Evolution and sociology

SPIRE, KEELE UNIVERSITY
KEELE

STAFFS  ST5 5GB   UK

Email: s.quilley@pol.keele.ac.uk

 

Please feel free to cite or quote, but in the knowledge that this is unfinished work and I reserve the right to revise the argument, change my turn of phrase, and possibly my mind.  I would very much appreciate feedback, constructive criticism and any suggestions.

 

 

Overview

 

 

Enrolling initially as a medical student, Elias was unusual for a sociologist in having some natural-scientific training. It was his recognition of the indivisibility of the biological and social dimensions of the organism-person that underlay the intellectual split with the Kantian paradigm of his supervisor Hönigswald, and his attempt to reformulate long standing philosophical dilemmas into developmental sociological problems. Much later, in Involvement and Detachment and The Symbol Theory, Elias elaborated a Comtean theory of knowledge in which biological and social dimensions of the human condition were understood as emergent phenomena at different levels of integration (Quilley, 2004). The relationship between these integrative levels was processual: iterative, spiralling and dynamic.

            By the time Elias was achieving some limited recognition in Anglophone sociology, long-term developmental sociology was out of fashion. An intellectually rampant molecular and genetic reductionism in the biological sciences, and a scientific inferiority complex in the social sciences, combined to make any engagement between sociology and biology politically suspect.  Together with the unintended (and unfounded) normative and teleological connotations associated with the term ‘civilising process’, these circumstances obscured Elias’ achievement in developing a potentially paradigmatic basis for sociology as the epistemological lynchpin in a broader human science encompassing the social, neuro-psychological, physiological, evolutionary and ecological dimensions of human development.

            However this unpropitious intellectual environment also obscured the unoriginality of Elias. As a sociologist he is certainly unique. But the epistemological framework centring on integrative levels and emergent dynamics has a long history in biology.  Reviewing the history of ‘holism’, ‘vitalism’ and ‘organicism’ in twentieth century biology – and particularly the tradition of embryology and developmental biology associated with Waddingon , Needham and the Theoretical Biology Club – the paper argues that Elias simply absorbed an organicist zeitgeist that had become subtly paradigmatic at around the time of the elaboration in the 1940s of the ‘modern synthesis’ in genetic-evolutionary theory (Huxley 1942; Dobzhansky 1937; Mayr 1942). In particular there is a strong parallel between the intellectual trajectory of Elias and that of Joseph Needham who built upon an established reputation in embryology to become an expert in the long-term socio-historical development in China. Elias was certainly aware of Needham’s work on integrative levels, as well as the work of Needham’s close friend Julian Huxley – probably the most well known political and social interlocutor for the mid-century biological revolution.

           

 

1.         Introduction:

 

The sociology of Norbert Elias is remarkable in many ways, but perhaps most of all in the singular and enduring coherence of his vision. From his earliest writings (Elias, 2006), through the substantive studies in historical sociology (1939; 1969; 1996), to his contributions to the theory knowledge and the sociology of knowledge processes (1956; 1989; 1987), there is an enduring epistemological vision and conceptual architecture that seems to have changed little during sixty years of prodigious writing and research. It is as if, at the start of his career, Elias constructed himself a ladder with which to ascend and descend the hierarchy of scientific phenomena – so as to examine the dynamics and processes at the various levels of integration that contribute to all trajectories of human development. At times he has elaborated his ‘model’, refining terminology and developing new concepts.  But although, in places, subsidiary rungs have been added, the overall structure of the ladder remains in place, as do all of the original rungs. For instance the ‘established-outsider’ opposition doesn’t appear in The Civilising Process, having been coined thirty years later during the course of his research into the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion on a Leicester housing estate (Elias & Scotson, 1965). And yet, the underlying concept most certainly is present, at least implicitly, not least because established-outsider dynamics were operative in the social life of the medieval Europe, just as they are in twentieth century suburban Britain (Mennell, 1992: 119). Likewise, the relationship between biological and social processes as ‘levels of integration’ (1987), though not spelt out, is present implicitly in The Civilising Process, not least in the overarching concept of ‘psychogenesis’: the moulding of the psychic habitus and therefore somatic-neurological development of individual person/organisms by emergent figurational dynamics associated with specific processes of ‘sociogenesis’.[1]  Similarly, the ‘triad of basic controls’ (1970) though absent in name can easily be read back into the underlying architecture of The Civilising Process.  In short, all of the concepts and lines of enquiry pursued by Elias in later books such as Time: An Essay, The Symbol Theory and Involvement and Detachment, are at least intimated in his very earliest writings.[2]

            Richard Kilminster in his introduction to The Symbol Theory (1989), and also an unpublished paper (1994), pointed out that part of the explanation for this consistency was that Elias absorbed a great deal of the scientific worldview that became paradigmatic in the biological sciences in what Huxley (1942) dubbed ‘the modern synthesis’. He argues that Elias would have encountered the work of ‘Julian Huxley, JBS Haldane, CH Waddington, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, Sewall Wright and others…during the early part of the 40-year period when he lived, taught and researched in Britain’ (1994: 17). Although it is difficult to prove the specific lines of connection, Kilminster is almost certainly right to point to the fourteen years between 1940 and 1954, when Elias was teaching part-time in London and collaborating with SH Foulkes in his work on group analysis, as the period when he became familiar with the coalescing synthesis in evolutionary biology. It is significant that prominent exponents of the modern synthesis rarely restricted themselves to questions of biological theory but contributed to a much wider debate around what was frequently referred to as ‘evolutionary humanism’.  This secular-scientific philosophy underlay a wide range of (for the most part) progressive political and ethical commitments.[3] What is certainly true is that the debate involved many of the intellectual heavyweights of the day, and it would have been virtually impossible for Elias to have remained unaware of their contributions. In the much smaller and more face-to-face intellectual milieu of the 1940s and early 1950s, it is even likely that he would have encountered people such as Waddington, Huxley and Needham.[4] As Kilminster points out, it is surely significant that nearly fifty years later, the only book cited by Elias in The Symbol Theory is Julian Huxley’s (1941) The Uniqueness of Man.

            In this essay, my intention is to explore the relationship between Elias and the evolutionary humanism of the modern synthesis that was, as Kilminster argues, ‘in the air’ during the formative years of Elias’s intellectual development. I will argue that Elias was both more and less original than is perhaps apparent through twenty-first century eyes. Specifically, the intellectual and theoretical bedrock of his contribution owes a rarely acknowledged debt to a series of long running debates in theoretical biology, which had culminated by mid-century in a loose consensus. Narrowly conceived this consensus was the ‘modern synthesis’ of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolutionary theory. More broadly and less explicitly there was also, if only for a short while, a broader consensus around organicism: the resolution of the long-running tension between ‘vitalism’ and ‘mechanism’ in the form of the ‘organicist’ focus on organisation, relations between the parts, and what became an epistemology of integrative levels (Woodger, 1929; Needham, 1937; Novikoff, 1945; Redfield 1942; Reiser 1958).[5]  In this light, the epistemological scaffold underlying all of Elias’s varied contributions to sociology (1956; 1987; 1989) is not entirely original. In particular:

·        His theoretical rationale for the autonomy of social processes and sociology as their appropriate disciplinary locus, is a reworking of arguments used by organicist biologists such as Woodger (1929) against the reductionist encroachments of the physical-chemical sciences.

·        The epistemology of levels of integration (Elias 1987) is derived directly from the organicist theorisation of ‘organisation’ and whole/part relations in biology.

·        The insistent distinction between the ‘phaseology’ (Goudsblom 2003) of social development and Victorian understandings of ‘Progress’ must be seen, at least in part, in terms of an engagement with (albeit with  considerable refinement of) Huxley’s conception of ‘psycho-social evolution’.

·        The pivotal insight of ‘symbol emancipation’ as an evolutionary turning point (1989) for non-human nature as well as for human beings, had been anticipated by almost every one of those evolutionary biologists who contributed to the debates over evolutionary humanism.

On the other hand, in re-working the organicist paradigm in evolutionary biology as an epistemological framework for sociology, Elias removed metaphysical and teleological elements that are recurring features in the evolutionary humanist debate, in Huxley and more particularly the work of Teilhard de Chardin. This is one reason why whilst those writers seem, to a contemporary reader, somewhat dated and anachronistic, Elias’s writing remains fresh and relevant, not only to biology but also to broader debates in the human sciences. In purging evolutionary humanism of its transcendental accretions, it is also true that Elias often refined and tightened up concepts only loosely developed by the biologists. A case in point is the clear distinction he makes between biological (Darwinian) evolution and social development (cultural /Lamarckian  ‘psycho-social evolution’). Not unexpectedly  ‘his terminology for dealing with this level [of social development] is noticeably tighter, more differentiated and adequate to its contours’ (Kilminster 1994: 18).

In short, because Elias was the only sociologist to fully engage with the mid-century consensus in biology, he was uniquely positioned to develop an approach to long term processes of social development which acknowledged their path-dependency, ‘phaseology’ and directionality, without giving ground to the teleology of Victorian progress theory. With concepts such as ‘homines aperti’ and the ‘triad of basic controls’ anchored in the epistemology of integrative levels, Elias is better placed to explore the relationship between social and biological processes, both in relation to evolutionary ecology and the biosphere, and also the neuro-somatic growth and development of individual person-organisms.

 

2.         Biological evolution and social development as ‘levels of integration’ in ‘the great evolution’: Elias’s combined realist epistemology and sociology of knowledge

 

In Involvement and Detachment (I&D) Elias elaborates a theory of knowledge that seeks to establish the relationship across the full spectrum of scientific disciplines within the arc of a ‘comprehensive process model’.[6] As a contribution to epistemology, I&D provides a convincing rationale for a spectrum of methodological priorities, ranging across a hierarchy of scientific disciplines and relating principally to the complexity and order of integration of the phenomenal subject matter in each case. The relevance of this model to the social sciences is that it establishes a strong rationale for the autonomy of sociology, whilst establishing more precisely the nature of the continuities and overlaps with neighbouring disciplines in the natural sciences.

Following a schema originally outlined by Auguste Comte (1907)[7] Elias argues that different scientific disciplines can be arranged along a continuum according to the nature of the data they seek to understand (1987: 121-33). These fields of investigation exhibit different degrees of differentiation, interdependency and in functional integration.  At one end of this spectrum lie the physical sciences whose basic units of observation – sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules etc. – form composite units that exhibit low levels of complexity, little functional differentiation and low levels of integration.  In consequence, component part units of any such composite structure are only minimally influenced by the emergent dynamics of the whole. Such fields of investigation are well suited to the characteristic analytical and reductive procedures of the physical sciences: dissection, isolation, experimentation and reduction to component parts. However moving across the spectrum, through organic chemistry, the natural sciences and eventually to anthropology and sociology, the fields of investigation become more complex. Composite structures form systems. Systems within systems entail multiple levels of integration. At each successive level, part-units exhibit greater functional differentiation and are involved in overlapping planes or modalities of integration. Moving in this direction, such atomistic reductive methods become less appropriate. An important reason for this is that in such fields of investigation, the qualities and characteristics of component part units are increasingly determined by the nature of their connections and relationships within such higher-level systems. In this context Elias observes that in moving away from physics, there is a subtle but consistent devaluation in the cognitive status of scientific laws and a corresponding increase in the importance of non-law like theoretical formulations, modelling temporal and spatial processes and structures (1987: 125). A prime example in the field of evolutionary biology would be Darwin’s essentially ‘historical’ theory of evolution.

For Elias, this spectrum of disciplines and their corresponding fields of investigation is also a hierarchy. The reason for this is that each more complex, more functionally differentiated field of investigation refers to composite units and systems that ‘contain’ (but cannot be reduced to) all lower levels of integration. For instance atoms and molecules are clearly components of all biological processes. However, biological systems involve structures whose part-units one level lower, are linked by a complex division of functions (e.g. the different organs in relation to the overall metabolism of the body). The behaviour and characteristics of such part units are irreversibly adjusted to the functioning of a composite unit of a higher order. ‘Life’ is a concept that simply refers to this irreversible order of integration. The shift from the physical to the biological sciences can be seen as a move upwards through

 

a hierarchic order within which, over a number of stages, part units together form composite units of a higher order and so lead, through a growing number of planes of differentiation and integration, to more and more complex formations (1987: 129)

 

Within this schema, social processes consequent upon language and culture represent the highest order of integration. A single cell is estimated to have between 10-12 interlocking planes of integration. Culture, at the level of human beings, escalates this complexity to almost unquantifiable degree. Units representing higher stages of integration possess stage-specific behavioural and functional properties that are derivable only in relation to their mode of integration – i.e. the manner in which they are organised functionally and interdependently. It follows that the behaviour of human beings has stage specific dimensions that emerge from the pattern of interdependent interaction and participation in social processes. But this pattern is a function of the social configuration and not of individual persons. This provides a convincing rationale for the autonomy of social processes as a field of investigation, whilst specifying fairly precisely the relationship to natural scientific disciplines.

A final feature of Elias’s conception of this ‘model of models’ is that the continuum of scientific disciplines and fields of investigation also represents a temporal sequence in ‘the grand evolution’.

 

The different sciences can then be understood as each contributing to solving the problems which different stages of an evolutionary process pose, their respective theoretical models as symbolizing different stages (1987: 146)

 

Anticipating the current biological thinking in relation to complexity theory (Kaufman 2000) Elias argues that there is an unambiguous direction to the grand evolution towards increasing complexity. By creating matter, ‘the big bang’ set in train the physical processes that constitute the first dimension in the ongoing transformation and evolution of the universe. This process of physical expansion provides the field of investigation for cosmology. Successive dimensions form a temporal sequence, with evolutionary-biological processes, and the plane of integration that we call ‘life’, emerging (on our planet) only 3.5 billion years ago. With human symbol emancipation, biological evolution eventually engenders the plane of integration we understand as culture: the ‘anthroposphere’ within the biosphere (Goudsblom 2002)

In summary, Elias presents a hierarchy of scientific disciplines that relates to a spectrum of fields of investigation arranged according to their degrees of complexity and levels of integration. This spectrum is also understood as a temporal sequence in the ‘great evolution’. However this ‘model of models’ is combined with an historical sociology of the ‘knowledge process’. For Elias the historical emergence of successive scientific disciplines, is but the most recent movement in the spiralling iteration between very long term processes of social development on the one hand, and the expanding stock of reality-congruent knowledge about the world. His principal point of departure in the analysis of this knowledge process, is the inter-dependence of the safety/danger balance on the one hand, and the involvement/detachment balance on the other. The relationship between knowledge and social development hinges, Elias argues, on the complex feedback loops – both ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ – between these two balances.  Early in human development, what Elias calls animistic, magico-mythical knowledge about the world was characterised by higher degrees of fantasy, consequent upon greater degrees of involvement. Putative connections between events and phenomena were, to a much greater degree, posited in relation to the direct meaning they had for the self.  The paradigmatic questions would not concern ‘how’ a phenomena occurred, but ‘why it happened to me’. Elias shows how high levels of danger induce greater degrees of involvement, making more detached observation and induction of possible connections between events and phenomena more difficult – and hence create obstacles to the expansion of the social stock of reality-congruent knowledge about the world.  As a result of this ‘double bind’ the early stages of the knowledge process are relatively slow and tortuous.  An early example would include the time, foresight, affective restraint (deferral of gratification) and the relatively detached understanding of the qualities of the raw material[8] required to collect the correct stone and create stone tools for use in a subsequent hunting expedition. However, to the extent that the knowledge process does move forward, each extension of detachment consistently enhances the capacity of human beings to control non-human nature. Over many millennia, in consequence of hundreds of small technological innovations, and in tandem with a steadily increasing stock of concepts and terms expressing more reality congruent understandings about the connections between processes and events in the natural world, the balance between danger and safety shifts steadily in favour of the latter (at least vis-à-vis non-human nature). Thus for Elias, there is a consistent and reciprocal relationship between (a) the level of detachment represented by public standards of thinking about natural events, and (b) the level and manner of control of non-human nature represented by public standards of manipulating them (1987: 8).  This gradual shift from a vicious loop or double-bind in the relationship between the involvement/detachment and safety/danger ratios, to a virtuous loop, proceeds according to ‘the principle of facilitation.’  As the size of this relatively insulated sphere safety increases (the anthroposphere within the biosphere), the achievement of more detached understandings becomes progressively easier to achieve.  It is for this reason that the knowledge process is characterised by rapid if not quite exponential acceleration.

 

 

 

 

3.         Antecedents and parallels in early to mid-twentieth century theoretical biology

 

As Kilminster points out, Elias’s vision of the relationship between biology and sociology has much in common with the ‘humanist frame’ (Huxley 1961) advanced by the evolutionists and geneticists of the 1930s and 40s (1994). The Symbol Theory and Involvement and Detachment embrace a number of propositions about the relationship between humanity and evolution, which Kilminster summarises as follows (17):

 

(i)                  Establishing human beings as an evolutionary breakthrough, a progression from a lower to a higher form.[9]

 

(ii)                Society as an emergent, extra-somatic phenomenon, not reducible to the physical, chemical and biological levels

 

(iii)               The idea that higher levels of integration tend to canalise lower ones.

 

 

(iv)              The importance of knowledge transmission and learning in human development

 

(v)                The uniqueness of the human capacity for symbolization.

 

(vi)              The issue of how humans might now come to guide the evolutionary process from their position as its highest level

 

(vii)             The importance of looking for global trends which might be leading towards the self-integration of humankind into a world civilisation.

 

In what follows, I will explore parallels and antecedents for all of these propositions in the early-mid twentieth century debates in theoretical biology. I will also attempt to map out other points of connection between Elias and his putative biological interlocutors. Specifically:

 

(viii)           On the relationship between the social and biological sciences.

 

(ix)              On the resolution of epistemological dualisms resulting from ‘process reduction’

 

(x)                The relationship between analysis and synthesis in scientific endeavour.

 

 

3.1    INTEGRATIVE LEVELS AND ORGANICISM

 

In the wake of the perceived challenge (and imperial explanatory claims) of physical science, early twentieth century biology was animated by the debate between ‘vitalists’ and ‘mechanists’. Whilst ‘physicalist’ biologists such as Jacques Loeb and Julius Sachs enthusiastically adopted the reductionist programme,  ‘vitalists’  insisted on the existence of some animating, constituent –  Hans Driesch’s  ‘Entelechie’ (1909), Philosophie des Organischen; (1911) The History & Theory of Vitalism) or Henri Bergson’s ‘élan vital’ (1907, Evolution Créative) – distinguishing living from inert matter (see Allen, 2005).[10] It was only later in the twentieth century that the debate was more or less resolved in the form of an ‘organicist’ conception – focusing on the organisational properties of living matter rather than some life-giving ‘vital substance’ (see Gilbert & Sarkar, 2000; Niño El Hani & Emmeche 2000).  Organicism in this form had several historical roots, one of which was the emergentist movement in early twentieth century Britain (see Ablowitz 1939; Blitz 1992; Beckermann et al 1992). But gradually the metaphysical, proclamatory holism of Jan Smuts (1926) and C Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution  (1924) gave way to a technical focus on whole/part relations, the principle of ‘downward causation’[11] and the over-riding importance of organisational relations between parts as amenable to scientific investigation. This mainstream organicism was exemplified by the writings of well known biologists – J Needham, CH Waddington, P Weiss, J Woodger, Ludvig von Bertalanffy, Ernst Mayr – many of whom were prominent intellectuals, (some associated with the radical programme of the Theoretical Biology Club in Cambridge) evincing a wide spectrum of very public left-liberal political positions during the interwar period (see Werskey, 1971).[12] 

The ‘theory of integrative levels’, as it came to be known, directed scientific scrutiny at the nested hierarchy of organisational relations, and was expressed most cogently by Needham in his Spencer lecture:

 

“Today we are perfectly clear … [that] the organisation of living systems is the problem, not the axiomatic starting point of  biological research. Organising relations exist, but they are not immune from scientific grasp and understanding. On the other hand, their laws are not likely to be reduced to the laws governing the behaviour of molecules at lower levels of complexity” (Needham 1937: **).

 

This conception became common currency in mid-twentieth century biology. Its significance was partly that, for a while at least, it established the integrity and autonomy of biological science vis-à-vis the physical-chemical sciences dealing with phenomena at lower levels of integration. Organicist biology pointed to complexity – the irreducible, emergent dynamics of the whole consequent upon the pattern of organisation of the parts – to refute the reductionist claims of physical science.[13] Although Needham’s formulation was the best known, both he and Von Bertalanffy  give credit to Woodger’ s Biological Principles (1929) for first outlining the orthodox position, although others such as Waddington (1957) give credit to Henderson (1917). The population geneticist Sewall Wright was probably closer to the mark in identifying Moore’s (1912) The Nature and Origin of Life as the first modern statement of philosophical organicism, focusing on complexity, hierarchical levels and emergent novelty (see Steffes 2006)

            What is certainly true is that the language and epistemological logic of these very debates seems to have been absorbed almost wholesale by Elias. The following passage is typical:

“Corresponding to the degree and stability of the functional integration of composite units on this level of natural events are forms of disintegration which have no counterpart on the physical–chemical plane. For them we have names such as ‘illness’ or ‘death’. A fly is swatted. It lies motionless. If one were able to take a complete inventory of its physical–chemical components, there is a high degree of certainty that, to begin with, there would be no difference between the living fly and the dead one. What has changed is the organisation of the physical–chemical processes, their integration to form systems on a higher level of organisation, such as tissue and organs, and their self-regulating adaptation to each other – just because organisms represent a specific organisation of physical–chemical processes and therefore a type of order which does not exist on the physical–chemical plane.” (Involvement & Detachment, 2006: **)

For Elias this organicist framework was significant in two ways. Firstly, just as organicism provided a clear theoretical confirmation for the autonomy of biology as a science, against the backdrop of a hierarchy of disciplines corresponding to successive levels of integrative complexity; it likewise guaranteed the autonomy of sociology, vis-à-vis biology whilst establishing also the points of connection and continuity (Quilley 2004).  Secondly, Elias was able to reformulate a whole series of biological insights in relation to part/whole relationships to serve as orienting concepts in sociology.  For instance, Woodger wrote

 

“A part, if it is a living part, i.e., one capable of division, cannot exist in nature in an inorganic environment.  If it persists under such conditions it is the product of a whole-producing division and therefore no longer a part. [Different from machines where parts can exist independently of the whole without themselves becoming wholes]…There is no such thing in nature as ‘living matter’ – we always find whole living organisms. Living parts are never found ‘wild’ as such. Another characteristic of a part is that what it is always dependent on other parts” (1929: 308-9 – italics in the original)

 

And elsewhere, Vernadsky reiterated Lotka’s (1925: 28) insistence on the inseparability of organisms and their environments and the mutual permeability of organisms  – implying that a relativity, or at least a dynamic relationality in relation to the ‘boundedness’ of the objects implied by conceptual categories such as ‘organism’ or ‘species’. He wrote: “The living organism, chiefly in philosophical speculation, but also in biology, is erroneously contrasted with its medium, as if the two were independent objects” (Vernadsky, 1944: 38). This language – the critique of the process reduction that accompanies overly bounded and concrete philosophical categories – is highly reminiscent of the argument advanced by Elias (e.g. 1978: 74,93, 111-12). And Elias repeatedly makes the analogous point about the ‘whole-dependent’ nature of individual person-organisms. Counterpoising the notionally closed-person or ‘Homo clausus’ view with that of pluralities of open people (‘Homines aperti’), Elias argues that there is no human individual (‘part’) to be found ‘wild’ outside of the ‘whole’ of a plurality of  interdependent humans. And the nature of the individual (‘part’) is always dependent on his/her relation to wider figurations (other ‘parts’).

            The suspicion that Elias had read the biological literature directly is given credence by the wealth of biological examples in his writing, many of which could have been drawn directly from the work of the interwar organicists. For instance, Woodger’s elaboration of the hierarchical order of living organisms (1929; 1931 – cited approvingly by Needham (1936) is almost identical to Elias’s own account of the levels of integration discernible in the hierarchy of biological organisation (1987: 150).

 

3.2    PROCESS PHILOSOPHY AND ‘THE GREAT EVOLUTION’

 

Underlying the organicist conception of integrative levels was a process-centred ontology, which established the continuity of physical, biological and social development, as aspects of an encompassing evolutionary process. Here again there is a very strong connection between Elias’s ‘process sociology’ and the processual biology of Woodger, Waddington, Needham & Huxley.  Thus when Huxley’s conception of “the whole of phenomenal reality [as] a single process which may properly be called evolution” (1955: 3) is more or less identical with what Elias calls  ‘the great evolution’ (1987).

            The inter-war period was marked by a pervasive if hazy recognition that modern physics had implications for the conceptual categories underpinning the positive conception of science. Symptomatic of this intellectual turmoil was the rising influence of the process-philosophy associated with Alfred North Whitehead, who is frequently quoted by theoretical biologists such as Huxley and Woodger. The main import of such philosophising was the relativity of seemingly fixed categories and the importance of time.  Huxley’s language is typical  (1953: 9-10):

 

‘All phenomena have a historical aspect…all reality is evolution … a one way process in time; unitary continuous; irreversible; self-transforming; and generating variety and novelty in its transformations”. 

 

More concretely, Woodger highlights the importance of a four dimensional framework in which things and processes are aspects of a single spatial-temporal reality, such that even a seemingly permanent object such as a stone “is an event since it is temporally extended….[and all] events are substances.”  (1929: 180).

            The implications for this processual view in biology was that seemingly fixed categories or objects were recast in four-dimensional language as ‘slabs of space time’ (1929: 301-2) such that any notion of biological organisation or structure had to incorporate ‘intrinsic serial change’.  Seen in this light, an ovum doesn’t develop into a frog, but rather “it is a temporal part of the history which is the frog” (302).

            Effectively placing inverted commas around the seemingly objective and invariant characteristics of static ‘things’, this emphasis on process is once again highly reminiscent of Elias’s constant struggle to revise terminology and concepts so as to avoid what he called ‘process reduction’. Woodger makes the same point about the habitual and problematic ‘thing-centredness’ of everyday language. 

 

“Our fondness for only thinking in terms of the adult frog is another example of our fondness for uniform objects. Thus to say that an organism develops means that it is temporally as well as spatially differentiated, and also that the temporal differentiation is serial, irreversible or non-rhythmical, although spatial parts may exhibit rhythmical changes. And in this process of serial change during the developmental period the spatial organisation becomes progressively more and more elaborate” (303)

 

Fifty years later the same point was made at greater length in a classic book by David Bohm (1984).

For the biologists, this processual perspective offered an immediate resolution to the long standing disputes over the relative importance of structure versus function: “form is simply a short time-slice of a single spatio-temporal reality” (Needham 1936: 6). Likewise for Von Bertalanffy life was defined by organisation, dynamic flow of processes and history: “Spatial wholeness and historicity are …different aspects of the same spatio-temporal whole” (1952: 113). And this processual view of the organism also had the effect of relativising the boundaries of the individual organism as the unit of analysis, and the boundaries between this bounded individual and the environment (Waddington 1957:6).

            In the same way, the organicist biologists frequently made asides to the effect that the four dimensional processual perspective made redundant the categorical dualisms inherited from Kant and Descartes – especially the mind/matter, body & soul problems: “Mind is not an entity in its own right…better to speak of mental activities” (Huxley, 1953:76).  And of course Elias argued in exactly the same way that mind and soul are stage specific concepts pertaining to specific levels of integration, and dynamics emerging from processual ‘wholes’ in the organisation of matter.

 

 “One need hardly say that the same argument holds good with regard to the old dispute about the relationship of what is traditionally called ‘body’ and ‘mind’. In this case too proposals for the solution of the problem on purely physical and on metaphysical lines are usually representative of the same style of thinking, and equally inept. They may be monistic or dualistic; they may credit the ‘mind’ with qualities of ‘matter’ or ‘matter’ with qualities of the ‘mind’ – all these propositions trying to account for the whole in terms of its parts” (Elias, 1987: 41, fn7)

 

Many biologists were happy to work through the implications of the processual organicist paradigm in relation to limited problems such as the relationship between genetics and embryology in developmental biology. Others, and most influentially Julian Huxley, took Whitehead’s philosophy of the continuity of a universal evolutionary process more literally.

In one sense the ground for this unificatory programme had started to be laid in the late nineteenth century.  Grinevald (1998) argues that between Seuss’s coining of the term ‘biosphere’ in 1875 (Seuss 1875) and Verndadsky’s elaboration of the concept at the Sorbonne in the early 1920s, one can detect a major pioneering movement to merge biology and geology. This was born of the growing recognition that, over very long time-frames, the biological processes had radically transformed the geological and chemical face of the earth.  Just as the organicist paradigm challenged the physico-chemical reductionism of the mechanists, Vernadsky was preparing the ground for holistic and systems theorising in ecology and the earth sciences (1926). Along with Lotka (1925; 1945), Vernadsky, drawing on Bergson (and indirectly Whitehead), was among the first to recognise the tension between biological evolution and Carnot’s law of entropy.

Julian Huxley, Vladimir Vernadsky, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Edouard Le Roy and others, took up this preoccupation with very long term connections between the geological, chemical and biological dimensions of unitary planetary evolutionary process, and sought to bring human beings into the frame (Sampson & Pitt, 1999).  Huxley’s schema is indicative. He demarcated this universal evolution into three sectors or phases:  inorganic-cosmological; biological; and human or ‘psycho-social’ (1953;1955). The emergence and overlaying of successive biological and psycho-social sectors constitute paradigmatic phases in the evolutionary history of the earth. For Huxley, the successive evolution of these sectors was an aspect of a broad narrative of complexification: in biological evolution the increasing capacity for awareness and exploitation of the environment, ultimately engenders a species capable of symbolic language; and in consequence, the dynamics of Darwinian evolution give way to a process of cultural (Lamarckian) evolution at a higher level.  And in accordance with the principle of downward causation that was a correlate of the theory of integrative levels – that the emergent dynamics of relations of higher levels channel and direct processes at lower levels – each  successive evolutionary phase, has a transformative effect on the evolutionary process as a whole.  Just as the evolution of life transformed the geol-chemical cycles of the earth, the ‘psycho-social’ evolution transforms the evolutionary trajectory of biological life.

 

“In our geological epoch – the psychozoic era, the era of reason – a new geochemical fact of capital importance is manifest. In the course of the last few thousand years, the geochemical action of humanity has, by means of agriculture seizing the living green matter, become intensive and excessively multiplied.” (Vernadsky, quoted in Sampson & Pitt 1999: 27)

 

What Huxley termed ‘psycho-social evolution’, Vernadsky called the ‘psychozoic era’ and Le Roy framed in terms of a process of ‘hominisation’:  the growing capacities of the human species consequent upon encephalisation and the concomitant ecological-evolutionary domination of the biosphere.  For all of these writers the continuous process of cosmic evolution is marked by distinct phases (see also von Bertalanffy, 1952: 30). All are acutely aware of the distinctiveness of humanity and all locate what Huxley, in his introduction to Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, refers to as ‘the critical point’ in the evolution of language.  In the language of Teilhard de Chardin and Le Roy the ‘vitalisation of matter’ is followed by the ‘hominisation’ of life.

            As a description of the evolutionary development of the earth, Elias’s conception of ‘the great evolution’ (1987) is very little removed from the narrative presented by these writers. He would have agreed with the intellectual ambitions, the language and the precepts of Dobzhansky (one of the originators of ‘the modern synthesis’):

 

“Life is very much older than man and the universe is much older than life.  This points to an indispensable condition which any synthesis must satisfy in order to be acceptable. It must envisage man, life, and the universe as changing rather than fixed, as parts of a single ongoing process rather than as three separate static realms. The central postulate of the synthesis must be that the universe and everything in it are evolving products of evolution. The synthesis must be an evolutionary synthesis.” (Dobzhansky, 1967: 157)

 

Elias’s concept of ‘symbol emancipation’ (1989) in many respects, a homologue for

Le Roy’s ‘hominsation’ or Huxley’s ‘critical point’.  And like these writers, and in keeping with the underlying theory of integrative levels, he was very conscious of the potential for social processes consequent upon symbol emancipation to steer and channel biological (evolutionary-ecological) processes (Goudsblom 1992; 2002; 2003; Quilley, 2004).  Elias would of course have parted company with Teilhard de Chardin in relation to the more metaphysical and teleological aspects of his theorisation of the ‘noosphere’.  But then, so did many biologists who were otherwise happy to frame their investigations in an overarching conception fundamentally similar to Elias’s understanding of ‘the great evolution’.

 

3.3    THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

 

Just as the epistemology of integrative levels guaranteed the autonomy of complex biological processes from any physico-chemical reductionism, organicist biologists frequently emphasised ‘the uniqueness of man’ (Huxley, 1961) and like Elias they identified the human capacity for symbolization and its consequences in generating an irreducible, self-sustaining and transforming intergenerational social stock of knowledge. Huxley is representative: “The critical point in the evolution of man – the change of state when wholly new properties emerged in evolving life – was when he acquired the use of verbal concepts and could organise his experience in a common pool” (1953: 115).  Von Bertalanffy reiterates: “the basic fact in anthropogenesis is the evolution of symbolism” (1967: 21).

Dobzhansky likewise points to the significance of the evolution of language, and arguing also against any would be imperial subsumation of sociology by the biological sciences (1972: 123). This oft-repeated anti-reductionism of the older generation of ‘modern synthesisers’ stands in marked contrast to the reductionist aspirations that often accompanied the later triumphs of evolutionary molecular genetics (Dawkins 1975), inspiring the first sociobiologists (Wilson 1975) and more recently the evolutionary psychologists (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992).

Given the widespread anxieties about biological determinism it is worth elaborating this point. For Huxley, ‘culture’ was fundamentally an emergent phenomena:

 

“The shareable body of material, mental and social constructions (‘artifacts, mentifacts, and sociofacts’) [are] created by individuals living in society, but …not simply explicable or directly deducible from …the general psychological or physiological properties of …individuals, any more than the characteristics of life are simply explicable …from ...the general chemical and physical properties of inorganic matter, or those of mind from a knowledge of the properties of neurones” (1955: 10-11).

 

Furthermore, and not dissimilar in essence from Elias’s understanding of the link between sociogenesis and psychogenesis, Huxley also recognised that –  in line with the theory of integrative levels – the emergent dynamics of a shared culture had the capacity to channel and mould processes at the (lower) level of the individual:

 

“The effective (or in biological parlance, phenotypic) characterisation and achievements of human beings in a society are to a very large extent the result of the pattern of culture in which the human individuals live and the cultural forces which play upon them” (1955: 12)

 

In this context he refers to a study by  Kroeber linking the emergence of genius to cultural outbursts: [Against the great man theory, the critical factor is]’the stage of development of the culture into which men of genius are born” (12).[14]

With respect to personality and what Elias called ‘psychic habitus’, Huxley argued that whilst humans do not start with a blank slate, the development of the individual emerges at the interface between the emergent dynamics of culture and the biological disposition of the organism. The results are intrinsically variable.

 

“We build our mental organisation from the ground up in a way that no animal does. The resulting constructions are exceedingly varied…There is no such thing as a normal man, since there is no norm, no blueprint for the mental buildings that men construct” (1953)

 

This is not the language that has, in recent decades, become synonymous with neo-Darwinian approaches to the domain of sociology.  And yet it was the shared language of those committed Darwinians who contributed to the consensus in evolutionary theory that first garnered sufficient coherence and adherence to be designated a’ synthesis’, and also an orthodoxy. 

That said, the absence of a blueprint doesn’t imply an existential carnival of free will or unrestricted human agency. Rather the psychological ‘phenotype’ emerges at the interface between biological potential, the emergent but none-the-less structuring dynamics of social interdependencies and chance.  And as Huxley notes, in consequence

 

“Man is the only organism habitually subjected to mental or emotional conflict. He is the only one which has to practice what the Freudians call repression, but also the only one who is constantly making conscious choices…the only organism which has a conscience … But the conscience is not implanted ready made by heredity or divine implantation…Like every other part of our minds it is a piece of mental machinery, constructed by the young child to meet the ambivalent situation that confronts it in its early years. The situation is the existence of one person – the mother or some efficient mother substitute – of authority, which is resented, and tender care, which is sought after and loved.  If this situation is absent, as in infants brought up in impersonal institutions, conscience may fail to develop, just as chlorophyll fails to develop in plants raised in the dark, and the children grow up amoral” (1953: 94)

 

This conception of the necessary social facilitation of a biological potential as a distinctive human trait is something often remarked upon by Elias (notably, in The Symbol Theory, in relation to the development of language in children).  However it is also notable that Huxley is happy to invoke Freud.  This underlines the intellectual heritage common to all intellectuals of Huxley’s generation. Huxley, Waddington, Needham and Elias were part of what was probably the last generation to have experienced a truly interdisciplinary social stock of scientific knowledge. In addressing the parallels between Elias and the organicists in evolutionary and developmental biology this is a crucial but easily overlooked point. Elias is famous for his failure to make due reference to his intellectual sources, but at least part of the explanation is that for his generation, a degree of familiarity with a very wide range of texts was taken for granted. Elias’s own work is very clearly influenced by Marx, Weber, Durkheim but also CH Cooley and the American pragmatist tradition, Darwin, William James, Whitehead and – as has been argued here – the organicist tradition in biology and associated currents of evolutionary humanism. Just by way of comparison it is interesting to note that in his theoretical text, Woodger (1929) discusses the views of JS Haldane, Joseph Needham, Darwin, William Bateson, Descartes, Hume, William James and Freud. Similarly in his discussion of the work of population geneticist Sewall Wright, Michael Ruse (2004) notes the central importance of Herbert Spencer, whilst Steffes (2006) links Wright’s panpsychic organicism to an intellectual geneaology including Spinoza, Leibniz, Henri Bergson andWilliam James. [15]

 

3.4    THE SEQUENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT AND THE PROBLEMS FACED BY YOUTHFUL DISCIPLINES

 

Since the organicists were agreed that the emergent social processes engendered by language were irreducible to the biological properties of individual organisms, they readily acceded to the need for scientific disciplines dedicated to investigating such dynamics. Thus in Huxley’s conception the ‘younger sister science’ of anthropology was the appropriate science of the psycho-social sector’ involving “ concepts and principles which are specific and restricted to man in their application” (1953: 7). As a relative ‘late-starter’ and with more complex  subject matter he regards it as of little  “ wonder that understanding of the psycho-social sector of reality lags behind that or the biological and the inorganic” (7). Making a similar point and lining up the various disciplines in Comtean manner in order of degrees of complexity of subject matter, Von Bertalanffy argues that biology, as the ‘central discipline’ poised literally in the middle of the sequence, has possibly the greatest multiplicity of problems…[and is] the meeting-place for those conceptions which …originate in the exact sciences on the one hand and in the social sciences on the other’ (1952: ix). 

This cognisance of the sequence of development of academic disciplines chimes with that outlined by Elias in Involvement and Detachment.  It is perhaps not surprising therefore that this continuum of subject matter and related disciplines also necessitates a correlative spectrum of methodological orientations.  Bertalanffy is typical of the organicists in taking a passing swipe at the inappropriate analytical posture carried over into biology from the physical sciences:  [Here] ‘the goal of biological research [was] to resolve the complex entities and processes that confront us in living nature into elementary units – to analyse them – in order to explain them by means of the juxtaposition of summation of these elementary units and processes” (1952: 10). He is, however, confident that this propensity to analyse is increasingly complemented by an appreciation of the need for synthesis, an orientation in which biology takes the lead.

 “Today ...all sciences are beset by problems which are indicated by notions such as ‘wholeness’, ‘organisation’ or ‘gestalt’ – concepts which have their root in the biological field” (ix)

Finally, the organicists share with Elias a common sense of the complexity of the human condition as emerging from the intersection of processes operating simultaneously on many different scales. As Bertalanffy notes in passing:   “Our experienced world is the product of a long evolution, cultural history and individual learning of the child. As psychiatrists say, the ‘ego boundary’ is established slowly and in a complex (but widely known) processes; and may be obliterated in psychopathology” (1952: 95).  But just as Needham had argued in relation to the structure of relations between the parts in complex biological wholes, the emergent structure of the social process is amenable to scientific scrutiny. For Bertalanffy, pressing home Needham’s insight in relation to social systems begged the possibility and necessity of what he dubbed a ‘theoretical history’.

 “The basic insight seems to be that history is not a process of an amorphous humanity, but is borne by a comparatively small number of socio-cultural systems, variously called cultures, civilisations etc… [which] show regularities of development…comparable to growth, maturity, decay and eventual extinction” (1952: 105; see also 1969: 200)

In his careful distinction between Darwinian evolution in biology and social development (rather than ‘cultural evolution’), and in the elaboration of concepts such as the ‘triad of basic controls’, sociogenesis, psychogenesis, functional democratisation, figurations, and homines aperti – Elias’s historical sociology was in many ways such an exercise in ‘theoretical history’

 

3.5    EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS

 

Huxley was unabashed in his affirmation of the idea of progress in evolution. His writing in this area has since become something of an embarrassment for the biological establishment, for which the idea of progress is anachronistic, anthropocentric and unjustifiable. Huxley did recognise that in so far as evolution involved diverging adaptation, it was problematic to compare one species or genetic line against another, as higher or lower forms, more or less evolved. But at the same time he argued that one could identify ‘advances’ or ‘improvements in organisation’ in four senses (1955: 5): 

·        The specialisation of a stock for a particular way of life. Here the unit of progress is a species.

·        Divergent radiation of a primitive type into a number of specialisations leading to ‘an improved exploitation of environmental variety’. Here the unit of progress that he seems to have in mind is a clade of species or an ecosystem.

·        Better physiological performance of some function. He gives a number of examples: the speed of conduction in nervous tissue, which increased a thousand fold in metazoan evolution; or the efficiency of flight in birds compared with ancestral Archaeopteryx; care of young in placental as compared to earlier egg-laying mammals; or ‘most spectacular’ in Huxley’s view, the mental improvement or increase in awareness, culminating eventually in human symbolic communication of shared experience. Here the unit of progress is an abstract morphological, physiological or ecological function.

·        ‘Improvement in general organisation’ such as the all round homeostatic and regulatory capacities of ‘warm-blooded’ vertebrates; or the organisation of mental capacities and awareness and the utilisation of stored experience.

His elaboration of these points is not altogether clear and he goes on to talk in general terms about the succession of ‘dominant types’, the constraints on the evolution in specialised lines, and the possible exhaustion of possibilities (for instance in relation to an absolute physical limit on the improvement of biological performance).

“Advance connotes a rise in the upper level of organisation, both of material physiology and of awareness; it involves the realisation of fuller control or fuller exploitation of the resources of the environment, fuller self-regulation or independence of its arbitrary or hostile forces and an increasingly comprehensive and increasingly accurate picture of its events and operations.” (1955:18)

This is not the place to review the debates around the vexed issue of evolutionary progress in any detail (see essays by Ruse, Richards Gould and McShea in Hall & Ruse, 1998, Part IX). However it should be noted that Huxley’s views were unremarkable and widely shared during the period in which he formulated them.  At one level the idea of progress was a simple description of the apparent increase in complexity and self-awareness of organisms over the long march of evolutionary time. Huxley focused, in particular, on the increasing capabilities of organisms in terms of their awareness of their environment and consequently, their ability to exploit effectively the available resources (1955: 18). And from the perspective of the biosphere as a whole, diversification of types and advancement of individual species entailed a progressively greater exploitation of resources at the level of the biosphere as a whole resulting in ‘a larger richer biomass’. 

            In this light, Huxley saw the advent of psycho-social evolution as a clear continuation of the progressive march of evolution, transposed into a new register: cultural (Lamarckian) rather than biological (Darwinian) evolution. And just as he dismissed the biological relativism that sought to deny progress in the latter, Huxley disputed the cultural relativism that prevented anthropologists from delineating any notion of cultural advance or progress. He pressed this point by arguing that the ‘scale of culture’ had a dual measure: the efficiency of the exploitation of environmental resources and the (somewhat more nebulous) fulfilment of individual potentiality (1955: 20).

            Whilst Huxley at least attempted to ground his understanding of progress in technical and material criteria, his friend and colleague, palaeontologist and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin crossed the line to develop a sweeping theological version of evolutionary humanism. Huxley’s progressive increase in somatic complexity and awareness becomes in Teilhard the ‘curve of corpusculisation’ (1966: 21), and ‘cephalisation and ….interiorising complexification’ (33). From the point of hominisation the ‘anthropoid patch in the Pliocene…glows under the influence of a new ascending radiation’ (60).  This kind of language was echoed by Von Bertalanffy who declared

 

“So evolution appears to be more than a mere product of chance governed by profit. It seems a cornucopia of ‘evolution créatice’ , a drama of suspense, of dynamics and tragic complications. Life spirals upwards to higher and ever higher levels, paying for every step” (1967: 87)

 

He then gives the same narrative of encephalisation, individualisation and complexification that elaborated by both Huxley and Teilhard.

            Others in Huxley’s group were much more cautious and distanced themselves from such flowery prognostications. However, their generally left-liberal political aspirations and the common concern with global civil society (as evident in the involvement of Huxley and Needham in UNESCO) is indicative of a common perception of the gradual integration of global humanity, and human psycho-social evolution as the leading edge of the greater cosmic evolution. With humanity the stream of culture takes over from the biological species as the main unit of evolution and purposive activity begins to structure the wider evolutionary process (Huxley 1953).  Even the elder statesman Dobzhansky often remarked on the evolution of symbolic culture as a moment of transcendant innovation as significant as the emergence of life, some 3.8 billion years ago. Repeating Huxley’s tripartite schema he wrote: “The evolution of culture is now superimposed on the two older evolutions, the biological and the cosmic” (1972: 122).  Likewise CH Waddington:  “In having given rise to man, biological evolution has transcended itself. Mankind is the only species engaged in two evolutions at the same time – the biological and the cultural”(1957: 6).

            In a purely descriptive sense, the idea that developments at the current highest level of integration (social processes) are beginning to channel and direct or ‘canalise’ developments at lower levels (the process of biological evolution) is significant, but uncontroversial. Quite clearly human domination of the biosphere, both geographically and also in terms of an extending trophic monopoly (Quilley, 2004), is transforming the trajectory of evolutionary ecology on the planet (Budiansky, 1998).  There is more than a hint of hubris in the often repeated claim made by Huxley and Teilhard de Chardin that purely biological progress had come to an end, signalling an era of human directed evolution.

 

“In the light of evolutionary biology man can now see himself as the sole agent of further evolutionary advance on this planet, and one of the few possible instruments of progress in the universe at large. He finds himself in the unexpected position of business manager for the cosmic process of evolution “ (Huxley, 1953: 116)

 

For Teilhard, although the traditional view would see humanity as just one twig on the bushy radiation of evolution, this was a twig with ‘prodigious biological qualities…transforming the biological world around it’ (1966: 15).

 

4.         Parallels and Precendents: An Evaluation

 

4.1    EVOLUTION, SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS IN ELIAS.

 

The evolutionary humanism, which placed humanity at the centre of a teleological evolutionary drama, was most self-consciously advocated by Huxley and Teilhard de Chardin, but also resonated more widely with the underlying political and spiritual inclinations of the first generation of biologists associated with the modern synthesis. This reworking of Victorian progress theory found an easy fit with the emergentist logic of the epistemology of integrative levels that had become the shared and mainstream framework of the organicist biologists. How then did Elias, in absorbing the theory of integrative levels and the organicist understanding of the relationship between social and biological processes, approach the issue of progress.

            Firstly, as a sociologist, Elias was far more precise in his distinction between evolutionary processes operating at different levels of integration. Specifically, he made a firm distinction between Darwinian evolution at the level of biology and long term processes of social development.[16] And as Kilminster points out, this distinction allows him to locate the evolution of symbolic culture (Teilhard’s ‘noosphere’) and the ensuing process of social development within the broad scheme of ‘the Great Evolution’ without any assumption of teleology (1994: 18). Where as biological evolution is irreversible, processes of social development are reversible and may be subject to both centralising and decentralising dynamics, integration and disintegration, demographic growth and ecological collapse.

            Secondly, he is much more careful than Huxley to distinguish between technical criteria for advancement or the ‘stage of development’, and an ethical or normative evaluation.  Where for Huxley evolutionary progress was equated fairly bluntly with ethical advance, Elias’s ‘triad of basic controls’ (1978) pointed only to a systematic relationship between the scale and intensity of interdependency concomitant with particular patterns of social development, the scale and effectiveness of human exploitation of the environment or trophic monopoly (Quilley, 2004) and observable patterns of habitual psychological restraint evident in personality formation.[17]  The trajectory of this three-way matrix could change direction. Both civilising processes and de-civilising processes are evident in the historical-sociological record (Mennell 1990).

            However whilst he did not import the teleological patina of progressivism, the organicist paradigm generally and the theory of integrative levels specifically, did provide for Elias a way of analysing social processes whilst keeping simultaneously in the frame, multiple time-frames and processes on different but mutually implicated biological and social levels of integration.

 

 

4.2    ASPECTS OF A SHARED ZEITGEIST

 

The review of the organicist literature of the mid-twentieth century and centring on the work of Julian Huxley is revealing. Specifically, it suggests that Elias shared with the then mainstream body of biological theory a number of substantive and conceptual orientations:

q                   An anti-Kantian, anti-Cartesian, processual epistemology derived from a number of sources, but most notably Whitehead’s process philosophy.

 

q                   A broad conception of a unitary evolutionary process – albeit with three phases or aspects – cosmic, biological and social – each with its own spatial contours and dynamics, mode of propulsion and characteristic tempo.

 

q                   An epistemology of integrative levels rooted in an organisational rather than metaphysical concept of ‘emergence’

 

q                   Familiarity with a shared corpus of overlapping work in the human sciences including for instance, Spencer, Comte, Darwin, Descartes, Marx, John Dewey, William James, Freud, Whitehead, CH Cooley.  This all-round classical education (now an impossible aspiration) is vital in so far as it tended towards a shared sense of how problems of philosophy and language impinged on the framing of research questions in both biology and the social sciences.  More specifically, one can point to a shared sense of the problem of what Elias called ‘process reduction’.

 

q                   A Freudian understanding of conscience formation combined with an appreciation of the historical, societal and individual variability in the emergence and channelling of both ‘mind’ and personality.

 

While Huxley’s ventures into the territory of culture and social processes remained impressionistic, insubstantial and marred by a pronounced teleology and an anachronistic understanding of progress, he did also affirm the “irreducibility of the highest human social level to lower ones, as part of an ethical-humanistic worldview based on an evolutionary picture of humankind” (Kilminster, 1994: 19).  As Kilminster points out, Elias’s rendered the epistemology of levels into a workable framework for the sociological investigation of long term processes of social development.  And although he shared with Teilhard de Chardin et al an appreciation that human integration might proceed an awful lot further than seems imaginable from the current phase of development, he also injected a very large measure of caution into the investigation which to be successful required a great deal of sociological work ‘to control of the intrusion of emotionally charged ideological evaluations into our observations of the biological and social levels of human beings’ (Kilminster, p19).  That Elias was comparatively more successful in this regard is evident from the fact that his own writings from the middle of the last century remain fresh and seem undated.  Reading Huxley on the other hand, it is difficult not to wince at his enthusiasm for eugenics or a misplaced enthusiasm for the capacity of the ‘higher cultures’ to realise the potential of individual citizens.

 

4.3    THE EBBS AND FLOWS OF ORGANCIST THINKING:

 

4.3.1        Elias’s focus on long term processes of social development and the influence of early to mid-twentieth century biology and psychology.

 

Sanderson (1997) charts the ebb and flow of evolutionary thinking in the social sciences over the last two hundred years. In the late nineteenth century sociology and anthropology were animated by successive evolutionary interpretations of history and the long-term development of human culture. Morgan, Tylor, Spencer, Marx and even Emile Durkheim contributed an evolutionary zeitgeist that captured public imagination. In its ideological aspect there was an obvious link between such Victorian progress theory and the self-image of the expanding European powers. But there was also a deeper epistemological attraction in the integration of the embryonic human sciences with Darwinian natural history.

During the 1920s and 30s, American anthropology in particular turned its back on history, coming under the sway of an extreme cultural relativism associated with the work of Franz Boas and Margaret Meade. It is an interesting coincidence that fifteen years prior to this the emergence of Mendelian genetics had seen the popularity of Darwinian evolutionary theory wane among biologists. This ‘eclipse of Darwinism’ as Huxley referred to it, was overcome only with the ‘modern synthesis’ of the early 1940s.[18] At around the same time there was a revival in evolutionist theorising and research anthropology associated with V Gordon Childe, Julian Steward and Leslie White, and carried over into the post-war materialist programme associated with Marvin Harris, Robert Carneiro, Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service (and to an extent the sociology of Parsons and Lenski).

Since the 1970s evolutionary theory has again lost favour across the social sciences, and epistemological relativism has been rampant in a multitude of self-referential forms. Like anthropology, sociology remains ‘a multi-paradigmatic or multi-perspectival subject … conflict ridden … [and without any] overall consensus …regarding concepts, theories and methods’ (Dunning & Mennell 2003: 1). And this situation has been made considerably worse by the abandonment, by possibly a majority of sociologists, of the very idea that the investigation of social processes can be scientific, and by implication of the idea that it should be possible to build up, over time, a social-stock of reality-congruent ideas about the operation of social processes.[19]

Sanderson rightly attributes (at least in part) the rejection of evolutionary thinking to a more general antipathy towards historical time-frames (1997: 103). Anxieties about disciplinary boundaries and the institutional incentive to develop an intellectual field sharply distinguished from the older and higher status discipline of history have led sociologists to abandon the past and ‘retreat into the present.’  Goudsblom refers to an endemic ‘hodiecentrism’ or today-centred thinking (1977: 7).

Norbert Elias has long been a notable exception to this state of affairs.  Although The Civilizing Process was elaborated in relation to a time-frame of one thousand years, studies such as Time and Involvement & Detachment pertain to long term processes spanning the entirety of human social development. And sociologists such as Joop Goudsblom (1992; 2002) have shown the immense application of Eliasian concepts to much broader evolutionary problems.

If Elias’s work seems out of step with developments in the discipline as a whole, this is because he was. Although studying during the interwar period with Karl Mannheim and in the milieu of the Frankfurt school, Elias’s first full time appointment at Leicester University did not come until after the war when he was in his fifties. The Civilizing Process, originally published in 1939 in Switzerland languished in almost total obscurity (certainly in the Anglophone world), until it was translated during the 1960s. Although he published much important work during subsequent decades this was notable in two respects. In contrast with the modern academic habit of dense and often self-referential referencing, Elias only rarely referred to the work of other sociologists.[20]His sparse academic citations generally referred to more enduring classical works of anthropology or history. The intellectual debates and controversies that do surface in his work tend to engage with the broader frame of reference that informed sociological theory during the inter-war period.

For instance during the 1920s and 1930s, a central question for German sociologists was the synthesis of insights from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. By synthesising aspects of Weber and Simmel, together with an understanding of the behaviourist psychology of Watson, the physiology of Cannon, Freudian psychoanalysis, the ‘Gestalt theory’ of Köhler and Wertheimer, and the ‘field theory’ of Lewin, and undertaking an equally historical, psychological and sociological study, The Civilising Process shows how the superego, in Freud’s sense, developed through time and in relation to specific structures of social interdependence. Clearly the underlying conceptual architecture was developed on the basis of a good understanding of early to mid-twentieth century advances across the full spectrum of biological and psychological disciplines.

Similarly the Comtean framework elaborated in Elias’s ‘Reflections on the Great Evolution’ were only published in Involvement and Detachment in1986, having been drafted in 1979.[21] However it is evident throughout the text that Elias is engaging with the two pillars of mid-twentieth century biology that were becoming paradigmatic during the 1940s: the process philosophy of organicism on the one hand, and the modern evolutionary theory on the other. Typically, the explicit references are limited to the work of Henri Bergson and the unfashionable French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl. Likewise in The Symbol Theory published towards the end of his life in 1989, Elias considers the impact of the evolution of language on long term processes of social development. Again the only explicit reference is to Julian Huxley’s The Uniqueness of Man published in 1941.

 

 

 

 

4.3.2        Organicism and the modern synthesis:

 

By the mid-twentieth century the ‘mainstream organicist’ paradigm, had come to function as the ‘background philosophy of biology’ (Niño El-Hani & Emmeche, 2000: 237). Organicism and the new synthesis became, albeit for a short while, an overlapping twin paradigm.   

In the post-war period enormous technical advances across the life-sciences have confirmed the molecular-genetic re-working of Darwinian evolutionary theory as the overarching framework of modern biology. However political anxieties about progressivist conceptions of evolution have seen the evolutionary humanism of the kind espoused by Julian Huxley expunged to the fringes of academic respectability. Inadvertently speaking from the same hymn sheet as his nemesis Richard Dawkins, liberal-left intellectuals such as Stephen J Gould figured strongly in the public campaign to keep evolution secular, directionless and essentially meaningless.[22]

But ironically the rejection of evolutionary humanism was also accompanied by a more tacit abandonment of the wider philosophy and epistemology of organicism. For the most part this can probably be best explained by the culture of specialization and the difficulty of maintaining a broad theoretical overview based upon a reasonable knowledge across many sub-disciplines. In biology, as in sociology, the Renaissance man of letters doesn’t seem to have survived into the post-war period. It is also true that the dazzling productivity of the reductionist analytical programme associated with molecular biology and biochemistry has, since the nineteen fifties, mesmerised the wider discipline. What ever the case, the resulting orientation towards reductionism and the elevation of analysis over synthesis has had a profound impact on the development of the discipline (Rose 1997). In particular a number of working assumptions have become precepts for ‘orthodox’ theoretical biology. These include:

i)                           that the enormous morphological and functional variety evident in the natural world is entirely and only the product of natural selection operating over geological timescales;

ii)                         that selection operates only at the level of the gene making any appearance of ‘group selection’ inadmissible;

iii)                        that evolution is inherently directionless.

The austere grandeur of this vision – of a genetic thread linking the forms and functions of all the life forms that exist and have ever existed, ever-branching and differentiating solely in response to the shifting tides of inter-generational variation, adaptation and natural selection – has been well captured by Jacques Monad’s Chance and Necessity (1971).

However, this Darwinian orthodoxy has never been as uniform as advocates such as Dawkins have often tried to imply. In contrast to his contemporaries Fisher and Haldane, Sewall Wright derided ‘beanbag genetics’ and the emphasis on hypothesised actions of individual genes, insisting instead on whole genomes and the study of evolution in naturally occurring populations.  This emphasis on populations and whole organisms as the unit of selection was also taken forward by Theodosius Dobzhansky, and his intellectual heir Ernst Mayr (1988). More radically, CH Waddington pointed to circumstances in which phenotypic processes of development in higher animals could direct and ‘canalise’ potentially favourable mutations, thereby broaching the Weismann barrier (1972 cited in Rose 1997: 218-9). Elsewhere, developmental biology is revealing discomforting evidence that, rather than being an accident of adaptive radiation and natural selection, many basic structural forms are constrained by simple mathematical and geometrical rules (e.g. Webster & Goodwin 1996). Likewise, the long-closed argument about group selection is beginning to be prised open once again: there is strong evidence that for social animals, capable of symbolic communication and inter-generational culture (i.e. humans), social groups can become a primary object of selection (see Ofek 2000). And following the ongoing controversies surrounding James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and the rediscovery by Lyn Margulis of ‘symbiogenesis’, the earth sciences are gradually absorbing the difficult proposition that planetary ecological systems may be intrinsically biophilic and ‘homeodynamic’ – i.e. they may gravitate naturally towards complex, self-sustainaining biological life. Finally, in what constitutes a profound heresy against orthodox common sense, theoretical biologists such as John Tyler Bonner (1988 – building on Waddington), Saunders & Ho (1976, 1981) and Stuart Kaufman (1995; 2000) working within the emerging paradigm of chaos theory, are at least re-legitimating as a working hypothesis, the idea that evolution might have a direction: an internal biophilic orientation towards biological (and social) complexity. For Rose (1997), these radical ideas are captured best by the concept of ‘autopoiesis’ (Maturana & Varela 1980), which seeks to reconcile the organism and its life-line as a process of becoming, the crude dichotomy of gene/environment being replaced by an iterative dialectic of specificity and plasticity in the process of development. Against perceived theoretical unanimity, he points to a continuing counter-current in biological thinking that flows back through the work of the Santa Fe Institute under Kaufman, and the Theoretical Biology Club of Joseph Needham and CH Waddington in inter-war Cambridge, through the process-philosophy of Bergson and right back to pre-Darwinian, French biologists such as Georges Cuvier and Etienne Geoffrey St. Hilaire. 

Rose’s agenda, along with Goodwin, Kaufman et al., is to ‘make biology whole again’.  However, the pertinent point for sociological observers of these ‘Darwin wars’ (see Morris 2001) is not that the new paradigm waiting in the wings may consign the last hundred years of scientific endeavour to the dustbin. Rather, the new biology would see the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy – the ‘new synthesis’ trumpeted (somewhat ironically[23]) by Julian Huxley and Dobzhansky during the 1930s – tempered by: renewed emphasis on the irreducibility of emergent dynamics at different levels organisation (Needham 1937; or nested ‘holons’ to use Koestler’s image, 1969); an orientation to the interpenetration of organisms and environments; the structural constraints on evolution; the centrality of process and ‘autopoeisis’; and the emergent complexities of homeodynamics (Rose, 1997: Ch 11).

The re-emergence of holism in biology and the recognition of complexity and different integrative levels is significant for sociology for two reasons. Firstly, the imperialist explanatory logic of early socio-biology, that would reduce sociology to biology, has been undercut by developments within the life sciences. And secondly, by the same token, in this recognition of emergent levels, there is space for sociology along side genetics, ecology, biochemistry and the raft of disciplines that contribute towards the ‘general biology’ intimated by Stuart Kaufman (2000: Ch1).  As Norbert Elias recognised much earlier, the relatively autonomous, emergent domain of social processes, which provides the subject matter for sociology, must always be recognised as an aspect of what he called ‘the great evolution’ (1987 [1956]).  Kaufman’s ‘general biology’ is in fact the study of Elias’ ‘great evolution’.

In fact the countervailing organicist paradigm has never really disappeared. As Bertalanffy noted at the time:

 

“The future historian of our times will note as a remarkable phenomenon that, since the time of the first world war, similar conceptions about nature, mind, life and society arose independently not only in different sciences but also in different countries, Everywhere we find the same leading motifs:  the concepts of organisation showing new characteristics and laws at each level, those of the dynamic nature of, and the antitheses within reality” (1952: 194)

 

For Bertalanffy, the rejection by Driesch and Haldane of the ‘machine theory of life’, the emergence of gestalt theory, Lloyd Morgan’s theory of emergent evolution, the process natural philosophy Alfred North Whitehead and the holism of Jan Smuts and Meyer Abich – all paved the way for the organicist conception and subsequently what he described as ‘general systems theory’, in which part/whole relationships were characterised by “dynamic regulation within an integrate system” (1967: 193)

 

“Workers widely separated geographically, without contact with each other, and in very different fields, arrived at essentially similar conceptions – sometimes to the point of almost literal coincidence of expression…[developments in] embryology, developmental psychology, cultural anthropology, neo-Kantian philosophy, sociology and others – converged into closely related conceptions of the organism, man and society “ (1967: 4)

 

In this way the organicist paradigm anticipated a more general systems approach which has since given rise to a raft of related developments in cybernetics, systems theory and game theory: “General system theory may be considered a science of ‘wholeness’ or holistic entities which hitherto, that is under mechanistic bias, were excluded as unscientific or metaphysical” (1967: 70). From this perspective, the organicist conception ,and the associated epistemology of levels, has never left the stage of the human sciences. And indeed it seems clear that with developments in chaos theory and the increasingly sophisticated mathematics of complexity being applied in ever wider spheres including economics, sociology and embryology and ecology, Bertalanffy’s instinct was well-placed.

 

5.         Conclusion: Towards a Synthetic Human Science

 

Elias absorbed and developed his epistemology of integrative levels during the nineteen thirties and forties when it was the central plank of a wider philosophy of organicism that was shared by the majority of theoretically-minded biologists of the time. However the interrupted trajectory of his career ensured that his work only came to prominence within sociology at a time when organicist currents within biology had been reduced to trickle and banished to the intellectual margins. The triumphal analytical reductionism epitomised by Dawkins’ (1975) genes-eye view of the world also consolidated a chasm of mutual misunderstanding and suspicion between social and biological sciences. For sociologists in particular the well-intentioned but clumsy encroachments of socio-biology signalled a colonial intent that was met by a wall of hostility and derision.

However the analytical myopia that has dominated the life sciences for fifty years seems to be throwing up problems – in genetics, in ecology, in the earth sciences, in psychology and always in sociology – that demand a holistic approach to the complex interaction between parts, between processes operating at different levels of integration. Such approaches require flexibility about the units of analysis and pluralism in relation to methodology. And above all they require a cooperative and problem-oriented relationship between neighbouring disciplines: i.e.) recognising the autonomy that derives from the organisational dynamics of particular levels of integration, but also the physical and functional continuity that is implicit in the imagery of ‘nested holons’ or ‘sub-systems’ – and the overarching temporal continuity explicit in ‘the great evolution.’ The practical significance of this is that biology can no more explain away social phenomena by disaggregating them into constituent biological ‘parts’, than chemistry can ‘explain’ molecular biology, or ecology.

            But a productive relationship between Comte’s neighbouring disciplines still requires trust and self-confidence on both sides. Both sociology and anthropology have for the last two decades been severely wanting on both counts. The significance of Norbert Elias’s process sociology in this context is two fold. Firstly the figurational paradigm developed in the more problem-based and less specialized and less discipline-bounded intellectual environment that characterised the decades before the post-war expansion and professionalization of higher education. Elias absorbed and engaged with many of the epistemological and programmatic issues animating disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, history, anthropology and linguistics. Because of this the figurational framework is pre-configured to operate at the overlaps of these disciplines and is well-placed to provide an integrating framework for an encompassing and synthetic human science. More specifically, in sharing the organicist epistemology of mid-century theoretical biology, figurational sociology is well-placed to engage with a nascent paradigm shift in the life sciences that is seeing the rediscovery of complexity and a renewed emphasis on the organisms rather than the gene, populations  of interacting organisms and communities of interacting species as integral units of analysis. In short figurational sociology could provide the central theoretical foundation for an integrated human science encompassing the full range of biological, psychological, historical and sociological disciplines (Loyal & Quilley, 2005).

            Secondly, if sociologists are able to renew a dialogue based on parity of esteem with colleagues in the biological sciences, the latter may find that the investigation of figurational dynamics may help resolve concrete scientific problems in disciplines dealing with phenomena at lower levels of integration. Two examples immediately spring to mind. With regard to one of the most contentious issues in evolutionary theory, Joop Goudsblom’s (1992) pioneering study of the relationship between fire and civilization provides a very concrete example of the way in which culture engendered by language facilitates processes of group selection (i.e. natural selection operating at the level of social groups rather than individual organisms).[24] More obviously the concept of psychogenesis and the entire thesis of The Civilizing Process details the canalizing and moulding of somatic and neurological development in individual person-organisms emergent social dynamics engendered by interactions between individuals and groups over long periods of time. In short, social life changes people’s brains and bodies – something that practicing doctors, dentists and psychologists have always understood.

 

.

 

References:

 

Ablowitz, Reuben (1939) ‘The Theory of Emergence’ Philosophy of Science 6 (1): 1-16

 

Allen,GE (2005) ‘Mechanism, vitalism and organicism in late nineteenth and twentieth century biology: the importance of historical context’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36: 261-283.

 

Baker,JR (1978) Julian Huxley. Scientist and World Citizen 1887-1975 (PARIS: UNESCO)

 

Bergson 1975 [1907], Creative Evolution, [Reprint 1944 ed.] Westport CT: Greenwood Publishing Group)

 

Bergmann,G (1944) ‘Holism, Historicism and Emergence’, Philosophy of Science, Vol 4: 209-21

 

Budiansky, S (1998) The Covenant of the Wild (London: Phoenix)

 

 Blitz, D (1992) Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and Levels of Reality (Dortrecht: Kluwer)

 

Beckermann,A, Flohr,H, Kim, J (eds) ( 1992 )Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter)

 

Böhm, D (2002 [1984]) Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge)

 

Cassirer,E 1953, 1955, 1957; The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 3 Vols (New Haven: Yale University Press)

 

Casillo,R (1992) ‘Lewis Mumford and the Organicist Concept in Social Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1) 91-116

 

Dawkins, R (1975) The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press)

 

Dobzhansky, T.(1937)  Genetics and the Origin of Species, (Columbia University Press)

 

-- (1972) ‘Unique aspects of man’s evolution’ in Biology and the Human Sciences (The Herbert Spencer Lectures 1970) by JWS Pringle (Ed.), (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp 121-139

 

--  (1967) The Biology of Ultimate Concern (New York: New American Library)

 

Dunning,E & Mennell,S., 2003, Norbert Elias: Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought, Four Volumes, London: Sage.

 

Elias, N. 2000 [orig. 1939], The Civilising Process , Rev. ed., Oxford, Blackwell.

 

-- (2006) Early Writings, [The Collected Works] Ed Richard Kilminster (Dublin: UCD Press Forthcoming)

 

--. 1978, What is Sociology? , London: Hutchinson.

 

-- 1982, ‘Scientific Establishments’, in Norbert Elias, Herminio Martins and Richard Whitley (eds.) Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies (Dordrecht: Reidal). 

 

--. 1983, The Court Society, Oxford, Blackwell.

 

-- .1987, Involvement and Detachment ,Oxford, Blackwell.

 

-- 1989, The Symbol Theory, London, Sage.

 

--. 1992, Time, An Essay, Oxford, Blackwell.

 

-- 1996, [1989 orig. in German], The Germans, Cambridge, Polity.

 

Garnett,A (1942) ‘Scientific Method and the Concept of Emergence’, Journal of Philosophy, 39, Aug, pp 477-86.

 

Gerard, RW (1942) ‘Higher levels of Integration’ in Redfield, Robert (ed) Levels of Integration in Biological and Social Systems (Lancaster, Penn.: The Jacques Cattell Press)

 

Gilbert,SF & Sarkar,S (2000) Embracing Complexity: Organicism for the 21st^st Century, Developmental Dynamics (219): 1-9

 

Goudsblom,J., 1977, Sociology in the Balance: A Critical Essay, Oxford, Blackwell.

--- 1992, Fire and Civilisation, London, Allen Lane.

--- (2002) ‘Introductory Overview: The Expanding Anthroposphere’ in De Vries,B. & Goudsblom,J Mappae Mundi. Humans and their Habitats in Long-Term Ecological Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press)

---  (2003) A Four Model of Photosynthetic Appropriation. Paper presented at a workshop – The culture and history of eating habits – hosted by Stichting Praemium Erasianum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 5-6^th November 2003.

Grinevald, Jacques (1998) ‘The Invisibility of the Vernadskian Revolution’, introduction to Vernadsky,Vladimir I 1998 [1926] The Biosphere (New York: Coperincus).

 

Hall,DL & Ruse,M (1998) (Eds) The Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

 

Henderson,L.J. (1917) The Order of Nature (Cambridge Mass.:  Harvard Uni Press)

 

Henle,P (1942) ‘The Status of Emergence’, Journal of Philosophy, 39, Aug. pp 486-93.

 

Huxley,J  (1953) Evolution in Action (New York: Signet)

 

-- (1955) Guest Editorial:  Evolution, Cultural and Biological, Yearbook of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp 2-25

 

-- (1954) ‘The Evolutionary Process’ in Huxley,J., Hardy, A.C., and Ford,E.B., (Eds) Evolution as a Process (London: Allen & Unwin)

 

--  (1961) (ed) The Humanist Frame (London: George Allen & Unwin)

 

Kaufman,S (1995) At Home in the Universe. The Search for Laws of Self-organisation and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press)

 

-- (2000) Investigations (New York: Oxford University Press)

 

Kilminster,R (1994) ‘The Symbol Theory’ as a Research Programme. Paper given at the XIII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Bielefeld, 18-23^rd July 1994.

 

Kilminster,R (1989) Editor’s Introduction, The Symbol Theory by Norbert Elias (London: Sage)

 

Koestler, A & JR Smythies 1969, Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in Life Sciences, London: Hutchinson

 

Le Roy, Edouard (1928) The Origins of Humanity and the Evolution of Mind.

 

Langer,SK 1948, Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Mentor Books)

 

Lotka,J 1925.  Elements of Physical Biology. Baltimore, Maryland: Williams and Wilkins Company

 

Loyal, S. & S. Quilley (2005) ‘Eliasian Sociology as a ‘Central Theory’ for the Human Sciences’, Current Sociology Vol 53 (1) *****

 

Maturana  H.R.and Varela F.J. 1980, Autopoiesis and Congnition: The Realisation of Living, Boston: Reidal

 

Mayr,E (1942) Systematics and the Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press)

 

Mennell, Stephen (1990) ‘Decivilising Processes: Theoretical Significance and Some Lines for Research’. International Sociology, 5 (2): 205–23.

 

Mitman,Greg (1992) The State of Nature: Ecology, Community and American Social Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)

 

Morris, R. 2001, The Evolutionists: The Struggle for Darwin’s Soul, New York: Freeman.

 

Moore (1912) The Nature and Origin of Life (Henry Holt & Co)

 

Needham, J (1936) Order and Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

 

Needham,J (1932) Thoughts on the problem of biological organisation, Scientia 26.

 

Needham, J. 1937, Integrative Levels: A Reevaluation of the Idea of Progress, Oxford: Clarendon Press)

 

Niño El-Hani, Charbel and Emmeche, Claus (2000) On some theoretical grounds for an organism centred biology: Property emergence, subservience and downward causation, Theoretical Bioscience, 119: 234-275

 

Novikoff,Alex B (1945) ‘The concept of integrative levels and biology’, Science, 101, March, pp 209-15

 

Quilley,S (2004) 'Ecology, 'Human Nature' and Civilising Processes: Biology and Sociology in the Work of Norbert Elias' in The Sociology of Norbert Elias, by Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

 

Quilley,S (2004) Social Development as Trophic Expansion: Food systems, Prosthetic Ecology and the Arrow of History, Amsterdam Sociologisch Tijdschrift,  September Vol 31(3): 321-348

 

Quilley,S & S.Loyal (2004) 'Towards a Central Theory: The Scope and Relevance of Norbert Elias' in The Sociology of Norbert Elias by Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley (eds) (March 2004), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

 

Reiser, Oliver L (1958) The Integration of Human Knowledge (Boston; Extending Horizons Press)

Rose,S (1997) Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism. (London: Penguin)

Ruse,M (2004) ‘Adaptive Landscapes and Dynamic Equilibrium: The Spencerian Contribution to Twentieth Century American Evolutionary Biology” in A. Lusting, R.J. Richards and M.Ruse (eds.), Darwinian Heresies (Cambridge University Press).

Sampson, Paul R and David Pitt (1999) The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: Global Environment, Society and Change (London: Routledge)

 

Sapp,J (1994) Evolution by Association. A History of Symbiosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

 

Sanderson,SK (1997) Evolutionism and its Critics, Journal of World Systems Research, Vol 3 (1) 94-114.

 

Seuss,E 1875 The Origin of the Alps (Vienna: Braunműller)

 

Steffes,D.M.  (2006) Panpsychic Organicism: Sewall Wright’s Philosophy for Understanding Complex Organic Systems. Journal of the History of Biology, Vol 40(2): 327-361

 

Sober,E and D Sloan Wilson (1999) Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behaviour (Harvard University Press)

 

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1966 [Orig. 1956, France]) Man’s Place in Nature. The Human Zoological Group (London: Collins)

 

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1959) The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins)

 

Von Bertalanffy, L.1956 ‘A biologist looks at human nature, Scientific Monthly, 82: 33-41, 1965 ‘On the Definition of the Symbol’ in J.R. Royce (ed) Psychology and the Symbol: An Interdisciplinary Symposium (New York: Random House), pp 28-71

 

Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig (1952) Problems of Life: An Evaluation of Modern Biological Thought (London: Watts & Co.)

 

Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig (1967) Robots, Men and Minds. Psychology in the Modern World  (New York: George Braziller)

 

Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig (1969) General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller)

 

Vernadsky,Vladimir I 1998 [1926] The Biosphere (New York: Coperincus)

 

Vernadsky,VI (1944) ‘Problems of Biochemistry II’ Transactions of the Conneticut Academy of Arts and Sciences V36 pp 483-517.

 

Waddington,CH (1957) The Strategy of Genes (London: George Allen & Unwin)

 

Wassall, TJ (1994) ‘The Role of Levels of Integration in Elias’s Sociology of Knowledge’, paper presented to the Ad Hoc Sessions on Figurational Sociology, XIII World Congress of Sociology, Bielefeld, 18-23 July, 1994.

 

Werskey,PG (1971)British Scientists and ‘Outsider’ Politics, 1931-1945, Science Studies, 1: 67-83.

 

Whitehead AN, 1978, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology [Gifford Lectures, 1927-1928] ( New York. Free Press)

 

Woodger,JH (1929) Biological Principles: A Critical Study ( London: Routledge & Paul)

 

Woodger,JH (1931) ‘The concept of the organism and the relation between embryology and genetics’ Pt III Quart. Review of Biology (6) 1931, 178, pp 193-199 ,

 

Worster,D (1977) Nature’s Economy. A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Camb