Science Studies, I (1971), 177-206.
Discussion
Paper
EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY AND IDEOLOGY: THEN AND NOW
Robert
M. Young
This paper was presented at a conference on 'The Social
Impact of Modern Biology', organized by the British Society for Social
Responsibility in Science in London, 26-28 November I970. It will appear in the
volume of conference proceedings edited by Watson Fuller-to be published on 21
May 1971 by Routledge & Kegan Paul as The Impact of Modern
Biology (hard cover £1.75, paperback £0.50)-and is reprinted by kind
permission. Because of the interest it aroused at the time, and the way in which
it drew on material from several academic disciplines, we are taking the unusual
step of reproducing the paper here so that readers may have the advantage of the
extended bibliographical and discursive footnotes, which will not be included in
the conference proceedings.
The paper was designed basically for an audience of
scientists who were assumed to have no knowledge of recent literature on social
and historical aspects of science. Dr Young is himself active within the history
and philosophy of science, and is working towards a closer relationship with
relevant studies in sociology and social anthropology. He makes no claim to a
comprehensive knowledge of all the related background literature, nor to
having provided here an exhaustive bibliography. This paper is in the nature of
a report of work and thought in progress, and a provisional sketch of an
emerging point of view. Discussion, criticism and elaboration of the paper's
contents, in the form of Notes or Letters, will be welcomed.
[THE EDITORS]
* Alphabetical notes appear at the end of the text
(pp. 189-206).
This paper is concerned with 'the attempt to develop a more
adequate intellectual framework' for understanding 'the general principles
involved in relating science and society’.1 In particular, I want to
consider the relationship between science on the one hand and philosophical,
social and political problems on the other. I hope to provide some suggestions
which will help us to see the constitutive role of evaluative concepts in
biology and will lead us to discuss values and politics as such : not cloaked in
the specious objectivity of ideologically neutral positive science. I shall
begin by contrasting this point of view with what I take to be the usual
piecemeal approach to the study of science and society. Next I shall suggest
that the philosophical status of certain key concepts in biology relate them as
closely to the human and social sciences as they do to the physico-chemical
ones. This point makes the introduction of the concept of ideology in biology
much less contentious than it might appear to be at first sight. For reasons
which I shall outline, the discussion will be conducted for the most part at one
remove from molecular genetics and will concentrate on the general theory on
which all modern biology is based. The examples which I will discuss are drawn
from the nineteenth-century evolutionary debate, from Lysenkoism, and from
current social and political extrapolations based on evolutionary biology. I
hope to show that these form part of a continuous tradition in which it is
routinely impossible to distinguish hard science from its economic and political
context and from the generalizations-which often also serve as motives for the
research-which are fed back into the social and political debate. The conclusion
which I hope to support is that we will have to learn to think in new ways if we
are really serious about exercising social responsibility in science. a
I hope that it will not be taken amiss if I begin by saying
that it seems to me that most discussions of social responsibility in science
reflect a Fabian approach to the fundamental problem, that is, favouring a
gradual, piecemeal strategy rather than attacking the enemy head-on. I should
perhaps remind you that the concept of Fabianism is double-edged: the resulting
tactics, in the hands of Fabius Maximus (surnamed Cunctator, the delayer) did
wear out the strength of Hannibal, while at the same time they were based on the
fact that Fabius lacked the resources to meet Hannibal in open battle. It is
clear that we lack the intellectual and moral resources to attack on all fronts,
but it is surely worth while to begin to enquire about the equipment we would
need.
The result of our piecemeal strategy is that we
persistently formulate our problems in terms of science on the one hand and
values on the other, although there are tentative attempts to define their
relationship. Looking at the papers which have been presented at this
conference, one finds that they consider aspects of technology, industry,
medicine, the very mixed fruits of the applications of science in the form of
genetic manipulation, immunology, agriculture, and the environment. Finally, we
have been told about fragmentation and about the direct political role of
scientists. If we add to these the crisis in the funding of science, the
dramatic consequences of linking immunology with surgery, the side effects of
chemotherapy, and the very direct effects of defoliants-followed in some
contexts by other sorts of very grotesque fragmentation-one is left with a
picture of the ship of scientific objectivity buffeted by the winds of the
military-industrial complex, technology, medicine, and so on. On such a buffeted
ship, how do we who are also morally concerned, responsible men conceive and
carry out our sense of social responsibility? About all we can do in these
circumstances is to gasp out our complaints: 'We caught you.' 'You can't do that
to me (or my findings).' 'I won't do it.' 'I'm concerned about that.' Some move
on to ask, 'What are we going to do about it?' and go on to shout, 'Stop that!'
or 'Get on with this', while a few drop out to do something which they find more
morally satisfying or socially relevant. This last group is related to a
mounting (and more or less coherent) critique of the scientific world view and
its relations with the ethos of advanced technocratic societies. Much of the
strength of the counter-culture and the appeal of pop pseudo-biology stems from
the failure of professional scientists to ask certain questions in relevant
ways. b
At this point we come up against the fundamental assumptions
of modern science and find that we are the victims of our own myths. The central
problem lies at the heart of the view of science which we hold and propagate. We
are struggling to integrate science and values at the same time that we are
prevented from doing so by our most basic assumptions. It would be ludicrous to
attempt briefly to discuss the metaphysical foundations of modern science, but
it may be useful to remind ourselves of certain key issues and to mention some
concepts which bear directly on scientific explanation in biology.
In the seventeenth century the development of methodology and
of the quantitative handling of data was related to a fundamental metaphysical
shift in the definition of a scientific explanation. The concepts of purpose and
value the 'final causes' and teleological explanations-which had been central to
the Aristotelian view of nature, were banished from the explanations of science
(though not from the philosophy of nature). The questions one asks of nature
could be as evaluative and qualitative as one liked, but the answers had to be
made in terms of matter, motion and number. In the physico-chemical sciences
this list of so-called 'primary qualities' has been modified to include some
less precise concepts such as force, energy and field, but the fundamental
paradigm of explanation-the goal of all science-has been to reduce or explain
all phenomena in physico-chemical terms. The history of science is routinely
described as a progressive approximation to this goal. This is the metaphysical
and methodological explanation for the fact that molecular biology is the queen
of the biological sciences and the basis on which other biological (including
human) sciences seek, ultimately, to rest their arguments. I need hardly say
that this has been a rather forlorn goal for much of biology and the source of a
great deal of punning and sheer bluff. c
The task of demonstrating the role of ideology in the most
nearly physico-chemical aspects of biology is, in principle, the same as that of
providing an ideological critique of the fundamental paradigm of all
post-seventeenth-century science. This task has been undertaken by Whitehead,
Mannheim, Burtt and others, and an assessment of it cannot be made here. d In leaving this question aside, however, we should not let the undoubted success
of molecular biology obscure the fact that most of biology is far from
qualifying for the more difficult task of requiring a metaphysical critique. For
the most part the biological sciences lie half way along a continuum extending
from pure mathematics and the physico-chemical sciences at one end and the
woolliest of the human and social sciences at the other. The particular
consequence of this intermediate position which is most unpalatable is that
biology partakes as much of the philosophical and methodological problems of the
social and political sciences as it does of the physico-chemical ones. One can
support this argument by pointing out that there is a hierarchy of concepts in
modern science which extends from the purely physico-chemical to the purely
evaluative and that biology shares a number of the most significant ones with
the 'softest' sciences.
At the fundamental level one finds the primary qualities mentioned above, and these are employed to explain the subjective
or secondary qualities of colour, odour, taste, temperature, etc. e In biology these qualities are the terms in which we analyse biological properties such as irritability, contractility, and so on. (The
concept of a 'biological property' was a conscious departure from the official
paradigm of explanation, and continues to serve us well.) 2 Properties are the terms in which we analyse structures and functions, and in doing so we employ (along with the human and social sciences, which cling
obstinately to organic analogies 3) the concepts of adaptation and utility. Structures and functions are the terms in which we analyse the next
level of explanation, organisms. On the basis of the theory of organic
evolution, biologists argue, of course, that persons are organisms, but
the concept of a person retains a further analysis from an older metaphysical
tradition and continues to be subjected to a dualistic division of the mental
and the bodily.4 I want to return for the purpose of this argument
to the concepts of a structure and function and trace some of the related
concepts along a different path. It takes only a moment's reflection to see that
the related concepts of adaptation and maladaptation, normal and pathological,
health and disease, clean and dirty, adjustment and deviance are very relative
indeed, and the employment of them is seldom far from explicit or implicit moral
(and often political) values. It is now a commonplace of the philosophy of
science that all facts are theory-laden. In biology, many facts are related to
concepts which are inescapably value-laden, and the same concepts are used
sometimes directly, sometimes analogously-in the human and the socio-political
sciences. f
By this point it should not be thought too great a
jump to introduce the concept of ‘Ideology'. The term has traditionally had
derogatory and political connotations which are connected with its
popularization by Marx, who concentrated his use of it as a term of abuse for
ideas which served as weapons for social interests. But Marxists were soon
subjected to their own critique, and this led to a general definition of
ideology: 'when a particular definition of reality comes to be attached to a
concrete power interest, it may be called an ideology. 5
Before Marx, however, those who coined the term and who
called themselves Idéologues considered themselves to be straightforward
scientists who argued that 'we must subject the ideas of science to the science
of ideas'.6 Their efforts in epistemology, psychology and physiology
helped to lay the foundations for modern experimental medicine in France, but
Napoleon found that the Idéologues were opposing his imperial ambitions,
and his criticisms and oppressive activities gave the term a derogatory
connotation.7 Recent writers have attempted to re-establish a
value-neutral use of the concept in the discipline of the sociology of
knowledge. g
The connection between what I was saying about the position
and concepts of biology along a continuum, with that of ideology, should become
clear if we adopt the point of view of the sociology of knowledge which argues
that situationally detached knowledge is a special case and that situationally
conditioned knowledge is the norm. Knowledge is both a product of social change
and a factor in social change and/or the opposition to it. 8 This is a
commonplace, but its systematic application has radical consequences for the
idea of 'objective' science. The fundamental claim is that our conception of
reality itself is socially constructed. You will recognize the essential insight
in Marx's oft-quoted assertion that 'It is not the consciousness of men which
determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social existence which
determines their consciousness.’9 More recently it has been argued
that no human thought, with the exception of mathematics and parts of the
natural sciences, is immune from the ideologizing influences of its social
context.10 It is in this sense that the sociology of knowledge offers
itself as a tool for analysing the 'social construction of reality'. h If we adopt this point of view, we can approach the problem of the relationship
between science and society from a new perspective. Although the sociology of
knowledge was developed as a result of problems in the social sciences, it can
be argued that our own problems should lead us to apply it to similar questions
in natural science and especially in biology.. Just as the concept of a hard,
discrete fact has had to be given up in the philosophy of science and the pure
sensation in psychology, the scientific concept which depends on these-that of
'Objectivity'-must surely be brought under scrutiny. Going further, the
privileged place of science in society and culture, sharply cutting off its
substantive statements from values, politics and ideology, must surely be
examined very closely. i
I appreciate that the point of view which I am advocating is
itself ideological, but it is not purely so. At the same time I am arguing that
we should search for these factors-not, I hasten to add, to expunge them but to
discuss social and political issues as such. I would equally argue that the case
for the role of such factors depends on presenting evidence which convinces a
morally concerned and critically thinking man. The point is that there is no
escaping the political debate, a debate which extends to the definition
of ideology but also to that of science and its most basic assumptions.
In its early manifestations the concept of ideology conveyed
a sense of more or less conscious distortion bordering on deliberate lies. I do
not mean to imply this. Like the concepts of alienation and exploitation,
ideology does not depend on the conscious intentions or the awareness of men.
Nice men exploit, and contented men are alienated, just as honest men have false
consciousness.11 To deny this would be to commit the intentional
fallacy, a polemical device which is widespread enough these days. I know a
professional manager of vast estates who claims resolutely that his work has
nothing to do with politics, while at the opposite extreme Angela Davis and the
American Black Panthers claim that all black people in prison are political
prisoners. Similarly, just ten years ago Daniel Bell proclaimed The End of
Ideology. Unfortunately, the book in which he did this contains fulsome
thanks to organizations, publications and individuals who have since been shown
to have close financial and political links with the American CIA.12 Thus, the effort to absorb the ideological point of view into positive science
only illustrates the ubiquitousness of ideology in intellectual life. j
Having spent most of the available time in outlining the
philosophical issues involved in the effort to relate biological science with
values, I can only sketch some of the evidence which I believe justifies the use
of ideological analyses in biological problems. I shall mention three case
studies which were chosen because they raise the issues starkly and have been
examined in sufficient detail so that one can safely refer to the secondary
literature : the nineteenth-century evolutionary debate, Lysenkoism, and the
current trend of writing speculative politics in the form of pseudo-biology.
Most historical research on the development of the theory of
organic evolution has stressed one of two themes : firstly the scientific story
based on geology, palaeontology, zoogeography, embryology and domestication,
along with the post-Darwinian debate on the validity of the mechanism of natural
selection, leading eventually to the neo-Darwinian theory with its basis in
genetics and molecular biology. The other perspective is the Victorian debate on
the conflict between science and theology which eventually centred on evolution.
But there is a third and equally important theme in the whole story, one which
contributed to and derived from the scientific and theological issues. I want to
use this aspect of the debate as the basis for the analogies I shall make about
the recent past and the present.
If one both broadens and narrows one's perspective on the
nineteenth-century evolutionary debate, it emerges that social and ideological
factors defined the context of the debate at the same time as they determined
key issues about the narrowest scientific problem: the precise mechanism of
evolutionary change. This context involves a number of complexly interrelated
issues which cannot be considered here : natural theology, Utilitarianism,
phrenology, historiography, belief in progress, positivism, and so on. If we
follow the thread of the scientific debate, it leads from the economic writings
of Adam Smith and T. R.
Malthus, to the theological and ethical works of Paley,
to the theological geology of William Buckland and Adam
Sedgwick, to the equally
theological-but anti-literalist and anti-evolutionary-writings of Charles Lyell,
and on to Darwin, Spencer and Wallace. This debate was closely intertwined with
and fed directly into controversies in psychology, physiology, medicine,
sociology, anthropology and genetics, all of which were invoked in debates on
'Social Darwinism’ and imperialism. There is not at any point any clear line of
demarcation between pure science, generalizations based on it, and the related
theological, social, political and ideological issues.
However, if one were forced to choose one issue which was
more nearly central than any other to the whole debate, it would be the role of struggle in defining the relations between men and between man and his
environment. Was the competitive struggle for existence inevitable, inescapable,
and even ordained, and did it or did it not produce moral and social progress?
The Malthusian theory of population provided Darwin with the key to the central
analogy between changes produced by the selective efforts of the breeders of
domesticated animals and the process of natural selection. Although a great deal
of controversy about the meaning of Darwin's theory for man and society was
conducted in his name, Darwin resolutely declined to take part in it. One's
analysis of the role of ideology in his work lies, therefore, in the context,
the genesis and the debate into which his ideas fed. k But even Darwin
pointed out that every fact must be for or against some theory.13 He
might have added that for practically everyone else, facts and theories were
exquisitely relevant to social, political and ideological positions in the
Victorian debate.
Alfred Russel
Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of
evolution by natural selection, was also indebted to Malthus for his insight
into the mechanism of evolution. However., he very soon saw that the
basis of the mechanism in Malthusian theory came into direct
conflict both with his socialism and his philosophy of nature. Consequently, he
abandoned natural selection as applied to crucial issues in man's physical,
mental and social development. He drew explicitly on anti-Malthusian social
theories in doing so. He concluded (rightly) that Malthusianism was used by
conservative and liberal thinkers as an excuse for blaming nature for man's
inhumanity to man and taking a fatalistic view about the impossibility of
radically restructuring Society14.
Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, was actively seeking a
mechanism which would guarantee social progress, and he saw that the Malthusian
analogy could not provide that. We tend to think of Spencer as a Victorian prig
and a champion of the losing side-the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of
acquired characteristics. In doing so we forget two important historical facts.
First, the question of the mechanism of evolutionary change was wide open
throughout the nineteenth century (even Darwin became progressively Lamarckian
in his thinking) and was not resolved in favour of neo-Darwinism until well into
the twentieth century.15 Second, Spencer was very influential in
nineteenth-century biology, and his social theories were far more influential
than those of Darwin and company: so-called 'Social Darwinism' is a misnomer.16 Spencer is quite explicit about the role of ideology in his view of the
mechanism of evolution. He had turned to biology to find support for an extreme
version of individualist laissez-faire social theory (vestiges of which
have been evident at this conference), and he thought he had found it in
Lamarckianism. l Towards the end of his life he prefaced his umpteenth
defence of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (in a debate with
Weismann) with the following remarks: 'a right answer to the question whether
acquired characters are or are not inherited, underlies right beliefs, not only
in Biology and Psychology, but also in Education, Ethics, and Poltics.17
The definitive answer to Spencer's hope of evolving the
perfect society, if only men would stop interfering with inevitable progress by
ill-considered things like public health measures, state schools, a postal
system, etc., came from T. H. Huxley. Between 1860, when Huxley smote
Bishop Wilberforce's theological pretensions against Darwin's theory, and 1893, when (again at Oxford) he delivered his cautionary lecture on 'Evolution and
Ethics', his defence of biology had moved from casting aside a simplistic
theological account of life to earnestly advocating that men realize that
science and evolutionary theory could not provide a guarantee of progress or a
substitute for moral and political discourse. In the meantime evolution had been
invoked to support all sorts of political and ideological positions from the
most reactionary to the most progressive, from total laissez-faire to
revolutionary Marxism. m The fallacy which Huxley was combating was
the naturalistic one.18 While agreeing that we cannot infer human
morals, much less inevitable social progress, from science, we should not fail
to see the complementary point that moral and political views were already
deeply imbedded in the science of the day.
I hope that I have made plausible the claim that the
nineteenth-century debate was far from free of ideology at any level. The link
between this debate and the notorious case of Lysenkoism was one of the would-be
participants in the evolutionary debate. Karl Marx wanted to dedicate the
English edition of Das Kapital to Darwin, who politely declined and wrote
to a friend, 'What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany on the connection
between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection.'19 Marx
wrote to Engels that he saw in Darwin's theory 'the basis in natural history for
our view'.20 However, Marx and Engels were at pains to divorce
evolution from its Malthusian basis. Like Wallace (on the left), they saw that
the Malthus-Darwin view of natural selection was available as the basis for a
reactionary, fatalistic view of man's position and social change; and like
Spencer (on the right), they saw that it failed to provide a guarantee of social
progress towards utopia. Marx and Engels thus rejected natural selection and
tended to support Lamarckianism as more congenial with their view of nature,
history and social change. n Once again, one should recall that the
experimental evidence was at that time open to a number of theoretical
interpretations.
There are those who would argue that since about 1900 there has been a decisive shift in evolutionary biology and that the progressive
working out of genetic and molecular mechanisms has brought major aspects of its
fundamental research into such close contact with pure physico-chemical science
that the role of social, political and ideological assumptions is rapidly
becoming vanishingly small. But in every period since the Renaissance it has
been claimed that the level of positive science has finally been reached in
biology. It was thought that the paradigm of modern biology was firmly
established in the midst of the nineteenth-century debate, and it is thought
again now. The point is that it has subsequently been shown time after time that at the time it was impossible clearly to separate the factors. We are now
in an analogous period when people are debating the social meaning of biology,
but before mentioning aspects of the current debate, I want to touch on Lysenkoism.
There is little point in my reviewing the controversy: there
is an excellent book and some other good studies of it.21 However, I
would like to suggest how we might approach the literature on Lysenkoism. Even
the term evokes in us horrors of the suppression of a scientific tradition,
censorship, pure ideological invective at the expense of objectivity in science
and at the expense of agricultural yields in a hard-pressed country. It also
conjures up the awful consequences of the cult of the individual bolstered up by
Western anti-communist pressures extending from the Revolution through the Cold
War. It should be recalled that it was Stalin's direct support for Lysenko which
was decisive. This continued under Khrushchev, and the catastrophe in
agriculture which was partly attributable to Lysenkoism played a role in
Khrushchev's downfall.22 Western scientists see the Lysenko episode
as pure, rank abuse of science and use it to shore up the anti-communism which
they acquire from other influences. o In sum, not very relevant for us.
But the fine texture of the controversy is very illuminating
just because we are so complacent about it. I suggest that we attempt to study
it in a different light, not as pure distortion or pornography but as the sort
of pathological exaggeration which we find so useful in biological research in
illuminating the norm. As Professor Gombrich points out, caricature can reveal
important features by means of grotesque exaggerations. 23
Two contrasting points will suggest what I mean. First, from
the point of view of at least quasi-objective experimental science, the
controversy is very reassuring. The men who stood out against all the hardships
of the period had something to cling to-the methods and findings of
international genetics and agrobiology. The lengths to which the Lysenkoists had
to go in expunging all traces of chromosomal biology is an inversion-a reversing
mirror-of the rational structure of biological science, showing the way it hangs
together as a network of evidence and inferences. They had to rewrite textbooks
in every field of biology, medicine, psychology, pedagogy, and so on, and to
institute censorship at every stage of publications.24The
contrasting point is that from an ideological point of view Lysenkoism makes
perfect sense if we see it in the light of the continuing controversy leading
from the nineteenth-century debate. As one of the Lysenkoist enthusiasts wrote,
'Weismannism-Morganism serves today in the arsenal of contemporary imperialism
as a means for providing a "scientific base" for its reactionary politics.'
Another said, 'It disarms practice and orients man towards resignation to the
allegedly eternal laws of nature, towards passivity, towards an aimless search
for hidden treasure and expectation of lucky accidents.' A typical article in
the period was entitled 'Mendelist-Morganist Genetics in Defence of
Malthusianism'.25 In the same period J. D. Bernal wrote a withering critique of
a number of neo-Malthusian socially pessimistic works by eminent British
scientists-including a Presidential Address to the British Association-which
were based on just the analogies which the Russian writers mention.26
It is rarely the case that the history of science produces
such a clear-cut example of the attempt of ideology to root out the well-attested
findings of a rapidly-developing research tradition, culminating in a conclusive
physico-chemical explanation of the basic mechanisms involved. It seems to me
that this episode provides a very promising research laboratory for studying the
limits of the ideological analysis of biology. Two conclusions are already clear
: it is seldom the case that one is dealing with pure science or pure ideology.
Multiple causation is the rule. p Second, a whole generation of
biologists in Russia learned to see nature in Lysenkoist terms and to do science
in good faith within that framework. q I said a long way back that
concepts of health and disease, adjustment and deviance are very relative
indeed. It is worth remarking that Medvedev was committed for a time to a mental
hospital for having allowed his book on the Lysenko affair to be published in
the West. In an important sense he was mad to do it, but strong protests led to
his release instead of committing the protesters as well.
This leads me to the current debate. Professor Bettelheim
tells us that student radicals are suffering from neurosis (many, he assures us,
can be cured by psychoanalytic psychotherapy). Professor Lorenz explains human
aggression and student protest in ethological terms (less hope there),27 while Herbert Marcuse tells us that the positions of both the young radicals and
the old reactionaries are biologically determined. r The list of
authors who have recently written ideologically prescriptive works in the guise
of descriptive and generalized accounts based on genetics, ethology, archaeology
and anthropology, and general biology is by now familiar to most of us: Morris,
Ardrey, Comfort, Towers and Lewis, Koestler. It is growing daily.28 From the point of view of professional scientists, one can feel safely distanced
from this use of biology. We do not take it seriously when Lysenko cites
pseudo-evidence against intra-specific competition, or when Robert Ardrey claims
that masses of scientific data support the inevitability of such competition. s We can even feel that it is little to do with us if Professor
Darlington-with 'FRS' prominently printed on the bookjacket-cites a mass of
scientific and historical evidence punningly interpreted in support of
reactionary social doctrines, including apartheid. t (We knew
he thought such things, after all.) But just as the Lysenkoists argued that
modern genetics gave support to Western bourgeois reactionaries, it is clear
that Professor Darlington's pseudo-science gives comfort to the South Africans.
For example, when a highly critical review appeared over my name in the New Statesman, I received a letter from a South African graduate patiently
explaining that my reading of the book was a result of my ideological bias.29 My point is that of course he was absolutely right about me, and I am
right about Professor Darlington's book.
More and more people are trying to base generalizations about
man, society, culture and politics on the biological sciences. They have always
done so and will continue to do so. Many of them may be relatively easy targets,
but the essential point is that no one can confidently draw, the line between
fact, interpretation, hypothesis and speculation (which may itself be fruitful).
It seems to me that it is the social responsibility of science to enter
wholeheartedly into this debate and directly answer such works in the
non-specialist press. Paradoxically, we must relax the authority of science and
see it in an ideological perspective in order to get nearer to the
will-o'-the-wisp of objectivity. We have won a Pyrrhic victory in establishing
the part-reality and part-myth of the autonomy and objectivity of science, and
the existence of this Society and its conflicting aims reflects our unsteady
position. In one sense science should feel strong enough to stop flailing horses
which died in the nineteenth century in their attempts to protect the status and
methods of science. But in another sense, we need-for our own moral purposes-to
think seriously about the metaphysics of science, about the philosophy of nature, of man and of society, and especially about the ideological assumptions
which underlie, constrain and are fed by science. Since we have systematically
weeded out this tradition among working scientists-one which flourished until
the 1920s we need help from other disciplines in gaining the necessary
perspective, and we could well turn to the continuing traditions of inquiry in
the social and political sciences which have gained impetus from the civil and
international conflicts of advanced technological societies. u
We can, if we are reluctant to consider evaluative concepts
as integral to biology, retain the distinction between the scientific and the
evaluative. Although I believe that the maintenance of this distinction is
philosophically indefensible, the programme which can be recommended for the
further study of social responsibility in science is operationally
indistinguishable from the one which follows from the strong version of my
thesis: study works on ideology and social science and apply their analyses to
our own work in order to test the limits of pure science. v I suspect that little
will remain inviolable, but whether or not I am right about this, we will have
cultivated a perspective which encourages the evaluative and political
consideration of scientific concepts and will find ourselves in greater control
of extrapolations from our work and much more wary of the specious aura of
scientific objectivity in which they are cloaked. I am in no sense recommending
an anti-rational, much less an irrational, activity." The aim is to open up more
aspects of science and its context to public debate so that conflicting values
can be discussed as such. Science is no substitute for morality or
politics, nor is it independent at any level from them. w We need to
see that ideology is an inescapable level of discourse, and need (in the first
instance) to debate conflicting ideological positions and (in the last instance)
to face and resolve the actual conflicts between the needs and goals of men in
the appropriate way.
(C) BSSRS 1971.
NOTES
a I have asked that these discursive and bibliographical
notes be placed at the end of the essay rather than at the foot of the relevant
pages in the hope that the paper will be read on its own. They are intended as a
commentary to provide materials for study for any who may wish to consider
adopting the point of view recommended in the paper. A number of people who
heard the paper and have written to me about it have asked for a critical
bibliography on which to base private study and discussion groups.
This seems particularly useful since-for reasons which the
paper seeks to illuminate-the reading of many scientists has become sequestered
from the literature which I shall cite. There are, of course, some exceptions:
the bomb, the Vietnam war, growing awareness of pollution. These and other
issues relating scientific work to social issues have become the subject of
study groups, occasional editorials in scientific journals, and some concerted
political action. However, the perspective from which these issues are seen is
usually the individualist, ethical point of view which dominated the BSSRS
conference and which I am suggesting we may find it worthwhile to transcend.
These notes are not designed to parade knowledge but to
provide non-specialist readers with access to the means of production at a level
which need not be so daunting that they are tempted to acknowledge the domain of
yet another sort of expert and then move on. Rather, I hope to encourage working
scientists to take part in developing the necessary philosophical and political
awareness for exercising genuine social responsibility. If one sets out to take
part in reversing the process of the division of labour in science, one must
necessarily take time from other research, professional and leisure activities.
If it turns out to be impossible to avoid the division of labour between
scientists as experts and as moral and political beings, then I would argue that
social responsibility in science is not possible.
I am aware that there are inelegancies and straightforward
blunders in this paper. It is meant to be a first attempt to make explicit
issues which have arisen in the course of my research and in other activities,
which seemed (but no longer seem) unrelated to that research. The argument is
based on the assumption that science and politics, thought and action, and
academic and radical aspects of life should not be kept distinct. Of course,
they can be kept distinct, but it is becoming clear that the distinctions serve
covert political positions. Those who would argue that politics should be kept
out of the classroom and the laboratory are taking a profoundly political stand
which they disguise with the mystification that 'the status quo is
apolitical'.
The works which are mentioned in these notes cover a wide
range of disciplines. I have attempted to include references to books and
articles which are accessible to scientists with little or no background in the
history, philosophy and social studies of science, while I have also tried to
draw the attention of professionals in those fields to perspectives which are
not usually represented in their professional journals. The aim is to provide a
context in which these writings will all be seen as part of a single debate.
For readers who would prefer a short list of books on these
issues, the following are recommended: A. N. Whitehead, Science and the
Modern World (Cambridge,1925, also paperback); E. A. Burtt, The
Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 2nd edition (London,
Routledge, 1932; also New York, Anchor paperback); K. Mannheim, Ideology and
Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Wirth and
Shils (London, Routledge, 1954; also paperback); P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann,
The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, Doubleday, 1966; also Anchor paperback); C. W. Mills, The
Sociological Imagination (New York, Oxford, 1959; also Penguin
paperback). At an elementary level, three explicitly introductory texts will
help the beginner: J. Plamenatz, Ideology (London, Macmillan, 1970; also
paperback), for a general analysis of the concept; H. D. Aiken, The Age of Ideology: The Nineteenth Century Philosophers (New York, Mentor
paperback, 1956), for a historical perspective; C. W. Mills, The Marxists (Harmondsworth, Penguin paperback, 1963), for a safe guide through that daunting
literature.
To some, the text of this paper will appear straightforward
and even commonplace, while to others it will seem impossibly contentious and
confused. It was addressed to an audience consisting largely of scientists, most
of whom were assumed to work in molecular genetics, and the presentation of the
argument is based on an assessment of their likely assumptions. Professional
scholars in the history, philosophy and social relations of science will
recognise three crucial points underlying the argument. I believe that the
points are to some extent original, if not in substance, at least in their
juxtaposition. The first is that traditional issues in epistemology (which have
been dominated by the epistemology of the physico-chemical sciences since the
seventeenth century) take on a new perspective when seen from the point of view
of the biological sciences. By stressing the pivotal position of the biological
sciences, the philosophy of the social sciences may be saved from collapsing
into hackneyed problems in the philosophy of physicalist reductionism. If the
biological and human sciences will recognize their common problems and the
continuity of their concepts, perhaps they can revive meaningful epistemological
discussion. The second point is that the sociology of knowledge becomes much
more interesting and relevant if we extend its domain from social reality to
nature, thus eliminating a distinction maintained by most students of that
discipline at the same time that we open the way to a genuinely anthropological
approach to science and to nature. The third point is that the juxtaposition of
new perspectives in the epistemology of science and the anthropology of nature,
seem to me to make most sense from the point of view of a radical socialist
political position. I would say that they only make sense from that point of
view, but I am not yet fully convinced that I can safely ignore certain
well-known philosophical difficulties which arise from such statements. Since
the maintenance of a distinction between philosophical and political positions
is one of the points which I have set out to bring under scrutiny, it should be
obvious that the position outlined here is not yet fully worked out.
b For indictments of the scientific, cultural
and political assumptions of modern technocratic societies, see T. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture. Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (New York, Doubleday, 1969; also Anchor paperback; London, Faber, 1970), esp. 50,.56 n, 100, and
ch. 7, esp. 232 (London edition); see also the writings of Herbert Marcuse
(cited below, note r). However much one may disagree with the views of the
Underground, its rejection of the scientific world view reflects on the
assumptions of science and its cultural context. I have discussed the social and
political significance of one aspect of the Underground-rock music and its
festivals-in 'The Functions of Rock', New Edinburgh Review, no. 10 (I
970), 4-I4 (Dec.). One can move in two directions from Roszak's rather
loosely-argued case. The first is into direct action on the model of Jerry
Rubin's Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York, Simon and Schuster,
1970; also paperback; London, Cape, 1970), which makes the neglected point that
all radical and revolutionary actions need not involve violence on the part of
those who wish to change society. (See also the excellent paper by Jon Beckwith
in the Proceedings of the BSSRS Conference.) The second direction eventually
leads down the same road but by means of a clear appreciation of the role of the
sciences in the existing order of society. This can best be seen by beginning
with relatively simple cases, such as that discussed by Kathleen Gough, 'World
Revolution and the Science of Man', in T. Roszak (ed.), The Dissenting
Academy (New York, Random House, 1967; London, Chatto & Windus, 1969; also Penguin paperback), Penguin edition, 125-44.
The move from these works to the mainstream of methodological
writings in the social sciences must be cautious if one is not to be caught up
in the very problems which one is attempting to avoid. A useful intermediary
document is A. Gouldner, 'Anti-Minotaur: the Myth of Value-Free Sociology', Social Problems, 9 (1962), 199-213; reprinted in I. L.
Horowitz (ed.), The New Sociology (Oxford, 1964; also paperback), 196-217. Beyond this, most standard treatments need careful translation. There is a
fairly straightforward reason for this: the social sciences (rather forlornly)
set up the physico-chemical sciences as a model for their own methodology and/or
their assumptions. Therefore, in order to make use of the insights of the social
sciences, one must set aside their deference towards the physico-chemical
sciences. This deference runs very deep, and setting it aside often requires
very complicated efforts of translation. For example, E. Durkheim's classical
exposition of The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), 8th edition,
trans. Solovay and Mueller (Chicago, 1938; also Free Press paperback) argues for
the autonomy of social facts and against reductionism but still offers the
methodology and assumptions of the natural sciences as models for the social
sciences. Similary, the social sciences make claims to objectivity and
neutrality analogous to those in the natural sciences. The classical statement
of this position is M. Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1903-17), trans. Shils and Finch (New York, Free Press, 1949). The majority of
social scientists still adhere to the crucial fact-value distinction on which
the concept of objectivity depends. See, for example, R. Dahrendorf, 'Values and
Social Science: The Value Dispute in Perspective', in Essays in the
Theory of Society (London, Routledge, 1968), ch. I, for an updating
of the Weberian point of view. These expositions of the position of social
scientists give a clear picture of certain aspects of their assumptions which, I
submit, one needs to understand in order better to ignore them for the purposes
of the approach which I am advocating.
c The most difficult task for an audience of
scientists is to entertain the possibility that the most basic assumptions of
modern science are conventions-that the metaphysics of
seventeenth-century science, as modified and codified in modern scientific
positivism, constitute a definition of reality and of what is acceptable
as a scientific explanation. A. N. Whitchead has called the belief that the
conventions of what is real (ontology), and of how we can know it
(epistemology), can lead us to a knowledge of reality itself, 'the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness'. (Science and the Modern World, op. cit., note a, 80-2). An approach to nature which has served us well for certain limited
purposes is, in fact, only one among many which are available to us. We must
learn seriously to consider alternative ontologies, especially where the
phenomena of life and society are concerned. This is not a call for teleology, gestalt, holism, or other pseudo-solutions which, rather than being
cures, are themselves symptoms of the difficulties involved in applying the
scientific paradigm to life and man.
For historical and philosophical studies of the crucial
change in the conception of a scientific explanation in the seventeenth century
see the works of Whitehead and Burtt, cited in note a, and E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. Dikshoorn (Oxford, 1961; also paperback), esp. 431-44; M. B. Hesse, Forces and Fields (London,
Nelson, 1961; also Totowa, New Jersey, Littlefeld and Adams paperback),
esp. ch. 7, 'The Corpuscular Philosophy'; R. Boyle, A Disquisition about the
Final Causes of Natural Things (London, Taylor, 1688). For a view
which attempts to place the mathematical and mechanical assumptions in a wider
context of ideas of order in the period, see M. Foucault, The Order of
Things (London, Tavistock, 1970), esp. 243, 273, 303, 348-9. For a brief
exposition of the primary-secondary quality distinction, see R. J. Hirst,
'Primary and Secondary Qualities', in P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (New York, Macmillan, 1967), vol. 6, 455-7; for a
discussion of the philosophical consequences for the biological and human
sciences, see R. M. Young, 'Animal Soul', ibid., vol. I, I22-7.
Most writing in the history of science reflects the
prevailing belief among scientists that science can be treated in relative
isolation from social and political issues. This leads to the presentation of
the history of the subject as the internal history of ideas, leading
progressively into new domains of nature. This is well conveyed by the title of
one of the best general surveys: the history of science is described as the
advancement of The Edge of Objectivity by C. C. Gillispie
(Princeton and Oxford, 1960; also paperback). There is a growing movement among
historians of science to set aside the distinction between the 'internal'
history of science and 'external' or contextual factors in the theology,
philosophy, social and political issues and events in any given period. (See
below, note i).
Most debates on the assumptions, methods and aims of the
biological, 'behavioural' and social sciences are explicitly or implicitly
concerned with the question of reductionism. The most useful standard source is
E. Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of
Scientific Explanation (London, Routledge, 1961), esp. chs. 11-14.
See also M. Brodbeck (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London, Collier-Macmillan, 1968); R. Carnap, 'Psychology in Physical
Language', and O. Neurath, 'Sociology and Physicalism', in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (Glencoe, Free Press, 1959), 165-98 and 282-317; C.
Hempel, 'Logical Positivism and the Social Sciences', in P. Achinstein and S. F.
Barker (eds.), The Legacy of Logical Positivism (Baltimore, Hopkins,
1969), 163-94, esp. 172, 178-80; L. W. Beck, 'The "Natural Science Ideal" in the
Social Sciences', Scientific Monthly, 68 (1949), 386-94. For a
more eclectic view, see D. Emmet and A. MacIntyre (eds.), Sociological Theory
and Philosophical Analysis (London, Macmillan paperback, 1970), esp. the
selections by Alfred Schutz.
d See note a; also X. Mannheim, Essay on the
Sociology of Knowledge (London, Routledge, 1952); Essays on Sociology and
Social Psychology (London, Routledge, 1953); Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London, Routledge, 1956). Mannheim believed that the intelligentsia
could be relatively above the political fight. In recent years it has seemed
more plausible that they are (along with their students) at the centre of it,
and the claims of academics to be above it are really coming from stage right.
Once again, the status quo is not apolitical; politics are already in the
classroom and laboratory. In his illuminating ideological analysis of British
culture, Perry Anderson begins by saying: 'Louis Althusser has recently written
that within the general system of higher education "the number one strategic
point of the action of the dominant class" is "the very knowledge students receive from their teachers". This is "the true fortress of class
influence in the university"; "it is by the very nature of the knowledge it
imparts to students that the bourgeoisie exerts its greatest control over
them".' 'Components of the National Culture', New Left Review, no. 50
(1968), 3-57 (July/Aug.), at pp. 3-4. Anderson excludes the natural
sciences and the creative arts from his analysis and suggests that 'the dose of
"objectivity" in the natural sciences and "subjectivity" in art is symmetrically
greater than either in the social sciences ..., and they therefore have
correspondingly more mediated relationships to the social structure. They do
not, in other words, directly provide our basic concepts of man and society-the
natural sciences because they forge concepts for the understanding of nature, not society, and art because it deals with man and society, but does not
provide us with their concepts.' (5-6.) The argument of the present paper
is designed to undermine the distinctions on which Anderson's exclusions depend.
The reasons he gives for making the exclusions are, I believe, based on a
fundamental misreading of the roles of both science (especially biology) and art
in generating views and concepts for the understanding of man and society, if
only because both make basic contributions to the disciplines which Anderson
does consider. (Anderson's essay has been reprinted in A. Cockburn and R.
Blackburn (eds.), Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action (Harmondsworth, Penguin paperback, 1969), 214-84; see also below, notes i and
u.)
e Many natural and social scientists would argue that
the problem should be stated in terms of levels of analysis based on
differing degrees of complexity of the empirical domains. The position being
argued in this paper is that the sciences should be placed on a continuum lying
between the theoretical extremes of the purely formal (mathematics and some
parts of physics) and the purely evaluative (social planning and pure ideology).
The end points are limiting extremes. Similarly, the distinctions between
objective and subjective and between fact and value should be seen in terms of
continua. The method of analysis which I am suggesting is the reverse of the
usual one: do not assume the valueneutrality and objectivity of science. Search
for values and ideological influences. When you grow weary, the residue can be
called 'objective'.
The argument of this section is more fully developed in my
paper on 'Persons, Organisms, . . . and Primary Qualities', delivered to the
British Society for the Philosophy of Science, London, 1969 (in
preparation for publication); cf. Foucault, op. cit., note C, 357-60, on
the conceptual affinities between the human and biological sciences. My point of
view about the position of biology is, once again, in opposition to the
mainstream of the philosophy of science, which is dominated by physics as the
paradigm science and physicalism as the paradigm of explanation. (See above,
note c.) In viewing the problem from this perspective, the most tempting
alternative is to disconnect the human and biological sciences from the
physico-chemical ones. This is the path chosen by Continental phenomenology.
See, for example, Foucault, The Order of Things (op. cit., note c), 348-55. The point, however, is to reconcile man and nature, not to
abrogate the problem by placing them in opposition. I have discussed this issue
in 'The Divided Science' (essay review of R. D. Laing's The Divided Self,
Delta, no. 38 (1966), 13-18 (Spring); 'Association of Ideas', in P.
P. Weiner (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York,
Scribner's, in the press); and 'Functionalism', ibid.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities has
dominated modern epistemology and is fundamental to the reductionist goal of
modern science. There are two recent, lucid discussions of the philosophical
issues involved in the distinction: J. Bennett, 'Substance, Reality, and Primary
Qualities', American Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1965), 1-17; D. M. Armstrong, 'The Secondary Qualities', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 46 (1968), 225-241. The clearest exposition which I
have seen of the consequences of the distinction for scientific explanation is
M. Brodbeck, 'Mental and Physical: Identity versus Sameness', in P. K.
Feyerabend and G. Maxwell (eds.), Matter, Mind, and Method (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1966), 40-58; cf. comments relating this issue
to biological explanation by R. M. Young, British Journal for the Philosophy
of Science, 18 (1967), 325-3o, and Whitehead, op. cit., note
a, esp. ch. 4.
f M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, Routledge, 1966; also Penguin
paperback). The concept of 'dirt' provides an excellent entrance into the
intimate relations between evaluative and natural conceptions. There is no place
for concepts of clean and dirty (any more than for adaptive and maladaptive,
normal and pathological, health and disease) in a pure reductionist framework.
Dirt, after all, is only 'matter out of place'. 'Dirt is the by-product of a
systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves
rejecting inappropriate elements.' (Penguin edition, 48.) There is no absolute
dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. Eliminating it is a positive effort
to organize the environment (12). Once we free anthropological analysis from
crude utilitarianism and its lineage the doctrine of survivals and naive
functionalism-we are provided by Professor Douglas with a powerful perspective
from which to reconsider our ideas about nature. In 'primitive' thought 'the
laws of nature are dragged in to sanction the moral code. . . .' 'The whole
universe is harnessed to men's attempts to force one another into good
citizenship.' (13). The relevant rituals are seen as parts of symbolic systems
which determine men's relations with nature. There is a close union of these
rituals with political systems. (78-85; cf. below, note i.)
There is also a growing literature criticizing the
pseudo-objectivity and the direct political role of the concepts of 'adjustment'
and 'deviance' in psychology, psychiatry and social theory. The most effective
and evocative writing from this point of view has been concerned with psychology
and psychiatry. The clearest analysis which I have seen is D. Ingleby, 'Ideology
and the Human Sciences', Human Context, 2 (1970), 425-54.
This essay cites most of the relevant literature and has been supplemented by an
excellent study of what he calls 'the politics of the people professions': 'The
Return of the Reified' (in preparation for publication). The clearest clinical
evocation of the issues is R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential
Study of Sanity and Madness (London, Tavistock, 1960; also Penguin
paperback). The best historical study is M. Foucault, Madness and
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Howard
(London, Tavistock, 1967). Foucault's analysis of the relations between
politics, economics and conceptions of insanity can serve as a model for further
studies of science and ideology. For a telling fictional treatment (which serves
as an allegory of contemporary America), see Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest (New York, Viking, 1962; also Signet paperback). There
are two useful collections of readings on deviance from a primarily sociological
point of view: E. Robinson and M. S. Weinberg (eds.), Deviance.. The
Interactionist Perspective (London, Collier-Macmillan, 1968; also
paperback); S. Dinitz et al. (eds.), Deviance: Studies in the Process
of Stigmatization and Societal Reactions (New York, Oxford, 1969; also
paperback). Cf. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, op. cit., note a,
Penguin edition, 102 sqq
For those who do not consider it a commonplace that all
facts are theory-laden, I am told that it would be useful to begin with the
following: P. K. Feyerabend, 'Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism', in
H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of
Science, Vol. III: Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time (Minneapolis,
Minnesota, 1962), 28-97; I. Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (New
York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1967; also paperback). At a more mundane level, see the
illuminating study of the role of assumptions and biases in the perception,
definition, and evaluation of evidence drawn from discussions with medical
students, by M. L. J. Abercrombie, The Anatomy of Judgment: An Investigation
into the Processes of Perception and Reasoning (London, Hutchinson,
1960; also Penguin paperback).
g Mannheim defines the concept as follows: 'The
concept "ideology" reflects the one discovery which emerged from political
conflict, namely, that ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively
interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain
facts which would undermine their sense of domination. There is implicit in the
word "ideology" the insight that in certain situations the collective
un-conscious of certain groups obscures the real condition of society both to
itself and to others and thereby stabilizes it.' (op. cit., note a, 36.) If one
accepts the view that no one is free from the powerful influences of his
interest group, the 'certain situations', which Mannheim implies are unusual and
regrettable, become the normal condition of man in any existing society.
There is a vast literature, in the sociology of knowledge. It
can be conveniently approached by means of the following articles: H. O. Dahlke,
'The Sociology of Knowledge', in H. E. Barnes and F. B. Becker (eds.), Contemporary Social Theory (New York, Appleton-Century, 1940), 64-89; R. K.
Merton, 'The Sociology of Knowledge', in G. Gurvitch (ed.), Twentieth Century
Sociology (New York, Philosophical Library, 1945), 366-405, reprinted in R.
K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, enlarged edition (New
York, Free Press, 1968), ch. I4 (cf. chs. 15-21); T.
Bottomore, 'Some Reflections on the Sociology of Knowledge', British Journal
of Sociology, 7 (1956), 52-58; K. W. Woolf, 'The Sociology of
Knowledge and Sociological Theory', in L. Gross (ed.), Symposium on
Sociological Theory (New York, Row, Peterson, 1959), 271-307; N. Birnbaum,
'The Sociological Study of Ideology, 1940-I960', Current Sociology, 9 (1960), 91-172. A recent compendium brings a survey of the
literature up to date: J. E. Curtis and J. W. Petras (eds.), The Sociology of
Knowledge: A Reader (London, Duckworth, 1970). The editors' introduction
includes an extensive bibliography, and their comprehensive selections extend
from Bacon to the present, including two essays by Max Scheler which have not
appeared in English before.
In reading this literature one must, once again, set aside
the prevailing assumption that ideologies represent a 'distortion' of
objectivity and then adapt the arguments to problems in the bastion of alleged
objectivity, the natural sciences. Pushing the sociology of knowledge back into
the domain of the natural sciences from a politically aligned point of view, has
the consequence of bringing into question the alleged neutrality and objectivity
of science on which the separation of sociology of knowledge from politics
depends. Thereby, social science is prevented from drawing on natural science in
attempts on the part of centrist and conservative ideologues to equate consensus
politics and equilibrium theories of society with scientific objectivity. In
this connection, my attention has recently been drawn to a book which is
supposed to have covered much of the ground whose boundaries are charted in the
present paper: W. Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge: An Essay in Aid of a
Deeper Understanding of the History of Ideas (London, Routledge, 1958). I
have not yet read it carefully, but the author's approach seems at first glance
very unpromising. He writes, 'In the past, two rather disparate, nay
irreconcilable, preoccupations have coexisted within the sociology of knowledge
and constantly cut across each other: the study of the political element in
thought, of what is commonly called "ideology", and the investigation of the
social element in thinking, the influence of the social groundwork of life on
the formation of a determinate mental image of reality. The one has sought to
lay bare hidden factors which turn us away from the truth, the other to identify
forces which tend to impart a definite direction to our search for it. I have
radically separated the two subjects ... and have then concentrated on the
latter; thus laying the foundations of what might be called a "pure" theory of
the social determination of thought, or, alternatively, a social theory of
knowledge.' (ix.) In consequence, Marx and Mannheim are pushed from centre
stage, to be replaced by Weber. The distinction which he draws at the outset
becomes sharper, so that by the end of the second chapter he might be said to be
providing raw materials for an analysis by Mary Douglas (op. cit., note
f) : '. . . thought determined by social fact is like a pure stream,
crystal-clear, transparent; ideological ideas like a dirty river, muddied and
polluted by the impurities that have flooded into it. From the one it is healthy
to drink; the other is poison to be avoided.' (91). By aligning his distinction
with the traditional Weberian fact-value dichotomy, Stark neatly sidesteps the
very issues raised by the pervasiveness of ideology and avoids the challenge of
Marxism to bourgeois sociology. Indeed, he is here going farther than most
writing in the sociology of knowledge, which appears to function as a way of
integrating Marxism into the dominant consensual, functionalist tradition,
thereby noticing only half of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: 'The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.'
h The sense in which the sociology of knowledge offers
itself as a new approach to the philosophy of science in a politically relevant
way is a special one which requires us to dig below the successive layers which
have covered up the meaningful insights of Marx. I have seen no literature in
the history, philosophy or social studies of science which refers to what now
appear to be the texts which become fundamental if one takes seriously the
points of view of Mannheim and of Berger and Luckmann. The sociology of
knowledge has moved far from its roots in Marx's conception of ideology.
Mannheim moved it towards a meta-objectivity, and functionalist social
scientists seem to have completed the process of attempting to take the ideology
out of the sociology of knowledge, thereby eliminating its radicalism and
assimilating it to the status quo. There are two paths to the relevant
literature. The first is to dig into the antecedents of Mannheim, looking afresh
at Marx and Engels, attempting to free ourselves from the interpretations of
generations of emasculators, Weber and Mannheiin in particular. Lichtheim
describes Mannheim's work as an epilogue to Weber and Weber as a 'bourgeois
Marx'. He also points out that Georg Lukács' History and Class-consciousness (1923) was a crucial influence on Mannheim and that Mannheim appeared to the cognoscenti (not quite fairly) as a 'bourgeois Lukács'. (Lichtheim, op. cit., note 5, 170-1.) Similarly, Birnbaum's perceptive review of 'The
Sociological Study of Ideology, 1940-1960' points out that while the debate
provoked by Mannheim’s work seemed to be over, the Marxist revival in western
countries, stressing the early writings of Marx, was producing a new interest in
the question of ideology. (op. cit., note g,11 6-17 ).
The second path to the relevant literature is to notice the
works which are currently exciting the interest of the New Left. They are the
same works concerned with Marxism: the newly-translated writings of Althusser
and Lukács, along with the writings of Marx and Engels which they are
interpreting, viz. L. Althusser, For Marx, trans. Brewster (London, Allen
Lane, 1969); L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London,
New Left Review, 1970); L. Althusser, 'Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon', New Left Review, no. 64 (1970), 3-11 (Nov./Dec.); G. Lukács, History and Class-consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (London, Merlin,
1971). For recent developments in the tradition begun by Lukács, see G.
Therborn, 'The Frankfurt School', New Left Review, no. 63 (1970), 65-96
(Sept./Oct.); J. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, trans. J. J. Shapiro (London, Heinemann, 1971; also paperback), esp. ch. 6,
'Technology and Science as "Ideology"'. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Milligan (Moscow, Foreign Languages, 1961); K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Dutt (London,
Lawrence and Wishart, 1965), abridged edition, ed. C. J. Arthur,
containing 'Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy' and 'Theses
on Feuerbach' (London, Lawrence and Wishart paperback, 1970); K. Marx and F.
Engels, Selected Works (London, Lawrence and Wishart paperback,
970). A related work is L. Goldmann, The Human Sciences and Philosophy, trans. White and Anchor (London, Cape paperback, 1969). Goldmann
initially intended to call the work 'Methodological Problems in the Sociology of
Knowledge', but saw that the relevant context was the relationship between the
human sciences and philosophy. Those who still need to be told that Marxism is
not the same as Russian Stalinism should also read R. Garaudy, The Turning
Point of Socialism, trans. P. and B. Ross (London, Collins, 1970;
also Fontana paperback). I should like to thank Grahame Lock of King's College,
Cambridge, who has kindly allowed me to read a draft of his dissertation
'On the Production of Knowledge' in which he provides an exposition of
Althusser's analysis of ideology and relates it to certain issues in
epistemology and the philosophy of science as practised in Britain and America.
Although, as Mr Lock says, the task of juxtaposing these philosophical
traditions is just beginning, he has shown how important a task it is.
i It is clear that Berger and Luckmann did not intend that their analysis of The Social Construction
of Reality should be pressed beyond social reality to nature
itself. Similarly, Mannheim is equivocal on this point (e.g. op. cit., note a, 243), although he is certainly aware of the issue (ibid.,
259-75); cf. Plamenatz, op. cit., note a, 55, 58). Nor would the
ideological critiques of classical Marxists go this far. Indeed, they make
strong claims on the concepts of 'scientific' and 'objectivity', sometimes with
bizarre and extremely historically conditioned and dated results. See, for
example, F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature (written 1873-6, 1878-83),
trans. Dutt (3rd edition, Moscow, Progress, 1964). Most commentators agree that
Marxism is supposed to be free of ideology (e.g. Plamenatz, 27). Bottomore says
of Marx, 'He seems to have thought of alienation as resulting from the character
of man's relation to Nature and the consequent social division of labour....
Marx thought of (non-alienated society as one in which the division of labour
(which made of human beings, narrow and limited individuals) would have been
abolished, and in which the relations between man and Nature and between man and
man would be perfectly clear and intelligible (in which, therefore, social and
political theories would be scientific and not ideological).' (op. cit., note g, 53.) Birnhaum says, 'A specific human group, a class, must so develop
that the conditions of its liberation from ideology are identical with the
conditions of human liberation generally. This coincidence is possible for the
proletariat because its attainment of vision coincides with its termination of
its existence as a class. This historical conjuncture also gives us the
assurance that Marxism itself escapes ideological distortion.' (op. cit.,
note g, 93.) I find these claims rather implausible this side of the
millennium, but accept the notion of ideologically conflicting views of man and
nature.
I am suggesting, however, that we adopt the methodological
strategy of pressing the ideological analysis as far as we can. In particular,
the thesis of the socio-historical relativity of knowledge must be extended to
the so-called 'Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century' (a conception
which is itself finding decreasing favour among historians of science), and the
analysis must be applied not only to the relatively easy cases cited here but
also to the paradigm of explanation of modem science itself. This conception
arose as a historical process in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and
should be subjected to socio-political, historical and philosophical analysis
like any other subject. There have been innumerable studies of the social and
ideological influences in this process which complement the internalist
historical writings about the 'Scientific Revolution'. Most of these have
centred around a debate in the 1920s and 1930s between Marxists and neo-Weberians
on the respective roles of strictly economic factors and the rise of the
Protestant ethic. However, it is only recently that some historians have seen
that their concern is not only with the causes and historical sources of the
'rational tradition' in modern science but also with the validity of the concept
of scientific rationality itself in a given period. This debate in the history
of science is of direct relevance to current issues in the debate on objectivity
and the role of ideology in science, since the question in the balance is the
allegedly privileged position of objectivity itself in the establishment of the
paradigm of explanation of modern science. This debate can be approached through
two essays, respectively defending and challenging the concept of a rational
tradition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in M. Teich and R. M.
Young (eds.), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (London,
Heinemann, 1971, in the press): M. B. Hesse, 'Reasons and Evaluations in the
History of Science', and P. M. Rattansi, 'Evaluations of Reason in Sixteenth and
Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy'.
One perspective which may prove useful to scientists and
historians of science in escaping from a polarized debate between 'internalists'
and 'externalists', 'rationalists' and 'irrationalists', or 'objectivists' and
'ideologues', is the anthropological one. If we take the single step of
replacing the sharp distinction between primitive and scientific thought with a
continuum, we can adapt the approach of anthropology to the study of our own
culture, including science. Professor Douglas has begun to make this move in Purity and Danger and more explicitly in her very illuminating essay
'Environments at Risk', Times Literary Supplement, no. 3583
(1970), 1273-5 (30 Oct.) where she writes: 'Tribal views of the
environment hold up a mirror to ourselves.' '. . the view of the universe and a
particular kind of society holding this view are closely interdependent.' 'When
I first wrote my book Purity and Danger about this moral power in the
tribal environment, I thought our own knowledge of the physical environment was
different. I now believe this to have been mistaken. If only because they
disagree, we are free to select which of our scientists we will hearken to, and
our selection is subject to the same sociological analysis as that of any
tribe.' (1273, 1274).
It may prove a useful exaggeration to treat our approach to
nature as a system of rituals and myths, by analogy to the treatment of natural
phenomena in 'primitive societies'. C. Levi-Strauss makes a small step in this
direction in his juxtaposition of primitive science with our own in The
Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage) (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).
Levi-Strauss seems only to be asking that we see 'primitive' ideas about nature
as a distinct mode of scientific thought, operating at a different level from
our own. (ch. I). If we set out to adapt the approaches of Douglas and
Levi-Strauss for our own enterprise, it would be necessary to go much further
and study the social role of the religion of science, the utterances of its high
priests, and its ritual incantations about the realities behind appearances. A
sourcebook for anthropological analogies which we may find helpful is R. A.
Manners and D. Kaplan (eds.), Theory in Anthropology: A Sourcebook (London, Routledge, 1968). Once again, all deference to natural science
must be ignored.
As Mannheim points out, the study of the history of art can
also provide analogies for the study of the social and historical relativity of
knowledge. (op. cit., note a, 243-4.) A particularly useful study for
this purpose is E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the
Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 2nd edition (London, Phaidon, 1960). Gombrich's approach to the question of the history of representation is
doubly useful, since it offers an antidote to any theory of an unencumbered
rational mind perceiving and representing nature, at the same time that it draws
attention to the point that art has a history which is not cumulative in a
simple linear sense. It is extremely useful to see the history of science in the
same light, both epistemologically and historically. In some ways his analysis
illuminates science better than the literature in the history and philosophy of
science. It should be noticed that it would have been a diversion from
Gombrich's primary purpose to complement his analysis with a socio-political
dimension. At the same time, what presents itself as a useful division of labour
is not without ideological consequences, as Anderson points out (op. cit., note d, 38-41).
j Bell claimed that, although his argument
is anti-ideological, it is not conservative. He thought that 'In the last
decade, we have witnessed an exhaustion of the nineteenth-century ideologies,
particularly Marxism, as intellectual systerm that could claim truth for
their views of the world' (16). In the text he sets out to show the
failure of ideological positions, with particular emphasis on America in the
forties and fifties. In his revealing epilogue on 'The End of Ideology in the
West, he concludes: 'Today, these ideologies are exhausted. The events behind
this important sociological change, are complex and varied.... But out of all
this history, one simple fact emerges: for the radical intelligentsia, the old
ideologies have lost their "truth" and their power to persuade.' (402.) What had
come to take their place? A 'dispassionate’ empirical', 'functional' approach to
society and politics: 'the ladder to the City of Heaven can no longer be a
"faith ladder", but an empirical one. . . .' (405.) As the McCarthy era ended,
Bell saw a new form of agreement on fundamental issues-an era of consensus politics, a new positivism based on stability and lack of political
polarization. 'In the Western world, therefore, there is today a rough consensus
among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the
desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political
pluralism. In that sense, too, the ideological age has ended.' (402-3.) This was
written only a decade ago.
As Bell points out, 'Ideology is the conversion of ideas into
social levers'. (400.) In the light of subsequent events this has turned out to
be a very ironic remark. In 1960, Birnbaum wrote, 'the recent
announcement-which appears on many counts to be premature-of "the end of
ideology" may be viewed as an attempt by a number of thinkers to present their
own ideology as a factual version of the world.' (op. cit., note g, 92.)
The trail of evidence in support of this conclusion begins with a lengthy
'Acknowledgment' at the end of Bell's book. He says, 'A number of these essays
appeared first in the pages of Commentary and Encounter, and my most
enduring obligation is to lrving Kristol, who, as an editor of the two
magazines, prompted these articles, and, as a friend, wrestled to bring order
out of them.
'Three of the longer essays were first presented as papers
from conferences sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an
international organization of intellectuals opposed to totalitarianism. I was
fortunate in being able to work for a year in Paris, in 1956-57 (while on leave
from Fortune), as director of international seminars for the Congress. I
learned much in discussion with the seminars planning committee-Raymond Aron, C.
A. R. Crosland, Michael Polanyi, and Edward Shils-and several of the essays,
particularly on the themes of ideology, reflect these talks.' (408.) He also
expresses gratitude for the 'practical political wisdom' of Michael Josselson,
administrative secretary of the Congress, and for the 'stimulus of exhilarating,
and exhausting, conversation' with Melvin Lasky. (ibid.) Lasky was also an
editor of Encounter, while Shils was (and is) a member of the advisory
board of Encounter and edits Minerva. These are two journals which
the Congress financed for a period (Minerva is now published for the
International Association for Cultural Freedom).
In 1963 Encounter issued a commemorative anthology which was
reviewed by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the New Statesman. He later wrote of
the review, 'I pointed out that the political side of Encounter was
consistently designed to support the policy of the United States Government:
"One of the basic things about Encounter is supposed to be its love of
liberty; it was the love of liberty that brought together, we are told, the
people who, in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, sponsored Encounter.
Love of whose liberty? This is conditioned-as it would be for a communist, but
in reverse-by the overall political conflict. Great vigilance is shown about
oppression in the communist world; apathy and inconsequence largely prevail
where the oppression is non-communist or anti-communist. This generalization
needs to be qualified. Silence about oppression has been, if possible, total
where the oppressors were believed to be identified with the interests of the
United States".' O'Brien gives examples and continues, 'At the time I wrote this
review, I knew nothing of any connection between the CIA and Encounter.
This is significant at the present stage, because the present [1967] line of
defence of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter is that,
though indeed-as they now admit-they were taking money from the CIA this did not
affect their policy which remained entirely independent and exactly what it
purported to be. It is interesting therefore that a critic, analysing the content of Encounter, and not concerned with the sources of its finance,
should have reached the conclusion that its policy was to support the American
side in the cold war. That is to say, that even if we grant that the policy was
independently formed, it was none the less exactly what the CIA must be presumed
to have wanted it to be. This happy coincidence could, of course, come about
without any pressure whatever on the editor, if the editor responsible for the
political side of the magazine had been originally hand-picked by the CIA. Mr
Braden has told us that in fact one of the editors of Encounter was "an
agent" of the CIA.
'On April 27th, 1966, the New York Times, in the
course of its series of articles on the Central Intelligence Agency, stated that
the CIA "has supported anti-communist but liberal organizations, such as the
Congress for Cultural Freedom and some of their newspapers and magazines. Encounter magazine was for a long time, though it is not now, one of the
indirect beneficiaries of CIA funds." ' (C. C. O'Brien, 'Some Encounters with
the Culturally Free', New Left Review, no. 44 (1967, 60-3.) O'Brien's
account traces the ensuing assertions, denials, partial admissions, and a
revealing lawsuit connected with these allegations, culminating in a public
apology to him by the editors of Encounter. He relates that 'by a timely
stroke of fortune, it was during this period that-following the disclosures in Ramparts magazine-the whole ramifications of the CIA politico-cultural
operation involving the Congress of Cultural Freedom and Encounter surfaced in the United States press so thoroughly that denials were no longer
possible.' (63.)
For further evidence on the ideological role of the claim
that we have reached 'the end of ideology', which is also related to the
activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, see S. M. Lipset, Political
Man (London, Heinemann, 1960; also Heinemann paperback), a standard work
which is widely assigned in undergraduate curricula. Lipset added to the book 'A
Personal Postscript: The End of Ideology?', in which he reported on a conference
sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom held in Milan in 1955 on 'The
Future of Freedom'. He was struck by the lack of disagreement across what he
seems to have considered to be a wide spectrum of political views from
'socialists' (Hugh Gaitskell and Richard Crossman), to liberals (Sydney Hook and
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) to conservatives (Michael Polanyi and Colin Clark).
Lipset reports that 'the traditional issues separating the left and the right
had declined to comparative insignificance'. (404.) 'The democratic class
struggle will continue, but it will be a fight without ideologies, without red
flags, without May Day parades.' (408.) The debate continued in the pages of Commentary, where Bell and H. D. Aiken shouted across a political distance
which does not appear particularly wide from the vantage point of six years
later (reprinted in Cox (ed.), op. cit., note 5, 134-72). It should be
noted that the books and essays of Bell, Lipset and Aiken all appeared in the
period 1960-4. It was in that year that the radical student movement began to
achieve prominence as a result of events at Berkeley, that the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution empowered President Johnson to take 'all steps necessary' to curb
'communist aggression' in South-east Asia, and Goldwater was nominated for
President. Since then the student protest movement, other manifestations of the
New Left, and complementary activities on the Right have brought about the end
of the end of ideology.
Even so, it cannot be said that most recent writers have
reflected this changed political atmosphere. There is clear evidence of
continuity in the positions of some participants in the debate. At the beginning
of his 'Personal Postscript', Lipset wrote, 'I have taken the chapter heading
from the title of Edward Shils' excellent report' on the 1955 Milan conference
(see above). 'See his "The End of Ideology?", Encounter, 5 (November 1955),
52-8'. (It appears that Shils' report is the origin of the phrase.) Lipset also
notes 'the similarities of the observations' in his own report and Shils'. In an
article on 'The Concept and Function of Ideology' which appeared in 1968 (and
which was presumably written at least ten years after the Milan conference)
Shils discusses ideology in terms which appear to me to make the concept largely
inapplicable to the views of the controlling elites of contemporary western
capitalist societies and uses conceptions drawn from religious writing
('sacred', 'charisma') to imply that ideology always involves an unrealistic
secular religion which militates against dissent and development of one's views.
Of the role of ideology in science and social science he says, 'But science is
not and never has been an integral part of an ideological culture. Indeed, the
spirit in which science works is alien to ideology.' '. . . the modern social
sciences have not grown up in the context of ideologies, and their progress has
carried with it an erosion of ideology.' He concludes, 'For all these reasons,
assertions to the effect that "science is an ideology" or that "the social
sciences are as ideological as the ideologies they criticize" must be rejected.'
(in D. L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York and London, Macmillan and Free Press, 1968) vol. 7, 66-76, at PP.
74-5). Cf, below, note t.
For a complementary treatment of the concept of ideology as
one which inevitably involves distortion, see Harry M. Johnson, 'Ideology and
the Social System', in ibid., 76-85, where the author provides a
revealing use of functionalist language to assert that ideology is somehow a
form of intellectual psychopathology: 'Since social malintegration tends to
generate ideology, the latter may be regarded, in many instances, as a symptom
of malintegration.' (79). The use of such pseudo-biological functionalist terms
robs the political debate of its moral and political validity and makes his
conclusion inescapable but profoundly mystifying: 'Ideology by its very nature
does not readily yield to scientific criticism.' (85).
The assumptions of the neo-positivist and functionalist
orthodoxy are coming under increasing fire from radical social and political
theorists. For an extended critique of sociological functionalism and its
ideological basis which focuses on the writings of the leading functionalist,
Talcott Parsons (with whom Shils collaborated for a time), see A.W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology (New York, Basic, 1970; London,
Heinemann, 1971). For an analogous analysis of the writings of
functionalist apologists of American foreign policy, see D. Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (London,
McGibbon & Kee, 1968; also Penguin paperback). For a treatment which
relates the ideological role of political and social scientists with the
approach of liberal historians, see Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York, Pantheon, 1969; also Penguin paperback),
esp. ch. I.
Turning briefly to the relationship between ideological
issues in the social and political sciences on the one hand and traditional
philosophy of science on the other, it should be noted that there is an
important affinity which has as yet received little investigation across
disciplinary boundaries. For a clear analysis of the concept of ideology from
the point of view of positivist metaphysics which employs the fact-value
distinction to oppose the views of Mannheim and, a fortiori, any position
which seeks to extend his position into natural science, see G. Bergmann,
'Ideology', Ethics, 61 (1951), 205-18, reprinted in Brodbeck, op. cit., note c, 123-38. One can begin to appreciate the ideological role
of the fact-value distinction by considering the argument of J. Habermas (which
is itself an examination of some views of Marcuse; see below, note r) in his
essay, 'Technology and Science as "Ideology",' loc. cit., note h. This
issue has been one of the preoccupations of the Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory, and although many participants in the New Left have found its politics
ultimately unsatisfactory (because of its tenuous relationship with political
action), some of the writings of its adherents can serve a useful purpose in
linking the literature of neo-Marxism with that of traditional philosophical and
social theory. See G. Therborn, 'The Frankfurt School', New Left Review, no. 63 (1970), 65-96 (Sept/Oct.).
k See J. S. Wilkie, 'Buffon, Lamarck and Darwin: the
Originality of Darwin's Theory of Evolution', in P. R. Bell (ed.), Darwin's
Biological Work. Some Aspects Reconsidered (Cambridge, I959; also New York,
Wiley paperback), 262-307; L. Eiseley, Darwin's Century: Evolution and
the Men who Discovered It (London, Gollancz, 1959; also New York,
Anchor paperback); G. de Beer, Charles Darwin: Evolution by Natural Selection (London, Nelson, 1963; also paperback).
Of the standard works on the nineteenth-century debate the
one which deals most subtly with this approach is J. G. Greene, The Death of
Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames, Iowa, 1959; also
Mentor paperback). See also O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II (London, Black, 1970), ch. I. For a contemporary treatment of the debate
in highly polarized terms, see J. W. Draper, History of the Conflict
Between Religion and Science (London, King, 1875; reprinted Gregg); cf.
notes to papers listed below.
I have suggested a framework for reinterpreting the
nineteenth-century debate on evolution and man's place in nature in 'The Impact
of Darwin on Conventional Thought', in A. Symondson (ed.), The Victorian
Crisis of Faith (London, SPCK, 1970), 13-35; 'Natural Theology, Victorian
Periodicals, and the Fragmentation of the Common Context', Victorian Studies (in the press); 'The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the
Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man's Place in Nature', M. Teich and R.M. Young
(eds.), op. cit., note i.
There is, as one would expect, a vast literature on Darwin's
influence in various fields. I have cited the works which I have found most
useful in 'Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select?', The Monist (in the
press, July 1971), note 10. On 'Social Darwinism', see R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, revised edition (Boston, Beacon, 1955;
also paperback); R. C. Bannister, ' "The Survival of the Fittest Doctrine" :
History or Histrionics?', Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970), 377-98. On the relationship between evolutionism and the social sciences,
see the perceptive study by J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in
Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1966; also paperback).
I have discussed the pervasive role of Malthus's theory in
nineteenth-century social, biological, theological and political debates in
'Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social
Theory', Past and Present, no. 43 (1969), 109-45.
*insert
l Spencer published his first defence of evolution in
1852, developed it in the context of psychology, and generalized it in
various writings between 1857 and 1861. Before any of these appeared, he
based his belief in inevitable social progress on biological principles in his
first book, Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness
Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London, Chapman, 1851). Since a
great deal of subsequent functionalist social and political theory was heavily
indebted to Spencer's later biologism of man and society, it may be worthwhile
to recall his faith in its original form. His section on 'The Evanescence of
Evil' concluded as follows: 'Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a
necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a 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 racehorse, according as its habits demand
strength or speed; as surely as a blacksmith's arm grows large,
and the skin of a labourer's hand 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 attain 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 a disregarded conscience becomes inert, and one that is obeyed active;
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.' (65.) In
the light of Spencer's faith and his examples, it is not surprising that he
chose-and clung to belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Cf. R.
M. Young, 'The Development of Herbert Spencer's Concept of Evolution', Actes
du XIe congrés international dhistoire des sciences (Warsaw,
Ossolineum, 1967), Vol. 2, 273-8; Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (London, Oxford, 1970), ch. 5; 'Malthus and the
Evolutionists. . .', op. cit., note k, 134-7, 141. See also R. A. Nisbit, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of
Development (New York and London, Oxford, 1969; also paperback), ch. 3.
m In composing the lecture Huxley was labouring
under serious restrictions. The benefactor of the series prohibited discussion
of religion or politics, while Huxley wanted to attack the secular religion and
the political extrapolations based on evolutionism. He solved his problem by
saying what he had to say by discussing exotic religions, especially Buddhism.
He later added some 'Prolegomena’ which make the argument much more explicit.
The two essays should therefore be read together: T. H. Huxley, Evolution & Ethics and Other Essays (London, Macmillan, 1894), Chs. 1-2. The
doctrines of Spencer were his chief targets, and he summarized his position
succinctly in a letter: 'There are two very different questions which people
fail to discriminate. One is whether evolution accounts for morality, the other
whether the principle of evolution in general can be adopted as an ethical
principle. The first, of course, I advocate, and have consistently insisted
upon. The second I deny, and reject all so-called evolutional ethics based upon
it.' Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (London,
Macmillan, I900), Vol. 2, 360.
The literature of social generalization from evolutionism is
very large. In the article on 'Darwin' in the 1931 edition of The
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, F. Hankins wrote: 'Darwinism as an
expression of a fundamental law of nature became a new orthodoxy to which appeal
was made to justify diverse opinions in many spheres. It was invoked to explain
social evolution in general and to support individualism and socialism,
competition and cooperation, aristocracy and democracy, brute force and
kindliness, militarism and pacifism, ethical pessimism and optimism, creative
emergent evolutionism and evolutionary naturalism.' Quoted in L. Sklair, The
Sociology of Progress (London, Routledge, 1970), 68. For an excellent brief
analysis of evolutionary ethics and social theory, see A. G. N. Flew,
Evolutionary Ethics (London, Macmillan Papermac, 1967), chs. 3-4; D. Macrac, Ideology and Society (London, Heinemann, 1961), chs. 11-12; G.
Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (New York, Knopf, 1968), ch. 12; R.
Mackintosh, From Comte to Benjamin Kidd: The Appeal to Biology or Evolution
for Human Guidance (London, Macmillan, 1899).
One can find appeals to evolution and the survival of the
fittest to justify political and social theories in places as disparate as A.
Conan Doyle's 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', C. Kingsley's Water Babies, and the writings of Mussolini: see Mannheim, op. cit., note a, 13on.
For the role of biological theory in Nazism, see D. Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the
German Monist League (London, Macdonald; New York, American
Elsevier,1971).
n In Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels
wrote: 'The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the
transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes' theory of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois economic theory of
competition, as well as the Malthusian theory of population. When once this feat
has been accomplished (the unconditional justification for which, especially as
regards the Malthusian theory, is still very questionable), it is very easy to
transfer these theories back again from natural history to the history of
society, and altogether too naïve to maintain that thereby these assertions have
been proved as eternal natural laws of society.' (3rd edition, trans. Dutt
(Moscow, Progress, 1964), 313; cf. 311).
o For example, the United States Government
joined with the Josia Macy Jr. Foundation and the National Science Foundation in
translating and distributing free to scientists a collection of articles
containing a number of Lysenkoist essays, the inclusion of which would be
difficult to defend on scientific grounds: The Central Nervous System and Behavior: Selected Translations From the Russian Medical Literature (Bethesda, Md., US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1959). See also
C. Zirkle, Evolutionism, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1959).
There is no doubt that Western scientists have exploited the
Lysenko affair for their own ideological purposes and that the Soviet
authorities have interpreted this activity as confirmation of their own position
about the ideological role of Western genetics. However, it is also clear that
Lysenkoism was part of a much wider pattern of the consequences of democratic
centralism, as is shown in A. Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Hardy
(London, Cape, 1940; also Four Square paperback), in A. Solzhenitsyn, The
First Circle, trans. Guybon (London, Collins, 1968; also Fontana
paperback), and by the reaction of the Soviet authorities when Solzhenitsyn was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The international aspect of the same
pattern is shown in two documents, one relating to the Slansky trial in
Czechoslovakia: A. London, On Trial (L'aveu), trans. Hamilton
(London, Macdonald, 1970); and the other a documentary history of the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia: R. Littell (ed.), The Czech Black Book (New York and London, Praeger, 1969). It is not fortuitous that there have been
Lysenkoist tendencies in China, Cuba and North Vietnam: would that nature set no
limits on socialists' determination to achieve abundance and equality.
p In her essay on 'Enviromnents at
Risk', op. cit., note i, Mary Douglas points out that the spectre
of classical economics and Malthusianism is still very much with us. (1273.) In
paying due attention to the legitimacy of the ideological debate over genetics
it is essential always to bear in mind that it was seldom genetics alone that
was in dispute but that most parties to the controversy-East and West-had an eye
on the generalizations about human nature and society which could be mounted on
the basis of different genetic theories. Since no one can confidently draw the
line between 'heredity and environment' or 'nature and nurture', there has been
a persistent tendency to seek guarantees for one's social and political views in
genetics itself. An analogy from psychology will help to make this point. The
American psychologist, B. F. Skinner, once said at a seminar in Cambridge that
it reassured him whenever he saw placards bearing the portraits of Marx and Mao.
Since, he said, they completely failed to understand what Skinner took to be the
scientific laws of learning ('the contingencies of reinforcement'), the ultimate
survival of the American capitalist system was assured-by the laws of nature.
q There is a revealing aside in Medvedev's account of
the controversy. As a young student in the mid-1940s-well before Lysenkoism
became a government-sanctioned orthodoxy with complete control over research,
teaching and publications he had a surprising awakening. 'The beginning of the
new debates also changed my personal notions about Lysenko. Up to then, not
really knowing genetics, I had viewed the controversy in genetics and Darwinism
as a real scientific debate in which, as it appeared to me, both sides deserved
respect. But, watching the renewal of the discussion on Darwinism, I understood
that the main aim of Lysenko and his followers was anything but elucidation of
scientific truth.' (106.) Like his Western counterparts, Medvedev sees
the Lysenko affair as a deviation from the true path of scientific objectivity.
His analysis therefore reveals as much as it says about ideology.
r The writings of Herbert Marcuse
provide the most sustained and sophisticated radical critique of the problem of
relating political and biological categories. He is at his best in discussing
the repressive nature of liberal ideologies in politics, social theory and
psychology. His most explicit treatments of the relationship between socialist
political theory and bourgeois psychological and biological theory is Eros
and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, Beacon,
1955; also New York, Vintage paperback; and London, Allen Lane, 1969; also Sphere paperback). In a new Preface to the London edition, Marcuse says
that the protest of young people against repressive capitalism 'will continue
because it is a biological necessity "By nature", the young are in the
forefront of those who live and fight for Eros against Death.... Today the fight
for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight'. (xxv.) In An Essay on
Liberation (Boston, Beacon paperback, 1969; London, Allen Lane, 1969) he provides an analysis of the question of 'A Biological Basis for
Socialism?' (7-22; cf. 3-6.) Marcuse's indictments of contemporary
society are most clearly expressed in One-Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial Society (London, Routledge, 1964; also Sphere paperback)
and more succinctly in his essay 'Repressive Tolerance', in R. P. Wolff et
al., A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, Beacon, 1965; also
London Cape paperback, 1969, with a 'Postscript 1968'). Marcuse's
criticisms of the leading alternative interpretation of psychoanalysis appear in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston, Beacon, 1968; also
paperback; London, Allen Lane, 1968), ch. 7, 'Love Mystified: A Critique of
Norman O. Brown and A Reply to Herbert Marcuse by Norman O.. Brown'. There is a
useful introduction to the radical movement in psychoanalytic theory: P. A.
Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert
Marcuse (New York, Harper Colophon paperback, 1969), published in
Britain as The Sexual Radicals (London, Temple Smith, 1970). For an
evaluation of Marcuse's theories, see Habermas, op. cit., note h, ch. 6.
s One of the clearest examples of the close
analogies between Lysenkoist biological theory and ideology was the question of
'cluster planting'. Medvedev writes, 'The first and costliest of Lysenko's
postwar enterprises was closely connected with his "abolition" of intraspecific
competition. According to Lysenko, Darwin invented this competition when the
book of the reactionary, Malthus, happened to fall into his hands.' Once he was
convinced of this, Lysenko prepared instructions for applying his theory of the
absence of competition within a species to the planting of trees. 'According to
these instructions, clusters of thirty or forty acorns were to be planted.
Thirty trees would arise from each cluster, and twenty-nine of them, according
to Lysenko's theory, would, without mutual oppression, placidly die, filled with
noble self-sacrifice for the prosperity of the fortunate shoot which they
guarded, battling like soldiers with the surrounding grass. This new "law of
species life" was termed "self-thinning-out" by Lysenko, and did not deny that
the majority of plants in a cluster must perish. This was not the result of
crowding, however, but for the glory of the species.' When asked, ' "Do you mean
that one will turn out to be stronger and the others will weaken or perish?" '
Lysenko replied, "No, they will sacrifice themselves for the good of the
species." ' (166-8; cf. 105-10, 12 7.)
R.Ardrey's views on natural inequality appear in his The
Social Contract (London, Collins, 1970), which I have not read. Rather, like
most of the lay public, I read the excerpts which he chose to publish in the
colour supplement of a Sunday newspaper. This is (along with the reviews of such
books) the way most laymen gain the impression that biological science sanctions
this or that ideological position.
t Just as Marcuse can be regarded as the most
sophisticated exponent of a radical approach to the relations between biology
and culture, C. D. Darlington easily wins the complementary position on the
Right. His dropsical study of The Evolution of Man and Society (London, Allen and Unwin, 1969) was served up in excerpts in a Sunday
colour supplement and in a reputable historical journal (where his most extreme
claims were not repeated) : 'The Genetics of Society', Past and Present, no. 43 (1969), 3-33 (May). At various points in the text of his book it
is asserted that class distinctions and the masterslave relationship have a
genetic basis (366, 547, 573, 592, 668-75). For example, he writes, 'In short,
racial discrimination has a genetic basis with a large instinctive and
irrational component. Its action may be modified by education or by economic
processes. But it cannot be suppressed by law.' (606.) 'This policy [Black
Power], leading to segregation of the two races and denying them a common
evolutionary future, parallels the South African policy of apartheid. It is not to be lightly dismissed. But before we accept it we must look at its
underlying assumptions. The, Negro writers condemn what they describe as racism.
"By 'racism'," they say, "we mean the predication of decisions and policies on
considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial
group and maintaining control over that group." When we look back over history,
however, what do we see? The application of this principle has governed the
evolution of all advancing societies since soon after the beginning of
agriculture. And it has been the means of their advancement.' (607.) In the
conclusion he writes, 'The misfit may be a mental, social or sexual misfit. He
may be delinquent or criminal. He is the price that has to be paid for
hybridization. He is the burden that has to he carried by society as a whole in
return for the most adaptable breeding system. Fortunately, he is, as a rule, of
reduced viability and fertility. Natural selection has in this way so far
prevented the burden from becoming intolerable.' (678.)
When one begins to notice ideological affiliations, they turn
up regularly, just where one would expect. For example, Darlington's book has
received some praise and some very gentle criticism at the hands of one of the
advocates of educational policies which lie to the right of the Conservative
party, Professor Max Beloff, and again at the hands of Professor F. A. von
Hayek, whom Lipset described as 'the arch-conservative economist', the only
person at the Congress of Cultural Freedom's Milan conference on 'The Future of
Freedom' who deplored the putative anti-ideological homogeneity and sought to
retain cleavages in 'the democratic camp' (op. cit., note J, 404-5). Both
of these discussions appeared in Encounter (October 1970 and February
1971).
u Most students of political theory and history would
agree that the promise of Mannheimian sociology of knowledge has not been
fulfilled, and it would be grotesquely misleading to suggest that scientists can
turn directly and straightforwardly to the literature of the sociology of
knowledge for help. Indeed, Ideology and Utopia carries in its argument
the seeds of its own absorption into a new level of 'objectivity' in Mannheim's
concept of 'relationism' (which he employs to avoid the abyss of relativism,
e.g. 70-1, 76-7, 253-4, 269-70). This conception makes it very easy to
choose consensus rather than conflict as the way out of the interplay of
ideologies. Presumably this is the basis of its appeal to (and its emasculation
by) American functionalist sociologists and political 'scientists'. Recent work
under the banner of 'the sociology of knowledge’ has gone in two main
directions, neither of which serves my purpose in recommending it: further into
philosophy in an effort to base political theory and historical research on an
analysis of the concept of 'action'; and towards phenomenology and social
psychology in an effort to explain the social construction of (social) reality.
It is in some ways fortunate that students of science from
the ideological point of view can turn to Mannheim, Merton, Berger and Luckmann,
etc., with their minds unencumbered by the history of the sociology of
knowledge. They can gain insights useful to the ideological analysis of science
without disappearing without trace into consensus politics, the philosophy of
action, or social psychology. These paths are open, should people find it
ideologically convenient to take them, but my recommendation of these works
extends only to, the hope that they can help us to see the role of evaluative,
social and political factors in the motives, theories and extrapolations of
scientists. The same caveat applies to the literature cited above in the
social sciences, the history of art, and the history and philosophy of science.
v Once again, morality, rationality and politics
cannot be clearly distinguished. I am well aware that the argument of this paper
runs the twin risks of committing the 'genetic fallacy' on the one hand and
indulging in 'historicism' on the other. I can only reply by compounding these
errors, if errors they be; until we explore the extent of rationalization we
will be in no position to chart the domain of reason ' and unless we explore the
analogies between the present and the past, we will be in no position to have
confidence in the alleged open-endedness of the future and to address ourselves
to the future with much hope of mastering ourselves without subordinatiing
others. Finally, I hope that by putting the issue in this politically aligned
way I have, unlike Mannheim, faced squarely the problem of self-reference. Of
course, it is likely that my approach will be ideologically unpalatable to many.
w The structure of the argument of the paper and the
commentary is, in conclusion, relatively simple: Scientists-both as men and as
scientists-are finding that they need to become political. However, in order to
do so, they need to see that science is already more or less covertly so. They
are prevented from seeing this by their own official myths, and in order to see
this they must become metaphysicians. It follows that social responsibility in
science cannot be coherently conceived until a hybrid discipline which we may
call 'social metaphysics' generates an approach which can allow working
scientists-and not just another group of 'specialists'-to perceive the intimate
intermingling of scientific and social assumptions. Only then can they become
socially responsible. At the bottom of this conundrum lies the primary-secondary
quality distinction, which presents itself to the physico-chemical sciences (and
to the ambitions of the biological and human sciences) as the fact-value
distinction. In working our way out of our self-imposed labyrinth, we may begin
by grasping that all facts are theory-laden; all theories are value-laden;
therefore all facts are value-laden. If we further agree that all values are
intimately related to ideologies, which in turn reflect the conflicting power
interests within and between societies, we begin to see both the complexities
and the dangers of taking social responsibility seriously. Many will undoubtedly
prefer to attend an occasional conference on the subject to announce their
concern, which, of course, is conclusively demonstrated by their mere presence
there.
1 These phrases are taken from the prospectus setting out the
aims of the conference and are quoted to indicate the particular issues among
the many listed there to which my remarks are addressed.
2 This point is most clearly expressed in Albrecht von
Haller's A Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals (1752). A contemporary translation with a modern introduction by Owsei
Temkin appeared in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 4 (1936),
6.51-99. It has been argued that von Haller's manifesto provided the basis for
modern experimental biology. It certainly provides a clear argument for the
conceptual flexibility which has been characteristic of modern biology.
3 The best single source for entering into the debate on the
organic analogy and its political consequences for the social sciences is N. J. Demerath III and R. A. Peterson (eds.), System, Change, and Conflict: A
Reader on Contemporary Sociological Theory and the Debate
over Functionalism (London, Collier-Macmillan, 1967). For an extremely
illuminating (and funny) critique of the major American functionalist theorist,
Talcott Parsons, see T. Bottomore, 'Out of this World', New York Review of
Books, 13 (1969), 34-9 (6 Nov.). See also Mills, The Sociological
Imagination, op. cit., note a.
4 The clearest discussion of the relationship between the
concept of a person and the mind-body problem is P. F. Strawson, Individuals:
An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London, Methuen, 1959), Part I.
5 Berger and Luckmann, op. cit., note a (Anchor
edition), 6, 123. For a historical analysis of the concept of ideology, see G.
Lichtheim, 'The Concept of Ideology', History and Theory, 4
(1965), 164-95, reprinted in G. H. Nadel (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of History (New York, Harper paperback, 1965), 148-79. For
a selection of the literature on ideology, see R. H. Cox (ed.), Ideology,
Politics, and Political Theory (Belmont, Calif., Wadsworth paperback, 1969),
including a usefui selected bibliography; cf. Plamenatz, op. cit., note a.
6 F. Picavet, Les idiologues, essai sur I'histoire
des idies et des theories scientifiques, philosophiques,
riligieuses, etc. en France depuis 1789 (Paris, Alcan, 1891); cf. Mannheim, op. cit., note a, 55, 62-7, on the pre-history of the concept in Bacon's
'idols' and from the Idiologues to Marx. See also Foucault, op. cit., note c, 240 sqq.; R. Bendix, 'The Age of Ideology: Persistent and
Changing', in D. E. Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (London, Free
Press, 1964), 294-327.
7 G. Rosen, 'The Philosophy of IdeoIogy and the Emergence of
Modern Medicine in France', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 20
(I946), 328-39; 0. Temkin, 'The Philosophical Background of Magendie's
Physiology', ibid., 10-35: cf. Lichtheim, op. cit., note 5,
147-54.
8 Mannheim, op. cit., note a, ch. 5, CSP. P. 269;
Berger and Luckmann, op. cit., note a (Anchor edition), 1-18.
9 K. Mar-x, from 'Preface to a Critique of Political Economy'
(1857), quoted in Mannheim, op. cit., note a, 11 2; cf. 104-19.
10 Berger and Luckmann, op. cit., note a (Anchor
edition), 9.
11 Mannheim, op. cit., note a, 54, 237-47.
12 D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of
Political Ideas in the Fifties, revised edition (London,
Collier-Macmillan,1962; also Free Press paperback).
13 Darwin wrote to Henry Fawcett in 1861, 'About thirty years
ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise;
and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into
a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that
anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if
it is to be of any service !' F. Darwin (ed.), More Letters of Charles
Darwin (London, Murray, 1903), v01. 1, I 95.
14 The work which Wallace found most congenial to his own
views was Henry George's Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Causes
of Industrial Depression and of Increase of Want with Increase
of Wealth ... the Remedy (New York, 1879; reprinted New York,
Schalkenbach Foundation, 1962). George's study is a socialist classic which was
very influential in Britain and America and which is of considerable current
relevance. See R.C. Bannister ' 'The Survival of the Fittest . . .', op.
cit., note k, 377, 383-8, 394-5, 397. I have discussed the relationship
between Wa]Iace's evolutionism and his socialism in 'The Impact of Darwin . . .', op. cit., note k, 29-31; 'Malthus and the Evolutionists. . .', op. cit,. note k, 130-4; ' "Non-Scientific" Factors . . .', op. cit., note k.
15 For a contemporary assessment of the debate on the
mechanism of evolution, see G. J. Remanes, Darwin and After Darwin, 3
vols. (London, Longmans, Green, 1892-7), esp. vol. 2, ch. i; cf. R. M.
Young, 'Darwin's Metaphor. . .', op. cit., note k. Of course,
there are still some defenders of the inheritance of acquired characteristics
who are not Lysenkoists.
16 See R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism . . . , op.
cit., note k, ch. 2; R. L. Cam (ed.), The Evolution of Society:
Selections from Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology (Chicago and
London, Chicago, i 967), esp. Editor's Introduction.
17 H. Spencer, The Principles of Biology, revised
edition (London, Williams & Norgate, 1898), vol. 1, 650, 672.
18 Flew, Evolutionary Ethics, op. cit., note m;
Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, op. cit., note a, xviii n; Mills, The
Sociological Imagination, op.cit., note a, ch. 4.
19 Francis Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (London, Murray, 1887), v01. 3, !2 3 7.
20 Quoted in R. L. Meek, Marx and Engels on Malthus (New York, International, 1954; also paperback), 71 ; cf. 72-88 for other
expressions of the views of Marx and Engels on Darwin's theory; cf. R. L. Meek,
'Malthus-Yesterday and Today', Science and Society, 18 (1954), 21-51.
21 Z. A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. Lerner (New York and London, Columbia, 1969); M. W. Mikulak, 'Darwinism,
Soviet Genetics, and MarxismLeninism', journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970), 359-76.
22 Medvedev, op. cit., 113- I 8, 213-23; cf.67, 134-5,
196, 199, 204-5, 248-9, 269, 271,.
23 'The successful caricature distorts appearances but only
for the sake of a deeper truth.' I... the likeness thus produced may be more
true to life than a mere portrayal of features could have been.' E. Kris and E.
H. Gombrich, 'The Principles of Caricature', in E. Kris, Psychoanalytic
Explorations in Art (London, Allen & Unwin, 1953), 198, 190. See also E. H.
Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays in the Theory of Art (London, Phaidon, 1963), esp. chs. 1 & 3, 12.
24 Medvedev discusses in detail the lengths to which the
supporters of Lysenkoism had to go. For instance, in 1948 there was an order 'to
destroy all stocks of Drosophila. All genetic literature was removed from
libraries.... In all publishing houses, standing type of books that did not
praise Lysenko was broken up.' (125-6.) Another ordered the replacement of 'all
previous curricula and texts on cytology, histology, embryology, biochemistry,
microbiology, general pathology, and oncology....' (182.) In medicine Medvedev
observes that 'Twenty-five successive classes of physicians have been graduated
from medical school without the slightest notion of the laws of heredity.' (194; cf. 65, 104-5, 24-7,131, 136, 191-2, 198, 251).
25 Medvedev, op. cit., 11 9-20, 167, passim. I
have given further examples of the continuity between the Malthusian debate and
Lysenkoism in 'Malthus and the Evolutionists . . .', op. cit., note
k,137-40. Medvedev provides a fascinating account of Lysenkoism as seen from
inside the Soviet Union, while Mikulak offers an illuminating historical and
ideological perspective on it. A more recent study of The Lysenko Affair by D. Joravsky (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard, 1970) analyses the issues in terms of
the relationships among science, ideology, political power, and the 'criterion
of practice' in agriculture; cf. Joravsky's essay on Medvedev's book: 'Cracked
Wheat', New York Review of Books, 14 (I970), 48-52 (29 Jan.), and his
earlier essay, 'Soviet Marxism and Biology before Lysenko', Journal of the
History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 85-104.
26 J. D. Bernal, 'The Abdication of Science', Modern
Quarterly, 8 (1952-3), 44-50; cf. J.Fyfe, 'Malthus and
Malthusianism', ibid., 6 (1951), 200-11.
27 B. Bettleheim, 'Obsolete Youth: Towards a Psychology of
Adolescent Rebellion', Encounter, 33 (1969), 29-42 (Sept.). For a less
transparent view, see E. H. Erikson, 'Reflections on the Dissent of Contemporary
Youth', International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 51 (1970),11-22.
Professor Lorenz's ethological 'explanation' of student protest was given at a
Nobel conference and again at an ethological conference in Rennes, France in the
summer of 1969. It was described to me by participants at the conference and
reported in The Observer's 'Back Page'. I have not seen his argument in
print.
28 I have discussed this literature in a review of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization: 'The Naked Marx', New Statesman, 78 (1969),
666-67 (7 Nov.). For scientific criticisms of the generalizations of Lorenz and
Ardrey, see M. F. A. Montagu (ed.), Man and Aggression (New York and
London, Oxford, 1968; also paperback).
29 R. M. Young, 'Understanding it All', New Statesman, 78 (1969), 417-18 (26 Sept.).