THE NATURALIZATION OF VALUE SYSTEMS IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES
This essay is the result of more than one transformation. I had for
some years intended to write an essay on the functionalist tradition in the human
sciences. I had prepared a draft and amended it a number of times, when I received an
invitation from the Course Team of an Open University course on ‘Science and Belief:
From Darwin to Einstein’ to contribute a course unit. I set out to adapt my ideas to
this context, but it was not an easy fit. In this re-publication of the essay I have not
deleted the materials strictly relevant to the course rubric and the ‘Self-Assessment
Questions’ (SAQ) which I found anathema at the time. (I made an attempt to re-absorb
the points I made in them into the text but found that at this distance in time I could
not do so without clumsiness and loss of flow.) I have also not modified the
‘explaining’ mode of discourse. Although this material was originally inserted
for pedagogical reasons, it provides a useful way of conveying my historiographic
argument. When I address the student directly, I might just as well be addressing my
professional colleagues in the history of science and of culture. It is very difficult even to begin to cover the relevant issues in the
space allotted to this topic. This means that I will have to sketch some matters and leave
out lots of others in order to focus on some key examples and their interconnections. I
have made the problem worse by persuading the Course Team that my original brief was too
narrow. I was asked to write on 'Religion and the Sciences of Mind' and to include
psychological theories from Darwin to about 1940. I replied that 'religion' should be
broadened to 'values', since the religious response to the problem of meaning and values
in life and nature was being challenged by other approaches, some of which, in turn,
purported to explain religion itself by reference to psychological, social and other
forces. I also argued that 'sciences of mind' was too restricted, since one of the most
striking features of the period is that those 'other approaches' included a wide range of
disciplines which were challenging the claims of religion to provide the most convincing
and satisfying grounding for value systems. These now make up what is called 'the human
sciences' and include — in addition to psychology — sociology, anthropology,
social psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and numerous sub-disciplines. Behind this argument for a reformulation of the unit was the position
that, as I see it, 'science and belief' becomes a progressively inappropriate way of
framing the developments in the post-Darwinian period. This is the sort of issue which
historians differ over, as do scientists reflecting on their own disciplines. Until
recently, most historians of science have been trained in, and have written on, the
history of the physico-chemical sciences. I would like you to consider the issues in a
different way by reassessing the role of the biological, medical and human sciences in the
foundation of our most basic beliefs. Putting the matter very crudely, the approach to
these issues which was based on the relationship between an individual's religious beliefs
and a Newtonian cosmology and which was accepted in the late-eighteenth and the
early-nineteenth centuries, was being replaced between Darwin's time and the 1930s by a
more social approach rooted in a progressive biological order. As a result of my arguing for a much wider brief it was agreed that I
should treat both secularization and the broad stream of approaches under the title 'The
Naturalization of Value Systems in the Human Sciences', i.e. the process by which other
frameworks were sought to replace spiritual, 'other-worldly', religious explanations of
nature, life and humanity with respect to fundamental values. Before attempting to carry
out that brief, however, I want to reflect a bit more on the rubric of the course. I am
doing this because I think it is important to make you aware of the issues embedded in how
the units have been conceived: the writing of history, like the investigation of nature
and society, involves choices among conflicting values. In different units are
intermingled arguments which stress demarcations between science and belief and others
which point out interactions between them. 'Belief' is also used in senses which are
sometimes ambiguous in their social, political, ethical and religious meanings. This is
not a result of carelessness or muddle but of the compromises involved in writing history
as a group with differing approaches to the relations between science and belief/values.
You, as students, are having to deal with two sorts of unstable basis: in the period with
which the course is concerned, the basis for what is meant by 'belief' was changing; at
the same time, some of those who are contributing to the course tend to think of belief in
primarily religious terms, while others (including me) do not. You will have to thread
your own way in this historical and historiographical labyrinth. I think that at a very deep level the sciences are predicated on value
systems and that they serve particular class interests. This approach isn't merely a quirk
of my historiography or politics. The problem of the source and basis for values is also a
key question, both in the period and in scholarship about the period. The
impact of science on the human sphere — earth, life, 'man' (the contemporary term was
characteristically sexist, and it would be anachronistic to alter it), and society —
was such that the domains of fact and value became manifestly entangled. How the principal
figures in the history of the debate and the scholars who study it sort out the issues, is
itself part of the problem. As I have said, I cannot thread this labyrinth for you, but I
do want you to know that I know that I am in it, too. Where I think I am is at the point
of view which criticizes scientists and scholars who (more or less self-consciously) have
sought to root their values in the laws of nature. I would prefer to debate values in
terms of the kind of society we want to bring into being and to approach nature as a
complex manifold (i.e., 'having various forms, features, applications' Shorter O.E.D.)
that we labour to shape in our efforts to convert our vision into reality. I'll start by summarizing some of my earlier writings on the subject,
since they form the basis of my approach to the unit. At the beginning of the period we
are considering, the debate about science and belief was occurring at two levels. There
certainly was a conflict between the claims of science and those of religion. My reading
of the literature has led me, however, to the interpretation that the explicit conflict
between science and religion was, and remained, part of a more popular culture, one
which we associate with polemicists on both sides, e.g., T. H. Huxley and Bishop
Wilberforce in 1860; Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Brian in 1925. At another
level, however, there was a subtle accommodation among the intellectual elite, with
enlightened theologians more or less gracefully handing over to the custodians of the laws
of nature the fundamental bases for social order and progress. This is what I argued in an
essay on 'The impact of Darwin on conventional thought' (Young, 1970a). After rehearsing
the 'Darwin v the Bible' version, I pointed out that it is significant that both
Lyell and Darwin were buried with great honour in Westminster Abbey, while one of Darwin's
earliest theological sympathizers, Frederick Temple, became Archbishop of Canterbury. In another essay, 'Natural theology, Victorian periodicals and the
fragmentation of a common context' (Young, 1969) I tried to explore and reflect on the
integrative role which natural theology (investigating the existence and attributes of the
Deity through the study of the phenomena of nature — 'the Book of God's Works')
played in the early decades of the nineteenth century. There is evidence in the
periodicals which were read by the Victorian intelligentsia, that natural theology
provided a matrix which kept the issues of nature, life, mind and society in a single
common context of intellectual and cultural life in which science was not separated from
fundamental values. I suggested that one of the concomitants of the development of
evolutionary theory was the break-up of this common intellectual culture and the
fragmentation of the relevant issues into separate disciplines. These, in turn, took up
different aspects of the problem of nature and the place of humanity in it. Clearly, there
were other forces leading to the professionalization of the people who specialized in the
topics which got hived off from the common context. Most historians of science who have
written about these historical changes have treated them largely within intellectual
history. To attempt to relate them to wider socio-economic forces in the decades around
the turn of the twentieth century would use up space at a prodigious rate, and there is no
reliable secondary literature to make the connections for us between, say, the
professionalization of anthropology and the needs of colonial administrators in Britain
(see Stauder, 1974; Gough, 1969; Weber, 1974) or the rise of professional sociology and
the development of a relatively stable industrial democracy in America (see Gedicks, 1975;
Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974; Lynch, 1977). Looking at the intellectual changes
from the inside, all I felt able to say in the essay I'm summarizing is that the sorts of
learned disputations across a wide set of issues, which appeared in the most prominent
periodicals and which were kept together for a time in the debates of that remarkable
forum, The Metaphysical Society (see Hutton, 1885) in the post-Darwinian period (1869-80),
ceased to be part of a common context. There are three interpretations which form the basis for my approach in
this essay. First, that issues formerly treated in the domain of natural theology came
progressively to be treated as part of the domain of science. Theological bases for such
debates, where they remained, became increasingly less explicit. This, I take it, is the
meaning of R. H. Hutton's remark on behalf of the theological party in the Metaphysical
Society: 'The uniformity of Nature is the veil behind which, in these latter days, God is
hidden from us’. Secondly, that the maintenance and reproduction of the values of the
society — as expressed in the periodical literature— passed from a common
culture to a set of particular disciplines, each with its own topic and periodical (these
are actual titles of periodicals launched in the period which are still in print): Mind,
Brain, Nature, Man (anthropology). Increasingly specialized writers worked more and
more within developing academic disciplines. The broad issue of 'man's place in nature'
was, for example, particularized in the editorial statement of the first issue of Mind (1876)
as follows: 'MIND intends to procure a decision of this question as to the scientific
standing of psychology' (quoted in Secondary Anthology, 2.2 p. 95). This fragmentation of
topics was occurring in an era of growing professionalization. To make my third basic interpretative point I have to go back before
Darwin, because it would be very misleading to allow you to think that the problems I've
been sketching were kept within theology, geology and general biology until Darwin; that
then came On the Origin of Species, followed by the growth of the human sciences on
a Darwinian foundation. It wasn't that way at all. In 'The role of psychology in the nineteenth-century evolutionary
debate' (Secondary Anthology, 3.2) I tried to show how psychology and other approaches
which we would now include among the human sciences were already providing many of the
materials for the foundation of evolutionary theory itself. An analogous case has been
made about sociology and anthropology by John Burrow in his fine book, Evolution and
Society: A Study in Mid-Victorian Social Theory (1966). He mounts a convincing
argument that Darwin 'was certainly not the father of evolutionary anthropology, but
possibly its wealthy uncle', and he was 'far away while the cradle of evolutionary social
theory was being prepared' on the basis of other intellectual traditions (Burrow, 1966,
pp. 100, 114). Burrow has been criticized for setting Darwinian and other traditions too
starkly in competition and thereby under-estimating their common sources (Young, 1967a).
His main point, however, remains unchallenged: evolutionary human and social science did
not spring directly from the rock of Darwin's theory. Underlying and preceding the
biological conceptions, which many took to provide the foundations of the human sciences,
there were conceptions from psychology and social theory already in place. Instead of a
train of influences like this: ideas from geology, These interact with studies of the history of nature and other versions
of evolutionism to produce support for the evolutionism of Chambers (1844), Spencer
(1852), Darwin/Wallace (1858), from which extrapolations were made to humanity and
society. The net result is a more convincing foundation for the human sciences,
but it can hardly be called an independent foundation laid on the bedrock of the
natural sciences — as opposed to earlier versions of the human sciences. This is the point to recall that the furore around the theory of
organic evolution was, at bottom, largely about the special places of 'man', the planet
Earth and the history of life. There was a very good reason for being nervous about the
impact of science on religion: it might undermine the foundations of values — the
doctrines of transcendent free will, responsibility and the basis for goodness (these were
just the fears expressed by Adam Sedgwick on reading Chambers; see Unit 12, Section 3.1).
The issue is far from being sorted out today. Whence come the values which we set against
the way things are? Religious people say that they come from God, are sustained by
religious institutions, beliefs and practices, are propagated by teachers and are attested
in holy writings. Secularists argue that they come from the hopes generated out of
suffering and from visions of a better life within society itself, and that they are
sustained by ethical beliefs, practices and writings. Radicals and revolutionaries believe
that they are generated from the conflicts and contradictions inherent in the structures
of ownership and social relations, which are basic to class societies, and are sustained
by collective struggle against the existing order. It is worth noting that the Christians
who oppose the absorption of the domain of transcendent values have something in common
with secularists, radicals and revolutionaries: all want questions of values —
whether they be seen as God's commandments, ethics or politics — to be considered as
such. All prefer to treat evaluative questions directly rather than wrapping them up
in another language or reducing them to problems in science or medicine. Considering an
act sinful, wrong or reactionary, saintly, right or progressive is preferred to using
scientific terms such as correct or incorrect, adaptive or maladaptive, normal or
pathological. The dubious extrapolation of the categories of science into other
fields of knowledge is called scientism (such extrapolations from biology give rise
to biologism). But when we speak of extrapolation from science into other domains,
we also have to ask how the evaluative conceptions got into conceptions about nature in
the first place. When values are taken out of the domain of religion we say that they are secularized.
When they are then embedded in conceptions of nature and in scientific concepts, they
are being naturalized. When they are then extrapolated from nature to humanity and
society, the process is scientism. The philosophical position which lends
legitimacy to the process of extrapolating values from the domain of facts (while
obscuring the fact that evaluative conceptions had previously been embedded in the natural
conceptions) is positivism. Positivism claims to separate facts from values and to
treat facts independently from their contexts and meanings and values, but the overall
effect is to sequester the values from open controversy by presenting them as legitimate
extrapolations from the facts. It’s contradictory, but there you are... Secularists, radicals, revolutionaries and Christians want to hold out
for a basis for values which is to some degree separate from the existing order of nature
and society. In differing ways and for differing reasons, they want to maintain a
transcendent basis for values, bringing them to nature and society in order to criticize
and change what is. The alternative approach is to argue that the source of order,
progress and goodness is embedded in the laws of nature, life and society, without
granting that that embedding was a process of human interpretation of the richness and
complexity of nature to serve particular interests. The traditions in the human sciences which I shall be sketching adopted
this scientistic strategy on a scale which is so grand that it has become common sense for
most people. Don't be surprised if you often feel lost in the theories and confused about
what is going on. When this happens, read on to my interpretation or stop and return to
the above list of definitions and try to work out which process is going on. ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 1 Summarize the main points of the Introduction so far in regard to the
following: (i) How did the role of natural theology change in the nineteenth
century? (ii) How were psychological and social theories related to Darwin's
theory of evolution ? (iii) What were the main changes in the 'human sciences'? (iv) What two strategies were there for determining values? (i) There was a decline in the role of natural theology in maintaining
a sense of the coherence and order of nature and society. (ii) Psychological and social theories played a very significant part
in providing the foundations for evolutionary theory which, in turn, provided firmer
scientific legitimation for the human sciences. (iii) The main changes were: fragmentation of the issues surrounding
human nature and society, concomitant with an increasingly professional treatment by
academic experts working in demarcated disciplines with specialist periodicals. (iv) There was a choice of strategies for determining values: treating
them as transcendent and basing them in religion, ethics, politics; or extrapolating them
from the laws of nature — via evolutionary social theory, biological or medical
analogies — to apply to human nature and society, uniting secularism, naturalization,
scientism and positivism. ___________________________________________________________ It would be easy to say, after we have canvassed the history of the
naturalization of values in the human sciences, that the story adds up to a considerable
scandal — a massive confidence trick. That is exactly how a close observer of
Victorian science, Frederick Engels, described its early stages in 1875: The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a
transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of bellum omnium contra
omnes [a war of all against all] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition
together with Malthus's theory of population. When this conjuror's trick has been
performed (and I question its absolute permissibility... particularly as far as the
Malthusian theory is concerned), and the same theories are transferred back again from
organic nature into history it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human
society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word
need be said about it [Marx and Engels, 1965, p. 302]. That is all very well and salutary, but we are left with the problems
of explaining how so many intelligent people could be so colossally duped for so long and
of how to undo all the harm. However, the issue is not as simple as Engels implies. Although flat
rejection of the theory of organic evolution has lived on into the twentieth century, it
is unlikely that many university students in institutions other than those based on
fundamentalist religious doctrines would reject the theory of evolution outright. I can't
say how many would reject its application to human history and social change. We are left
with a problem of agonizing complexity and of the greatest importance: how to treat values
in a post Darwinian world. That is, now that 'man and all his works' can be treated as
ultimately the product of random mutation and natural selection, what basis is there for
values which cannot be reduced to immutable laws of nature — the very slide from
value to fact (or 'ought' to 'is') about which Engels was protesting, leading to the
fatalistic conclusion that 'whatever is, is right'? We want to explain that which it is
appropriate to explain in biological terms but not to become resigned and reductionist
about human purposes, values and struggles for a better world. It is not merely silly or 'puerile' to try to explain human matters in
scientific — especially biological — terms. It is, however, a very vexed
question to decide when, if at all, it is and when it is not appropriate to do so. This
question is unresolved today, for example, in the wake of the discoveries of molecular
biology about the mechanisms of biological inheritance. The view propagated by that
discipline, of life as 'information', and by sociobiology (with its bid to take over
ethics) leaves the question as open as it was in the immediate wake of Darwinism. I do not
want anything in this essay to be taken to prejudge this question, but I will be trying
very hard to show the consequences of the main forms of the naturalization of value
systems which were, and remain, in vogue. A suggestion about how to approach the disciplines, people and
quotations that follow: I recommend that you make a habit of taking note of terms from the
sciences as you come across them. Here are some of the ones to look for:
adaptive/maladaptive, normal/pathological, adjusted/maladjusted, deviant, abnormal,
psychopathology, social pathology, equilibrium, system, structure, function, organism,
statics, dynamics, survival, fittest, process, morphology. I am sure you will find more.
In conducting this exercise I think you will be struck by the pervasiveness of the
reduction of transcendent ethical, social and political values to scientific concepts. I have chosen to concentrate on those aspects of the human sciences
after Darwin which most dramatically illustrate the attempt to make into natural laws the
values of the prevailing social and political order and rationalize its changing needs.
The main thread of my exposition runs from preparing the ground with a discussion of the
ideas of Herbert Spencer to tracing the development of functionalism in psychology,
anthropology and sociology, along with certain related developments, for example,
behaviourism. Important assumptions which were very influential in the functionalist
social sciences were worked out on the Continent in the work of Max Weber and Emile
Durkheim, whom I discuss briefly. For the most part, however, I am tracing functionalist
thought in Britain and America, where the tradition has been more important. At the end I
have included a very brief section on the applications of this approach in industry and
elsewhere in scientific management, and a section on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. I
have done this in order to show just how far functionalist thought has penetrated into
applied spheres. Where relevant, I have drawn attention to how the main figures in these
disciplines treat religion, so that my exposition includes descriptions of their ways both
of explaining and of replacing religion. It is important to emphasize that I make no
mention of the traditions in the human sciences which have attempted to avoid the
explanation of psychological and social phenomena in biological, medical or other terms
drawn from science. Anti-scientistic points of view in the study of humankind are not free
from some of the ethical and political criticisms I make of the functionalist and related
positions, but at least they do not seek to end debate by appealing to the laws of nature.
Among the traditions I do not consider are phenomenology, Gestalt theory, existential
psychology, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and humanistic psychology (McNall
and Johnson, 1975; Attewell, 1974). There are other, more recent developments in the human
sciences which make scientific claims but which do not make the same lavish use of
biomedical and other scientific analogies and reductions. I make no mention of these,
either, for example, structuralism, linguistics, discourse analysis (nor do I define, here
or elsewhere in the unit, terms which I do not propose to discuss). ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 2 Let me remind you of the point I made in the Preface and earlier in
this Introduction that the problem of the source and basis for values is a key question in
the scholarship about the period, and that I am — and you are — involved in this
problem. Read through the Introduction again and list what you think are the assumptions
which indicate my position on the question of values. Here is how I would describe my assumptions: (i) that values are transcendent: we bring them to our interpretations
of nature, human nature and society and that it is important to be as open about that as
we can manage to be; (ii) that the wholesale application of biological theories to human
society has had, on the whole, a conservative influence; (iii) that naturalistic ethics are fatalistic, prejudging and severely
limiting our sense of the potential for social change; (iv) that the extrapolation of the categories of science in general to
other domains (scientism) is bad and sequesters from controversy the value systems
embedded in the choice of scientific concepts; (v) that the history of efforts to draw a line between facts and values
has obscured the real values being propagated and that we need to find a different way of
approaching the interpretation and transformation of nature. (This assumption is very much
between the lines. It is not made more explicit here, because the terms of reference of
the course do not invite explicit presentation of unit authors' own views.) (See Young,
1977; Radical Science Journal Collective, 1978; Young 1979, 1979a, 1979b, 1979c, 1979d;
London Labour Process/Left Strategy Group 1979.) ___________________________________________________________ Let's plunge in with a sharp juxtaposition. In spite of Engels's remark
'that not a word need be said' about social Darwinism, he goes on (in the same
letter of 1875 to the Russian sociologist, P. L. Lavrov) to expound an alternative view
demarcating the domain of the human from that of the animal: The essential difference between human and animal society consists in
the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. This sole but
cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of animal societies
to human societies. It makes it possible, as you properly remark, "for man to
struggle not only for existence but also for pleasures and for the increase of his
pleasures, . . . to be ready to renounce his lower pleasures for the highest
pleasure". Without disputing your further conclusions from this I would, proceeding
from my premises, make the following inferences: at a certain stage the production of man
thus attains such a high level that not only necessaries but also luxuries, at first, true
enough, only for a minority, are produced. The struggle for existence — if we permit
this category for the moment to be valid — is thus transformed into a struggle for
pleasures, no longer for mere means of subsistence but for means of development,
socially produced means of development, and to this stage the categories derived from
the animal kingdom are no longer applicable’ {Marx and Engels, 1965, p. 303]. As Engels sees it, the self-conscious purposiveness of human production
as a social activity, creating goods beyond those required for animal subsistence, leads
to activities which transcend the categories of the animal kingdom. At the other extreme from Engels's sharp demarcation between the animal
and the human, lies the work of the most influential Victorian social thinker, Herbert
Spencer, whose work stressed that the cosmic and ethical processes are one. In his first
book, published in 1851, with the scientistic title Social Statics, Spencer wrote
the following passages: We commonly enough compare a nation to a living organism. We speak of
"the body politic", of the functions of its several parts, of its growth, and of
its diseases, as though it were a creature. But we usually employ these expressions as
metaphors, little suspecting how close is the analogy, and how far it will bear carrying
out. So completely, however, is a society organized upon the same system as an individual
being, that we may almost say there is something more than analogy between them. [Spencer,
1851, p. 448] A FUNCTION to each organ, and each organ to its own function, is the
law of all organization. To do its work well, an apparatus must possess special fitness
for that work; and this will amount to unfitness for any other work. The lungs cannot
digest, the heart cannot respire, the stomach cannot propel blood. Each muscle and each
gland must have its own particular nerve. There is not a fibre in the body but what has a
channel to bring it food, a channel to take its food away, an agency for causing it to
assimilate nutriment, an agency for stimulating it to perform its peculiar duty, and a
mechanism to take away effete matter; not one of which can be dispensed with. Between
creatures of the lowest type, and creatures of the highest, we similarly find the
essential difference to be, that in the one the vital actions are severally decomposed
into their component parts, and each of these parts has an agent to itself. In
organizations of another order the same principle is apparent. [Spencer 1851, p. 274] Similarly then as the experiences of all people in all times —
experiences that are embodied in maxims, proverbs, and moral precepts, and that are
illustrated in biographies and histories, go to prove that organs, faculties, powers,
capacities, or whatever else we call them, grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is
inferred that they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, there
is the one above deduced from it — that humanity must in the end become completely
adapted to its conditions — unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of
civilization being artificial, it is part of nature; all of a piece with the development
of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and
are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and
provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those
modifications must end in completeness. As surely as the tree becomes bulky when it stands
alone, and slender if one of a group; as surely as the same creature assumes the different
forms of cart-horse and race-horse, according as its habits demand strength or speed; as
surely as a blacksmith's arm grows large, and the skin of a labourer's hands thick; as
surely as the eye tends to become long-sighted in the sailor, and short-sighted in the
student; as surely as the blind man attains a more delicate sense of touch; as surely as a
clerk acquires rapidity in writing and calculation; as surely as the musician learns to
detect an error of a semitone amidst what seems to others a very babel of sounds; as
surely as a passion grows by indulgence and diminishes when restrained; as surely as there
is any efficacy in educational culture, or any meaning in such terms as habit, custom,
practice;— so surely must the human faculties be moulded into complete fitness for
the social state; so surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so
surely must man become perfect. [Spencer, 1851, pp. 64-65] ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 3 List the metaphors, analogies and allusions Spencer uses (or underline
them). What does he think they prove? On reading those passages — especially the last — you may
well (as I do) feel beaten into submission by the wealth and range of his allusions.
Notice that the first passage occurs nearer the end of the book than the others,
suggesting a move from metaphor and analogy while, in fact, the passages I quoted next
actually occur earlier in Spencer's book and display an orgy of identification of the
human with the biological and physiological. He also slides neatly from learning to
progress, to a remarkably sanguine doctrine of human perfectibility — all based on
the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Evolution is habit writ large. ___________________________________________________________ The date of Social Statics is important — seven years
before the announcement of natural selection theory in the joint Darwin-Wallace paper of
1858. Of course, Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (see
Unit 12, Section 3.1) and the furore surrounding its evolutionism and the extending of it
to human history had been in the public domain for seven years before Spencer's book
appeared. In 1852. Spencer was to advocate evolution in an essay on 'The Development
Hypothesis' in The Leader, and in 1855 he used the idea of the mechanism of
learning by the repeated association of experiences and extended it (in a less sketchy way
than in Social Statics) from the individual to the race, to account for both
individual development and evolution of species by the inheritance of acquired
characteristics. By 1860 there was no coyness about analogies or metaphors. He discussed
'The Social Organism' in evolutionary terms, freely mixing biological and social language:
Societies slowly augment in mass; they progress in complexity of
structure, at the same time their parts become more mutually dependent, their living units
are removed and replaced without destroying their integrity; and the extents these
peculiarities are proportionate to their vital activities. These are traits that societies have in common with organic bodies. And
these traits in which they agree with organic bodies and disagree with all other things,
entirely subordinate the minor distinctions: such distinctions being scarcely greater than
those which separate one half of the organic kingdom from the other. The principles
of organization are the same and the differences are simply differences of application
[Spencer, 1860, p. 206]. Having established the common principles, Spencer feels able to
pronounce with confidence on social and economic forms — particularly the ones which
were in greatest need of justification because of the effects of the industrial revolution
on jobs and the social order: The doctrine of the progressive division of labour, to which we are
here introduced, is familiar to all readers. And further, the analogy between the
economical division of labour and the "physiological division of labour", is so
striking as long since to have drawn the attention of scientific naturalists: so striking,
indeed, that the expression "physiological division of labour", has been
suggested by it. It is not needful, therefore, to treat this part of the subject in great
detail. We shall content ourselves with noting a few general and significant facts, not
manifest on a first inspection. [Spencer, 1860, pp. 211-12] ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 4 What is the interaction between social and biological concepts in the
above passage ? The social concept of the division of labour conjures up the image of a
factory where one person does one operation, another person the next, dividing up work
formerly done by a craftsman into a number of tasks which require much less skill and give
much less satisfaction to the worker. Spencer treats the social concept of division of
labour as the source of the biological conception whereby different parts of the body
perform different physiological functions. The physiological version can then be used as a
scientific anchor and justification for further social applications. ___________________________________________________________ Spencer proceeds to develop elaborate analogies between physiological
functions and economic production in which greater division of labour produces superior
commodities which circulate in society, 'just as the circulating mass of nutritive
materials' becomes progressively differentiated and improved in a highly evolved organism
(Spencer, 1860, p. 220). Although Spencer saw his writings as championing the individual against
interference by others or by bureaucracies, his view of life and society was, in the end,
purely adjustive. He defined life itself as 'the continuous adjustment of internal
relations to external relations'. Life, adaptation, the hierarchical division of labour,
progress and evolution became essentially equivalent concepts. His secular, evolutionary
theodicy became: whatever is, is right — or will be in due course as the result of
evolution. I am, of course, using 'theodicy' in a metaphorical sense: instead of
justifying the ways of God to man, Spencer is showing the essential harmony between his
highest values and nature (see Unit 1, Section 3.3.2). Once again, as you saw in Unit 2
(Section 2.2.4), Spencer believed in the unity of the ethical and cosmic processes. Much
of his grand, multi-volume Synthetic Philosophy, embracing science, psychology and
ethology (the 'science of' ethics), was aimed at convincing the weary reader that
biological adaptation assured that individualism and the general good were becoming
progressively harmonized by universal — including social — evolution. Therefore,
legislative, bureaucratic, institutional and state interference were not only unnecessary
but positively harmful, since they might interfere with society's otherwise inevitable
progress. This laissez-faire faith extended to opposing most of the public health and
other warnings to the public which we now take for granted, such as the pure-food laws,
standards of advertising, as well as compulsory education. It is tempting to go on from Spencer to discuss the influence of the
concepts of evolution and survival of the fittest, in their mixed economic and biological
forms, on popular notions of progress and competition. It was taken up in the (misnamed)
movement of 'social Darwinism' and used as an ideological justification of the most
rapacious 'robber barons' in the high tide of individualistic capitalism around the turn
of the twentieth century. The Course Team has decided, however, that it is too large a
topic to handle properly, and that we should not pretend that we can do it any justice in
a small space (see Unit 12, Section 7; Hofstadter, 1955; Josephson, 1934; Semmel, 1960;
Bannister, 1979). Something must be said here, however, about the socio-economic and
intellectual forces which were at work between the period of Spencer's work and the
development of functionalist thinking, since it was social Darwinism which functionalism
was supplanting. The American financiers, Andrew Carnegie of the steel industry and John
D. Rockefeller of the oil industry, were enthusiastic exponents of the application of the
doctrine of 'the survival of the fittest': that open competition favoured the most
deserving. 'Only through pruning', Rockefeller told a Sunday School class, 'could the
American Beauty rose have been developed' (Collier and Horowitz, 1976, p. 887; see also
Hofstadter, 1955, p.45, Bannister, 1979, pp. 134, 268-70, reports that this was, in fact,
said by Rockefeller’s son, John D., Jr.). This approach was not confined, however, to
popular rationalizations of monopolies and huge fortunes. 'Social Darwinism' is a
misnomer, because it was Spencer's influence, not Darwin's, which played the leading part
in spreading the doctrine. This does not mean, however, that Darwin avoided extrapolations
from his theory to society. Whole sections of The Descent of Man (1871; 2nd
edition, 1874) were straightforward applications of evolutionism to explain, for example,
'superior' and 'inferior' races and individuals. (See chapters 3-6, especially pp. l33-43
and A309 Conflict and Stability in the Development of Modern Europe, 1789-1970, Block
II, Part 1, 'Varieties of social Darwinism'.) Spencer’s books sold half a million copies in America and his
influence on the founders of academic sociology in that country was enormous. One of them,
Charles H. Cooley, said, 'I imagine that all of us who took up sociology between 1870,
say, and 1890 did so at the instigation of Spencer'. Lester Ward, the first important
American critic of Spencer, observed as late as 1898 that most American sociologists were
'virtually disciples of Spencer' (Gedicks, 1975, p.28; Schwendinger and Schwendinger,
1974, p. 108). Here are some examples of his widespread influence and of the influence of
evolutionism in a wider sense. William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), a disciple of Spencer
who was very prominent in American academic life, was professor of political and social
science at Yale and was most influential in the 1880s. His theory of social evolution
departed in some respects from Spencer's but he consistently appealed to evolutionary
naturalism for its basis. L. T. Hobhouse (1864-1929) was the founder of academic sociology
in Britain and sought to ground in evolutionary theory a belief in progress in the service
of individualism. On the Continent, two Germans used evolutionism as a putative basis for
versions of socialism. Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) argued that it supported
non-revolutionary, i.e., 'evolutionary socialism', an approach which was influential in
the development of social democracy associated with British Fabianism and the current
Labour Party. Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) drew on Darwinism for the version of 'scientific
socialism' which provided the foundations for the German Communist Party. To complete this
short-list of uses to which evolutionism was put in the political sphere, I should mention
the gentle anarchism of Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) who interpreted Darwinism as a
basis for co-operation in society (on these figures, see Arato, 1973; Lichtheim, 1961;
Steenson, 1979; Sumner, 1963; Bernstein, 1961; Gay, 1952; Kropotkin, 1902; Woodcock and
Avakumovic, 1950). It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to claim that evolution was taken
up as a rationalization for all sorts of popular movements from anarchism to fascism.
Apart from space limitations, the reason I am not pursuing any of those paths is that I
want to consider the influence of biological ideas in that tradition in the human sciences
which has been most important in twentieth-century Britain and America. What I hope to
have conveyed is not a single, consistent extrapolation from evolutionism but a wide
variety of appeals to nature for ethical, social and political doctrines. If we were
making a detailed study, we would go into the nuances; for example, that Spencer ceased to
believe that perfection would be reached, only constantly approximated, and that Sumner
became increasingly pessimistic about the tendencies of evolution toward degradation. (See
Bannister (1979) chapter 5 for the nuances of Sumner's departure from aspects of and his
growing pessimism.) Most people who were influenced by some version of social Darwinism
were not very careful or precise in their rendering of the issues. They found 'survival of
the fittest' — a phrase of Spencer's which Darwin took up — useful in making
sense of their world. Many also put an optimistic interpretation on the phrase. For
example, Andrew Carnegie’s motto was: ‘All is well, since all grows better’
(Bannister, 1979, p. 80). This general lumping together of the issues also
found its way into popular expositions of science in the period. In the article on
'Biology' in Chambers Encyclopedia (1882), we find: For the place vacated by Paley's theological and metaphysical
explanation has simply been occupied by that suggested to Darwin and Wallace by Malthus in
terms of the prevalent severity of industrial competition and these phenomena of the
struggle for existence . . . have thus come to be temporarily exalted into a complete
explanation of organic progress. [Quoted in Bannister, 1979, p. 14] Before we leave social Darwinism it is worth noting that it is a social
philosophy which is far from dead. An editorial in Computer Weekly (24 Jan. 1980),
for example, comments on the dominant role of IBM as follows: 'The problem of trying to
regulate IBM is that what is good for IBM is in general good for the user, and as the
company becomes more innovative and more competitive that becomes increasingly true. IBM
is an inevitable product of the capitalist system in which survival of the fittest must
always tend toward monopoly.' One more point before we move on to the history of functionalism in the
human sciences. This sort of careless jumbling of issues and rampant extrapolation was
vigorously opposed from within the scientific community by people who were as close to the
development and dissemination of evolutionism as T. H. Huxley and A. R. Wallace. Huxley's
essay on 'Administrative Nihilism' (1871) and his Romanes Lecture on 'Evolution and
Ethics' (1893) were aimed directly at Spencer's ideas. Wallace's writings contained many
essays on the limits of natural selection as applied to man. ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 5 Review the section on Huxley in Unit 2 (Section 2.3) and that on
Wallace in Unit 12 (Section 5) and make sure you are clear about the bases of their
objections to making extrapolations from organic evolution to society. I won't try to repeat issues which were reviewed in those units. What I
want to stress, however, is that both considered that the basis of values and ethics was
independent of natural selection. Huxley considered them transcendent and part of an
effort to combat the socially harmful effects of the struggle for existence. Wallace
argued that evolution could not account for important mental attributes, and he ended up
with spiritualist elements in his explanation of the sources of values. Huxley was a
liberal, Wallace a socialist. But they were agreed that, as one writer in the Westminster
Review put it in 1886: 'there shall, in spite of Nature, be equal conditions'
(quoted in Young, 1971a, p. 224). ___________________________________________________________ Instead of pursuing the public debate on the use of evolutionism in
rather loose ways, I want to turn now to its use in pure and applied fields of academic
disciplines. Evolutionary concepts were combined with others from thermodynamics, physics,
chemistry and medicine and were employed in laying the foundations of the behavioural and
human sciences, which are currently the most reputable and pervasive expressions of belief
in a stable, progressive social order. These developments, it seems to me, led to the
institutionalization of the change from a natural theology to a secular, biologically
based sense of the structure of nature and society — from justifying the ways of God
to man to relying on the evolving order of nature, including human nature. At the same
time (and in close relationship with changes in the structure of industry) these
developments were concomitant with a shift from individualistic 'survival of the fittest'
doctrines of social Darwinism to conceptions suited to a less rapidly changing and
rapacious society in the early twentieth century. The earlier period saw the construction
of an industrial base which involved intense competition. After the turn of the century,
the era of managerial capitalism was being established. Technocratic and meritocratic
controls replaced brute force. Power came to be exercised through experts who gained their
positions 'on merit' in a competitive educational system and job market. Social life was
experienced less as a jungle and more as an integrated network of careers. These
developments parallel changes in social theory and social science which I shall outline. Here is how a historian of the changing assumptions of sociology of the
period describes the change: In the face of severe economic depressions and labour rebellions of
unprecedented scope and violence [in the United States], the ideology of Social Darwinism
and laissez-faire gave way to a new ideology which acknowledged the need for the social
regulation of economic life. The social carriers of this new ideology were
intellectuals, humanitarians, social workers and Protestant clergymen who saw the
possibility of all out class warfare in the growing combinations of capital in the trusts
and monopolies and the growing militance of labour unions and socialist movements. It was
out of this technocratic reform movement that the new discipline of sociology took shape.
[Gedicks, 1975, p. 29] A new and important group was emerging which has come to be called the
'professional-managerial class' or the 'service class' and which now makes up about a
quarter of the working populations. As radicals see it, the role of this group of experts
is to smooth out, to negotiate, 'to mediate the basic class conflict of capitalist
society and create a "rational", reproducible social order' (Ehrenreich and
Ehrenreich, 1979, p. 19). If space permitted I should also want to look at the development of
primatology, sex research, family studies, and related disciplines in the human sciences
which Donna Haraway has shown to be closely integrated with functionalism under the
guidance and patronage of the Rockefeller Foundation charities. The work of a central
figure in many of these developments, Robert M. Yerkes, links the charitable foundations,
universities, neurophysiology, endocrinology, personnel management, psychopathology,
educational testing, personality studies, and social and sexual hygiene. Yerkes 'saw
himself and his scientific peers working to foster a rational society based on science and
preserved from the old ignorance, embodied especially in religion and politics' (Haraway,
1978, pp. 28, 28n, 40 -41). In an important complementary study, she presents an overview
of the embodiment of value systems in 'The biological enterprise: sex, mind and profit
from human engineering to sociobiology' (Haraway, 1979). The influence of evolutionism on academic psychology occurred primarily
through the functional school, which was most prominent in America. Before defining the
functionalist approach, I want to say something about its origins, which owed more to
Spencer than to Darwin. ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 6 Look back at Unit 12 to the passages from Darwin's Notebooks (Section
4). Which of his speculations can be said to refer to psychology? Most of them; but the range of his interests in mental and behavioural
phenomena is clear in extracts i, ii, vi, x, xv, xix, where he indulges in bold assertions
of the importance of his theory to metaphysics, comparative psychology and the sources of
intellect. He even speculated at one point that thought could be treated as a secretion of
the brain, just as gravity is treated as a property of matter. This is quoted in 'The role
of psychology in the nineteenth-century evolutionary debate', where it is also pointed out
that Darwin did not pursue these implications very far (Secondary Anthology, 3.2). You
will recall from Unit 12, Section 4 that On the Origin of Species had only one,
cryptic sentence on man. It is preceded by a sentence on psychology which he modified in
later editions to read, ’Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already
laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and
capacity by gradation' (Darwin, 1895, p. 402). ___________________________________________________________ Darwin, then, deferred to Spencer in matters of psychology. The
development of functional psychology has other sources as well. It can be traced
indirectly to the use of the concept of 'function' in a psychological (rather than in a
strictly physiological) sense by the phrenologists (see TV 07 Skull). Among direct
influences, Spencer's work was the most important, but it was reinforced by that of
contemporaries who treated mental activity in biological terms (especially Alexander Bain
and G. H. Lewes in Britain; see Young, 1970, chapters 3 and 5). These ideas were taken up
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1870s in a discussion group not unlike London's
Metaphysical Society. The difference was that the Cambridge group, the Metaphysical Club,
were much less reserved and sceptical about evolution and even less troubled by
theological issues. They were enthusiastically applying evolutionary ideas to all sorts of
spheres — philosophy, social and political theory, jurisprudence, and especially
psychology. The resulting theories were to become pervasive in American intellectual life.
(There is a full discussion of this group and its influence in Wiener, 1949; cf.
Russett, 1976, chapter 3.) They form a loose family under the name 'pragmatism', with
'practice' as the key test of validity or truth. Pragmatists emphasized learning through
doing, adaptation, and a biological version of the 'principle of utility': organisms seek
pleasure and avoid pain. Beliefs and the consequences of actions could be treated as a
generalized version of this basic rule, so that ethics could use as a test the greatest
good of the greatest number. Consequences as experienced, i.e., what happened in practice,
was, once again, the acid test. Functionalism was, in effect, pragmatist psychology. The
philosophical and psychological ideas of the most eminent member of the Metaphysical Club,
William James (1842-1910), were particularly influential in developing pragmatism and
applying it in the psychological sphere. His ideas led John Dewey (1859-1952) to modify
his earlier idealism (see Unit 1, Section 2.2.1) towards a biological view of mind. It was
partly through Dewey's influence on leading psychologists at Chicago, Columbia and Yale
Universities that an explicitly functional psychology came into being. Its identity as a
'school' was developed through debates with the 'structuralist' point of view which was
then prevalent. Structuralism grew out of the European tradition in psychology and was
preoccupied with sensation, perception, intellectual processes. The 'structuralist' point
of view was associated with the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt ('the father of
experimental psychology') and his Anglo-American disciple, E. B. Titchener. (For details,
see Boring, 1950, chapters 16 and 18.) Structuralist psychologists stressed mental contents
and structures at the expense of mental acts and what people and other
organisms do. The polarity, then, was between structure and functions. An idea can
be treated as a mental content in the mental structure called 'intellect'. A structuralist
would be keen to trace the path from sensation to idea. In contrast, 'willing' or
'wishing' is an active process, which a functionalist would be keen to relate to
adaptation to the environment. The influence of James's Principles of Psychology (1890 and
still available in paperback) was decisive in the American debate in propagating an
adaptive and environmentalist approach to psychology. Instead of concentrating on how we
experience sensations, perceptions, conceptions and how we think, the functionalists
concentrated on how we act in our surroundings. As James says in stressing the influence
of Spencer, 'to have brought in the environment as vital was a masterstroke' (quoted in
Young, 1970, p. 195). One sign of how this approach to mental life bore on the
naturalization of values was a further volume by James in which he explores, as a sort of
'natural history' by a psychologist, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
James's study is completely sympathetic and unpolemical, but it is not about the truth of
beliefs; rather, it is about the psychology of belief. Inspired by James's work, Dewey went on to develop a functionalist
psychology which attracted a wide following. He wrote prolifically across a broad spectrum
on education, social psychology, philosophy and industrial democracy. Although he was a
less original thinker than James, he was very effective in getting pragmatism and
functionalist psychology institutionalized in research and teaching, where a whole
philosophy of education came to be based on his ideas of capturing the pupil's interest
and building on that. His ideas are often (I think unfairly) blamed for declining
intellectual standards in American education, for example, the substitution of home
economies and learning to drive a car, for the three 'Rs'. He advocated that once one had
captured the student's interest they should be lured toward difficult subjects. Less
gifted disciples interpreted his ideas of adaptation as 'give 'em what they want; anything
to keep them interested'. (There is a good discussion of this in the section on
‘Education in a Democracy’ in Hofstadter, 1963, where the difficulty of applying
the idea of ‘life adjustment’ is critically examined.) The leading exponent of functional psychology in its narrower sense was
James R. Angell (1869-1949), who went on to become President of Yale. In his essay
delineating 'The Province of a Functional Psychology' (his Presidential Address before the
American Psychological Association in 1906), he traced its ancestry to Aristotle and its
modern expressions to Spencer and Darwin, noting its common roots with pragmatism. Its
approach to mental activity was ... as part of a larger stream of biological forces which are daily and
hourly at work before our eyes and are constitutive of the most important and most
absorbing part of our world. The psychologist of this stripe is wont to take his cue from
the basal conception of the evolutionary movement, i.e., that for the most part organic
structures and functions possess their present characteristics by virtue of the efficiency
with which they fit into the extant conditions of life broadly designated the environment.
With this conception in mind he proceeds to attempt some understanding of the manner in
which the psychical contributes to the sum total of organic activities, not alone the
psychical in its entirety, but especially the psychical in its particularities — mind
as judging, mind as feeling, etc. This is the point of view which instantly brings the psychologist cheek
by jowl with the general biologist.... We find nowadays both psychologists and biologists who treat
consciousness as substantially synonymous with adaptive reactions to novel situations.
[Angell, 1907, pp. 444-5, 447] It is easy to see functional psychologists moving away from the study
of intellect to the consideration of the organism in its environment. ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 7 What is this position likely to mean when applied to people's lives? In the case of people, functionalism turned out to mean the study of
fitting in with and succeeding in the family, society and work. The influence of the
functional point of view reflected both the biological and the wider sense of the adaptive
aspect of its assumptions. It led to research in comparative and physiological psychology
and to contacts with general biology. When applied to humans it promoted work in applied
and social psychology and connections with industry, advertising, counselling and
psychotherapy, i.e., various ways of fitting people into jobs, getting them to consume
certain products and promoting psychological and social adjustment. Functional
psychologists were evolutionists in a very broad sense, studying and attempting to develop
techniques for promoting harmony between organisms, including humans, and their
environments. ___________________________________________________________ Functionalism did not maintain a separate identity as a school of
thought after 1930. Less than a decade after Angell's manifesto, functionalism was
challenged in an aggressive methodological claim from J. B. Watson (1878-1958), who
asserted that the study of mental functions could not be scientific, because they were not
accessible to controlled scientific experimentation. There is strict continuity in this
tradition: Watson studied under Angell, who, in turn, had been James's pupil and Dewey's
colleague. Watson's first statement of 'Psychology as the behaviorist views it' (1913) was
characteristically forthright and laid the foundations of the 'Behaviourism' of the next
decade, henceforth the dominant American school until the 1960s. Watson began: Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective
experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control
of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific
value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to
interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary
scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior
of man, with all its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's
total scheme of investigation. [Watson 1913, p. 547] Behaviourism, then, is positivism applied to psychology (see Unit 1,
Section 2.3.1). Just as Watson found it easy to jettison consciousness, he had no place
for instinct. Both mental and the biological centres of humans and other organisms became
irrelevant to the project of conditioning organisms to the requirements of the
environment. Watson's intellectual influence was great, and his methodological innovations
were applied across a wide range of disciplines, such as, 'Don't interpret voters'
attitudes in political science; study their 'voting behaviour". His own academic
career, however, was cut short by a sexual scandal, and he was forced to earn his living
outside the universities. He turned to advertising, and we owe many of the sophisticated
techniques of modern adverts to his application of behaviourist techniques to selling
products (and election candidates) in the media, e.g., the assertive, rapid-fire
repetition of the product's name, coupled with instructions in the imperative mode. He
also lectured from public (non-academic) platforms and wrote in women's magazines. He was
belatedly fêted by the American Psychological Association in 1957, the year before he
died. Watson's most famous claim appears in a course of lectures, published
as Behaviorism (1924): Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified
world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to
become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist,
merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants,
tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. [Watson, 1924, p. 104] In one century biologism had moved from the 'innate' talents and
propensities of phrenology (see TV 07) to the pure environmentalism of behaviourism. In
phrenology practically all that matters is the innate mental faculties; in behaviourism,
however, it is the conditioned experience of the organism: one extreme refers all to
biological inheritance, the other to lived experience in the environment. The spirit of Watson's project was carried on inside academic
psychology by B. F. Skinner (1904- ), the psychologist at Harvard who developed techniques
of 'operant conditioning' (especially as a result of rewarding pigeons for performing
desired tasks). He went on to argue that he could 'shape' any behaviour by carefully
building up its elements and arranging the appropriate rewards. Out of this behavioural
technology there have been developed techniques for conditioning mental patients with
token rewards, of treating 'sexual deviation' by aversive (painful) conditioning, and of
teaching by machines. The American Central Intelligence Agency has also funded a
considerable amount of research, including some of Skinner's, for its own purposes.
(Marks, 1979, p. 160. Funding of work by other eminent researchers in the human sciences
is discussed on pp. 147-8, 157, 159 - Eysenck; 160, 187, 188 of Marks's study of CIA
research in behavioural control.) Skinner carried his approach to human relations into the realm of
social engineering by writing a fictional account of a utopian community, Walden Two (1948),
a book in which the question remains unresolved as to what values and what way of life
should be implemented by the behavioural technologists, i.e., who shall programme the
programmers of the community. The question is not entirely hypothetical, since several
communities have been set up on Skinner's model. He took the issue up again two decades
later, and in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) faced head-on the humanistic
objections which had been made to his earlier argument. Rather as Watson had 'solved' the
problems of mind and of innate endowment by jettisoning the concepts, Skinner 'solves' the
problem of freedom and dignity by declaring that these are futile objectives which should
be replaced by 'a technology of behavior', which he believes will eliminate the social
diseases of want, war and illness. Technique is all, and the problem of the basis for
transcendent values remains outside disciplined discourse: 'how' is science; 'why' is
nowhere. Indeed, some of the most striking findings in recent psychology have
come from the work of Stanley Milgram, whose research on Obedience and Authority (1974)
shows that experimental subjects, placed in the right environment in which the authority
of experts is emphasized, will press a button which they believe may deliver a fatal
electrical shock to another subject. The sole reward is the knowledge that they have
faithfully followed the instructions of the scientific expert. ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 8 How does this research connect with the issues of scientism and the
naturalization of value systems ? Behaviourism has moved from its parent tradition, functionalism. In so
doing it has elevated adjustment into an imperative. The work of Skinner and Milgram
concentrates on the technology of inducing obedience. By means of the biological concept
of adaptation, the social one of adjustment gains legitimacy, and by an easy slide, the
problem becomes one of 'engineering' obedience. Once naturalized, this goal pushes out
others, and scientism generalizes it to make it the goal of social engineering. Other
goals and the debates on them are left with no place in the scientific endeavour. ___________________________________________________________ The theories outlined above — pragmatist philosophy, functional
psychology and behaviourist methodology — all concentrate on the direct, practical
consequences of what organisms, including human ones, do. They all trace their inspiration
to evolutionism, largely as popularized by Spencerians in the United States. The
experience of the organism-environment interaction is seen by all of these approaches as
the key to learning and progress. These approaches have also been very influential in the
development of Anglo-American social science, especially sociology and social
anthropology. However, the two theorists whose work played the largest role in laying the
foundations of functionalist social science were a German and a Frenchman, Max Weber
(1864-1920) and Emile Durkheim (1858-1917). Their influences extend far beyond their
impact on British and American functionalism, so the story I shall tell here is a very
incomplete one. Weber's work developed in constant interaction with the Marxist
tradition — so much so that he has been called 'the bourgeois Marx' to emphasize his
efforts to offer satisfactory explanations within the existing social order of the
phenomena which Marx stresses in his critique of capitalism. Where Marx emphasized the
dependence of the consciousness and values of people on the contradictions in their
socio-economic circumstances, Weber saw intellectual culture as a relatively autonomous
sphere in social life. (For a very clear comparison of Marx and Weber on capitalism, see
Birnbaum, 1953; for a lucid contrast of Marx and Durkheim see Lukes, 1967; for an overview
of Marx, Durkheim and Weber see Giddens, 1971). Weber's position has been most influential in the form of his theory of
the motivating role of the religious ideology of Protestantism in the early development of
capitalism, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Like
William James, he treated religion as a topic in the study of motivation and historical
causation and not as a set of beliefs that he was advocating. Where Spencer concentrated
on tracing a natural basis for values and opposed their institutionalization in
bureaucracies, Weber stressed the social aspect of beliefs and saw the bureaucratic
state as a precondition for capitalism. That is, he thought that the sorts of guarantees
Spencer sought in organic processes should properly be referred to the very social
institutions Spencer anathematized. Although Weber was explicitly opposed to explaining
social phenomena in biological terms, his theories nevertheless became potent tools in the
hands of those who interpreted societies in terms of organic analogies. His position had
the same effect as the one examined above under behaviourism, since it sequestered the
basis for values from the problem of how to maintain the social order, a problem which he
treated in technical terms. Weber was taking this line in reaction to positions which were
in vogue when he wrote: the conservative derivation of political norms from history by the
organicists of the 'Younger Historical School' in Germany, on the one hand, and the
Marxist view that historical analysis and social values are causally related, on the
other. He argued that the expertise of the social scientist and government bureaucrat
could and should be separated from politics. He believed that values could not be
rationally derived, but once arrived at by irrational processes, their implementation
becomes a technical issue requiring value-neutral experts. The 'rationality' of social
engineering was thus divorced from the goals and the basic structure of society as a whole
and reduced to a much narrower sort of thinking, a 'technological rationality'. In Weber's
theory, science is concerned with the analysis, and bureaucracy with the implementation,
of values and goals which are given by the system and which are not themselves subject to
critical analysis. While the biological reductionists had removed critical evaluations
from the analysis of the social system by rooting them in biological evolutionism, Weber
considered values irrational and beyond the reach of analysis. He turned instead to the
supposedly neutral role of the experts who both study the system and run it. ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 9 If biological scientism is extrapolation from supposedly biologically
given values, how can Weber's separation of the technical roles of experts from
values be scientism as well? Both take the values as given and so protect them from critical debate.
In both cases the values are given in the social system, and the social scientist
is only concerned about their maintenance. Weber's scientism was at a different level from
that of organic analogies, but it is scientism none the less. ___________________________________________________________ Weber's emphasis on the subjective and irrational aspects of social
life, the conscious intentions of people which embody the social values or goals of the
society, and the apparent separation of fact from value were all taken up by later
functionalists in the service of a theory of social integration and equilibrium based on
'empirically' given norms. In an important critique of the theories of 'Industrialism and
Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber', the Marxist social critic Herbert Marcuse writes,
'His theory of the intrinsic value-freedom, or ethical neutrality, of science reveals
itself as that which it is in practice: an attempt to make science "free" to
accept obligatory valuations that are imposed on it from the outside' (Marcuse, 1968, p.
202). In the applied sphere, the Weberian concept of civil service played an important
part (among many other factors) in giving legitimacy to the image of the obedient,
unassuming, conscientious servant of the state. It is just this willingness for a
bureaucrat to separate the technique and efficiency with which a job is done, from
questions of humanity, responsibility and guilt, which were at the centre of the war
crimes trials at the end of World War II. The most notorious (belated) trial was that of
Adolph Eichmann, who organized the transportation of Jews and others to the Nazi
concentration camps where more than six million people were systematically killed or
worked to death. Eichmann admitted that he did the work but insisted that he was 'not
guilty'. He had done his job conscientiously, he argued, and it was not for him to
question the underlying ethical and humanitarian issues. Indeed, he said he had always
done his best to behave in humane ways and that the guilt belonged to those who had
authority over him, his superiors. (This position is the object of the reflections of the
social philosopher Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil - Arendt, 1963). I cite this example to emphasize how important the issue
is. The submerging of values from the surface of social decisions can have the gravest
consequences. The other person who was, along with Spencer and Weber, most
influential in the development of functionalist sociology was Emile Durkheim. Like Weber,
he was opposed to Spencer's biological reductionism, but he shared Spencer's concern for
the basis of social integration or solidarity. Another contrast is that Durkheim was a
socialist, whereas Spencer was a radical individualist. Durkheim shared Weber's emphasis
on the role of social norms and causes rather than referring to another,
biological, level to explain human behaviour. He went further and argued for the autonomy
of 'social facts', which he advocated treating as a different level of nature, one which
could not be reduced to individual psychological or biological explanations. But in
rejecting biological reductionism, Durkheim did more than any other academic sociologist
in the functionalist tradition to establish the centrality of biological analogies. His
theories involved a move from the biological concepts of 'adaptive' and 'maladaptive' to
the biomedical ones of 'normal' and 'pathological' along with a crucial conflation of the
concepts of 'norm' and 'normal' (explained in the quotation below). Normative categories
thereby become scientized. In this assumption, that there can be a science of ethics,
Durkheim was in a common tradition with Spencer and with more recent ideas in ethology and
sociobiology. For example, E. O. Wilson, proponent of a biological approach to the human
sciences, writes, 'Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that
the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and
biologicized' (Wilson, 1975, p. 562; for a collection of readings on the current debate,
see Caplan (1978). Here are some representative passages from Durkheim's The Rules of
Sociological Method (1895) in which his biomedical concepts are apparent: Briefly, for societies, as for individuals, health is good and
desirable; disease on the contrary, is bad and to be avoided. If, then, we can find an
objective criterion, inherent in the facts themselves, which enables us to
distinguish scientifically between health and morbidity in the various orders of social
phenomena, science will be in a position to throw light on practical problems and still
remain faithful to its own method. [Durkheim, 1895, p. 49] We shall call 'normal' these social conditions that are the most
generally distributed, and the others 'morbid' or 'pathological'. If we designate as
'average type' that hypothetical being that is constructed by assembling in the same
individual, the most frequent forms, one may say that the normal type merges with the
average type, and that every deviation from this standard of health is a morbid
phenomenon.... It is the function of the average organism that the physiologist studies;
and the sociologist does the same. [Ibid., pp. 55-6] The healthy constitutes the norm par excellence and can
consequently be in no way abnormal. [Ibid., p. 58] Now, it is important, from the very beginning of research, to be able
to classify facts as normal and abnormal, save for the few exceptional cases, so that the
proper domains can be assigned to physiology and pathology, respectively. [Ibid., p. 63] The various principles we have established up to the present are, then,
closely interconnected. In order that sociology may be a true science of things, the
generality of phenomena must be taken as a criterion of their normality. [Ibid., pp.
74-75] ...health is something that is defined as inherent in things. For then
the object of our efforts is both given and defined at the same time. It is no longer a
matter of pursuing desperately an object that retreats as one advances but of working with
steady perseverance to maintain the normal state, of re-establishing it if it is
threatened, and of rediscovering its conditions if they have changed. The duty of the
statesman is no longer to push society toward an ideal that seems attractive to him, but
his role is that of the physician: he prevents the outbreak of illnesses by good hygiene,
and he seeks to cure them when they have appeared. [Ibid., p. 75] ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 10 Underline the biological and medical terms in the above passages. What
do you think happens to political disagreements and non-conformists in this schema? Durkheim candidly translates ethically and politically contested issues
into ones of maintaining status quo, which is taken to be normal if average.
Extreme political dissidence and non-conformity become the object of the physician's
'curative' ministrations. There is, alas, a growing literature on various forms of this
practice, East and West. (See Medvedev, 1971; Goffman, 1968; Kesey, 1972; Fireside, 1980).
His biographer concedes that this approach 'blinded Durkheim to the possibility of real
historical alternatives at any given stage of development' (Lukes, 1973, p. 30). ___________________________________________________________ Durkheim saw himself as heir to earlier French advocates of a
biologically based social science, Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, whose work we
cannot consider here. Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was an extremely important early theorist of
a biological approach to the human sciences, while Comte (1798-1857) was the founder of
positivism. (See the essays on them in Raison, 1969, for a quick introduction. For the
purpose of relating their work to this unit, see Greene, 1959; Manuel, 1956, 1972; Haines,
1978). Although Durkheim was in constant conflict with aspects of Spencer's sociology, at
a deeper level he adopted many of the fundamental concepts which Spencer shared with
Saint-Simon and Comte. The line between biological analogies and biological reductionism
is hard to maintain in the face of page after page of biological terms. The net effect is
to experience the elements and relationships in social relations as pre-given by a
framework which is not open to challenge. Durkheim was a consistently sociological functionalist,
but his concepts at the level of the social were still biological ones. He says, for
example, 'The function of a social fact ought always to be sought in its relation to some
social end' (Durkheim, 1895, p. 111) at the same time that he whole heartedly embraced the
(albeit social) 'struggle for existence'. He concentrated on the contribution of the part
to the whole in maintaining the stability or equilibrium, in explaining The Division of
Labour in Society (1893), a feature which he considered the key to social solidarity.
Primitive societies, he said, were characterized by homogeneity, involving less division
of labour and exhibiting a rougher, mechanical solidarity. Population pressure and
competition led progressively to heterogeneity and greater division of labour in societies
which increasingly exhibited truly integrated, organic solidarity. Homogeneity and
heterogeneity, as you may recall from Unit 2, are familiar terms from Spencer's
'Law of Evolution'. His ideas are retained but expressed in purely social terms: No doubt the current formula, which defines social life as a
correspondence between the internal and the external milieu, is only an approximation;
however, it is in general true. Consequently, to explain a social fact it is not enough to
show the cause on which it depends; we must also, at least in most cases, show its
function in the establishment of the social order. [Durkheim, 1895, p. 97] But the language in which social functions get discussed is redolent of
biologism (i.e., scientism using biological concepts): There are a number of circumstances where different functions enter
into competition. Thus, in the individual organism, during a long fast, the nervous system
is nourished at the expense of the other organs, and the same phenomenon is produced if
cerebral activity develops too considerably. It is the same in society. In time of famine
or economic crisis, the vital functions are obliged, in order to maintain themselves, to
support themselves at the expense of less essential functions. [Durkheim, 1895, p. 271] ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 11 What's slippery in that analogy? In a famine it is understandable that the body preserves the delicate
brain tissue at the expense of, say, stored fat or the bulk of muscles. Is it so
uncontroversial that, in the analogy, the landowners, factory owners and government (the
'vital functions') should remain well-fed while the peasants and workers (the 'less
essential functions') starve? It is a matter of social and political priorities to define
the 'vital functions' and the 'less essential functions' in a society. Why not share the
food out equally? Then, perhaps, take a poll as to what action to take when supplies run
shorter. ___________________________________________________________ Biological language is pervasive in Durkheim's writings. Sociology was
concerned with the study of 'social morphology' (forms or structures); the 'pathology' of
the division of labour; and individual anomie (normlessness, cutting one off from
solidarity and likely to lead to suicide, the subject of one of his major works). His
arguments are characteristically conducted in terms of the sort of detailed biological
analogy quoted above. This remained true, even as his views became more traditional and
idealistic. As he moved away from seeing society as a system of organs and functions, his
emphasis on the role of morality and religion and on society as 'a focus of moral life'
remained functionalist: 'Its true function is to create the ideal' (Peyre, 1960, p. 25;
Lukes, 1973, p. 5). Durkheim's last book reflected this increasing emphasis on the role of
ritual in cementing the existing social order. In The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life (1912), he set out to explain religion as a social product which expressed the
character of the social totality. The same thing has to be said of this book as has been
said of those of James and Weber on religion: they are studying it and attempting to
explain religious practices, experiences and influences. The extent to which the claims of
believers may or may not be true is not important to the enquiry in the way that it would
matter to believers. Durkheim considers various 'primitive' forms of worship —
animism, naturism, totemism, and the ideas of soul, spirit and gods, along with attitudes
to ritual. In doing so, however sympathetically, he was treating the transcendent as
merely social and was silent about whether or not it could have a divine basis as well. He
was himself a non-believer and was born a Jew. His treatment of religion could be said to
be so tolerant as to be positively harmful: The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths
translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social. The reasons
with which the faithful justify them may be, and generally are, erroneous; but the true
reasons do not cease to exist, and it is the duty of science to discover them. In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true
in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of
human existence. [Durkheim, 1912, pp. 14-15] Similarly, he in no way foresees the demise of religion. This is not
because of doubts about its eternal truth but because of his view of its social function: Thus there is something eternal in religion which is destined to
survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has progressively enveloped
itself. There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at
regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity
and its personality. [Ibid., pp. 474-75] (Doesn't this remind you of Spencer in Unit 2? A further passage with
Durkheim's views on the relationship between science and religion appears in the Primary
Anthology, item 6j.) Although Durkheim's work was concerned with the social level of
integration and stressed the need for positive norms in individual and social life, he was
accepting the fundamental features of society and only setting out to explain the
contributions of particular social phenomena to the maintenance of the whole. Organic
analogies helped to create a conception of sociology which justified the increasing
division of labour and opposed radical structural change. Spencer had taken for granted
mid-Victorian laissez-faire. Weber's liberalism, in effect, supported the bureaucratic
Prussian state. In his turn, Durkheim was attempting to strengthen the moral solidarity of
the unstable French Third Republic (1870-1909). It was from these highly ideologically
committed sources that the major orientations and assumptions of 'value-free' social
science were selected and, in some cases, reinterpreted. ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 12 Using examples from the discussion of Weber and the passages quoted
from Weber and Durkheim, find examples of (i) naturalization of values; (ii) scientism;
(iii) positivism. Use the definitions given above (three paragraphs before SAQ 1). What
criticisms have I made of these ways of dealing with values? I have been criticizing, first, the covert packing of values into
social theories by the choice of biological concepts which favour stability, equilibrium,
slow change, and the use of the results to justify particular ethical and social beliefs;
and second, the alleged separation of facts from values, when the values are already part
of the facts. You may or may not agree with the values being propagated (I don't), but it
is important to notice that we are being prevented from having that debate by the way the
issues are formulated. ___________________________________________________________ From the 1920s, Durkheim's work was the single most important
intellectual influence on the originators of functionalist anthropology in Great Britain,
Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. They turned to his theories in reaction
against the dominant late nineteenth-century conception of anthropology (discussed in Unit
12). By the 1920s there was a very strong reaction against the use of biological analogies
to explain away exotic customs. An important concomitant of this abandonment of the
'doctrine of survivals' was the fact that anthropologists began to leave their studies,
their books and their collections of anecdotal evidence and to undertake field trips
involving intensive study of contemporary 'primitive' societies. Three important
theoretical consequences of this fieldwork were: (i) A shift from a licence to explain away, to a passionate desire to
make sense of, and the politico-economic need to control more closely, the relations
between social phenomena in colonial societies (for substantiation see Stauder, 1974;
Bonte, 1974-5; the journal Review of African Political Economy). This led
anthropologists to seek to understand and explain the contribution of apparently exotic
customs to the social system and involved a theoretical revolution away from the doctrine
of survivals and towards functionalism; (ii) The abandonment of the historical dimension of anthropological
explanation which (in different ways) had been central to the work of Spencer, Weber,
Durkheim and — the usually unmentioned alternative position — Marx and Engels.
Historical explanations had acquired a very bad reputation by the 1920s as a result of
their speculative use by nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropologists, such as E. B.
Tylor and L. H. Morgan; they were replaced by meticulous ethnographic fieldwork among
existing tribal societies; (iii) The consequent need to abandon a unitary model of the history and
structure of humankind and to retreat into a cultural relativism which has only lately
been challenged by anthropologists. They have sought to re-emphasize unity among the
varieties of humankind by moving to a deeper, structural level of analysis of cultural
practices and symbols. Malinowski (1884-1942) was a Pole who spent most of his academic career
at the London School of Economics. It has been argued that the epistemological foundations
of his functionalism were indebted to the pragmatist philosophical writings of C. S.
Peirce and William James (Leach, 1957), but although there are important affinities among
their ideas, Malinowski's most explicit acknowledgements are to Durkheim. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955), who was British, had a peripatetic career
until he became Professor of Anthropology at Oxford (1939-48). He traced his own
fundamental conceptions to Montesquieu ('social system'), Comte ('statics' versus
'dynamics'), Spencer (social evolution via diversification and adaptation), and, above
all, to Durkheim (the central concept of 'function'). Malinowski became increasingly concerned with the relations between
social functions and the basic psychological and biological needs of individuals, needs
which he considered to give rise to secondary, instrumental social and cultural
institutions. He was thus, contra Durkheim, reducing the social to the individual
and the individual to biological need. Radcliffe-Brown's analyses continued to emphasize
the role of strictly social elements in maintaining the overall functional unity of highly
structured social systems. He never departed from the Durkheimian conception of the
autonomy of the social from the biological. With these different emphases, Malinowski and
Radcliffe Brown worked out the basic functionalist approach which came to dominate the
British School of social anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s. Together they made
'functionalism' a fighting term (rather as Watson had made 'behaviourism' one in American
psychology) and insisted that studies of contemporary societies conducted according to
this approach could achieve far more than could the simple collection and analysis of
ethnographic facts. Hitherto unnoticed relationships in cultures could help reveal the
integrative character of societies. Malinowski described himself as the 'arch-functionalist' and arrogated
to himself (only half jokingly) the title of 'Founder of the Functionalist School of
Anthropology'. He said that 'the magnificent title of the Functional School of
Anthropology has been bestowed by myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extent out of
my own sense of irresponsibility' (Firth, 1957, p. 11). Those who have rejected
Malinowski's theoretical pretensions have continued to admire his detailed descriptions
and analyses, especially the standards he set for the technique of intensive fieldwork. The most full-blown statement of anthropological functionalism is an
essay by Radcliffe-Brown, 'On the concept of function in social science' (1935), which
appears in the Prlmary Anthology (item 6i) and which you should now read with the
following question in mind. ___________________________________________________________ SAQ 13 Write down a list of the physical, biological and medical terms
Radcliffe-Brown uses so promiscuously. What is their cumulative effect? If one considers what sorts of terms might go in their place, it is
easy to see how they propagate a particular model of society as stable, without
contradictions and without its priorities and values amenable to public contestation and
collective action for change. The central concepts of 'process', 'structure' and
'function' are applied without any sense of past or future. ___________________________________________________________ It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of this approach
over the past half century. The collection in which the essay currently appears is a basic
text for all anthropology students. I bought my copy a decade before writing this unit,
and it was the seventh reprint of the paperback edition. By the mid-1950s it was argued
that all British social anthropology was functionalist, and functionalists held all the
major chairs in the country. Although Radcliffe-Brown said that 'functional unity' was
only an hypothesis and a matter of degree, it increasingly became an assumption which
equated 'is' and 'ought' and begged evaluative and political questions just as neatly (and
circularly) as natural theology and Spencer had done: whatever is, is best. 'How manifold
are thy works, O Lord. In wisdom hast thou made them all', says the Psalmist. It could be
argued, for example, that suicide is functional, because it reduces conflict between the
individual and society. Indeed, Audrey Richards reports that ...the belief in the importance of every institution within a culture
to the continued existence of that culture led to the charge, often made by [colonial]
administrators, that functional anthropologists were not prepared to allow for any change
in the tribes they were studying. Field-workers were even suspected of supporting ritual
murders or cannibalism on the ground that in some way or other they contributed to
"tribal integration". [Richards, 1957, p. 19] When working with colonial administrators, anthropologists could help
to rationalize policy and provide advice for, and in some cases work directly in, the
organization of economic exploitation and counter-insurgency (See Horowitz, 1967; Asad,
l973; Hymes, 1974, especially Part III: 'Studying Dominated Cultures'). Much of the criticism of functional anthropology has been directed at
its almost exclusive concentration on 'integration', 'dynamic equilibrium' and 'organismic
holism' — concepts which stress the coherence, stability and balance of social
forces. Its followers have paid relatively little attention to change, conflict and to the
contradictions inherent in social life and at the interface between socio-economic orders,
for example, when a tribal culture undergoes urbanization and industrialization. This
approach to society is variously attributed to the unintended consequences ('latent
functions' in functionalist jargon; 'false consciousness' in Marxist terms); to the use of
organic analogies in intensive, often myopic studies of small-scale societies, and/or to
deep ideological commitments (see Mills, 1970; Demerath and Peterson, 1967 — a very
useful collection; Gouldner, 1971; Goddard, 1972). There have been important interactions between British
functionalist anthropology and American functionalist sociology, but the origins of the
latter can be traced rather precisely to a small group of scholars at Harvard in the
1930s. (The traditional distinctions between 'anthropology' and 'sociology' is that
anthropologists study exotic, 'primitive' societies, while sociologists study 'modern'
ones. In recent times the distinction has broken down, for example, when anthropologists
study modern urban settings.) There is a remarkable account of it by Barbara Heyl in the
Secondary Anthology (3.1) 'The Harvard "Pareto Circle"’ (the article is not
a set text, but it is highly recommended). Here is my gloss on her story. The members of the group were heirs to the pragmatist tradition and
were influenced by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, but the main catalytic influence on
their work was the charismatic personality of an eminent biologist, L. J. Henderson
(1878-1942), who formed a circle of young scholars around himself (my approach to
Henderson is very different from the one taken in Unit 11). He was consciously attempting
to formulate a social theory which could rebut the prevailing liberal and Marxist analyses
of society which were gaining adherents in the depths of the Great Depression of the
1930s. For his main weapon in this battle he chose the writings of the aristocratic and
profoundly anti-democratic French-Italian sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), whose
theories provided much of the intellectual basis of Italian Fascism. Pareto saw society as
a system of mutually interacting particles which move from one state of equilibrium to
another. Henderson's disciples later recalled that he used Pareto to cast doubt on belief
in any real goodness in people or any validity for liberal, much less socialist, ideas and
traditions. Henderson added a number of thermodynamic, physico-chemical and biomedical
analogies to Pareto's formulations so that the concepts of 'system' and 'equilibrium'
acquired a wide range of allusion. He also wrote sympathetically about nineteenth-century
natural theology as a useful model for studying both biological and physico-chemical
systems in a remarkable book on The Fitness of the Environment (1913). Members of Henderson's circle went on to attain eminence in key
positions and to give the 'right' direction to the growing influence of American social
science. From their beginnings in the avowedly anti-radical 'Pareto Circle' they and their
followers and students have propagated functionalism under the guise of value-free
analysis throughout the social sciences and liberal arts in America. A historian of the
movement claimed (in 1959) that functionalism was synonymous with sociological method. A
decade later it was argued that functionalism was simply a synonym for explicit scientific
analysis in general. We have to grant that its wealth of scientific terms, concepts and
models makes this all too plausible. Functional analyses have been offered to explain all
aspects of society and culture, including the reductio ad absurdum of so describing
social conflict in Lewis Coser's The Function of Social Conflict (1956) and even Revolutionary
Change in Chalmers Johnson's (1966) book of that title. For example, chapter 4 is
entitled 'The Disequilibrated Social System' and chapter 6, 'Measuring Disequilibrium'.
Here is a sample: Social science can contribute to the avoidance of revolution by
identifying in advance probable future instances of dissynchronization between value
structures and patterns of environmental adaptation—that is, conditions requiring
either politically-sanctioned change or revolutionary change. [Johnson, 1966 p.166] (For an overview, written from within the disciplines, of the strengths
and weaknesses of functionalism in the human sciences, see Martindale, 1965. For strong
claims on behalf of functionalism, see Davis, 1959.) The work of Robert K. Merton (b.1910 and a member of the 'Pareto
Circle') has been most influential in developing and refining the conceptual aspects of
functionalism and its application to science itself as a topic in sociology. In his
best-known essay, 'Manifest and Latent Functions' (1949), he draws heavily on the
theoretical work of Weber, Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown and members of the 'Pareto Circle'
(especially Talcott Parsons and Clyde Kluckholn) and buttresses this with lavish
references to analogies from contemporary physiology and biology of internal balance of
'homeostasis' (Cannon). There is hardly any room for the text on the pages where he
appeals to this literature in the footnotes of his book, Social Theory and Social
Structures. I reproduce here two pages of his article:: This much is the text of his page 100: (100) SOCIAL THEORY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE neutral to their contents, and may serve equally well as containers for
ideological poison or for ideological nectar. THE LOGIC OF PROCEDURE Prevalence of the Functional Orientation The functional orientation is of course neither new nor confined to
the social sciences. It came, in fact, relatively late on the sociological scene, if one
may judge by its earlier and extended use in a great variety of other disciplines. [fn49]
The central orientation of functionalism — expressed Now there is a line across the page, and the rest of the page —
about nine tenths — is footnote: ___________________________________________________________ The footnote begins with two quotations: "The intensity of the exertions evoked by the national danger far
exceeded ordinary capacities of human beings. All were geared up to an abnormal pitch. Once
the supreme incentive had dis-appeared, everyone became conscious of the severity of the
strain. A vast and general relaxation and descent to the standards of ordinary life was
imminent. No community could have gone on using up treasure and life energy at such a
pace. Most of all was the strain apparent in the higher ranks of the brain workers. They
had carried on uplifted by the psychological stimulus which was now to be removed. 'I can work until I drop' was sufficient while the
cannon thundered and armies marched. But now it was peace: and on every side
exhaustion, nervous and physical, unfelt or unheeded before, became evident." "In all revolutions there comes a the period of inertia
when the fatigue of the effort compels a pause in the process of innovation. That
period is bound to come with the cessation of hostilities. After a life on the heights
the human constitution seems to demand tranquillity and relaxation. To insist,
in the period of pause that we gird up our loins for a new and difficult journey, above
all for a journey into the unknown, is to ask the impossible.... When hostilities against
Nazism cease, men will want, more than anything, a routine of thought and habit which
does not compel the painful adaptation of their minds to disturbing excitement." Merton comments (still in the footnote to page 100): The Gibbonesque passages in the first [quotation] are, of course, by
Churchill, the Winston Churchill between the Great Wars, writing in retrospect about the
aftermath of the first of these: The World Crisis: Volume 4, The Aftermath, (London:
Thornton Butterworth, 1928), 30, 31, 33. The observations in the second [quotation] are
those of Harold Laski, writing during the Second Great War to say that it is the policy of
Mr. Churchill to make "the conscious postponement of any issue deemed 'controversial'
until the victory is won [and] this means . . . that the relations of production are to
remain unchanged until peace comes, and that, accordingly, none of the instruments for
social change on a large scale, will be at the national disposal for agreed
purposes." Revolution of our Time, (New York: Viking Press, 1943), 185, 187,
193, 227-8, 309. Unless Churchill had forgotten his analysis of the aftermath of the first
war, it is plain that he and Laski were agreed on the diagnosis that significant
and deliberately enacted social change was unlikely in the immediate posPreface
Introduction
the study of domestication of animals,
biological taxonomy (classification)
together led to the theory of evolution by natural selection,
which, in turn,
led to evolutionary psychology and social sciences;
instead of this, we have
various theories about mind, brain and society:
Malthusianism,
phrenology,
utilitarianism,
associationism,
neurophysiology,
positivism, statistics,
anthropology
and sociology.
Spencer's social evolutionism
4 Functional psychology and behaviourism
5 Foundations of functionalist social science: Weber and Durkheim
6 Functionalist anthropology
7 Functionalist sociology