The Transcendence of the Social: Durkheim, Weismann, and the Purification of Sociology

Maurizio Meloni

doi:10.3389/fsoc.2016.00011

Abstract

This chapter highlights a conceptual traffic from biological views of heredity as hard (closed to environmental signals) to sociology in Durkheim’s strategic usage of German biologist August Weismann. The transcendence of the social in Durkheim is entirely isomorphic to Weismann’s transcendence of the germplasm: in both cases, they aimed to construct objective realities, radically independent and exterior from individual tendencies and peculiarities. Weismann offered Durkheim an important scientific companion to make boundaries between sociology and biology. In conclusion, by taking Weismann as an anticipator of the genetics revolution a few years later, I argue for a profound complicity between twentieth-century non-biological sociology and genetics. They both made space for a neat distinction between biological heredity and sociocultural transmission, heredity and heritage. This may no longer be a viable option for 21st century postgenomic views.

Highlights

Weismann and the Possibility of the SocialThis paper addresses the emergence during the late nineteenth century of a certain way of thinking that came to be seen in the twentieth century as self-evident for many social scientists and biologists alike
The first is a domain of biological perpetuation based on an inner force that is insensitive to external signals: in this first domain, it has to be noticed, Durkheim uses an ambiguous language of hereditary habits, but obviously he is referring to ideas of heredity as interiorized and hard, “not whittled away by the action of particular individual environments,” “consistently uniform in spite of the diverse external circumstances” (R: 116)
Once again supporting a minority interpretation of Weismann, what Durkheim emphasizes in the destruction of use-inheritance is emancipation from the yoke of heredity: “the societies that are produced are of a different species from those which generated them, because the latter, by combining, give rise to an entirely fresh organisational pattern” (R: 116)

Summary

Introduction

Weismann and the Possibility of the SocialThis paper addresses the emergence during the late nineteenth century of a certain way of thinking that came to be seen in the twentieth century as self-evident for many social scientists and biologists alike. In a Lamarckian context, as I have argued elsewhere (Meloni, 2016a,b), the social is always on the verge of turning into the biological, i.e., in a nineteenth century language, habits via use-inheritance are progressively fixed and transmitted by heredity to the generations.

Results

Conclusion