The organism metaphor in sociology

Social Research, Summer, 1995 by Donald N. Levine

IDEAS from biology have entered social science along three routes. In the eighteenth century (and again today in sociobiology) biological studies aided an effort to identify the instinctive dispositions of human actors, an effort pursued by British moral philosophers such as Shaftesbury, Monboddo, and Adam Smith.(1) In the nineteenth century, biology's theories about the adaptive organization of different species stimulated formulations about the characteristics of human populations.2 In the first instance, biology affected social science by treating human individuals as a subset of individual animals; in the second, by treating human communities as a subset of the universe of plant and animal communities. In both cases, the relationship is immediate: selected concepts, propositions, and analytic methods of biology get applied directly to human cases.

Although these initiatives have sometimes borne interesting fruit, the influence of biology on the development of sociology has been most potent perhaps when it has taken the form of a metaphor. It is literally correct to say that human individuals are animals and that human populations are animal populations. But it is metaphorical to say that human society is a biological organism. A number of social scientists have employed this metaphor to model certain ways of studying society, to generate insights about social phenomena, and to legitimate certain social values.

Analogies between the human individual and the body politic have been entertained since the time of Plato at least.(3) What is especially notable about the more recent usages is that they cropped up in contexts that eschewed poetic language in scientific undertakings. From Hobbes and Condorcet through Malthus and Pareto down to the committees of the International Social Science Council, a train of distinguished scholars has struggled to secure a science of society modeled on the precise practices of the natural sciences. High among their intentions has been a wish to strip the language used by social analysts of its poetic baggage, to sanitize its rhetoric and cleanse it of its ambiguities, so that the communication of true knowledge could be reliable as with mathematical symbols or their verbal equivalents (Levine, 1985, ch. 1). The more general impulse behind this effort has been known as positivism, whose grandfather was the eccentric French philosopher Auguste Comte. Ironically, Comte employed the social organism metaphor to ground the science of sociology.(4)

Humanity as Supreme Organism

Living in an era of what he called intellectual and moral anarchy, Auguste Comte (like his erstwhile mentor Saint-Simon) sought a way to help reorganize society without reverting to archaic forms of social order. A major component of the progressive order he sought was the notion of a supreme being that could provide moral inspiration and foster social unity. For such a notion to be credible among the enlightened of his day, Comte felt, it could not be based on scientifically discredited theological beliefs; a credible supreme being had to be natural, not supernatural. Comte thus looked for a being higher than human individuals yet still human, and he found it in the very notion of human society. However, society could play that role only if it could be shown to be more than an aggregation of individual human elements, if it were a real entity with properties knowable through scientific investigation.

Rousseau had already analyzed such a supraindividual social phenomenon when he distinguished between two forms in which social wholes were manifest, the will of all (volonte' de tous) and the general will (volonte' generale). In the former case, collective will amounted to a mere aggregation of the wills of all its individual members; in the latter--the properly social--case, it amounted to a collective phenomenon sui generic. Rousseau described true association in society as a moral entity with qualities distinct from those of the souls who compose it. However, Comte was dissatisfied with Rousseau's way of conceiving the matter. For one thing, Rousseau presumed that the collective will came into being as an artificial construction, a result of a social compact, not as a natural phenomenon. What is more, Rousseau derived this notion from metaphysical speculation, not through scientific thought-ways. With one swoop Comte surmounted both difficulties. He introduced an analogy between society as a natural being and the biological organism.

By identifying society thus as a natural phenomenon subject to invariant laws, the metaphor of the social organism represented an empirically demonstrable supraindividual being that could stand as an object for individual devotion. Eventually, Comte created a system of worship of the supreme organism, humanity, including a calendar of saints days commemorating the chief benefactors of humanity.

The organism metaphor also enabled Comte to appeal to the successes of biology to legitimate a science of positive sociology destined to follow on its heels. Beyond this, he used it to lend direction to the sociological enterprise. He did so through two perspectives, social statics and social dynamics, modeled on the division between anatomy and physiology. From the metaphor of the organism he secured for social statics its "philosophical principle": the fundamental consensus of the social organism (Comte, 1877, p. 245).5 Prior to Comte, the term consensus had been used chiefly by biologists as a concept to designate the interconnectedness of the various organs of living bodies. Comte extended the concept of consensus to designate modes of connection among the parts of society as well, an extension that led to its subsequent meaning of shared beliefs. He spoke of it as a naturally occurring phenomenon, "an inevitable universal consensus which characterizes all features of all living bodies" and which the "social organism" would necessarily manifest to an even higher degree than the individual organism (p. 235). The consensus of the social organism was greater by virtue of an extensive division of labor that created vast systems of interdependence in human society and also through the interconnectedness among human generations from tradition and memory.