Biology Reinvigorated

In fact, analogy is a legitimate form of comparison, and comparison is the only practical means we have for the understanding of things. The fault of the biological sociologists was not that they used it but that they used it wrongly. Instead of trying to control their studies of society by their knowledge of biol ogy, they tried to infer the laws of the first from the laws of the second.Émile Durkheim, 1898In order to establish itself as a discipline, it was not enough for sociology to disassociate itself from philosophy and psychology. The lines appearing in the above epigraph, published exactly one hundred years ago, remind us of what is often not considered in the difficulty of establishing social sciences in the world as a whole: first - and as a question of priority - disciplines had to fight the widely prevailing influence jointly held by evolutionism, "social Darwinism," and "biological sociology" at the end of the nineteenth century. Durkheim's methodological warning thus contains something that elicits a "feeling of déjà vu" in us, with respect to some of the theoretical debates that the "scholarly community" puts forward today for the general public. Is this simply a superficial and somewhat coincidental similarity, or is it, rather, the rebirth of an idea

Political science · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · Race, Genetics, and Society