Can We Survive Science? - Steve Fuller's Humanity 2.0 - Book Review

The founding fathers of sociology, such as Auguste Comte and Saint Simon, had a close engagement with debates and research in biology. Comte, for example, argued that it was by modeling itself on the holistic framework of biology that sociology could emerge as a scientific discipline and at the same time contribute to the revolutionary development of society. France was to be at the center of both revolutions in science and society (Gane 2006:3). Emile Durkheim (1951, 1958) and his generation thought in terms of medical metaphors such as “social pathology” to describe crime and deviance or the malfunctioning of social groups. In Suicide, the notion of anomie is an illustration of social pathology which he also developed in The Rules of Sociological Method. Ideas from evolutionary biology also entered into early sociology through the theories of Charles Darwin and primarily through the general impact of Herbert Spencer on early sociology. Spencer’s influence was fundamental to 19th-century sociology. The quest to create a science of society is neatly described by Daniel Breslau (2007:42–43) in his account of “The American Spencerians” when he notes that the “early sociologists were not interested in a sociology that looked like the natural sciences but in a natural science about society.” From these opening remarks, we can conclude that 19th-century sociologists closely followed developments in the natural sciences and that evolutionary biology provided an appropriate route toward “a natural science about society.”