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Corresponding author:Stephen Quilley, SPIRE, Keele University, Keele, Staffs ST5 5BG, UK.Email: [email protected]

Journal of Classical Sociology10(4) 391–419

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Integrative levels and ‘the Great Evolution’: Organicist biology and the sociology of Norbert Elias

Stephen QuilleyKeele University, UK

AbstractThe achievement of Norbert Elias was to develop a paradigmatic foundation for sociology as the lynchpin in a broader human science encompassing the social and biological dimensions of human development. The extent to which he remains at the margins of a discipline profoundly suspicious of the biological sciences is perhaps an index of his originality. But this outsider status also obscures the unoriginality of his work. Elias’s unifying epistemological framework centring on ‘integrative levels’ and ‘emergent dynamics’ drew heavily on a long tradition of organicist biology. Reviewing developments in twentieth-century biology, it is argued that Elias simply absorbed an organicist Zeitgeist that had become subtly paradigmatic at around the time of the elaboration, in the 1940s, of the ‘modern synthesis’ in genetic-evolutionary theory.

Keywordsanthroposphere, complexity, Elias, emergent dynamics, evolution, figurational sociology, holism, human science, Huxley, Needham, noosphere, organicism, vitalism, theoretical biology

From his earliest writings (Elias, 2006), through the substantive studies in historical sociology (1969, 1996 [1989], 2000 [1939]), to his contributions to the theory knowl-edge and the sociology of knowledge processes (1989, 2007 [1987]), there is, in the work of Norbert Elias, a consistent epistemological vision and conceptual architecture.

Richard Kilminster in his introduction to The Symbol Theory (1989), and also an unpublished paper (1994), pointed out that part of the explanation for this consistency was that Elias absorbed a great deal of the scientific worldview that became paradigmatic in the biological sciences in what Huxley (1942) dubbed ‘the modern synthesis’. When Elias arrived in England in 1935, he first went to Cambridge, because the initiative to rescue him from Paris was taken by his old and close friend Alfred Glucksman, a biologist at the University. Elias was proud of having been cited by Alfred for a contribution he

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(NE) made to a paper on embryology – Needham’s subject. He was in Cambridge again during the war, when the London School of Economics was evacuated there and housed in a building opposite Peterhouse College. Kilminster argues that Elias would have encountered the work of ‘Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, Conrad Waddington, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, Sewall Wright and others …during the early part of the 40-year period when he lived, taught and researched in Britain’ (1994: 17). Although it is difficult to prove the specific lines of connection, Kilminster is almost certainly right to point to the fourteen years between 1940 and 1954, when Elias was teaching part-time in London and collaborating with S.H. Foulkes in his work on group analysis, as the period when he became familiar with the coalescing synthesis in evolutionary biology. It is significant that prominent exponents of the modern synthesis rarely restricted themselves to questions of biological theory but contributed to a much wider debate around what was frequently referred to as ‘evolutionary humanism’. This sec-ular-scientific philosophy underlay a wide range of (for the most part) progressive political and ethical commitments.1 What is certainly true is that the debate involved many of the intellectual heavyweights of the day, and it would have been virtually impossible for Elias to have remained unaware of their contributions. In the much smaller and more face-to-face intellectual milieu of the 1940s and early 1950s, it is even likely that he would have encountered people such as Waddington, Huxley and Needham.2 As Kilminster points out, it is surely significant that nearly fifty years later, the only book cited by Elias in The Symbol Theory is Julian Huxley’s The Uniqueness of Man (1941).

In recent decades there has been growing interest in the intellectual origins of figura-tional sociology and Elias’s place in the history of ideas. This has produced important contributions on the sociology of knowledge (Kilminster, 1993; Rehberg, 1979), on the convergence of sociology, history and psychology (and specifically Weber, Huizinga and Freud – Goudsblom, 1987: 42–62), on social psychology (Niestroj, 1989), evolutionary biology (Kilminster, 1994) and psychoanalysis (Schröter 1993).

In developing this project, Elias was undoubtedly influenced by the wider currents of relationalism and organicism that dominated debates in the philosophy of science and specifically theoretical biology during the early decades of the twentieth century. One specific influence that has become a source of considerable controversy between Maso (1995), on the one hand, and Kilminster and Wouters (1995) and Johan Goudsblom (1995), on the other, is the influence of Ernst Cassirer. Maso has argued that Elias’s socio-logical model owed a great deal to the Neo-Kantian philosophy and particularly the work of Cassirer. Early in his career, Elias, he argues, actively took sides with Cassirer in a series of disputes with Honigswald (Elias’s supervisor). Later he ‘rehashed’ elements of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms to develop The Symbol Theory (Maso, 1995: 58). More significantly he argues that Elias’s entire programme was an extension and develop-ment of Cassirer’s (1923 [1910], 1956 [1936], 1957 [1929]) argument that the emergence of scientific thinking has seen a ‘gradual substitution of relation models for substance models’ (Maso, 1995: 58). Cassirer continued a break with the substantialist premise of ‘essence’ initiated by Leibniz’s understanding of mathematics as a science of relations rather than things. For Cassirer, developments in modern physics, starting with Maxwell and Faraday’s conceptualization of electrons and culminating with Einstein’s theory of

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relativity, confirmed that the character of ‘fundamental’ entities such as electrons, and eventually even such basic categories as ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘matter’, was neither fixed nor immutable, but was inherently ‘relative’: that is, a function of some overall configuration. Wouters, Kilminster and Goudsblom are certainly right that Maso wildly overstates the reliance of Elias on Cassirer, and underplays the significance of Elias’s sociology as a fundamental epistemological and methodological break with philosophy per se. But at the same time, Maso himself argues that The Civilizing Process was the first sociological model to be based on a consistent relational model, and the Eliasians also concede the influence of Cassirer on Elias and that the former made a signal contribution in the devel-opment of relational thinking across many disciplines during this period (Kilminster and Wouters, 1995: 101).3

What is more germane to this essay is the fact that Cassirer, although more well known as an interpreter of modern physics, also developed a theoretical interpretation of biology as the basis for his philosophical anthropology (Cassirer, 1944; see Krois, 2004). Quoting approvingly both Von Bertalanffy (see below) and the biologists Haldane and Uexküll, whom he saw as part of a tradition going back to Goethe, Cassirer devel-oped ‘his own version of organicism’ (Krois, 2004: 283). Coming from overlapping intellectual circles in neo-Kantian philosophy and developing separate but parallel com-mentaries on what then would have been termed the ‘philosophy of man’ (although Elias would have rejected that term outright), Cassirer and Elias clearly shared a frame of reference and many points of departure with regard to epistemology and the philosophy of science. For instance both Cassirer (1923 [1910]) and Elias (2006) use the example of a single tone in a musical melody – meaningless as an independent entity, the note is meaningful only in relation to other notes in a melodic sequence (Maso, 1995). But this tells us little about lines of influence, since the holistic integrity of melody had become a bit of a cliché of the early twentieth-century gestalt movement (Kilminster and Wouters, 1995). All we can really say is that both Elias and Cassirer had been exposed to the same intellectual currents. As it turns out, this is true of Elias’s relationship to organicism more generally.

In this essay, my intention is to explore the relationship between Elias and the evo-lutionary humanism of the modern synthesis that was, as Kilminster argues, ‘in the air’ during the formative years of Elias’s intellectual development. I will argue that Elias was both more and less original than is perhaps apparent through twenty-first-century eyes. Specifically, the intellectual and theoretical bedrock of his contribution owes a rarely acknowledged debt to a series of long-running debates in theoretical biology, which had culminated by mid-century in a loose consensus. Narrowly conceived, this consensus was the ‘modern synthesis’ of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolu-tionary theory. Less explicitly and at a higher level of abstraction, there was also, if only for a short while, a broader consensus around organicism: the resolution of the long-running tension between ‘vitalism’ and ‘mechanism’ in the form of the ‘organi-cist’ focus on organization, relations between the parts, and what became an episte-mology of integrative levels (Needham, 1932, 1937; Novikoff, 1945; Redfield 1942; Reiser 1958; Woodger, 1929).4 In this light, the epistemological scaffold underlying all of Elias’s varied contributions to sociology (1989, 2007 [1987]) is not entirely original. In particular:


• his theoretical rationale for the autonomy of social processes and sociology as their appropriate disciplinary locus is a reworking of arguments used by organicist biologists such as Woodger (1929) against the reductionist encroachments of the physical–chemical sciences;

• the epistemology of levels of integration (Elias, 2007 [1987]) is derived directly from the organicist theorization of ‘organization’ and whole/part relations in biology;

• the insistent distinction between the ‘phaseology’ (Goudsblom, 2003) of social development and Victorian understandings of ‘Progress’ must be seen, at least in part, in terms of an engagement with (albeit with considerable refinement of) Huxley’s conception of ‘psycho-social evolution’; and

• the pivotal insight of ‘symbol emancipation’ (Elias, 1989) as an evolutionary turn-ing point for non-human nature as well as for human beings had been anticipated by almost every one of those evolutionary biologists who contributed to the debates over evolutionary humanism.

On the other hand, in reworking the organicist paradigm in evolutionary biology as an epistemological framework for sociology, Elias removed metaphysical and teleological elements that are recurring features in the evolutionary humanist debate, in Huxley and more particularly the work of Teilhard de Chardin. This is one reason why, whilst those writers seem, to a contemporary reader, somewhat dated and anachronistic, Elias’s writ-ing remains fresh and relevant, not only to biology but also to broader debates in the human sciences. In purging evolutionary humanism of its transcendental accretions, it is also true that Elias often refined and tightened up concepts only loosely developed by the biologists. A case in point is the clear distinction he makes between biological (Darwinian) evolution and social development (that is, cultural/Lamarckian ‘psycho-social evolu-tion’). Not unexpectedly, ‘his terminology for dealing with this level [of social develop-ment] is noticeably tighter, more differentiated and adequate to its contours’ (Kilminster, 1994: 18).

In short, because Elias was the only sociologist fully to engage with the mid-century consensus in biology, he was uniquely positioned to develop an approach to long-term processes of social development which acknowledged their path-dependency, ‘phaseol-ogy’ and directionality, without giving ground to the teleology of Victorian progress theory. With concepts such as ‘homines aperti’ and the ‘triad of basic controls’ anchored in the epistemology of integrative levels, Elias is better placed to explore the relationship between social and biological processes, in relation both to evolutionary ecology and the biosphere, and also to the neuro-somatic growth and development of individual person-organisms.5

Biological Evolution and Social Development as ‘Levels of Integration’ in ‘the Great Evolution’: Elias’s Combined Realist Epistemology and Sociology of KnowledgeIn Involvement and Detachment, Elias elaborates a theory of knowledge that seeks to establish the relationship across the full spectrum of scientific disciplines within the arc

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of a ‘comprehensive process model’ (see Quilley, 2004a). This model centres on a hier-archy of scientific disciplines that relates to a spectrum of fields of investigation arranged according to their degrees of complexity and ‘levels of integration’. Elias uses the latter term straightforwardly in the sense of inter-war organicist theory: that is, organizational dynamics relating to nested hierarchies of whole/part relationships (for example, Needham, 1937). This spectrum of scientific fields and subject matters is also under-stood as a temporal sequence in ‘the great evolution’: ‘The different sciences can then be understood as each contributing to solving the problems which different stages of an evolutionary process pose, their respective theoretical models as symbolizing different stages’ (Elias, 2007 [1987]: 202).

Anticipating the current biological thinking (Kaufman, 2000), Elias argues that there is an unambiguous direction to the grand evolution towards increasing complexity. By creating matter, ‘the big bang’ set in train the physical processes that constitute the first dimension in the ongoing transformation and evolution of the universe. This process of physical expansion provides the field of investigation for cosmology. Successive dimen-sions form a temporal sequence, with evolutionary-biological processes, and the plane of integration that we call ‘life’, emerging (on our planet) only 3.5 billion years ago. With human symbol emancipation, biological evolution eventually engenders the plane of integration we understand as culture: the ‘anthroposphere within the biosphere’ (Goudsblom, 2002).

However this ‘model of models’ is combined with a historical sociology of the knowledge process. For Elias the historical emergence of successive scientific disci-plines is but the most recent movement in the spiralling iteration between very long-term processes of social development, on the one hand, and the expanding stock of reality-congruent knowledge about the world, on the other. His principal point of depar-ture in the analysis of this knowledge process is the inter-dependence of the safety/danger balance, on the one hand, and the involvement/detachment balance, on the other. The relationship between knowledge and social development hinges, Elias argues, on the complex feedback loops – both ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ – between these two bal-ances. Early in human development, what Elias calls animistic, magico-mythical knowledge about the world was characterized by higher degrees of fantasy, consequent upon greater degrees of involvement. Putative connections between events and phe-nomena were, to a much greater degree, posited in relation to the direct meaning they had for the self. The paradigmatic questions would not concern ‘how’ a phenomenon occurred, but ‘why it happened to me’. Elias shows how high levels of danger induce greater degrees of involvement, hindering more detached observation and induction of possible connections between events – and hence create obstacles to the expansion of the social stock of reality-congruent knowledge about the world. As a result of this ‘double bind’, the early stages of the knowledge process are relatively slow and tortu-ous. An early example would include the time, foresight, affective restraint (deferral of gratification) and the relatively detached understanding of the qualities of the raw mate-rial6 required to collect the correct stone and create stone tools for use in a subsequent hunting expedition. However, to the extent that the knowledge process does move for-ward, each extension of detachment consistently enhances the capacity of human beings


to control non-human nature. Over many millennia, in consequence of hundreds of small technological innovations, and in tandem with a steadily increasing stock of con-cepts and terms expressing more reality-congruent understandings about the connec-tions between processes and events in the natural world, the balance between danger and safety shifts steadily in favour of the latter (at least vis-à-vis non-human nature). Thus for Elias, there is a consistent and reciprocal relationship between (a) the level of detachment represented by public standards of thinking about natural events, and (b) the level and manner of control of non-human nature represented by public standards of manipulating them (Elias, 2007 [1987]: 75–76). This gradual shift from a vicious loop or double bind in the relationship between the involvement/detachment and safety/danger ratios to a virtuous loop proceeds according to ‘the principle of facilitation’. As the size of this relatively insulated sphere of safety increases (the anthroposphere within the biosphere), the achievement of more detached understandings becomes progres-sively easier to achieve. It is for this reason that the knowledge process is characterized by rapid, if not quite exponential, acceleration.

Antecedents and Parallels in Early to Mid-Twentieth-Century Theoretical BiologyAs Kilminster (1994) points out, Elias’s vision of the relationship between biology and sociology has much in common with the ‘humanist frame’ (Huxley, 1961) advanced by the evolutionists and geneticists of the 1930s and 1940s. The Symbol Theory and Involvement and Detachment embrace a number of propositions about the relationship between humanity and evolution, which Kilminster summarizes as follows (1994: 17):

(i) establishing human beings as an evolutionary breakthrough, a progression from a ‘lower’ to a ‘higher’ form;7

(ii) society as an emergent, extra-somatic phenomenon, not reducible to the physical, chemical and biological levels;

(iii) the idea that higher levels of integration tend to canalize lower ones;(iv) the importance of knowledge transmission and learning in human development;(v) the uniqueness of the human capacity for symbolization;(vi) the issue of how humans might now come to guide the evolutionary process from

their position as its highest level;(vii) the importance of looking for global trends which might be leading towards the

self-integration of humankind into a world civilization.

In what follows, I will explore parallels and antecedents for all of these propositions in the early to mid-twentieth-century debates in theoretical biology. I will also attempt to map out other points of connection between Elias and his putative biological interlocu-tors. Specifically:

(viii) on the relationship between the social and biological sciences;(ix) on the resolution of epistemological dualisms resulting from ‘process reduction’;(x) the relationship between analysis and synthesis in scientific endeavour.

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Integrative Levels and OrganicismIn the wake of the perceived challenge (and imperial explanatory claims) of physical science, early twentieth-century biology was animated by the debate between ‘vitalists’ and ‘mechanists’. Whilst ‘physicalist’ biologists such as Jacques Loeb and Julius Sachs enthusiastically adopted the reductionist programme, ‘vitalists’ insisted on the existence of some animating constituent – Hans Driesch’s ‘entelechie’ (1914) or Henri Bergson’s ‘élan vital’ (1975 [1907]) – distinguishing living from inert matter (see Allen, 2005).8 It was only later in the twentieth century that the debate was more or less resolved in the form of an ‘organicist’ conception – focusing on the organizational properties of living matter rather than some life-giving ‘vital substance’ (see Gilbert and Sarkar, 2000; Niño El-Hani and Emmeche, 2000). Organicism in this form had several historical roots, one of which was the emergentist movement in early twentieth-century Britain (see Ablowitz, 1939; Beckermann et al. 1992; Blitz, 1992). But gradually the metaphysical, proclamatory holism of Jan Smuts and C. Lloyd Morgan gave way to a technical focus on whole/part relations, the principle of ‘downward causation’9 and the over-riding importance of organizational relations between parts as amenable to scientific investigation. This mainstream organi-cism was exemplified by the writings of well-known biologists – Joseph Needham, Conrad Waddington, Paul Alfred Weiss, Joseph Woodger, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Ernst Mayr – many of whom were prominent intellectuals, (some associated with the radical programme of the Theoretical Biology Club in Cambridge) evincing a wide spectrum of very public left-liberal political positions during the inter-war period (see Werskey, 1971).10

The ‘theory of integrative levels’, as it came to be known, directed scientific scrutiny at the nested hierarchy of organizational relations, and was expressed most cogently by Needham in his Spencer lecture:

Today we are perfectly clear … [that] the organisation of living systems is the problem, not the axiomatic starting point of biological research. Organising relations exist, but they are not immune from scientific grasp and understanding. On the other hand, their laws are not likely to be reduced to the laws governing the behaviour of molecules at lower levels of complexity.

(Needham, 1937: 15)

This conception became common currency in mid-twentieth-century biology. Its sig-nificance was partly that, for a while at least, it established the integrity and autonomy of biological science vis-à-vis the physical–chemical sciences dealing with phenomena at lower levels of integration. Organicist biology pointed to complexity – the irreduc-ible, emergent dynamics of the whole consequent upon the pattern of organisation of the parts – to refute the reductionist claims of physical science. Although Needham’s formulation was the best known, both he (1937: 15) and Von Bertalanffy (1968) gave credit to Woodger’ s Biological Principles (1929) for first outlining the orthodox posi-tion, whilst Waddington (1957) gave credit to Henderson (1917) and Sewall Wright identified Moore (1912) as the first modern statement of philosophical organicism (see Steffes, 2007).

What is certainly true is that the language and epistemological logic of these very debates seem to have been absorbed almost wholesale by Elias. The following passage is typical:


Corresponding to the degree and stability of the functional integration of composite units on this level of natural events are forms of disintegration which have no counterpart on the physical–chemical plane. For them we have names such as ‘illness’ or ‘death’. A fly is swatted. It lies motionless. If one were able to take a complete inventory of its physical–chemical components, there is a high degree of certainty that, to begin with, there would be no difference between the living fly and the dead one. What has changed is the organisation of the physical–chemical processes, their integration to form systems on a higher level of organisation, such as tissue and organs, and their self-regulating adaptation to each other – just because organisms represent a specific organisation of physical–chemical processes and therefore a type of order which does not exist on the physical–chemical plane.

(2007 [1987]: 203–204)

For Elias this organicist framework was significant in two ways. Firstly, just as organi-cism provided a clear theoretical confirmation for the autonomy of biology as a science, against the backdrop of a hierarchy of disciplines corresponding to successive levels of integrative complexity, it likewise guaranteed the autonomy of sociology vis-à-vis biology whilst establishing also the points of connection and continuity (Quilley 2004a). Secondly, Elias was able to reformulate a whole series of biological insights in relation to whole/part relationships to serve as orienting concepts in sociology. For instance, Woodger wrote:

A part, if it is a living part, i.e., one capable of division, cannot exist in nature in an inorganic environment. If it persists under such conditions it is the product of a whole-producing division and therefore no longer a part. [Different from machines where parts can exist independently of the whole without themselves becoming wholes.] …There is no such thing in nature as ‘living matter’ – we always find whole living organisms. Living parts are never found ‘wild’ as such. Another characteristic of a part is that what it is always dependent on other parts.

(1929: 308–309, italics in the original)11

And elsewhere, Vernadsky reiterated Lotka’s (1925: 28) insistence on the inseparabil-ity of organisms and their environments and the mutual permeability of organisms – implying a relativity, or at least a dynamic relationality, in relation to the ‘boundedness’ of the objects implied by conceptual categories such as ‘organism’ or ‘species’. He wrote: ‘The living organism, chiefly in philosophical speculation, but also in biology, is erroneously contrasted with its medium, as if the two were independent objects’ (Vernadsky, 1944: 38). This language – the critique of the process reduction that accompanies overly bounded and concrete philosophical categories – is highly remi-niscent of the argument advanced by Elias (e.g. 1978: 74, 93, 111–112). And Elias repeatedly makes the analogous point about the ‘whole-dependent’ nature of individual person-organisms. Counterpoising the notionally closed-person or ‘Homo clausus’ view with that of pluralities of open people (‘homines aperti’), Elias argues that there is no human individual (‘part’) to be found ‘wild’ outside of the ‘whole’ of a plurality of interdependent humans. And the nature of the individual (‘part’) is always depen-dent on his/her relation to wider figurations (other ‘parts’).

The suspicion that Elias had read the biological literature directly is given cre-dence by the wealth of biological examples in his writing, many of which could have

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been drawn directly from the work of the inter-war organicists. For instance, Woodger’s elaboration of the hierarchical order of living organisms (1929, 1931– cited approvingly by Needham [1936]) is almost identical to Elias’s own account of the levels of integration discernible in the hierarchy of biological organisation (2007 [1987]: 204–212).

Process Philosophy and ‘the Great Evolution’Underlying the organicist conception of integrative levels was a process-centred ontology, which established the continuity of physical, biological and social devel-opment as aspects of an encompassing evolutionary process. Here again there is a direct connection between ‘process sociology’ and the processual biology of Woodger, Waddington, Needham and Huxley. Thus Huxley’s conception of ‘the whole of phenomenal reality [as] a single process which may properly be called evolution’ (1955: 3) is more or less identical with what Elias (2007 [1987]) calls ‘the great evolution’.

The inter-war period was marked by a pervasive if hazy recognition that modern phys-ics had implications for the conceptual categories underpinning the positive conception of science. Symptomatic of this intellectual turmoil was the rising influence of the pro-cess-philosophy associated with Alfred North Whitehead, who is frequently quoted by theoretical biologists such as Huxley and Woodger. The main import of such philosophiz-ing was the relativity of seemingly fixed categories and the importance of time. Huxley’s language is typical: ‘All phenomena have a historical aspect …all reality is evolution … a one-way process in time; unitary continuous; irreversible; self-transforming; and gener-ating variety and novelty in its transformations’ (1953: 9–10). More concretely, Woodger highlights the importance of a four-dimensional framework in which things and processes are aspects of a single spatial-temporal reality, such that even a seemingly permanent object such as a stone ‘is an event since it is temporally extended …[and all] events are substances’ (1929: 180).

The implications for this processual view in biology was that seemingly fixed catego-ries or objects were recast in four-dimensional language as ‘slabs of space time’ (Woodger, 1929: 301–302) such that any notion of biological organization or structure had to incorporate ‘intrinsic serial change’. Seen in this light, an ovum doesn’t develop into a frog, but rather ‘it is a temporal part of the history which is the frog’ (1929: 302, original italics).

Effectively placing inverted commas around the seemingly objective and invariant characteristics of static ‘things’, this emphasis on process is once again highly reminis-cent of Elias’s constant struggle to revise terminology and concepts so as to avoid what he called ‘process reduction’. Woodger makes the same point about the habitual and problematic ‘thing-centredness’ of everyday language.

Our fondness for only thinking in terms of the adult frog is another example of our fondness for uniform objects. Thus to say that an organism develops means that it is temporally as well as spatially differentiated, and also that the temporal differentiation is serial, irreversible or non-rhythmical, although spatial parts may exhibit rhythmical changes. And in this process of


serial change during the developmental period the spatial organisation becomes progressively more and more elaborate.

(1929: 303)

For the biologists, this processual perspective offered an immediate resolution to the long-standing disputes over the relative importance of structure versus function: ‘… form is simply a short time-slice of a single spatio-temporal reality’ (Needham, 1936: 6). Likewise, for Von Bertalanffy, life was defined by organization, dynamic flow of pro-cesses and history: ‘Spatial wholeness and historicity are …different aspects of the same spatio-temporal whole’ (1952 [1949]: 113). And this processual view of the organism also had the effect of relativizing the boundaries of the individual organism as the unit of analysis, and the boundaries between this bounded individual and the environment (Waddington, 1957: 6).

In the same way, the organicist biologists frequently made asides to the effect that the four-dimensional processual perspective made redundant the categorical dualisms inher-ited from Kant and Descartes– especially the mind/matter, body and soul problems: ‘Mind is not an entity in its own right …better to speak of mental activities’ (Huxley, 1953: 76). And of course Elias argued in exactly the same way that mind and soul are stage-specific concepts pertaining to specific levels of integration, and dynamics emerg-ing from processual ‘wholes’ in the organization of matter.

One need hardly say that the same argument holds good with regard to the old dispute about the relationship of what is traditionally called ‘body’ and ‘mind’. In this case too proposals for the solution of the problem on purely physical and on metaphysical lines are usually representative of the same style of thinking, and equally inept. They may be monistic or dualistic; they may credit the ‘mind’ with qualities of ‘matter’ or ‘matter’ with qualities of the ‘mind’ – all these propositions trying to account for the whole in terms of its parts.

(Elias, 2007 [1987]: 99, fn. 16)

Many biologists were happy to work through the implications of the processual organicist paradigm in relation to limited problems such as the relationship between genetics and embryology in developmental biology. Others, and most influentially Huxley, took Whitehead’s philosophy of the continuity of a universal evolutionary pro-cess more literally.

In one sense the ground for this unificatory programme had started to be laid in the late nineteenth century. Grinevald (1998) argues that between Seuss’s coining of the term ‘biosphere’ in 1875 (Seuss, 1875) and Verndadsky’s elaboration of the concept at the Sorbonne in the early 1920s, one can detect a major pioneering movement to merge biology and geology. This was born of the growing recognition that, over very long time-frames, the biological processes had radically transformed the geological and chemical face of the earth. Just as the organicist paradigm challenged the physico-chemical reduc-tionism of the mechanists, Vernadsky (1998 [1926]) was preparing the ground for holistic and systems theorizing in ecology and the earth sciences. Along with Lotka (1925), Vernadsky, drawing on Bergson (and indirectly Whitehead), was among the first to recognize the tension between biological evolution and Carnot’s law of entropy.

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Huxley (1955, 1961), Vernadsky (1998 [1926]), Teilhard de Chardin (1959 [1955], 1966), Le Roy (1928) and others all took up this preoccupation with very long-term con-nections between the geological, chemical and biological dimensions of unitary plane-tary evolutionary process, and sought to bring human beings into the frame (Sampson and Pitt, 1999). Huxley’s schema is indicative. He demarcated this universal evolution into three sectors or phases: inorganic-cosmological; biological; and human or ‘psycho-social’ (1953, 1955). The emergence and overlaying of successive biological and psycho-social sectors constitute paradigmatic phases in the evolutionary history of the earth. For Huxley, the successive evolution of these sectors was an aspect of a broad nar-rative of complexification: in biological evolution the increasing capacity for awareness and exploitation of the environment ultimately engenders a species capable of symbolic language; in consequence, the dynamics of Darwinian evolution give way to a process of cultural (Lamarckian) evolution at a higher level. And in accordance with the principle of downward causation that was a correlate of the theory of integrative levels – that the emergent dynamics of relations of higher levels channel and direct processes at lower levels – each successive evolutionary phase has a transformative effect on the evolution-ary process as a whole. Just as the evolution of life transformed the geo-chemical cycles of the earth, the ‘psycho-social’ evolution transforms the evolutionary trajectory of biological life.

In our geological epoch – the psychozoic era, the era of reason – a new geochemical fact of capital importance is manifest. In the course of the last few thousand years, the geochemical action of humanity has, by means of agriculture seizing the living green matter, become intensive and excessively multiplied. (Vernadsky, quoted in Sampson and Pitt, 1999: 27)

What Huxley termed ‘psycho-social evolution’, Vernadsky (1998 [1926]) called the ‘psychozoic era’ and Le Roy (1928) framed in terms of a process of ‘hominization’: the growing capacities of the human species consequent upon encephalization and the con-comitant ecological-evolutionary domination of the biosphere. For all of these writers the continuous process of cosmic evolution is marked by distinct phases (see also Von Bertalanffy, 1952 [1949]: 30), of which the emergence of the ‘anthroposphere’ (Goudsblom, 2002) is the most recent and perhaps the most significant (see Christian, 2005: Intro).

As a description of the evolutionary development of the earth, Elias’s conception of ‘the great evolution’ (2007 [1987]) is very little removed from the narrative presented by these writers. He would have agreed with the intellectual ambitions, the language and the precepts of Dobzhansky (one of the originators of ‘the modern synthesis’):

Life is very much older than man and the universe is much older than life. This points to an indispensable condition which any synthesis must satisfy in order to be acceptable. It must envisage man, life, and the universe as changing rather than fixed, as parts of a single ongoing process rather than as three separate static realms. The central postulate of the synthesis must be that the universe and everything in it are evolving products of evolution. The synthesis must be an evolutionary synthesis.

(Dobzhansky, 1967: 157)


Elias’s concept of ‘symbol emancipation’ (1989) in many respects, a homologue for Le Roy’s ‘hominization’ or Huxley’s ‘critical point’. And like these writers, and in keeping with the underlying theory of integrative levels, he was very conscious of the potential for social processes consequent upon symbol emancipation to steer and channel biologi-cal (evolutionary-ecological) processes (Goudsblom, 1992, 2002, 2003; Quilley, 2004b). Elias would of course have parted company with Teilhard de Chardin in relation to the more metaphysical and teleological aspects of his theorization of the ‘noosphere’. But then, so did many biologists who were otherwise happy to frame their investigations in an overarching conception fundamentally similar to Elias’s understanding of ‘the great evolution’.

This conception continues to underpin much environmental thinking. In an evolution-ary narrative starting with the big bang or ‘primordial Flaring Forth’, the theologian Thomas Berry (2005) frames his analysis of the ecological crisis in relation to what he calls the ‘ecozoic era’, in which for the first time biological life becomes an ‘organism’, capable of ‘reflexive awareness’, consciousness and so the capacity to determine its own future. As agents in this transition it is up to humanity whether this grand process of ‘com-plexification, miniaturization and quickening’ is able to continue (Register, 2006: 26).

The Uniqueness of ManJust as the epistemology of integrative levels guaranteed the autonomy of complex biological processes from any physico-chemical reductionism, organicist biologists frequently emphasized ‘the uniqueness of man’ (Huxley, 1961). And, like Elias, they identified the evolution of language and culture as the point of departure. Huxley is representative: ‘The critical point in the evolution of man – the change of state when wholly new properties emerged in evolving life – was when he acquired the use of ver-bal concepts and could organise his experience in a common pool’ (1953: 115). Von Bertalanffy reiterates: ‘… the basic fact in anthropogenesis is the evolution of symbol-ism’ (1967: 21).

Dobzhansky likewise points to the significance of the evolution of language, arguing also against any would-be imperial subsumption of sociology by the biological sciences (1972: 123). This oft-repeated anti-reductionism of the older generation of ‘modern syn-thesizers’ stands in marked contrast to the reductionist aspirations that often accompa-nied the later triumphs of evolutionary molecular genetics (Dawkins, 1975), inspiring the programme of socio-biology and, more recently, evolutionary psychology.

Given the widespread anxieties about biological determinism, it is worth elaborating this point. For Huxley, ‘culture’ was fundamentally an emergent phenomenon:

The shareable body of material, mental and social constructions (‘artifacts, mentifacts, and sociofacts’) [are] created by individuals living in society, but …not simply explicable or directly deducible from …the general psychological or physiological properties of …individuals, any more than the characteristics of life are simply explicable …from ... the general chemical and physical properties of inorganic matter, or those of mind from a knowledge of the properties of neurones.

(1955: 10–11)

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Furthermore, and not dissimilar in essence from Elias’s understanding of the link between sociogenesis and psychogenesis, Huxley also recognized that – in line with the theory of integrative levels – the emergent dynamics of a shared culture had the capacity to chan-nel and mould processes at the (lower) level of the individual:

The effective (or in biological parlance, phenotypic) characterization and achievements of human beings in a society are to a very large extent the result of the pattern of culture in which the human individuals live and the cultural forces which play upon them.

(1955: 12)

In this context he refers to a study by the anthropologist Kroeber linking the emergence of genius to cultural outbursts: ‘[Against the great man theory, the critical factor is] the stage of development of the culture into which men of genius are born’ (1955: 12).12

With respect to personality and what Elias called ‘psychic habitus’, Huxley argued that whilst humans do not start with a blank slate, the development of the individual emerges at the interface between the emergent dynamics of culture and the biological disposition of the organism. The results are intrinsically variable.

We build our mental organization from the ground up in a way that no animal does. The resulting constructions are exceedingly varied. …There is no such thing as a normal man, since there is no norm, no blueprint for the mental buildings that men construct.

(Huxley, 1953: 119)

This is not the language that has, in recent decades, become synonymous with neo-Darwinian approaches to the domain of sociology. And yet it was the shared language of those commit-ted Darwinians who contributed to the consensus in evolutionary theory that first garnered sufficient coherence and adherence to be designated a’ synthesis’, and also an orthodoxy.

That said, the absence of a blueprint doesn’t imply an existential carnival of free will or unrestricted human agency. Rather the psychological ‘phenotype’ emerges at the inter-face between biological potential, the emergent but nonetheless structuring dynamics of social interdependencies and chance. And as Huxley notes, in consequence:

Man is the only organism habitually subjected to mental or emotional conflict …[and] which has to practice what the Freudians call repression, but also the only one who is constantly making conscious choices …the only organism which has a conscience. … But the conscience is not implanted ready made by heredity or divine implantation. …Like every other part of our minds it is a piece of mental machinery, constructed by the young child to meet the ambivalent situation that confronts it in its early years. The situation is the existence of one person – the mother or some efficient mother substitute – of authority, which is resented, and tender care, which is sought after and loved. If this situation is absent, as in infants brought up in impersonal institutions, conscience may fail to develop, just as chlorophyll fails to develop in plants raised in the dark, and the children grow up amoral.

(1953: 94)

This conception of the necessary social facilitation of a biological potential as a dis-tinctive human trait is something often remarked upon by Elias (notably, in The


Symbol Theory, in relation to the development of language in children). However it is also notable that Huxley is happy to invoke Freud. This underlines the intellectual heritage common to all intellectuals of Huxley’s generation. Huxley, Waddington, Needham and Elias were part of what was probably the last generation to have expe-rienced a truly interdisciplinary social stock of scientific knowledge. In addressing the parallels between Elias and the organicists in evolutionary and developmental biology, this is a crucial but easily overlooked point. Elias is famous for his failure to make due reference to his intellectual sources, but at least part of the explanation is that for his generation, a degree of familiarity with a very wide range of texts was taken for granted.

The Sequence of Scientific Development and the Problems Faced by Youthful DisciplinesThe Comtean hierarchy of scientific disciplines that forms the basis of combined episte-mology and sociology of knowledge is pretty much identical with the framework of organicist biology (for example, Haldane, 1932: 47–86). Decades before Elias made the same argument, biologists used this conception to defend the autonomy of higher (inte-grative) level disciplines against reductionist claims from below (Haldane, 1932: 84) – in many instances highlighting, as a prime example, the autonomy of social science disci-plines from biology (Huxley, 1953: 7), whilst arguing at the same time for biology as a privileged domain in which the exact sciences interfaced with the social sciences (Von Bertalanffy 1952 [1949]: ix). At the same time, matching almost exactly Elias’s stance in Involvement and Detachment, organicist biologists would also habitually underline a correlative spectrum of methodological orientations, attacking the inappropriate exten-sion of the ‘analytical posture’ from lower into higher (integrative) level disciplines in which analysis must increasingly be complemented by interpretation and synthesis. As Von Bertalanffy said: ‘Today ... all sciences are beset by problems which are indicated by notions such as “wholeness”, “organization” or “gestalt” – concepts which have their root in the biological field’ (1952 [1949]: ix).

Finally, the organicists shared with Elias a common sense of the complexity of the human condition as emerging from the intersection of processes operating simultane-ously on many different scales. As Von Bertalanffy noted in passing:

Our experienced world is the product of a long evolution, cultural history and individual learning of the child. As psychiatrists say, the ‘ego boundary’ is established slowly and in a complex (but widely known) processes; and may be obliterated in psychopathology.

(1952 [1949]: 95)

But just as Needham had argued in relation to the structure of relations between the parts in complex biological wholes, the emergent structure of the social process is amenable to scientific scrutiny. For Von Bertalanffy, pressing home Needham’s insight in relation to social systems begged the possibility and necessity of what he dubbed a ‘theoretical history’.

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The basic insight seems to be that history is not a process of an amorphous humanity, but is borne by a comparatively small number of socio-cultural systems, variously called cultures, civilisations etc. … [which] show regularities of development … comparable to growth, maturity, decay and eventual extinction.

(1952 [1949]: 105; see also 1968: 200)

In his careful distinction between Darwinian evolution in biology and social develop-ment (rather than ‘cultural evolution’), and in the elaboration of concepts such as the ‘triad of basic controls’, sociogenesis, psychogenesis, functional democratization, figu-rations, and homines aperti, Elias’s historical sociology was in many ways such an exer-cise in ‘theoretical history’.

Evolution and ProgressHuxley was unabashed in his affirmation of the idea of progress in evolution. His writing in this area has since become something of an embarrassment for the biological estab-lishment, for which the idea of progress is (now) anachronistic, anthropocentric and unjustifiable. Huxley did recognize that insofar as evolution involved diverging adapta-tion, it was problematic to compare one species or genetic line against another, as higher or lower forms, more or less evolved. But at the same time he argued that one could identify ‘advances’ or ‘improvements in organization’ in four senses (1955: 5):

• The specialization of a stock for a particular way of life. Here the unit of progress is a species.

• Divergent radiation of a primitive type into a number of specializations leading to ‘an improved exploitation of environmental variety’. Here the unit of progress that he seems to have in mind is a clade of species or an ecosystem.

• Better physiological performance of some function (for example, the speed of conduction in nervous tissue). Here the unit of progress is an abstract morpho-logical, physiological or ecological function.

• ‘Improvement in general organization’ such as the all-round homeostatic and reg-ulatory capacities of ‘warm-blooded’ vertebrates; or the organization of mental capacities and awareness and the utilization of stored experience.

This is not the place to review the debates around the vexed issue of evolutionary prog-ress in any detail (see essays by Ruse, Richards, Gould and McShea in Hall and Ruse, 1998: Part IX). However, it should be noted that Huxley’s views were unremarkable and widely shared during the period in which he formulated them. At one level the idea of prog-ress was a simple description of the apparent increase in complexity and self-awareness of organisms over the long march of evolutionary time. Huxley focused, in particular, on the increasing capabilities of organisms in terms of their awareness of their environment and, consequently, their ability to exploit effectively the available resources (1955: 18). And from the perspective of the biosphere as a whole, diversification of types and advancement of individual species entailed a progressively greater exploitation of resources at the level of the biosphere as a whole, resulting in ‘a larger richer biomass’.


In this light, Huxley saw the advent of psycho-social evolution as a clear continuation of the progressive march of evolution, transposed into a new register: cultural (Lamarckian) rather than biological (Darwinian) evolution. And just as he dismissed the biological relativism that sought to deny progress in the latter, Huxley disputed the cul-tural relativism that prevented anthropologists from delineating any notion of cultural advance or progress. He pressed this point by arguing that the ‘scale of culture’ had a dual measure: the efficiency of the exploitation of environmental resources and the (somewhat more nebulous) fulfilment of individual potentiality (1955: 20).

Whilst Huxley at least attempted to ground his understanding of progress in technical and material criteria, his friend and colleague Teilhard de Chardin crossed the line to develop a sweeping theological version of evolutionary humanism. Huxley’s progressive increase in somatic complexity and awareness became in Teilhard the ‘curve of corpus-culisation’ (1966: 21), and ‘cephalisation and …interiorising complexification’ (1966: 33). From the point of hominization the ‘anthropoid patch in the Pliocene …glows under the influence of a new ascending radiation’ (1966: 60). This kind of language was echoed by Von Bertalanffy, who declared:

So evolution appears to be more than a mere product of chance governed by profit. It seems a cornucopia of ‘evolution créatrice’, a drama of suspense, of dynamics and tragic complications. Life spirals upwards to higher and ever higher levels, paying for every step.

(1967: 87)

He then gives the same narrative of encephalization, individualization and complexifica-tion elaborated by both Huxley and Teilhard de Chardin.

Others in Huxley’s group were much more cautious and distanced themselves from such flowery prognostications. However, their generally left-liberal political aspirations and the common concern with global civil society (as evident in the involvement of Huxley and Needham in UNESCO) is indicative of a common perception of the gradual integration of global humanity, and human psycho-social evolution as the leading edge of the greater cosmic evolution. With humanity the stream of culture takes over from the biological species as the main unit of evolution and purposive activity begins to structure the wider evolutionary process (Huxley, 1953). Even the elder statesmen Dobzhansky (1972: 122) and Waddington (1957: 6) were captivated by the idea of humanity and sym-bolic language as an evolutionary-ecological watershed, supplementing and transform-ing cosmic and biological processes of evolution with a new plane of integration, and an overarching principle of cultural evolution.

In a purely descriptive sense, the idea that developments at the current highest level of integration (social processes) are beginning to channel and direct or ‘canalize’ devel-opments at lower levels (the process of biological evolution) is significant, but uncontro-versial (Brand, 2010). Quite clearly, human domination of the biosphere, both geographically and in terms of an extending trophic monopoly (Quilley, 2004b), is trans-forming the trajectory of evolutionary ecology on the planet (Budiansky, 1998). But at the same time there is more than a hint of hubris in the often-repeated claim made by Huxley and Teilhard de Chardin that purely biological progress had come to an end, signalling an era of human directed evolution with ‘[man] in the unexpected position of

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business manager for the cosmic process of evolution’ (Huxley, 1953: 116). For Teilhard de Chardin, although the traditional view would see humanity as just one twig on the bushy radiation of evolution, this was a twig with ‘prodigious biological qualities …transforming the biological world around it’ (1966: 15).

Zeitgeist or Direct Borrowing: Evidence from the Marbach ArchiveThere seems to be ample evidence that much of what made Elias unique as a sociologist was derived, at least in part, from an early exposure to theoretical and methodological debates in the life sciences, and the arguments of the organicist biologists in particular. The key ideas that he absorbed as the implicit framework for his theory of civilizing processes centred on the theoretical rationale for the autonomy of sociology vis-à-vis biology and the epistemological framework of levels of integration. His originality was in the synthesis, in recovering these ideas for the social scientists, rather than in formulat-ing them in the first place. Elias also absorbed from the broad thrust of evolutionary humanism, the understanding of interweaving social and biological processes at nested temporal scales, from the growth and development of individual person-organisms, to long-term processes of social development, biological evolution and even geological history and ultimately cosmogenesis. His advance on those such as Huxley was to remove the teleological and progessivist elements and develop a perhaps more sober and less rosy, properly scientific basis for evolutionary humanism.

The question remains as to whether Elias absorbed these ideas from a Zeitgeist in which biological ideas and particularly those relating to genetics, evolution and evolu-tionary humanism were ‘in the air’. It is certainly significant that until the dramatic post-war expansion of higher education, the academic milieu was much smaller, facilitating face-to-face contacts and the diffusion of ideas between disciplines. I have already high-lighted a number of cases where Elias’s language and use of particular examples indicate a first-hand knowledge of organicist texts. Is there any further evidence to be gleaned from the Elias archive at Marbach of his relationship to twentieth-century biology in general and organicism in particular? Well, there is very little direct evidence, but there are some suggestive indications. First of all, Elias clearly retained an active interest in biology that went back to his days as a medical student. For instance in his notebooks, at various times, we see detailed notes on evolution (for example, on Darwin and Wallace in notebook1290/1293; or on Lotze’s 1899 book Microcosmos in notebooks 1125/1126). His personal library contained many reference books on biological science, with works on molecular and cellular development, genetics and biochemistry, including titles by prominent biologists and public intellectuals such as John Scott Haldane and his son J.B.S. Haldane, Ludwig von Bertalanffy (Problems of Life), John Bonner-Tyler (Morphogenesis), T.H. Huxley, Julian Huxley, A.N. Whitehead, Jacques Monad, Ernst Haeckel, Arthur D. Lovejoy, Peter Kropotkin, Conrad Waddington, and others. Similarly his reading lists for social psychology courses taught in the 1940s and early 1950s at London University feature references to an enormous variety of scientists, including Charles Darwin, Conrad Waddington (Introduction to Modern Genetics), W.B. Cannon, Jean Piaget, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler (on gestalt psychology), Nikolaas Tinbergen (on instinct) and William James. Elias also subscribed to Scientific American,


and during the 1940s to The Medical Echo (a quarterly digest of medical literature). For a sociologist, Elias certainly took a consistent and unusual interest in the life sciences, and particularly those with a bearing on the growth, development and evolution of human individuals and groups.

What about the specific connections I have been attempting to draw out in this essay? It is impossible to say with any certainty what Elias may have read in libraries, and, as has already been remarked, he was not a great believer in citations. However, in his own library, there are a number of volumes which are suggestive. These include Von Bertalanffy’s Problems of Life (1952 [1949]) and J.S. Haldane’s Materialism (1932) – two important statements of the organicist programme (see above); and John Bonner-Tyler’s Morphogenesis: An Essay on Development (1963) and a German edition of Erich Jansch’s The Self-Organization Universe (1980). Bonner-Tyler is a highly respected biologist who came to problem of complexity and self-organization by the same route originally travelled by Needham, namely a consideration of biological form and the pro-cess of ontogenetic development. His later work includes a vision of a self-organizing universe (1988) not dissimilar to that of Stuart Kaufman at the Sante Fe Institute. Jansch’s book, which Elias did have, is from the same stable. Whilst he did not own Biological Principles, Elias did have a copy of Woodger’s Physics, Psychology and Medicine: A Methodological Essay (1956). It seems reasonable to assume that he was at least aware of his more famous work on the philosophy of biology, which as we have seen, in places, resonates so clearly with the theory of knowledge Elias advances in Involvement and Detachment. In the same way, although there is no direct evidence that he read Emergent Evolution, Elias did recommend C. Lloyd Morgan’s Habit and Instinct on a 1942 exten-sion course in Social Psychology for the University of London.

There are also other small hints. For instance, in ‘Vitalisms and Animisms’, Chapter 2 of the French edition of Jacques Monad’s Chance and Necessity, Elias has underlined passages referring to the biosphere as an emergent and inherently unpredictable (albeit explainable) form of complexity (1971: 55); and in relation to ‘molecular ontogenesis’, the possibility of the emergence of ‘spontaneous order’ (1971: 100).

Parallels and Precendents: An Evaluation

Evolution, Social Development and Progress in EliasThe evolutionary humanism which placed humanity at the centre of a teleological evolu-tionary drama was most self-consciously advocated by Huxley and Teilhard de Chardin, but also resonated more widely with the underlying political and spiritual inclinations of the first generation of biologists associated with the modern synthesis. This reworking of Victorian progress theory found an easy fit with the emergentist logic of the epistemol-ogy of integrative levels that had become the shared and mainstream framework of the organicist biologists. How, then, did Elias, in absorbing the theory of integrative levels and the organicist understanding of the relationship between social and biological pro-cesses, approach the issue of progress?

Firstly, as a sociologist, Elias was far more precise in his distinction between evolu-tionary processes operating at different levels of integration. Specifically, he made a firm

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distinction between Darwinian evolution at the level of biology and long term processes of social development.13 And as Kilminster points out, this distinction allows him to locate the evolution of symbolic culture (Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noosphere’) and the ensuing process of social development within the broad scheme of ‘the great evolution’ without any assumption of teleology (1994: 18). Whereas biological evolution is irre-versible, processes of social development are reversible and may be subject to both cen-tralizing and decentralizing dynamics, integration and disintegration, demographic growth and ecological collapse.

Secondly, he is much more careful than Huxley to distinguish between technical cri-teria for advancement or the ‘stage of development’, and an ethical or normative evalu-ation. Where for Huxley evolutionary progress was equated fairly bluntly with ethical advance, Elias’s ‘triad of basic controls’ (1978) pointed only to a systematic relationship between the scale and intensity of interdependency concomitant with particular patterns of social development, the scale and effectiveness of human exploitation of the environ-ment or trophic monopoly (Quilley, 2004b) and observable patterns of habitual psycho-logical restraint evident in personality formation.14 The trajectory of this three-way matrix could change direction. Both civilizing processes and de-civilizing processes are evident in the historical-sociological record (Mennell, 1990).

However whilst he did not import the teleological patina of progressivism, the organ-icist paradigm generally and the theory of integrative levels specifically did provide for Elias a way of analysing social processes whilst keeping simultaneously in the frame multiple time-frames and processes on different but mutually implicated biological and social levels of integration.

Aspects of a Shared ZeitgeistThe review of the organicist literature of the mid-twentieth century and centring on the work of Huxley is revealing. Specifically, it suggests that Elias shared with the then main-stream body of biological theory a number of substantive and conceptual orientations:

• An anti-Kantian, anti-Cartesian, processual epistemology derived from a number of sources, but most notably Whitehead’s process philosophy (and perhaps also the relationalist philosophy of biology of Ernst Cassirer – see Krois, 2004).

• A broad conception of a unitary evolutionary process, albeit with three phases or aspects – cosmic, biological and social – each with its own spatial contours and dynamics, mode of propulsion and characteristic tempo.

• An epistemology of integrative levels rooted in an organizational rather than metaphysical concept of ‘emergence’.

• Familiarity with a shared corpus of overlapping work in the human sciences, including, for instance, Spencer, Comte, Darwin, Descartes, Marx, John Dewey, William James, Freud, Whitehead and C.H. Cooley. This all-round classical edu-cation (now an impossible aspiration) is vital insofar as it tended towards a shared sense of how problems of philosophy and language impinged on the framing of research questions in both biology and the social sciences. More specifically, one can point to a shared sense of the problem of what Elias called ‘process reduction’.


• A Freudian understanding of conscience formation combined with an apprecia-tion of the historical, societal and individual variability in the emergence and channelling of both ‘mind’ and personality.

While Huxley’s ventures into the territory of culture and social processes remained impressionistic, insubstantial and marred by a pronounced teleology and an anachronis-tic understanding of progress, he did also affirm the ‘irreducibility of the highest human social level to lower ones, as part of an ethical-humanistic worldview based on an evolu-tionary picture of humankind’ (Kilminster, 1994: 19). As Kilminster points out, Elias rendered the epistemology of levels into a workable framework for the sociological investigation of long-term processes of social development. And although he shared with Teilhard de Chardin et al. an appreciation that human integration might proceed an awful lot further than seems imaginable from the current phase of development, he also injected a very large measure of caution into the investigation, which to be successful required a great deal of sociological work ‘to control of the intrusion of emotionally charged ideo-logical evaluations into our observations of the biological and social levels of human beings’ (Kilminster, 1994: 19). That Elias was comparatively more successful in this regard is evident from the fact that his own writings from the middle of the last century remain fresh and seem undated. Reading Huxley, on the other hand, it is difficult not to wince at his enthusiasm for eugenics or a misplaced enthusiasm for the capacity of the ‘higher cultures’ to realize the potential of individual citizens.

The Ebbs and Flows of Organicist Thinking

Organicism and the Modern Synthesis. By the mid-twentieth century the ‘mainstream organicist’ paradigm, had come to function as the ‘background philosophy of biology’ (Niño El-Hani and Emmeche, 2000: 237). Organicism and the new synthesis became, albeit for a short while, an overlapping twin paradigm.

In the post-ar period enormous technical advances across the life ciences have con-firmed the molecular-genetic reworking of Darwinian evolutionary theory as the over-arching framework of modern biology. However,political anxieties about progressivist conceptions of evolution have seen the evolutionary humanism of the kind espoused by Huxley expunged to the fringes of academic respectability. Inadvertently speaking from the same hymn sheet as his nemesis Richard Dawkins, liberal-left intellectuals such as Stephen J.Gould figured strongly in the public campaign to keep evolution secular, direc-tionless and essentially meaningless.

But ironically the rejection of evolutionary humanism was also accompanied by a more tacit abandonment of the wider philosophy and epistemology of organicism. For the most part this can probably be best explained by the culture of specialization and the difficulty of maintaining a broad theoretical overview based upon a reasonable knowl-edge across many sub-disciplines. In biology, as in sociology, the Renaissance man of letters doesn’t seem to have survived into the post-war period. It is also true that the daz-zling productivity of the reductionist analytical programme associated with molecular biology and biochemistry has, since the 1950s, mesmerized the wider discipline. Whatever the case, the resulting orientation towards reductionism and the elevation of

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analysis over synthesis has had a profound impact on the development of the discipline (Rose, 1997). In particular a number of working assumptions have become precepts for ‘orthodox’ theoretical biology. These include:

(i) that the enormous morphological and functional variety evident in the natural world is entirely and only the product of natural selection operating over geo-logical timescales;

(ii) that selection operates only at the level of the gene, making any appearance of ‘group selection’ inadmissible;

(iii) that evolution is inherently directionless.

However, this Darwinian orthodoxy has never been as uniform as advocates such as Dawkins have often tried to imply. In contrast to his contemporaries Fisher and Haldane, Sewall Wright (1980) derided ‘beanbag genetics’ and the emphasis on hypothesized actions of individual genes, insisting instead on whole genomes and the study of evolu-tion in naturally occurring populations (see also De Winter, 1997; Dronamraju, 2011). This emphasis on populations and whole organisms as the unit of selection was also taken forward by Theodosius Dobzhansky, and his intellectual heir Ernst Mayr (1988). More radically, Conrad Waddington pointed to circumstances in which phenotypic processes of development in higher animals could direct and ‘canalize’ potentially favourable muta-tions, thereby broaching the Weismann barrier (Waddinton, 1968–1972, cited in Rose, 1997: 218–219). Elsewhere, developmental biology is revealing discomforting evidence that, rather than being an accident of adaptive radiation and natural selection, many basic structural forms are constrained by simple mathematical and geometrical rules (e.g. Webster & Goodwin, 1996). Likewise, the long-closed argument about group selection is beginning to be prised open once again: there is strong evidence that for social animals, capable of symbolic communication and inter-generational culture (i.e. humans), social groups can become a primary object of selection (see Ofek, 2000). And following the ongoing controversies surrounding James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and the rediscov-ery by Lyn Margulis of ‘symbiogenesis’, the earth sciences are gradually absorbing the difficult proposition that planetary ecological systems may be intrinsically biophilic and ‘homeodynamic’ – that is, they may gravitate naturally towards complex, self- sustainaining biological life. Finally, in what constitutes a profound heresy against orthodox common sense, theoretical biologists such as John Bonner-Tyler (1988 – build-ing on Waddington), Ho and Saunders (1979), and Kaufman (1995, 2000), working within the emerging paradigm of complexity theory, are at least re-legitimating as a working hypothesis the idea that evolution might have a direction: an internal biophilic orientation towards biological (and social) complexity. For Rose (1997), these radical ideas are captured best by the concept of ‘autopoiesis’ (Maturana & Varela 1980), which seeks to reconcile the organism and its life-line as a process of becoming, the crude dichotomy of gene/environment being replaced by an iterative dialectic of specificity and plasticity in the process of development. Against perceived theoretical unanimity, he points to a continuing counter-current in biological thinking that flows back through the work of the Santa Fe Institute under Kaufman, and the Theoretical Biology Club of Joseph Needham and Conrad Waddington in inter-war Cambridge, through the process-philosophy


of Bergson and right back to pre-Darwinian, French biologists such as Georges Cuvier and Etienne Geoffrey St Hilaire.

Rose’s agenda, along with Goodwin, Kaufman and others such as Jablonka and Lamb (2006) is to ‘make biology whole again’. However, the pertinent point for sociological observers of these ‘Darwin wars’ (see Morris, 2001) is not that the new paradigm waiting in the wings may consign the last hundred years of scientific endeavour to the dustbin. Rather, the new biology would see the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy – the ‘new synthesis’ trumpeted (somewhat ironically15) by Huxley (1942), Dobzhansky (1937) and Mayr (1942) from the late 1930s – tempered once again by a renewed emphasis on the irreduc-ibility of emergent dynamics at different levels of organization (Needham, 1937; or nested ‘holons’, to use Koestler’s image: Koestler & Smythies, 1969); an orientation to the interpenetration of organisms and environments; the structural constraints on evolu-tion; the centrality of process and ‘autopoeisis’; and the emergent complexities of homeodynamics (Rose, 1997: Chap. 11).

The re-emergence of holism in biology and the recognition of complexity and differ-ent integrative levels are significant for sociology for two reasons. Firstly, the imperialist explanatory logic of early socio-biology, which would reduce sociology to biology, has been undercut by developments within the life sciences. And secondly, by the same token, in this recognition of emergent levels, there is space for sociology alongside genetics, ecology, biochemistry and the raft of disciplines that contribute towards the ‘general biology’ intimated by Kaufman (2000: Chap. 1). As Norbert Elias recognized much earlier, the relatively autonomous, emergent domain of social processes, which provides the subject matter for sociology, must always be recognised as an aspect of what he called ‘the great evolution’ (2007 [1987]). Kaufman’s ‘general biology’ is in fact the study of Elias’s ‘great evolution’.

In fact the countervailing organicist paradigm has never really disappeared. As Von Bertalanffy noted at the time:

The future historian of our times will note as a remarkable phenomenon that, since the time of the first world war, similar conceptions about nature, mind, life and society arose independently not only in different sciences but also in different countries, Everywhere we find the same leading motifs: the concepts of organisation showing new characteristics and laws at each level, those of the dynamic nature of, and the antitheses within reality.

(1952 [1949]: 194)

For Von Bertalanffy, the rejection by Driesch and Haldane of the ‘machine theory of life’, the emergence of gestalt theory, Lloyd Morgan’s theory of emergent evolution, the process natural philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the holism of Jan Smuts and Meyer Abich – all paved the way for the organicist conception and subsequently what he described as ‘general systems theory’, in which whole/part relationships were character-ized by ‘dynamic regulation within an integrate system’ (1967: 193).

Workers widely separated geographically, without contact with each other, and in very different fields, arrived at essentially similar conceptions – sometimes to the point of almost literal coincidence of expression …[developments in] embryology, developmental psychology,

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cultural anthropology, neo-Kantian philosophy, sociology and others – converged into closely related conceptions of the organism, man and society.

(1967: 4)

In this way the organicist paradigm anticipated a more general systems approach which has since given rise to a raft of related developments in cybernetics, systems theory and game theory: ‘General system theory may be considered a science of “wholeness” or holistic entities which hitherto, that is under mechanistic bias, were excluded as unsci-entific or metaphysical’ (1967: 70). From this perspective, the organicist conception, and the associated epistemology of levels, has never left the stage of the human sciences. And indeed it seems clear that with developments in chaos theory and the increasingly sophisticated mathematics of complexity being applied in ever wider spheres, including economics, sociology and embryology and ecology, Von Bertalanffy’s instinct was well placed.

Conclusion: Towards a Synthetic Human ScienceElias absorbed and developed his epistemology of integrative levels during the 1930s and 1940s when it was the central plank of a wider philosophy of organicism that was shared by the majority of theoretically minded biologists of the time. However, the inter-rupted trajectory of his career ensured that his work only came to prominence within sociology at a time when organicist currents within biology had been reduced to trickle and banished to the intellectual margins. The triumphal analytical reductionism epito-mized by Dawkins’s (1975) gene’s-eye view of the world also consolidated a chasm of mutual misunderstanding and suspicion between social and biological sciences. For soci-ologists in particular the well-intentioned but clumsy encroachments of socio-biology signalled a colonial intent that was met by a wall of hostility and derision.

However, the analytical myopia that has dominated the life sciences for fifty years seems to be throwing up problems – in genetics, in ecology, in the earth sciences, in psychology and always in sociology – that demand a holistic approach to the complex interaction between parts, between processes operating at different levels of integration. Such approaches require flexibility about the units of analysis and pluralism in relation to methodology. And above all they require a cooperative and problem-oriented relation-ship between neighbouring disciplines: that is, recognizing the autonomy that derives from the organizational dynamics of particular levels of integration, but also the physical and functional continuity that is implicit in the imagery of ‘nested holons’ or ‘sub- systems’ – and the overarching temporal continuity explicit in ‘the great evolution’. The practical significance of this is that biology can no more explain away social phenomena by disaggregating them into constituent biological ‘parts’ than chemistry can ‘explain’ molecular biology or ecology.

But a productive relationship between Comte’s neighbouring disciplines still requires trust and self-confidence on both sides. Both sociology and anthropology have for the last two decades been severely wanting on both counts. The significance of Norbert Elias’s process sociology in this context is two-fold. Firstly, the figurational paradigm developed in the more problem-based and less specialized and less discipline-bound


intellectual environment that characterized the decades before the post-war expansion and professionalization of higher education. Elias absorbed and engaged with many of the epistemological and programmatic issues animating disciplines, ranging from evolu-tionary biology to psychology, psychoanalysis, history, anthropology and linguistics. Because of this the figurational framework is pre-configured to operate at the overlaps of these disciplines and is well placed to provide an integrating framework for an encom-passing and synthetic human science. More specifically, in sharing the organicist episte-mology of mid-century theoretical biology, figurational sociology is well placed to engage with a nascent paradigm shift in the life sciences that is seeing the rediscovery of complexity and a renewed emphasis on the organisms rather than the gene, populations of interacting organisms and communities of interacting species as integral units of anal-ysis. In short, figurational sociology could provide the central theoretical foundation for an integrated human science encompassing the full range of biological, psychological, historical and sociological disciplines (Quilley and Loyal, 2005).

Secondly, if sociologists are able to renew a dialogue based on parity of esteem with colleagues in the biological sciences, the latter may find that the investigation of figura-tional dynamics may help resolve concrete scientific problems in disciplines dealing with phenomena at lower levels of integration. Two examples immediately spring to mind. With regard to one of the most contentious issues in evolutionary theory, Goudsblom’s (1992) pioneering study of fire and civilization provides a very concrete example of the way in which culture engendered by language facilitates processes of group selection (that is, natural selection operating at the level of social groups rather than individual organisms).16 More generally, the concept of psychogenesis and the entire thesis of The Civilizing Process detail the canalizing and moulding of somatic and neurological development in individual person-organisms by emergent social dynamics: that is, behavioural patterns engendered by (mostly blind and unintended) interactions between individuals and groups over long periods of time. In short, social life changes people’s brains and bodies – some-thing that practising doctors, dentists and psychologists have always understood.

Notes 1. For instance, Joseph Needham was an active member of the Labour Party, a one-time member

of the Anglican Good Shepherd order and eventually married a Quaker, Dorothy Moyle. He and his wife were members of a revolutionary Christian socialist community. Julian Huxley was a long-time associate of H.G. Wells, and became General Secretary of UNESCO, appoint-ing Needham as his Science Officer. Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and palaeontologist, used his inventive understanding of Catholic dogma as a foundation for a transcendental ver-sion of evolutionary humanism.

2. Before the Second World War, Needham worked for a while in a laboratory in Berlin and spoke German.

3. Records at the Elias archive in Marbach certainly show that Elias owned a 1953 copy of Cassirer’s Substance and Function (1923 [1910]) as well as The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951 [1932]), indicating that he went back to these debates during the 1950s when he was starting to put together material for Involvement and Detachment (2007 [1987]).

4. Kilminster (1994) also points out that the term ‘emergence’ was gaining currency in the phi-losophy of science. He cites Bergmann (1944), Henle (1942) and Garnett (1942). The papers in Robert Redfield’s volume (1942) came out of an interdisciplinary conference of biologists

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and social scientists held in Chicago in 1941 and attended by Robert E. Park, A.L. Kroeber as well as Redfield himself (Kilminster, 1994: 26, fn. 3). During the inter-war period and into the 1940s, ecologists such as Warder C. Allee and Alfred Emerson at Chicago had been directed at the phenomenon of cooperation in intraspecies populations as well as the integration of interspecies systems, both levels behaving as super-organismic units and subject to evolution by natural selection (Sapp, 1994: 137). This work culminated in the seminal text by Allee, Emerson, Park, Park and Schmidt, Principles of Animal Ecology (1949). The super-organism concept in ecology was in part formulated as a corrective to what were seen as the excesses of neo-Darwinism. It lost ground in the post-war period, partly because the ‘modern synthesis’ made theories based on ‘group selection’ increasingly untenable, but also because of what were interpreted as unsavoury political overtones of collectivism and the subordination of the individual (Worster, 1977).

5. I have heard of but not been able to read an unpublished conference paper by Wassall (1994), which also explores the role of the levels of integration concept in Elias’s writing.

6. A piece of flint ‘as such’ – rather than an animistic conception of the living stone as an active agent, with intentions and motivations and possibly concerning ‘me’ directly.

7. Used in relation to evolution, terms such as ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ are usually placed in inverted commas and viewed with suspicion by biologists anxious to distance themselves from the teleology of Victorian progress theory.

8. Incidentally, Elias cites other works by Bergson in Part II of Involvement and Detachment (2007 [1987]: 145; see also editor’s note p. 98).

9. That dynamics emerging from interactions between entities at higher levels could mould con-stituent entities at lower levels.

10. Whilst the association between a tacitly organicist, anti-reductionist orientation and left-liberal politics continued into the latter half of the twentieth century with the very public work of Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins and Stephen J. Gould, this later generation of left-inclined biologists distanced themselves from the humanist understanding of evolutionary progress.

11. Although see Woodger (1932) for a qualification of this point. For citation and discussion see Needham (1937: 16–17).

12. It is interesting that among the analogous phenomena he refers to in this context are the rather sudden developments of theory and technique in Renaissance painting. This is precisely the topic that Elias takes up in the introduction to Involvement and Detachment (2007 [1987]), linking the manifest achievements of great men such as Velázquez, Rembrandt and Van Eyck to a more general intergenerational knowledge process, the advancing social stock of knowl-edge and the spiralling and iterative process of detachment in the modalities of that knowl-edge. See also Elias’s study of Mozart (1993 [1991]).

13. That is, Lamarckian evolution, although Elias did not use this term.14. Huxley’s intuition is, however, not so far from Elias’s triad of basic controls: He says: ‘[The]

evolutionary position and possibilities [of a culture] are ultimately determined by the quantity and quality of its awareness and the modes in which it is organised’ (1955: 18). Replacing the rather vague terms ‘awareness’ and ‘modes of organization’ with a reference to the combined ‘social stock of knowledge’, social division of functions and the level of scientific-technical specialisation (all of which contribute to a society’s ‘awareness’ of environmental resources) results in an understanding of developmental sequence and stages not dissimilar to Elias’s.

15. Ironic, because Huxley and Dobzhansky were among the least reductionist and most organ-ism- and population-centred of Darwinians, often sympathetic to heretical ideas in relation to evolution and progress and group selection.

16. Supporting in this instance David Sloan Wilson and others against the orthodox rejection of group selection exemplified by Richard Dawkins (Sober and Wilson, 1999).


AcknowledgementThis article has been brewing for a long time. The author would like to thank Stephen Mennell especially for providing a stream of comments and suggestions, and also Joop Goudsblom and Eric Dunning for invaluable insights, conversation and encouragement, Richard Kilminster for raising many of the questions in the first place and Steven Loyal for sharing with me a mutual interest in (and writing partnership on) the work of Norbert Elias.

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Author biography

Stephen Quilley Technically a sociologist, has too great an interest in biology, human ecology and problems of ‘deep time’ to make conversation with conventional sociolo-gists straightforward. With a research programme grounded in Eliasian sociology and a focus on of long-term processes of social-ecological development, his interests are var-ied, including urban regeneration and political economy, ecological economics, complex adaptive systems, resilience and social innovation. Following study of social and politi-cal science (Cambridge University) and Russian and East European studies (Birmingham), Quilley did his doctoral research on the political economy of urban regeneration (Manchester). After lecturing in sociology at University College Dublin, in 2006 he took up a position in environmental politics at Keele University.

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