Through an examination of French organicism–one of the models proposed for the nascent science of sociology in the late 19th century–this article argues two main points: that organicism was crucial in the establishment of ‘society’ as a scientific object; and that the specific characteristics of this new object were retained by later sociology long after the organic analogies and evolutionary views that justified them had been explicitly abandoned. Organicism played a significant role in establishing a strong notion of society as (...) a concrete, real entity–a notion that had a lasting impact on sociological theory and became one of the most important ‘categories of thought’ of the 20th century. (shrink)

During the last third of the 19th century, the ‘new’ French psychology developed within ‘the hypnotic context’ opened up by Charcot. In spite of their claims to the scientific nature of their hypnotic experiments, Charcot and his followers were unable to avoid the miracles that had accompanied mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. The hysterics hypnotized in the Salpêtrière Hospital were expected to have supernormal faculties and these experiments opened the door to psychical research. In 1885 the first French psychology society (...) was founded. The research carried out by this society may seem surprising: its members – Charles Richet in particular – were interested in strange phenomena, like magnetic lucidity, ‘mental suggestion’, thought-reading, etc. Very quickly, psychologists applied themselves to finding rational explanations for these supposedly miraculous gifts. Generally, they ascribed them to unconscious or subconscious perceptual mechanisms. Finally, after a few years, studies of psychical phenomena were excluded from the field of psychology. However, during the 4th International Congress of Psychology, which took place in Paris in 1900, the foundation of an institute devoted to the study of psychical phenomena was announced, but Pierre Janet and Georges Dumas founded within it the Société Française de Psychologie, from which psychical research was excluded. As for Charles Richet, disappointed by the psychologists, he devoted himself to the development of a new ‘science’ which he called ‘Métapsychique’. Several hypotheses have been put forward to account for this early research undertaken by the French psychologists, pertaining as much to parapsychology as to scientific psychology. (shrink)

: The transfer of modes of thought, concepts, models, and metaphors from Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary biology played a significant role in the mergence, constitution, and legitimization of sociology as an autonomous discipline in France at the end of the nineteenth century. More specifically, the Durkheimian group then came to be recognized as "French sociology." In the present paper, I analyze a facet of the struggle among various groups for this coveted status and demonstrate that the initial adherence to and (...) subsequent abandonment of "the biological" played an important, but complex, role in the outcome of that struggle. Furthermore, the choice of biological model, whether Darwinian or Lamarckian, had repercussions on one's position in that cultural field. The outcome of the "battle" between René Worms' group that supported and contributed to the Revue Internationale de Sociologie (RIS) on the one hand, and Emile Durkheim's group and those committed tothe L'Année Sociologique (AS) on the other—from which the Durkheimians emerged victorious—was due not only to internal scientific factors, but also to a particular juxtaposition of developments within sociology and anthropology and their relation to and interaction with French culture and politics at large. (shrink)

During the influx of neurological research into France from across Europe that took place rapidly in the late 19th century, the philosophy course in lycées was mobilized by education reformers as a means of promulgating the emergent brain sciences and simultaneously steering their cultural resonance. I contend that these linked prongs of philosophy’s public mission under the Third Republic reconciled contradictory pressures to advance the nation’s scientific prowess following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 without dropping France’s distinct (...) tradition of 19th-century spiritualism, which extended from Maine de Biran’s philosophical psychology to Victor Cousin’s official eclectic spiritualism. Between 1874 and 1902, the French Ministry of Public Instruction transformed philosophy into a national project designed to guide the reception of experimental psychology generally and neurology in particular. This article features original archival research on philosophy textbooks and students’ course notes that illuminate the cultural and intellectual impact of these sciences in the fin de siècle from inside the classroom. I argue that the scientific turn in the psychology section of the lycée philosophy course reflected and brought about a distinct philosophical movement that I call ‘scientific spiritualism’. While historians have analysed philosophy instruction as a mechanism used by the Third Republic to secularize students, this article sheds new light on lycée philosophy professors’ campaign to promote scientific spiritualism as a means to advance incipient brain research and pare its reductionist implications. (shrink)

I argue that the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) decided to constitute sociology, a novel field, as ‘scientific’ early in his career. He adopted evolutionized biology as then practiced as his principal model of science, but at first wavered between alternative repertoires of concepts, models, metaphors and analogies, in particular Spencerian Lamarckism and French neo-Lamarckism. I show how Durkheim came to fashion a particular deployment of the French neo-Lamarckian repertoire. The paper describes and analyzes this repertoire and explicates how it (...) might have been available to a non-biologist. I analyze Durkheim’s very early writings between 1882 and 1892 in this context to substantiate my argument. (shrink)

It is often said that the advent of the Freudian talking cure around 1900 revolutionised the psychiatric setting by giving patients a voice. Less known is that for decades prior to the popularisation of this technique, several researchers had been experimenting with another, written practice aimed at probing the mind. This was particularly the case in France. Alongside neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s spectacular staging of hypnotised bodies, ‘automatic writing’ became widely used in fin-de-siècle clinics and laboratories, with French psychologists regularly asking (...) entranced patients to scribble down words to validate their nascent theories on the divided self. This article traces the emergence of automatic writing in French psychological discourse at the close of the 19th century. By focusing on the early work of Dr Pierre Janet and some of his contemporaries, it re-examines the role played by this practice in what Henri Ellenberger famously called ‘The Discovery of the Unconscious’. It also considers the various levels of reconstruction at play in recent historical accounts. What does it mean to give subjects a (written) voice? How does automatic writing differ from the Freudian talking cure as respective expressions of the unspeakable? And how might these questions inform future historical practice? (shrink)

In inter-war France, history of philosophy was a very important academic discipline, but nevertheless its practitioners thought it necessary to defend its identity, which was threatened by its vicinity to many other disciplines, and especially by the emergent social sciences and history of science. I shall focus on two particular issues that divided traditional historians of philosophy from historians of science, ethnologists and sociologists, and that became crucial in the definition of the identity of their disciplines: the conception of history (...) and the interpretation of texts. By analysing representative discussions and positions, I shall show that traditional historians of philosophy needed to reassert their own approach to history, which, borrowing the term from Bergson, I define as ‘snapshot’. This approach is focused on a particular idea or text rather than a narrative. I shall also show that history of philosophy, in its traditional form, would have been undermined both intellectually and institutionally by the opposite ‘narrative’ approach of history of science and of the social sciences. Social scientists openly attacked history of philosophy’s methods and, in the eyes of traditional philosophers, its existence as an academic discipline. The same opposition is to be found in evaluation of past texts, which for traditional historians of philosophy were to be read as timeless documents, while for historians of science, ethnologists and sociologists were to be considered as documents exhibiting a particular mentality. However, between these alternatives there were intermediate positions. I shall in particular consider that of Léon Brunschvicg: he embraced a narrative approach and considered texts as documents of different ways of thinking, but at the same time carried on employing philosophical methods and defending the institutional position of philosophy. I shall argue that this was possible partly because of the considerable amount of power he enjoyed at the Sorbonne. (shrink)

an exemplar of an approach that takes the human mind to be largely the product of social and cultural factors with negligible contributions from biology. The author argues that on the contrary, his sociological theory of the categories is compatible with the possibility of innate cognitive capacities, taking causal cognition as his example. Whether and to what extent there are such innate capacities is a question for research in the cognitive neurosciences. The extent to which these innate capacities can then (...) be explained by natural selection remains an open question for empirical investigation. Key Words: categories • causality • cognition • Durkheim • evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

In 1877, the young Alfred Espinas defended a philosophical study, ‘doctorat ès lettres’, at the Sorbonne University, entitled Des Sociétés animales. This was to become one of the principal sources of French organicist sociology. The paradox, however, is that this work seems to be fundamentally a study of natural science. Espinas tried to justify his position theoretically through two types of reciprocally exclusive and uncomplementary arguments. The first one consists in showing that only certain kinds of animal groupings belong legitimately, (...) if not academically, to sociology. The second one has a greater audacious and uncontrollable dimension. It consists in asserting that all pluricellular organisms are true societies. In this article we first focus on the role played by cellular theory in such a ‘sociologization’ of biology, concerning the extension of sociology. Second, we examine the importance of such confusion within the fields of extension, in aiming to explain the conceptual transfers between social sciences and life sciences, in the second half of the 19th century. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the meaning that the term “experimental” acquires within spiritualism during the second half of the nineteenth century. It builds upon Paul Janet’s notions of “experience” and “experimentation” in psychology, by stressing the role of physiology and pathology in his reflection. Regardless of the role the concept of “experimentalism” took on in Victor Cousin’s psychology, which arguably indicated more an “internal affection” than actual experimentation, in Janet’s spiritualism the term regains its original meaning of empirical verification. Janet (...) highlights the importance of madness to the development of a new psychological paradigm that could reconcile philosophy and medicine, reason and experience, by taking up pathology as a form of natural and indirect experimentation. (shrink)