separation being considered as purely conventional." 147

Revue franaise de sociologie way his ideas are expressed, (47) energetically underlined that "the immediate and determinant cause of social phenomena is not to be found in the nature of individuals" (1975, p. 24); it was necessary to explain them by other social phenomena. We cannot, then, minimize the theoretical and methodological differences separating the first sociologists on this point. Still, even these diverse points of view appear against a uniform back ground. The distinctions between phenomenological levels evoked by Comte or Durkheim have epistemological but in no way ontological value. For both of them, their purpose was not to separate opposed orders of realities, realities pertaining to wholly different principles. Inert bodies, living beings, and socie tieswere not distinct provinces of being, juxtaposed in nature and each coming under a special jurisdiction. Social phenomena were indeed, in a way, subordinate to physiological ones; they were a product of the complexification of the latter. Their relations were not those of juxtaposition, but inclusion. If they had to be distinguished, this was because getting from one to the other involved not opposition, but moving by means of regular pro gression from one level to the next. As Comte stressed, physical, physiolog ical, homogeneous" and social (1975, phenomena vol. 1, p. were 57).not Comte "identical", did not deny but "they that these are certainly types of phenomena were not of the same "nature"; it was just that, to his mind, such a question had no value for the positive approach, which professed to "ignore absolutely the deep nature of any body". In any case, "recognizing the necess ity of separating the study of rough and living bodies in no way requires con sidering the two to be of essentially different natures" {ibid., p. 57). In like spirit, Durkheim pointed out that the sociologist was faced with two alternatives: "Either to situate [social phenomena] resolutely outside nature; that is, admit that they are not subject to the law of causality and thus consti tute a world apart within the world, or to proceed with them as with other na tural phenomena." {ibid., p. 98; my italics). On this point Spencer is surely closer than he seems to the two French socio logists. For to accept as he did the idea of a social science, recognize the exis tence of social phenomena seems very much to mean acknowledging from the start that these phenomena required special study, that the laws to which they were subject could not be discerned by contemplating the properties of the brain. To accept the extreme consequences of the idea that biological genera lity is relevant to social phenomena would be to eliminate the phenomenological aspect of such "phenomena". In the English sociologist's work, it was hardly through misuse of language that social phenomena were discussed. Even though Spencer strongly insisted on the possibility of relating such phenomena to physiological ones, the operative concepts of sociology and the explanations provided by it were not, in his work, deduced from pro perties attributed to the human body, and sociology was given special atten(47) Comte believed, for example, that the study of physiology, and more specifically phrenology, was an indispensable prerequisite 148 to studying social facts (1975, vol.1, Deuxime leon, p. 57). For Durkheim this was not a necessity.

Dominique Guillo tion in his System of Synthetic Philosophy. W> In sum, Spencer is not Cabanis. (49) Thus, without disregarding everything that, on other points, sepa rates the first sociologists, we can say that when it comes to principles, they differed more in terms of what they emphasized than by any kind of doctrinal opposition. The world as it manifests itself to one of its creatures -man- was thus com posed of phenomenal levels successively included within each other. Social phenomena, for example, were included among vital phenomena, of which they were a complex variant. The objects of study that properly belonged to each phenomenal level were, on one side, integrated combinations of objects from the next-lower degree of complexity, and on the other, parts of those that constituted the level just above them. Physiology's or psychology's (50) last object, for example -respectively, the human body and the human mind- cons tituted the initial element of interactions that give rise to social phenomena, to the extent, it must be specified, that those interactions were harmonic. (51) The world thus possessed an overall structure that was repeated at all scales at which it was available to observation, from the most exquisite to the coarsest, from the most general point of view -celestial mechanics- to the most spe cific -sociology. It was composed of differentiated parts whose movements were balanced; parts that were themselves composed of integrated parts in ac cordance with identical principles. In sum, the theories developed by Saint-Si mon, Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim all partook of and shared one general idea, above and beyond the variety of meanings through which that idea was clarified by each of them; namely, that from societies down to chemical com ponents by way of classes, institutions, the family, the body and the vital or gans, the world was thoroughly organized. None postulated an irreducible duality or antagonism between living and inert matter, between the social and the individual. The notion of organization had clearly taken on the meaning it inherited from natural history, where the ontological unity of the world was associated with division and subdivision of phenomena. Organization and harmony The fundamental notion of this discourse on society is thus not the "organ ism" as concept of reality or figure valorizing the properties of the living be ing over those of the machine. It is rather organization; that is, the way that differentiated parts are associated in order to ensure the harmonious activity (48) This is the name Spencer gave to the set composed by his First Principles: the principles of biology, psychology, and sociology. (49) See Cabanis (1795). Comte was most certainly alluding to Cabanis when he criticized those "few physiologists of the first order" who "thought social physics was a mere appendage of physiology" (1975, vol. 1, Deuxime leon, p. 57). (50) As we know, Comte excluded psychology from his classification of the sciences. (51) This held also for other living bodies, In such a framework, it is possible to theorize the existence of "animal societies". 149

Revue franaise de sociologie of the whole they compose. Such a notion no more opposes mechanism to liv ing body than it refers in itself to a particular reality; rather it renders mecha nism and living being two figures of harmonic working together. This explains the central position attributed to the notion of consensus in Comte's sociology, and more generally to the vocabulary of harmony. (52) The same holds true for Durkheim, who, as we know, insisted on the solidarity spontaneously manifested by social aggregates. For these two French sociolog ists, as for Spencer, the notion of harmony designated a static or dynamic balance between forces -forces that could just as easily be physical-chemical as specifically physiological or social. (53) Natural history, anthropology, and sociology: from animal organization to social organization We are now in a position to reconstitute the single weft that united the hu man and life sciences in the nineteenth century. Cuvier's work had two major consequences. First, by raising the notion of organization to the rank of zoo logical classification principle, it gave rise to "anthropology" as it was under stood in the nineteenth century; that is, a science of human "organization" in the biological sense of the term, its "faculties", and varieties. Furthermore, it led to lively, fruitful debates that worked to give "organization" a highly ab stract meaning as well as great theoretical scope. As is illustrated by, among others, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire's "structural" model, such a notion, used from a taxonomie perspective, was ready to be extended beyond the living body and to lower levels, to encompass the universe as a whole. And the first socio logists (54) seem very clearly to have appropriated and pursued to the limits the implications of this conception, delivered to them in fragmentary, allusive (52) The opening of Comte's 48th lesson {Cours de philosophie positive, 1975, vol. 2) is written entirely within this lexical framework. Comte evokes the "fundamental solidarity between all possible aspects of the social organism" (p. 112) and the "general" or "universal consensus" characterizing that same "social organism" (p. 114). Further on he adds that "a positive conception of social harmony spontaneously provides [... ] through the sum of its practical applications, the scientific foundation for a healthy elementary theory of the political order properly speaking" (p. 1 1 8). The principle of harmony is so generally applicable that it even seems to be appropriate for describing the relations of "intimate solidarity", the true "social connectedness" that unite the different sciences in the positivist system (p. 1 12; all my italics). 150 (53) On this point see, for example, the 40th lesson of Comte's Cours: "It can indeed be said that wherever there is any kind of system, there must exist a certain kind of solidarity, [But] despite its necessary universality, the scientific notion of solidarity and consensus is most fitting for organic systems, because of their greater complexity." (pp. 118-119). Even if solidarity only appears diffusely there, it is, according to Comte, already manifest in physical systems. Most often, however, and notably in Durkheim's thinking, the notions of force and balance are used metaphorically in sociology, to mark the necessity of treating social matter as scientific fact, (54) Here we must be careful to except Durkheim, who used rather than founded this tradition,

Dominique Guillo form by early nineteenth-century natural history and embryology. (55) Socio logyis quite specifically this historically situated discourse on society, that places social reality at the heart of a more general logic of "organization". (56) For these sociologists, whether it was explicitly formulated in their works or not, the principle of organization, of universal harmony in movement and matter, was to be found at all levels of reality. (57) From this perspective, the science of "social organization" focused on the top of the pyramid of integrated systems that constituted the world. Sociology brought the system of knowledge full circle and provided knowledge that was closest to man's most immediate interests. It was the veritable lynchpin of the system, in that it proposed to bring to light the categories of logical under standing through a history of their development within humanity, and then, as method, to make use of those categories in establishing a system of knowl edge, a reasoned classification of the sciences. "Anthropology" played the pivotal role here: systematically exploring "human organization" as the basis of the "faculties" implied folding back the table of functions -specifically ce rebral functions- as closely as possible onto that of organs. (58) Anthropology showed how man's material and spiritual realities fit together by making the two indistinct at just the blind spot where anatomy and physiology came to gether. To the extent that man was "organized" and a part of an "organized social body", he participated in the universal weft that crossed through and constituted the world. Indeed, he was a small world in himself. We could say, for example, that in terms of embryonic development, he contained within himself the whole zoological "series"; (59) and the universe could be considered a repetition of the structure of the human body. The notion of organization thus played an in tegrating role within the space of knowledge: in much nineteenth-century thinking, man discovered organization in himself -his body, the object of (55) The perspectives of these two sciences were closely related in the early nineteenth century. We could even say that embryology was theoretically dependent on natural history during the time the latter was dominated by "comparative anatomy", as illustrated by Saint-Hilaire's theses on development. (56) It is of course not my intention to give a normative definition of sociology in general, but merely to characterize the meaning the word had in the nineteenth century, specifically for the person who shaped that meaning. (57) A text by Comte illustrates in exemplary fashion just how the conception was inherited from natural history. Here Cuvier's conceptions seem to have so penetrated the thinking of the time that the French sociologist does not even bother to refer to the illustrious zoologist, if indeed he was conscious of borrowing the concept: "Without descending, for example, to the intimate solidarity between the diverse branches of each science or art, is it not obvious that the different sciences among themselves, and almost all the arts among themselves, exist in such a state of social connectedness that the well known state of a single part, if it is sufficiently characterized, makes it possible to foresee to some degree of real philosophical certainty, the general state that corresponds to all that others, following the laws of appropriate harmonies?" (1975, vol. II, p. 112; my italics). Above and beyond the specificity of the object under study, we readily recognize here the "principle of the correlation of [organized] forms" and how Cuvier used it to reconstruct fossiles from their parts. The line running from the naturalists "organization" to Comte's "harmony" or "solidarity" is here strikingly. (58) In fact the two were folded so tightly onto each other that it became impossible to see any difference between anatomy and physiology. (59) See Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire's ideas on embryonic development. 151

Revue franaise de sociologie anthropology- and discovered himself in organization; that is, in society, the object of sociology. By redistributing the levels of reality that it imposed, this generalized logic of organization fit knowledge domains together, assigning them a common basis or background. This is not to say that in the nineteenth-century sociology was based on an thropology, itself understood to have "biological foundations", as this would have strongly marked sociological discourse by what is today called "biologi cal determinism". This type of category is too closely tied to our contempor ary understanding of things to provide a correct assessment of nineteenthcentury doctrines. Often, because those doctrines were not sufficiently clari fied, one only sees in them the superficial oppositions of the history of thought. In fact, many such points of view could be expressed through this type of anthropology, both those that insisted on the causal role of the envi ronment in determining behavior and those that contested this role. In the nineteenth century, sociology and anthropology were correlative in that they actualized the diverse aspects of a single general representation of the world, a representation whose source was in large part the studies conducted at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. From the point of view of these thinkers, the social level was a continua tion of the physiological one, from which it emerged through complexification. These two levels were connected, and their respective ob jects obeyed the same principles. This made it possible to import some of the life sciences' concepts and methods, as a means of guidance in the new, untilled field of investigation of social "organization". This in turn explains the numerous accounts in nineteenth-century sociology of patient, painstaking listing of resemblances and distinctions between living bodies and society. But if the analogical method was then credited with great heuristic power, this was also and above all because it had taken on great value in this framework of thought. If, indeed, all realities were secretly connected to and communic ated with each other by means of their "organization"; if the principles a t aching to organization regulated all of nature's productions, including the social body, then the same structure was indefinitely repeated throughout the world. Even though natural beings might present differences, the analogies that brought them together could not be limited or occasional, because they shared the integrated nature of their fundamental relations. From this point, the analogical method was by nature fruitful because its procedures repro duced those that regulated the very production of things. Indeed, it was ac cepted quite naturally because it reflected the ontology underlying the sociological thinking of the time. * * * This enquiry has aimed to show that organization constituted the central conceptual hub of nineteenth-century sociological theories, at least those that sought a foundation in the life sciences. From this angle, sociology seems to have been inscribed in the continuation of the theoretical debates that had en152

Dominique Guillo gaged practitioners of natural history ever since Cuvier had raised organiza tion to the rank of principle for classifying living beings. From one sphere to another, of course, the meaning of the notion shifted, as did the role that fell to it and the debates surrounding it. In this way the notion took on a much more abstract meaning in the social sciences. But it was definitely organizat ion, not organism (in opposition to machine) that constituted the main theo retical background against which Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, and certain "organicist" thinkers developed their theories. More importantly, it can be demonstrated that the oppositions within nineteenth-century natural history -particularly on the matter of classifications, which for some ought to take the form of an ascending line and for others a branching tree- constituted the key to the intelligibility of the opposition between Comptian and Spencerian con ceptions of history and social types. (60) The inquiry conducted here also, it seems, provides us with components for understanding the sociology of contemporary categories. We know how obvi ousthe machine/organism opposition appears to present-day theorists of socio logy. The antagonism between the two is postulated as a fact, a contrast be tween two realities which is thought to serve as a solid anchoring for objec tive typologies. However, as suggested here, this antithesis has been assumed rather than shown to exist; it consists in selectively valorizing properties deemed antagonistic in each of the two realities to which it refers, properties whose deployment, inexhaustible in very principle, in turn makes the opposi tion look like a useful one founded on empirical observation. It can hardly be found wanting, because it is based on the differences it instates. We see, then, how it was able to attain the status of an obvious intuition and come to orga nize our spontaneous classification of the doctrines of the past, without the circular reasoning that founds it ever coming to light. Though, as we have seen, this opposition considerably obscures understanding of nineteenth-cen tury organicist sociology's reference to biology, the machine/organism anti thesis continues to be taken for granted in contemporary thought. It constitutes, in sum, real a priori knowledge in Simmel's sense of the word, (61> an inheri tance, it would seem, from German Romanticism, and initially, from a celebrated passage in Kant's Critique of Judgment aimed at refuting Descartes' animalmachine. (62) The figure of the machine as a foil for the living body is thus a recent category, with no relevance for nineteenth-century French thinking, which is instead founded, as we have seen, on the notion of organization, itself based on no such exclusionary opposition. Dominique GUILLO Shadyc-Cnrs Centre de la Vieille Charit 2, rue de la Charit - 13002 Marseille France Translation: Amy Jacobs (60) See Guillo (1998, 2000). (61)Boudon (1999) has shown how this idea is also to be found in Durkheim's Previously published: RFS, 2000, 41, 2 Elementary Forms of Religious Life. (62) See above, 153

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