The organism metaphor in sociology

Social Research, Summer, 1995 by Donald N. Levine

Spencer leapt deliberately from simile to metaphor. It is not enough to say that society is like an organism, he declaimed; society is an organism. Like organic aggregates, Spencer argued, societal aggregates exhibit growth. Like living bodies, social bodies increase in structure as they increase in size. And in both, the differences in structure are accompanied by progressive differentiation of functions. In both cases, the internally differentiated functions are so related that they are mutually determined and mutually dependent. A fundamental distinction develops among functional systems specialized to deal with external environments, those that deal with the internal sustenance of bodies, and those that evolve to facilitate transmission of nutrients between those two classes of organs. These reciprocally dependent parts form cohesive bodies, which then exhibit the property of being able to outlast the lives of their units. Drawing on the organism metaphor, then, Spencer introduced into sociological theory the germinal concepts of social structure, societal function, and systemic equilibrium.

These conceptions were applied in diverse ways by a number of scholars, including Albert Schaffle in Germany, Emile Durkheim in France, and Arthur Radcliffe-Brown in England. Schaffle actually titled his work The Structure and Life of the Social Body and described it as an encyclopedic sketch of an anatomy and physiology of human society (1881). While critical of Comte and Spencer for shooting beyond what was empirically demonstrable, he endorsed their project and went on to dissect the social organism methodically. Schaffle begins with a discussion of the basic cell of the body social, identified as the nuclear family. He proceeds to gloss a number of phenomena as social tissues. There are amorphous connective tissues, social bonds that reflect common ethnicity, territory, language, beliefs, and the like. And there are functionally differentiated tissues. Networks of residential communities correspond to skeletal tissues. Police and fortifications comprise protective tissues like the epidermis of animals. Households, which circulate nutritive materials, comprise society's capillary tissues. Social formations that mobilize the body social for external action correspond to muscular tissues. Nerve fibers are represented by various means of symbolic communication. Societal organs are formed from varying combinations of these five types of functional tissues. The national economy Schaffle analyzes as a great apparatus of social digestion, educational institutions as the social nervous system. The intercellular substances of organisms he locates in society's material equipment: buildings, tools, roads, means of transportation. The result is a systematic morphology and physiology of the body social that, while easy to ridicule, remains substantively suggestive.

Although Durkheim's prosecution of the organismic analogy did not exhibit the exorbitant detail of his German colleague, he used it to advance significant theoretical claims. Like Spencer, Durkheim fashioned a schema for classifying types of human society as one would classify different types of organisms. He went beyond Spencer's focus on external systemic functions of defense and internal functions of sustenance to emphasize internal mechanisms of system cohesion, such as common beliefs, reactions to crime, and normative regulations. Of perhaps most enduring value, Durkheim theorized the concept of organismic functions circumspectly. He distinguished the meaning of function as a set of vital processes from its stronger sense as expressing the relationship between vital processes and certain needs of the organism. He distinguished between the function of a phenomenon and the processes that bring it into being. And he insisted that organismic structures can vary independently of their functions: "It is a proposition true in sociology as in biology, that the organ is independent of its function" (Durkheim, [1895] 1982, p. 121).