The organism metaphor in sociology

Social Research, Summer, 1995 by Donald N. Levine

The vision of a plenitude of cultures going through the cycle from birth to maturity to decline and death advanced Herder's ecumenical agenda by affording a new metaphor with which to represent the progress of humanity. Instead of identifying progress with the evolution of a dominant group along a single line, it appears to consist of the progressive creation of more and more variegated peoples, each with its distinctive cultural form, over the face of the earth. Concluding his account of Rome, Herder muses: "Ages roll on; and with them the offspring of ages, multiform man. Everything that could blossom upon earth, has blossomed; each in its due season, and its proper sphere" (p. 268).

Herder's cyclical vision was recovered and applied in various ways by a number of later scholars, who extended his idea of cultural decline into tough-minded depictions of contemporary disintegration. Writing a few decades after Comte, Konstantin Leontiev depicted the social organism as destined to a complete cycle of life (Leontiev, [1873] 1987). Leontiev divided the life cycle of nations, like that of all other organisms, into three main phases. The initial phase of simplicity affords a time for nations to accumulate energies and build up their vitality. At this time, diverse nations, just like plants and embryos, resemble one another. Internally, they are marked by the relative similarity of their component parts. They arrive at fruition in the second phase, the period of a nation's greatest creativity. In this phase, all nations exhibit a flourishing individualization. This stems from internal complexity, represented by a robust political aristocracy. At the height of its life, the organism's fund of energy is dissipated, the nation becomes exhausted, and there ensues the final phase, a period of disintegration and decay. Leontiev marshals evidence from the plant and animal kingdoms to fortify his model of the upward evolution of all organisms as manifesting a process of internal differentiation and increasing distinctness from the environment, followed by disintegration accompanied by the fusion of previously distinct parts and growing assimilation to the environment. In Western Europe, the Carolingian period concluded the formative phase, the ninth to the seventeenth centuries formed the phase of climactic development, while from the eighteenth century onward Europe was decaying through a process of fusion and equalization.

Social Anatomy and Physiology

Herbert Spencer was another influential thinker who treated the organism metaphor differently than had Comte. Although he felt provoked to dissociate himself publicly from Comte's philosophy, Spencer nevertheless became the medium through which a Comte-like notion of the social organism was imported into modern social systems theory. Talcott Parsons himself celebrated this achievement, a quarter-century after lending currency to Crane Brinton's obituary of Spencer, when he acknowledged that Spencer's ideas of self-regulating systems and functional differentiation could frame an analytic scheme quite suitable for present-day sociologists (Parsons, 1937, p. 3; 1961, pp. vii-x).