16 - The Superorganic

Abstract

Herbert Spencer coined the word superorganic. It was related to his analogy between society and an individual organism. By the term superorganic, he meant that societies were to be understood as entities that were more than and different from the sum of their individual parts. A. L. Kroeber, in his important essay The Superorganic (1917), used the word much more aptly than Spencer to distinguish the methods and subject matter of ethnology, and what Kroeber calls history from the biological sciences in general. This chapter explores whether the term superorganic remains a purposely vague term synonymous with that in human behavior, and its various products and institutions that is not explicable in its variable manifestations as biological or racial. Emile Durkheim's main objection to Spencer's view of the superorganic was that he did not consistently treat social institutions as truly sui generis. Durkheim felt that human social life, its social facts, had two distinct aspects: (1) the social substratum or the associational morphology of society, and (2) the collective representations with which the collective conscience somehow creates the symbols, emotions, and values that the people share.