The Eternal Return of Sociology’s Repressed Biological Unconscious

Abstract

When the social sciences are presented as the most progressive of the three main bodies of knowledge — that is vis-à-vis the humanities and the natural sciences — a story is told whereby the social sciences provide voice and direction for what the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers had called the ‘project of humanity’. On the one hand, the social sciences incorporated the non-elite members of Homo sapiens whose lives did not leave the sorts of traces that nineteenth-century humanists had deemed worthy of study and, on the other, they bore secular witness to old theological ideas that humans stand out from the rest of nature by virtue of their uniquely ‘meaningful’ activities. Moreover, the other two bodies of knowledge are presented as offering an unholy alliance of the theoretical and the instrumental. Illustrative of the humanities is the educational regime of philosopher-kings in Plato’s Republic, in which a lifetime of contemplation becomes preparation for manipulative, authoritarian rule. In the case of the natural sciences, consider the application of the mathematical abstractions of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics to the exploitation of the earth and possibly beyond. In contrast, the social sciences appeared as the prime vehicle of humanity’s self-realization, treading a middle ground between the excesses of purely theoretical and purely instrumental knowledge, what Habermas used to — and critical realists still do — call the ‘emancipatory’ interest in knowledge (Bhaskar 1986).