Work-in-Progress:
Degeneration, Race, & the Rise of Sociology
The
work of writing the follow-up to Until Darwin has begun.
Below is a little bit about the manuscript and more will be posted
here over the next few months as another project draws closer to
completion . The motivation for this return is that, in hindsight,
my approach in Until Darwin perpetuated a certain silence
through its focus on the place of Darwin's encounters with slavery in
his thinking about nature, natural selection, and the tangled bank of
life. Of course, Darwin is a towering figure across many disciplines
whose work simply can not be ignored if we want to understand how we
got to the place we find ourselves. However, Darwin's long shadow
obscures just how difficult it was for even him to bring an end to
the monogenic/ploygenic debates that permeated Enlightenment attempts
to understand human variety. Most importantly, in Until Darwin
it obscured the continuities of polygenism, degeneracy, and race
before and after the publication of the Origin, as well as
their place in the emerging fields (systems of knowledge) of
sociology and biology.
The
persistence of the concepts of degeneracy, race, and to a lesser
degree polygenism, is a problem confronting the study of Darwin and
Darwinism, but is also one found in the pages of any study of
degeneracy or racialism. This begs the so far unanswered question:
How is it that theories of race and degeneracy predate the Darwinian
revolution and move from a relatively minor position within Natural
History to a dominant position within the new sciences of life? By
investigating this question, we are led to consider how polygenism,
race, and degeneracy were reinterpreted after the collapse of Natural
History. If these continuities exist, this investigation should
reveal how the fields of biology and sociology relied on each other
for validation and legitimacy through their deployment of shared
scientific ideologies of race and degeneracy. In Until Darwin,
one gets the impression that Darwin's Origin of Species was an
epistemological break, but it was an error to have left that
impression. It is the persistence of these scientific ideologies
that raise questions about the extent of the "revolution"
initiated by the publication of the Origin. Degeneracy, race,
and polygenism were not discarded as out-date scientific ideologies.
In the wake of the Origin of Species, race and degeneracy –
at times with an undercurrent of polygenic theory – became objects
of scientific study, and their use as dynamic social forces in
modern life only intensified. Of course, one must admit that
Darwinism in its broad meaning produces its own theories of race and
degeneracy, but this only supports the assertion that these notions
once comfortably housed within Natural History soon found their place
with the new sciences of life. These scientific ideologies gave
legitimacy and social relevance to biology and sociology. It is
almost impossible to imagine biology and sociology as disciplines
apart from their relevance to government and to the health of the
governed.
Thomas
Huxley wrote that Naturalists like himself – for the term
“biologist” was only just coming into use – had been too humble
to simply and honestly lay their rightful claim to the entire domain
of life, and so for mere convenience the study of modern human life
had been ceded to sociology. Huxley was quick to point out that with
the inevitable advance of knowledge, biology will one day no longer
need to be so humble and will inevitably take its place as the
organizing science of social and natural life. Until that day,
“...one should not be surprised if it occasionally happens that you
see a biologist trespassing upon questions of philosophy or politics;
or meddling with human education; because, after all, that is part of
his kingdom which he has only voluntarily forsaken” (Huxley. 1876
(1902) “Study of Biology” in Scientific
Memoirs
IV: 252-253). As told by this foremost of the new scientists,
confining themselves to one domain of life contributed to the
formation a new system of knowledge that his contemporary William
Sumner called “the sciences of life in society” within which
“....biology and sociology touch. Sociology is a science which
deals with one range of phenomena produced by the struggle for
existence, while biology deals with another. The forces are the
same... the sciences are cognate” (1881:173; from “Sociology”
in War
and Other Essays:
165-194).
The
question that we will attempt to examine in this manuscript is a
deceptively simple one: how is it that notions of polygenism,
degeneracy and race survived the end of Natural History and were so
easily incorporated into, and transformed by, the new sciences of
life? It should be admitted that this question demands a more complex
answer than this single – if any work is really singular –
manuscript will provide. We can only point out an avenue of critique
that has not been fully accessible until recently. These pages will
focus on the place of degeneracy and race in the emerging disciplines
of biology and sociology, with special attention being given to their
place in the emergence and legitimization of sociology in the United
States. We can justify this focus on the United States, if indeed it
need be justified, because it is here that the polygenic theory
reached its zenith and where slavery made questions of human variety
and the replies of race and degeneracy aspects of everyday life and
politics. The sciences of life and society have always given a
special place to degeneracy and race. Broadly speaking, the goal is
to demonstrate that the social was always biological and the
biological has always been social, at least since the moment when we
began to speak of sociology and biology as the sciences of life.
NGRAM (just for fun)
Biology,Sociology,Biologist,Sociologist,biologist,sociologist,degenerate,degeneration,eugenics: 1800-1939
Biology,Sociology,Biologist,Sociologist,biologist,sociologist,degenerate,degeneration,eugenics: 1800-1939
