Robert M. Young Online Writings
Science Studies, I (1971), 177-206.
Discussion Paper
EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY AND IDEOLOGY: THEN AND NOW
This paper was presented at a conference on 'The Social Impact of Modern Biology', organized by the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in London, 26-28 November I970. It will appear in the volume of conference proceedings edited by Watson Fuller-to be published on 21 May 1971 by Routledge & Kegan Paul as The Impact of Modern Biology (hard cover £1.75, paperback £0.50)-and is reprinted by kind permission. Because of the interest it aroused at the time, and the way in which it drew on material from several academic disciplines, we are taking the unusual step of reproducing the paper here so that readers may have the advantage of the extended bibliographical and discursive footnotes, which will not be included in the conference proceedings.
The paper was designed basically for an audience of scientists who were assumed to have no knowledge of recent literature on social and historical aspects of science. Dr Young is himself active within the history and philosophy of science, and is working towards a closer relationship with relevant studies in sociology and social anthropology. He makes no claim to a comprehensive knowledge of all the related background literature, nor to having provided here an exhaustive bibliography. This paper is in the nature of a report of work and thought in progress, and a provisional sketch of an emerging point of view. Discussion, criticism and elaboration of the paper's contents, in the form of Notes or Letters, will be welcomed.
[THE EDITORS]
* Alphabetical notes appear at the end of the text (pp. 189-206).
This paper is concerned with 'the attempt to develop a more adequate intellectual framework' for understanding 'the general principles involved in relating science and society’.1 In particular, I want to consider the relationship between science on the one hand and philosophical, social and political problems on the other. I hope to provide some suggestions which will help us to see the constitutive role of evaluative concepts in biology and will lead us to discuss values and politics as such : not cloaked in the specious objectivity of ideologically neutral positive science. I shall begin by contrasting this point of view with what I take to be the usual piecemeal approach to the study of science and society. Next I shall suggest that the philosophical status of certain key concepts in biology relate them as closely to the human and social sciences as they do to the physico-chemical ones. This point makes the introduction of the concept of ideology in biology much less contentious than it might appear to be at first sight. For reasons which I shall outline, the discussion will be conducted for the most part at one remove from molecular genetics and will concentrate on the general theory on which all modern biology is based. The examples which I will discuss are drawn from the nineteenth-century evolutionary debate, from Lysenkoism, and from current social and political extrapolations based on evolutionary biology. I hope to show that these form part of a continuous tradition in which it is routinely impossible to distinguish hard science from its economic and political context and from the generalizations-which often also serve as motives for the research-which are fed back into the social and political debate. The conclusion which I hope to support is that we will have to learn to think in new ways if we are really serious about exercising social responsibility in science. a
I hope that it will not be taken amiss if I begin by saying that it seems to me that most discussions of social responsibility in science reflect a Fabian approach to the fundamental problem, that is, favouring a gradual, piecemeal strategy rather than attacking the enemy head-on. I should perhaps remind you that the concept of Fabianism is double-edged: the resulting tactics, in the hands of Fabius Maximus (surnamed Cunctator, the delayer) did wear out the strength of Hannibal, while at the same time they were based on the fact that Fabius lacked the resources to meet Hannibal in open battle. It is clear that we lack the intellectual and moral resources to attack on all fronts, but it is surely worth while to begin to enquire about the equipment we would need.
The result of our piecemeal strategy is that we persistently formulate our problems in terms of science on the one hand and values on the other, although there are tentative attempts to define their relationship. Looking at the papers which have been presented at this conference, one finds that they consider aspects of technology, industry, medicine, the very mixed fruits of the applications of science in the form of genetic manipulation, immunology, agriculture, and the environment. Finally, we have been told about fragmentation and about the direct political role of scientists. If we add to these the crisis in the funding of science, the dramatic consequences of linking immunology with surgery, the side effects of chemotherapy, and the very direct effects of defoliants-followed in some contexts by other sorts of very grotesque fragmentation-one is left with a picture of the ship of scientific objectivity buffeted by the winds of the military-industrial complex, technology, medicine, and so on. On such a buffeted ship, how do we who are also morally concerned, responsible men conceive and carry out our sense of social responsibility? About all we can do in these circumstances is to gasp out our complaints: 'We caught you.' 'You can't do that to me (or my findings).' 'I won't do it.' 'I'm concerned about that.' Some move on to ask, 'What are we going to do about it?' and go on to shout, 'Stop that!' or 'Get on with this', while a few drop out to do something which they find more morally satisfying or socially relevant. This last group is related to a mounting (and more or less coherent) critique of the scientific world view and its relations with the ethos of advanced technocratic societies. Much of the strength of the counter-culture and the appeal of pop pseudo-biology stems from the failure of professional scientists to ask certain questions in relevant ways. b
At this point we come up against the fundamental assumptions of modern science and find that we are the victims of our own myths. The central problem lies at the heart of the view of science which we hold and propagate. We are struggling to integrate science and values at the same time that we are prevented from doing so by our most basic assumptions. It would be ludicrous to attempt briefly to discuss the metaphysical foundations of modern science, but it may be useful to remind ourselves of certain key issues and to mention some concepts which bear directly on scientific explanation in biology.
In the seventeenth century the development of methodology and of the quantitative handling of data was related to a fundamental metaphysical shift in the definition of a scientific explanation. The concepts of purpose and value the 'final causes' and teleological explanations-which had been central to the Aristotelian view of nature, were banished from the explanations of science (though not from the philosophy of nature). The questions one asks of nature could be as evaluative and qualitative as one liked, but the answers had to be made in terms of matter, motion and number. In the physico-chemical sciences this list of so-called 'primary qualities' has been modified to include some less precise concepts such as force, energy and field, but the fundamental paradigm of explanation-the goal of all science-has been to reduce or explain all phenomena in physico-chemical terms. The history of science is routinely described as a progressive approximation to this goal. This is the metaphysical and methodological explanation for the fact that molecular biology is the queen of the biological sciences and the basis on which other biological (including human) sciences seek, ultimately, to rest their arguments. I need hardly say that this has been a rather forlorn goal for much of biology and the source of a great deal of punning and sheer bluff. c
The task of demonstrating the role of ideology in the most nearly physico-chemical aspects of biology is, in principle, the same as that of providing an ideological critique of the fundamental paradigm of all post-seventeenth-century science. This task has been undertaken by Whitehead, Mannheim, Burtt and others, and an assessment of it cannot be made here. d In leaving this question aside, however, we should not let the undoubted success of molecular biology obscure the fact that most of biology is far from qualifying for the more difficult task of requiring a metaphysical critique. For the most part the biological sciences lie half way along a continuum extending from pure mathematics and the physico-chemical sciences at one end and the woolliest of the human and social sciences at the other. The particular consequence of this intermediate position which is most unpalatable is that biology partakes as much of the philosophical and methodological problems of the social and political sciences as it does of the physico-chemical ones. One can support this argument by pointing out that there is a hierarchy of concepts in modern science which extends from the purely physico-chemical to the purely evaluative and that biology shares a number of the most significant ones with the 'softest' sciences.
At the fundamental level one finds the primary qualities mentioned above, and these are employed to explain the subjective or secondary qualities of colour, odour, taste, temperature, etc. e In biology these qualities are the terms in which we analyse biological properties such as irritability, contractility, and so on. (The concept of a 'biological property' was a conscious departure from the official paradigm of explanation, and continues to serve us well.) 2 Properties are the terms in which we analyse structures and functions, and in doing so we employ (along with the human and social sciences, which cling obstinately to organic analogies 3) the concepts of adaptation and utility. Structures and functions are the terms in which we analyse the next level of explanation, organisms. On the basis of the theory of organic evolution, biologists argue, of course, that persons are organisms, but the concept of a person retains a further analysis from an older metaphysical tradition and continues to be subjected to a dualistic division of the mental and the bodily.4 I want to return for the purpose of this argument to the concepts of a structure and function and trace some of the related concepts along a different path. It takes only a moment's reflection to see that the related concepts of adaptation and maladaptation, normal and pathological, health and disease, clean and dirty, adjustment and deviance are very relative indeed, and the employment of them is seldom far from explicit or implicit moral (and often political) values. It is now a commonplace of the philosophy of science that all facts are theory-laden. In biology, many facts are related to concepts which are inescapably value-laden, and the same concepts are used sometimes directly, sometimes analogously-in the human and the socio-political sciences. f
By this point it should not be thought too great a jump to introduce the concept of ‘Ideology'. The term has traditionally had derogatory and political connotations which are connected with its popularization by Marx, who concentrated his use of it as a term of abuse for ideas which served as weapons for social interests. But Marxists were soon subjected to their own critique, and this led to a general definition of ideology: 'when a particular definition of reality comes to be attached to a concrete power interest, it may be called an ideology. 5
Before Marx, however, those who coined the term and who called themselves Idéologues considered themselves to be straightforward scientists who argued that 'we must subject the ideas of science to the science of ideas'.6 Their efforts in epistemology, psychology and physiology helped to lay the foundations for modern experimental medicine in France, but Napoleon found that the Idéologues were opposing his imperial ambitions, and his criticisms and oppressive activities gave the term a derogatory connotation.7 Recent writers have attempted to re-establish a value-neutral use of the concept in the discipline of the sociology of knowledge. g
The connection between what I was saying about the position and concepts of biology along a continuum, with that of ideology, should become clear if we adopt the point of view of the sociology of knowledge which argues that situationally detached knowledge is a special case and that situationally conditioned knowledge is the norm. Knowledge is both a product of social change and a factor in social change and/or the opposition to it. 8 This is a commonplace, but its systematic application has radical consequences for the idea of 'objective' science. The fundamental claim is that our conception of reality itself is socially constructed. You will recognize the essential insight in Marx's oft-quoted assertion that 'It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social existence which determines their consciousness.’9 More recently it has been argued that no human thought, with the exception of mathematics and parts of the natural sciences, is immune from the ideologizing influences of its social context.10 It is in this sense that the sociology of knowledge offers itself as a tool for analysing the 'social construction of reality'. h If we adopt this point of view, we can approach the problem of the relationship between science and society from a new perspective. Although the sociology of knowledge was developed as a result of problems in the social sciences, it can be argued that our own problems should lead us to apply it to similar questions in natural science and especially in biology.. Just as the concept of a hard, discrete fact has had to be given up in the philosophy of science and the pure sensation in psychology, the scientific concept which depends on these-that of 'Objectivity'-must surely be brought under scrutiny. Going further, the privileged place of science in society and culture, sharply cutting off its substantive statements from values, politics and ideology, must surely be examined very closely. i
I appreciate that the point of view which I am advocating is itself ideological, but it is not purely so. At the same time I am arguing that we should search for these factors-not, I hasten to add, to expunge them but to discuss social and political issues as such. I would equally argue that the case for the role of such factors depends on presenting evidence which convinces a morally concerned and critically thinking man. The point is that there is no escaping the political debate, a debate which extends to the definition of ideology but also to that of science and its most basic assumptions.
In its early manifestations the concept of ideology conveyed a sense of more or less conscious distortion bordering on deliberate lies. I do not mean to imply this. Like the concepts of alienation and exploitation, ideology does not depend on the conscious intentions or the awareness of men. Nice men exploit, and contented men are alienated, just as honest men have false consciousness.11 To deny this would be to commit the intentional fallacy, a polemical device which is widespread enough these days. I know a professional manager of vast estates who claims resolutely that his work has nothing to do with politics, while at the opposite extreme Angela Davis and the American Black Panthers claim that all black people in prison are political prisoners. Similarly, just ten years ago Daniel Bell proclaimed The End of Ideology. Unfortunately, the book in which he did this contains fulsome thanks to organizations, publications and individuals who have since been shown to have close financial and political links with the American CIA.12 Thus, the effort to absorb the ideological point of view into positive science only illustrates the ubiquitousness of ideology in intellectual life. j
Having spent most of the available time in outlining the philosophical issues involved in the effort to relate biological science with values, I can only sketch some of the evidence which I believe justifies the use of ideological analyses in biological problems. I shall mention three case studies which were chosen because they raise the issues starkly and have been examined in sufficient detail so that one can safely refer to the secondary literature : the nineteenth-century evolutionary debate, Lysenkoism, and the current trend of writing speculative politics in the form of pseudo-biology.
Most historical research on the development of the theory of organic evolution has stressed one of two themes : firstly the scientific story based on geology, palaeontology, zoogeography, embryology and domestication, along with the post-Darwinian debate on the validity of the mechanism of natural selection, leading eventually to the neo-Darwinian theory with its basis in genetics and molecular biology. The other perspective is the Victorian debate on the conflict between science and theology which eventually centred on evolution. But there is a third and equally important theme in the whole story, one which contributed to and derived from the scientific and theological issues. I want to use this aspect of the debate as the basis for the analogies I shall make about the recent past and the present.
If one both broadens and narrows one's perspective on the nineteenth-century evolutionary debate, it emerges that social and ideological factors defined the context of the debate at the same time as they determined key issues about the narrowest scientific problem: the precise mechanism of evolutionary change. This context involves a number of complexly interrelated issues which cannot be considered here : natural theology, Utilitarianism, phrenology, historiography, belief in progress, positivism, and so on. If we follow the thread of the scientific debate, it leads from the economic writings of Adam Smith and T. R. Malthus, to the theological and ethical works of Paley, to the theological geology of William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick, to the equally theological-but anti-literalist and anti-evolutionary-writings of Charles Lyell, and on to Darwin, Spencer and Wallace. This debate was closely intertwined with and fed directly into controversies in psychology, physiology, medicine, sociology, anthropology and genetics, all of which were invoked in debates on 'Social Darwinism’ and imperialism. There is not at any point any clear line of demarcation between pure science, generalizations based on it, and the related theological, social, political and ideological issues.
However, if one were forced to choose one issue which was more nearly central than any other to the whole debate, it would be the role of struggle in defining the relations between men and between man and his environment. Was the competitive struggle for existence inevitable, inescapable, and even ordained, and did it or did it not produce moral and social progress? The Malthusian theory of population provided Darwin with the key to the central analogy between changes produced by the selective efforts of the breeders of domesticated animals and the process of natural selection. Although a great deal of controversy about the meaning of Darwin's theory for man and society was conducted in his name, Darwin resolutely declined to take part in it. One's analysis of the role of ideology in his work lies, therefore, in the context, the genesis and the debate into which his ideas fed. k But even Darwin pointed out that every fact must be for or against some theory.13 He might have added that for practically everyone else, facts and theories were exquisitely relevant to social, political and ideological positions in the Victorian debate.
Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, was also indebted to Malthus for his insight into the mechanism of evolution. However., he very soon saw that the basis of the mechanism in Malthusian theory came into direct conflict both with his socialism and his philosophy of nature. Consequently, he abandoned natural selection as applied to crucial issues in man's physical, mental and social development. He drew explicitly on anti-Malthusian social theories in doing so. He concluded (rightly) that Malthusianism was used by conservative and liberal thinkers as an excuse for blaming nature for man's inhumanity to man and taking a fatalistic view about the impossibility of radically restructuring Society14.
Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, was actively seeking a mechanism which would guarantee social progress, and he saw that the Malthusian analogy could not provide that. We tend to think of Spencer as a Victorian prig and a champion of the losing side-the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In doing so we forget two important historical facts. First, the question of the mechanism of evolutionary change was wide open throughout the nineteenth century (even Darwin became progressively Lamarckian in his thinking) and was not resolved in favour of neo-Darwinism until well into the twentieth century.15 Second, Spencer was very influential in nineteenth-century biology, and his social theories were far more influential than those of Darwin and company: so-called 'Social Darwinism' is a misnomer.16 Spencer is quite explicit about the role of ideology in his view of the mechanism of evolution. He had turned to biology to find support for an extreme version of individualist laissez-faire social theory (vestiges of which have been evident at this conference), and he thought he had found it in Lamarckianism. l Towards the end of his life he prefaced his umpteenth defence of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (in a debate with Weismann) with the following remarks: 'a right answer to the question whether acquired characters are or are not inherited, underlies right beliefs, not only in Biology and Psychology, but also in Education, Ethics, and Poltics.17
The definitive answer to Spencer's hope of evolving the perfect society, if only men would stop interfering with inevitable progress by ill-considered things like public health measures, state schools, a postal system, etc., came from T. H. Huxley. Between 1860, when Huxley smote Bishop Wilberforce's theological pretensions against Darwin's theory, and 1893, when (again at Oxford) he delivered his cautionary lecture on 'Evolution and Ethics', his defence of biology had moved from casting aside a simplistic theological account of life to earnestly advocating that men realize that science and evolutionary theory could not provide a guarantee of progress or a substitute for moral and political discourse. In the meantime evolution had been invoked to support all sorts of political and ideological positions from the most reactionary to the most progressive, from total laissez-faire to revolutionary Marxism. m The fallacy which Huxley was combating was the naturalistic one.18 While agreeing that we cannot infer human morals, much less inevitable social progress, from science, we should not fail to see the complementary point that moral and political views were already deeply imbedded in the science of the day.
I hope that I have made plausible the claim that the nineteenth-century debate was far from free of ideology at any level. The link between this debate and the notorious case of Lysenkoism was one of the would-be participants in the evolutionary debate. Karl Marx wanted to dedicate the English edition of Das Kapital to Darwin, who politely declined and wrote to a friend, 'What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection.'19 Marx wrote to Engels that he saw in Darwin's theory 'the basis in natural history for our view'.20 However, Marx and Engels were at pains to divorce evolution from its Malthusian basis. Like Wallace (on the left), they saw that the Malthus-Darwin view of natural selection was available as the basis for a reactionary, fatalistic view of man's position and social change; and like Spencer (on the right), they saw that it failed to provide a guarantee of social progress towards utopia. Marx and Engels thus rejected natural selection and tended to support Lamarckianism as more congenial with their view of nature, history and social change. n Once again, one should recall that the experimental evidence was at that time open to a number of theoretical interpretations.
There are those who would argue that since about 1900 there has been a decisive shift in evolutionary biology and that the progressive working out of genetic and molecular mechanisms has brought major aspects of its fundamental research into such close contact with pure physico-chemical science that the role of social, political and ideological assumptions is rapidly becoming vanishingly small. But in every period since the Renaissance it has been claimed that the level of positive science has finally been reached in biology. It was thought that the paradigm of modern biology was firmly established in the midst of the nineteenth-century debate, and it is thought again now. The point is that it has subsequently been shown time after time that at the time it was impossible clearly to separate the factors. We are now in an analogous period when people are debating the social meaning of biology, but before mentioning aspects of the current debate, I want to touch on Lysenkoism.
There is little point in my reviewing the controversy: there is an excellent book and some other good studies of it.21 However, I would like to suggest how we might approach the literature on Lysenkoism. Even the term evokes in us horrors of the suppression of a scientific tradition, censorship, pure ideological invective at the expense of objectivity in science and at the expense of agricultural yields in a hard-pressed country. It also conjures up the awful consequences of the cult of the individual bolstered up by Western anti-communist pressures extending from the Revolution through the Cold War. It should be recalled that it was Stalin's direct support for Lysenko which was decisive. This continued under Khrushchev, and the catastrophe in agriculture which was partly attributable to Lysenkoism played a role in Khrushchev's downfall.22 Western scientists see the Lysenko episode as pure, rank abuse of science and use it to shore up the anti-communism which they acquire from other influences. o In sum, not very relevant for us.
But the fine texture of the controversy is very illuminating just because we are so complacent about it. I suggest that we attempt to study it in a different light, not as pure distortion or pornography but as the sort of pathological exaggeration which we find so useful in biological research in illuminating the norm. As Professor Gombrich points out, caricature can reveal important features by means of grotesque exaggerations. 23
Two contrasting points will suggest what I mean. First, from the point of view of at least quasi-objective experimental science, the controversy is very reassuring. The men who stood out against all the hardships of the period had something to cling to-the methods and findings of international genetics and agrobiology. The lengths to which the Lysenkoists had to go in expunging all traces of chromosomal biology is an inversion-a reversing mirror-of the rational structure of biological science, showing the way it hangs together as a network of evidence and inferences. They had to rewrite textbooks in every field of biology, medicine, psychology, pedagogy, and so on, and to institute censorship at every stage of publications.24The contrasting point is that from an ideological point of view Lysenkoism makes perfect sense if we see it in the light of the continuing controversy leading from the nineteenth-century debate. As one of the Lysenkoist enthusiasts wrote, 'Weismannism-Morganism serves today in the arsenal of contemporary imperialism as a means for providing a "scientific base" for its reactionary politics.' Another said, 'It disarms practice and orients man towards resignation to the allegedly eternal laws of nature, towards passivity, towards an aimless search for hidden treasure and expectation of lucky accidents.' A typical article in the period was entitled 'Mendelist-Morganist Genetics in Defence of Malthusianism'.25 In the same period J. D. Bernal wrote a withering critique of a number of neo-Malthusian socially pessimistic works by eminent British scientists-including a Presidential Address to the British Association-which were based on just the analogies which the Russian writers mention.26
It is rarely the case that the history of science produces such a clear-cut example of the attempt of ideology to root out the well-attested findings of a rapidly-developing research tradition, culminating in a conclusive physico-chemical explanation of the basic mechanisms involved. It seems to me that this episode provides a very promising research laboratory for studying the limits of the ideological analysis of biology. Two conclusions are already clear : it is seldom the case that one is dealing with pure science or pure ideology. Multiple causation is the rule. p Second, a whole generation of biologists in Russia learned to see nature in Lysenkoist terms and to do science in good faith within that framework. q I said a long way back that concepts of health and disease, adjustment and deviance are very relative indeed. It is worth remarking that Medvedev was committed for a time to a mental hospital for having allowed his book on the Lysenko affair to be published in the West. In an important sense he was mad to do it, but strong protests led to his release instead of committing the protesters as well.
This leads me to the current debate. Professor Bettelheim tells us that student radicals are suffering from neurosis (many, he assures us, can be cured by psychoanalytic psychotherapy). Professor Lorenz explains human aggression and student protest in ethological terms (less hope there),27 while Herbert Marcuse tells us that the positions of both the young radicals and the old reactionaries are biologically determined. r The list of authors who have recently written ideologically prescriptive works in the guise of descriptive and generalized accounts based on genetics, ethology, archaeology and anthropology, and general biology is by now familiar to most of us: Morris, Ardrey, Comfort, Towers and Lewis, Koestler. It is growing daily.28 From the point of view of professional scientists, one can feel safely distanced from this use of biology. We do not take it seriously when Lysenko cites pseudo-evidence against intra-specific competition, or when Robert Ardrey claims that masses of scientific data support the inevitability of such competition. s We can even feel that it is little to do with us if Professor Darlington-with 'FRS' prominently printed on the bookjacket-cites a mass of scientific and historical evidence punningly interpreted in support of reactionary social doctrines, including apartheid. t (We knew he thought such things, after all.) But just as the Lysenkoists argued that modern genetics gave support to Western bourgeois reactionaries, it is clear that Professor Darlington's pseudo-science gives comfort to the South Africans. For example, when a highly critical review appeared over my name in the New Statesman, I received a letter from a South African graduate patiently explaining that my reading of the book was a result of my ideological bias.29 My point is that of course he was absolutely right about me, and I am right about Professor Darlington's book.
More and more people are trying to base generalizations about man, society, culture and politics on the biological sciences. They have always done so and will continue to do so. Many of them may be relatively easy targets, but the essential point is that no one can confidently draw, the line between fact, interpretation, hypothesis and speculation (which may itself be fruitful). It seems to me that it is the social responsibility of science to enter wholeheartedly into this debate and directly answer such works in the non-specialist press. Paradoxically, we must relax the authority of science and see it in an ideological perspective in order to get nearer to the will-o'-the-wisp of objectivity. We have won a Pyrrhic victory in establishing the part-reality and part-myth of the autonomy and objectivity of science, and the existence of this Society and its conflicting aims reflects our unsteady position. In one sense science should feel strong enough to stop flailing horses which died in the nineteenth century in their attempts to protect the status and methods of science. But in another sense, we need-for our own moral purposes-to think seriously about the metaphysics of science, about the philosophy of nature, of man and of society, and especially about the ideological assumptions which underlie, constrain and are fed by science. Since we have systematically weeded out this tradition among working scientists-one which flourished until the 1920s we need help from other disciplines in gaining the necessary perspective, and we could well turn to the continuing traditions of inquiry in the social and political sciences which have gained impetus from the civil and international conflicts of advanced technological societies. u
We can, if we are reluctant to consider evaluative concepts as integral to biology, retain the distinction between the scientific and the evaluative. Although I believe that the maintenance of this distinction is philosophically indefensible, the programme which can be recommended for the further study of social responsibility in science is operationally indistinguishable from the one which follows from the strong version of my thesis: study works on ideology and social science and apply their analyses to our own work in order to test the limits of pure science. v I suspect that little will remain inviolable, but whether or not I am right about this, we will have cultivated a perspective which encourages the evaluative and political consideration of scientific concepts and will find ourselves in greater control of extrapolations from our work and much more wary of the specious aura of scientific objectivity in which they are cloaked. I am in no sense recommending an anti-rational, much less an irrational, activity." The aim is to open up more aspects of science and its context to public debate so that conflicting values can be discussed as such. Science is no substitute for morality or politics, nor is it independent at any level from them. w We need to see that ideology is an inescapable level of discourse, and need (in the first instance) to debate conflicting ideological positions and (in the last instance) to face and resolve the actual conflicts between the needs and goals of men in the appropriate way.
(C) BSSRS 1971.
NOTES
a I have asked that these discursive and bibliographical notes be placed at the end of the essay rather than at the foot of the relevant pages in the hope that the paper will be read on its own. They are intended as a commentary to provide materials for study for any who may wish to consider adopting the point of view recommended in the paper. A number of people who heard the paper and have written to me about it have asked for a critical bibliography on which to base private study and discussion groups.
This seems particularly useful since-for reasons which the paper seeks to illuminate-the reading of many scientists has become sequestered from the literature which I shall cite. There are, of course, some exceptions: the bomb, the Vietnam war, growing awareness of pollution. These and other issues relating scientific work to social issues have become the subject of study groups, occasional editorials in scientific journals, and some concerted political action. However, the perspective from which these issues are seen is usually the individualist, ethical point of view which dominated the BSSRS conference and which I am suggesting we may find it worthwhile to transcend.
These notes are not designed to parade knowledge but to provide non-specialist readers with access to the means of production at a level which need not be so daunting that they are tempted to acknowledge the domain of yet another sort of expert and then move on. Rather, I hope to encourage working scientists to take part in developing the necessary philosophical and political awareness for exercising genuine social responsibility. If one sets out to take part in reversing the process of the division of labour in science, one must necessarily take time from other research, professional and leisure activities. If it turns out to be impossible to avoid the division of labour between scientists as experts and as moral and political beings, then I would argue that social responsibility in science is not possible.
I am aware that there are inelegancies and straightforward blunders in this paper. It is meant to be a first attempt to make explicit issues which have arisen in the course of my research and in other activities, which seemed (but no longer seem) unrelated to that research. The argument is based on the assumption that science and politics, thought and action, and academic and radical aspects of life should not be kept distinct. Of course, they can be kept distinct, but it is becoming clear that the distinctions serve covert political positions. Those who would argue that politics should be kept out of the classroom and the laboratory are taking a profoundly political stand which they disguise with the mystification that 'the status quo is apolitical'.
The works which are mentioned in these notes cover a wide range of disciplines. I have attempted to include references to books and articles which are accessible to scientists with little or no background in the history, philosophy and social studies of science, while I have also tried to draw the attention of professionals in those fields to perspectives which are not usually represented in their professional journals. The aim is to provide a context in which these writings will all be seen as part of a single debate.
For readers who would prefer a short list of books on these issues, the following are recommended: A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge,1925, also paperback); E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 2nd edition (London, Routledge, 1932; also New York, Anchor paperback); K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Wirth and Shils (London, Routledge, 1954; also paperback); P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, Doubleday, 1966; also Anchor paperback); C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York, Oxford, 1959; also Penguin paperback). At an elementary level, three explicitly introductory texts will help the beginner: J. Plamenatz, Ideology (London, Macmillan, 1970; also paperback), for a general analysis of the concept; H. D. Aiken, The Age of Ideology: The Nineteenth Century Philosophers (New York, Mentor paperback, 1956), for a historical perspective; C. W. Mills, The Marxists (Harmondsworth, Penguin paperback, 1963), for a safe guide through that daunting literature.
To some, the text of this paper will appear straightforward and even commonplace, while to others it will seem impossibly contentious and confused. It was addressed to an audience consisting largely of scientists, most of whom were assumed to work in molecular genetics, and the presentation of the argument is based on an assessment of their likely assumptions. Professional scholars in the history, philosophy and social relations of science will recognise three crucial points underlying the argument. I believe that the points are to some extent original, if not in substance, at least in their juxtaposition. The first is that traditional issues in epistemology (which have been dominated by the epistemology of the physico-chemical sciences since the seventeenth century) take on a new perspective when seen from the point of view of the biological sciences. By stressing the pivotal position of the biological sciences, the philosophy of the social sciences may be saved from collapsing into hackneyed problems in the philosophy of physicalist reductionism. If the biological and human sciences will recognize their common problems and the continuity of their concepts, perhaps they can revive meaningful epistemological discussion. The second point is that the sociology of knowledge becomes much more interesting and relevant if we extend its domain from social reality to nature, thus eliminating a distinction maintained by most students of that discipline at the same time that we open the way to a genuinely anthropological approach to science and to nature. The third point is that the juxtaposition of new perspectives in the epistemology of science and the anthropology of nature, seem to me to make most sense from the point of view of a radical socialist political position. I would say that they only make sense from that point of view, but I am not yet fully convinced that I can safely ignore certain well-known philosophical difficulties which arise from such statements. Since the maintenance of a distinction between philosophical and political positions is one of the points which I have set out to bring under scrutiny, it should be obvious that the position outlined here is not yet fully worked out.
b For indictments of the scientific, cultural and political assumptions of modern technocratic societies, see T. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture. Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (New York, Doubleday, 1969; also Anchor paperback; London, Faber, 1970), esp. 50,.56 n, 100, and ch. 7, esp. 232 (London edition); see also the writings of Herbert Marcuse (cited below, note r). However much one may disagree with the views of the Underground, its rejection of the scientific world view reflects on the assumptions of science and its cultural context. I have discussed the social and political significance of one aspect of the Underground-rock music and its festivals-in 'The Functions of Rock', New Edinburgh Review, no. 10 (I 970), 4-I4 (Dec.). One can move in two directions from Roszak's rather loosely-argued case. The first is into direct action on the model of Jerry Rubin's Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1970; also paperback; London, Cape, 1970), which makes the neglected point that all radical and revolutionary actions need not involve violence on the part of those who wish to change society. (See also the excellent paper by Jon Beckwith in the Proceedings of the BSSRS Conference.) The second direction eventually leads down the same road but by means of a clear appreciation of the role of the sciences in the existing order of society. This can best be seen by beginning with relatively simple cases, such as that discussed by Kathleen Gough, 'World Revolution and the Science of Man', in T. Roszak (ed.), The Dissenting Academy (New York, Random House, 1967; London, Chatto & Windus, 1969; also Penguin paperback), Penguin edition, 125-44.
The move from these works to the mainstream of methodological writings in the social sciences must be cautious if one is not to be caught up in the very problems which one is attempting to avoid. A useful intermediary document is A. Gouldner, 'Anti-Minotaur: the Myth of Value-Free Sociology', Social Problems, 9 (1962), 199-213; reprinted in I. L. Horowitz (ed.), The New Sociology (Oxford, 1964; also paperback), 196-217. Beyond this, most standard treatments need careful translation. There is a fairly straightforward reason for this: the social sciences (rather forlornly) set up the physico-chemical sciences as a model for their own methodology and/or their assumptions. Therefore, in order to make use of the insights of the social sciences, one must set aside their deference towards the physico-chemical sciences. This deference runs very deep, and setting it aside often requires very complicated efforts of translation. For example, E. Durkheim's classical exposition of The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), 8th edition, trans. Solovay and Mueller (Chicago, 1938; also Free Press paperback) argues for the autonomy of social facts and against reductionism but still offers the methodology and assumptions of the natural sciences as models for the social sciences. Similary, the social sciences make claims to objectivity and neutrality analogous to those in the natural sciences. The classical statement of this position is M. Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1903-17), trans. Shils and Finch (New York, Free Press, 1949). The majority of social scientists still adhere to the crucial fact-value distinction on which the concept of objectivity depends. See, for example, R. Dahrendorf, 'Values and Social Science: The Value Dispute in Perspective', in Essays in the Theory of Society (London, Routledge, 1968), ch. I, for an updating of the Weberian point of view. These expositions of the position of social scientists give a clear picture of certain aspects of their assumptions which, I submit, one needs to understand in order better to ignore them for the purposes of the approach which I am advocating.
c The most difficult task for an audience of scientists is to entertain the possibility that the most basic assumptions of modern science are conventions-that the metaphysics of seventeenth-century science, as modified and codified in modern scientific positivism, constitute a definition of reality and of what is acceptable as a scientific explanation. A. N. Whitchead has called the belief that the conventions of what is real (ontology), and of how we can know it (epistemology), can lead us to a knowledge of reality itself, 'the fallacy of misplaced concreteness'. (Science and the Modern World, op. cit., note a, 80-2). An approach to nature which has served us well for certain limited purposes is, in fact, only one among many which are available to us. We must learn seriously to consider alternative ontologies, especially where the phenomena of life and society are concerned. This is not a call for teleology, gestalt, holism, or other pseudo-solutions which, rather than being cures, are themselves symptoms of the difficulties involved in applying the scientific paradigm to life and man.
For historical and philosophical studies of the crucial change in the conception of a scientific explanation in the seventeenth century see the works of Whitehead and Burtt, cited in note a, and E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. Dikshoorn (Oxford, 1961; also paperback), esp. 431-44; M. B. Hesse, Forces and Fields (London, Nelson, 1961; also Totowa, New Jersey, Littlefeld and Adams paperback), esp. ch. 7, 'The Corpuscular Philosophy'; R. Boyle, A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (London, Taylor, 1688). For a view which attempts to place the mathematical and mechanical assumptions in a wider context of ideas of order in the period, see M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London, Tavistock, 1970), esp. 243, 273, 303, 348-9. For a brief exposition of the primary-secondary quality distinction, see R. J. Hirst, 'Primary and Secondary Qualities', in P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, Macmillan, 1967), vol. 6, 455-7; for a discussion of the philosophical consequences for the biological and human sciences, see R. M. Young, 'Animal Soul', ibid., vol. I, I22-7.
Most writing in the history of science reflects the prevailing belief among scientists that science can be treated in relative isolation from social and political issues. This leads to the presentation of the history of the subject as the internal history of ideas, leading progressively into new domains of nature. This is well conveyed by the title of one of the best general surveys: the history of science is described as the advancement of The Edge of Objectivity by C. C. Gillispie (Princeton and Oxford, 1960; also paperback). There is a growing movement among historians of science to set aside the distinction between the 'internal' history of science and 'external' or contextual factors in the theology, philosophy, social and political issues and events in any given period. (See below, note i).
Most debates on the assumptions, methods and aims of the biological, 'behavioural' and social sciences are explicitly or implicitly concerned with the question of reductionism. The most useful standard source is E. Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (London, Routledge, 1961), esp. chs. 11-14. See also M. Brodbeck (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London, Collier-Macmillan, 1968); R. Carnap, 'Psychology in Physical Language', and O. Neurath, 'Sociology and Physicalism', in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (Glencoe, Free Press, 1959), 165-98 and 282-317; C. Hempel, 'Logical Positivism and the Social Sciences', in P. Achinstein and S. F. Barker (eds.), The Legacy of Logical Positivism (Baltimore, Hopkins, 1969), 163-94, esp. 172, 178-80; L. W. Beck, 'The "Natural Science Ideal" in the Social Sciences', Scientific Monthly, 68 (1949), 386-94. For a more eclectic view, see D. Emmet and A. MacIntyre (eds.), Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis (London, Macmillan paperback, 1970), esp. the selections by Alfred Schutz.
d See note a; also X. Mannheim, Essay on the Sociology of Knowledge (London, Routledge, 1952); Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology (London, Routledge, 1953); Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London, Routledge, 1956). Mannheim believed that the intelligentsia could be relatively above the political fight. In recent years it has seemed more plausible that they are (along with their students) at the centre of it, and the claims of academics to be above it are really coming from stage right. Once again, the status quo is not apolitical; politics are already in the classroom and laboratory. In his illuminating ideological analysis of British culture, Perry Anderson begins by saying: 'Louis Althusser has recently written that within the general system of higher education "the number one strategic point of the action of the dominant class" is "the very knowledge students receive from their teachers". This is "the true fortress of class influence in the university"; "it is by the very nature of the knowledge it imparts to students that the bourgeoisie exerts its greatest control over them".' 'Components of the National Culture', New Left Review, no. 50 (1968), 3-57 (July/Aug.), at pp. 3-4. Anderson excludes the natural sciences and the creative arts from his analysis and suggests that 'the dose of "objectivity" in the natural sciences and "subjectivity" in art is symmetrically greater than either in the social sciences ..., and they therefore have correspondingly more mediated relationships to the social structure. They do not, in other words, directly provide our basic concepts of man and society-the natural sciences because they forge concepts for the understanding of nature, not society, and art because it deals with man and society, but does not provide us with their concepts.' (5-6.) The argument of the present paper is designed to undermine the distinctions on which Anderson's exclusions depend. The reasons he gives for making the exclusions are, I believe, based on a fundamental misreading of the roles of both science (especially biology) and art in generating views and concepts for the understanding of man and society, if only because both make basic contributions to the disciplines which Anderson does consider. (Anderson's essay has been reprinted in A. Cockburn and R. Blackburn (eds.), Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action (Harmondsworth, Penguin paperback, 1969), 214-84; see also below, notes i and u.)
e Many natural and social scientists would argue that the problem should be stated in terms of levels of analysis based on differing degrees of complexity of the empirical domains. The position being argued in this paper is that the sciences should be placed on a continuum lying between the theoretical extremes of the purely formal (mathematics and some parts of physics) and the purely evaluative (social planning and pure ideology). The end points are limiting extremes. Similarly, the distinctions between objective and subjective and between fact and value should be seen in terms of continua. The method of analysis which I am suggesting is the reverse of the usual one: do not assume the valueneutrality and objectivity of science. Search for values and ideological influences. When you grow weary, the residue can be called 'objective'.
The argument of this section is more fully developed in my paper on 'Persons, Organisms, . . . and Primary Qualities', delivered to the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, London, 1969 (in preparation for publication); cf. Foucault, op. cit., note C, 357-60, on the conceptual affinities between the human and biological sciences. My point of view about the position of biology is, once again, in opposition to the mainstream of the philosophy of science, which is dominated by physics as the paradigm science and physicalism as the paradigm of explanation. (See above, note c.) In viewing the problem from this perspective, the most tempting alternative is to disconnect the human and biological sciences from the physico-chemical ones. This is the path chosen by Continental phenomenology. See, for example, Foucault, The Order of Things (op. cit., note c), 348-55. The point, however, is to reconcile man and nature, not to abrogate the problem by placing them in opposition. I have discussed this issue in 'The Divided Science' (essay review of R. D. Laing's The Divided Self, Delta, no. 38 (1966), 13-18 (Spring); 'Association of Ideas', in P. P. Weiner (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, Scribner's, in the press); and 'Functionalism', ibid.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities has dominated modern epistemology and is fundamental to the reductionist goal of modern science. There are two recent, lucid discussions of the philosophical issues involved in the distinction: J. Bennett, 'Substance, Reality, and Primary Qualities', American Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1965), 1-17; D. M. Armstrong, 'The Secondary Qualities', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 46 (1968), 225-241. The clearest exposition which I have seen of the consequences of the distinction for scientific explanation is M. Brodbeck, 'Mental and Physical: Identity versus Sameness', in P. K. Feyerabend and G. Maxwell (eds.), Matter, Mind, and Method (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1966), 40-58; cf. comments relating this issue to biological explanation by R. M. Young, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 18 (1967), 325-3o, and Whitehead, op. cit., note a, esp. ch. 4.
f M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, Routledge, 1966; also Penguin paperback). The concept of 'dirt' provides an excellent entrance into the intimate relations between evaluative and natural conceptions. There is no place for concepts of clean and dirty (any more than for adaptive and maladaptive, normal and pathological, health and disease) in a pure reductionist framework. Dirt, after all, is only 'matter out of place'. 'Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.' (Penguin edition, 48.) There is no absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. Eliminating it is a positive effort to organize the environment (12). Once we free anthropological analysis from crude utilitarianism and its lineage the doctrine of survivals and naive functionalism-we are provided by Professor Douglas with a powerful perspective from which to reconsider our ideas about nature. In 'primitive' thought 'the laws of nature are dragged in to sanction the moral code. . . .' 'The whole universe is harnessed to men's attempts to force one another into good citizenship.' (13). The relevant rituals are seen as parts of symbolic systems which determine men's relations with nature. There is a close union of these rituals with political systems. (78-85; cf. below, note i.)
There is also a growing literature criticizing the pseudo-objectivity and the direct political role of the concepts of 'adjustment' and 'deviance' in psychology, psychiatry and social theory. The most effective and evocative writing from this point of view has been concerned with psychology and psychiatry. The clearest analysis which I have seen is D. Ingleby, 'Ideology and the Human Sciences', Human Context, 2 (1970), 425-54. This essay cites most of the relevant literature and has been supplemented by an excellent study of what he calls 'the politics of the people professions': 'The Return of the Reified' (in preparation for publication). The clearest clinical evocation of the issues is R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study of Sanity and Madness (London, Tavistock, 1960; also Penguin paperback). The best historical study is M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Howard (London, Tavistock, 1967). Foucault's analysis of the relations between politics, economics and conceptions of insanity can serve as a model for further studies of science and ideology. For a telling fictional treatment (which serves as an allegory of contemporary America), see Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (New York, Viking, 1962; also Signet paperback). There are two useful collections of readings on deviance from a primarily sociological point of view: E. Robinson and M. S. Weinberg (eds.), Deviance.. The Interactionist Perspective (London, Collier-Macmillan, 1968; also paperback); S. Dinitz et al. (eds.), Deviance: Studies in the Process of Stigmatization and Societal Reactions (New York, Oxford, 1969; also paperback). Cf. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, op. cit., note a, Penguin edition, 102 sqq
For those who do not consider it a commonplace that all facts are theory-laden, I am told that it would be useful to begin with the following: P. K. Feyerabend, 'Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism', in H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III: Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1962), 28-97; I. Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1967; also paperback). At a more mundane level, see the illuminating study of the role of assumptions and biases in the perception, definition, and evaluation of evidence drawn from discussions with medical students, by M. L. J. Abercrombie, The Anatomy of Judgment: An Investigation into the Processes of Perception and Reasoning (London, Hutchinson, 1960; also Penguin paperback).
g Mannheim defines the concept as follows: 'The concept "ideology" reflects the one discovery which emerged from political conflict, namely, that ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination. There is implicit in the word "ideology" the insight that in certain situations the collective un-conscious of certain groups obscures the real condition of society both to itself and to others and thereby stabilizes it.' (op. cit., note a, 36.) If one accepts the view that no one is free from the powerful influences of his interest group, the 'certain situations', which Mannheim implies are unusual and regrettable, become the normal condition of man in any existing society.
There is a vast literature, in the sociology of knowledge. It can be conveniently approached by means of the following articles: H. O. Dahlke, 'The Sociology of Knowledge', in H. E. Barnes and F. B. Becker (eds.), Contemporary Social Theory (New York, Appleton-Century, 1940), 64-89; R. K. Merton, 'The Sociology of Knowledge', in G. Gurvitch (ed.), Twentieth Century Sociology (New York, Philosophical Library, 1945), 366-405, reprinted in R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, enlarged edition (New York, Free Press, 1968), ch. I4 (cf. chs. 15-21); T. Bottomore, 'Some Reflections on the Sociology of Knowledge', British Journal of Sociology, 7 (1956), 52-58; K. W. Woolf, 'The Sociology of Knowledge and Sociological Theory', in L. Gross (ed.), Symposium on Sociological Theory (New York, Row, Peterson, 1959), 271-307; N. Birnbaum, 'The Sociological Study of Ideology, 1940-I960', Current Sociology, 9 (1960), 91-172. A recent compendium brings a survey of the literature up to date: J. E. Curtis and J. W. Petras (eds.), The Sociology of Knowledge: A Reader (London, Duckworth, 1970). The editors' introduction includes an extensive bibliography, and their comprehensive selections extend from Bacon to the present, including two essays by Max Scheler which have not appeared in English before.
In reading this literature one must, once again, set aside the prevailing assumption that ideologies represent a 'distortion' of objectivity and then adapt the arguments to problems in the bastion of alleged objectivity, the natural sciences. Pushing the sociology of knowledge back into the domain of the natural sciences from a politically aligned point of view, has the consequence of bringing into question the alleged neutrality and objectivity of science on which the separation of sociology of knowledge from politics depends. Thereby, social science is prevented from drawing on natural science in attempts on the part of centrist and conservative ideologues to equate consensus politics and equilibrium theories of society with scientific objectivity. In this connection, my attention has recently been drawn to a book which is supposed to have covered much of the ground whose boundaries are charted in the present paper: W. Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge: An Essay in Aid of a Deeper Understanding of the History of Ideas (London, Routledge, 1958). I have not yet read it carefully, but the author's approach seems at first glance very unpromising. He writes, 'In the past, two rather disparate, nay irreconcilable, preoccupations have coexisted within the sociology of knowledge and constantly cut across each other: the study of the political element in thought, of what is commonly called "ideology", and the investigation of the social element in thinking, the influence of the social groundwork of life on the formation of a determinate mental image of reality. The one has sought to lay bare hidden factors which turn us away from the truth, the other to identify forces which tend to impart a definite direction to our search for it. I have radically separated the two subjects ... and have then concentrated on the latter; thus laying the foundations of what might be called a "pure" theory of the social determination of thought, or, alternatively, a social theory of knowledge.' (ix.) In consequence, Marx and Mannheim are pushed from centre stage, to be replaced by Weber. The distinction which he draws at the outset becomes sharper, so that by the end of the second chapter he might be said to be providing raw materials for an analysis by Mary Douglas (op. cit., note f) : '. . . thought determined by social fact is like a pure stream, crystal-clear, transparent; ideological ideas like a dirty river, muddied and polluted by the impurities that have flooded into it. From the one it is healthy to drink; the other is poison to be avoided.' (91). By aligning his distinction with the traditional Weberian fact-value dichotomy, Stark neatly sidesteps the very issues raised by the pervasiveness of ideology and avoids the challenge of Marxism to bourgeois sociology. Indeed, he is here going farther than most writing in the sociology of knowledge, which appears to function as a way of integrating Marxism into the dominant consensual, functionalist tradition, thereby noticing only half of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.'
h The sense in which the sociology of knowledge offers itself as a new approach to the philosophy of science in a politically relevant way is a special one which requires us to dig below the successive layers which have covered up the meaningful insights of Marx. I have seen no literature in the history, philosophy or social studies of science which refers to what now appear to be the texts which become fundamental if one takes seriously the points of view of Mannheim and of Berger and Luckmann. The sociology of knowledge has moved far from its roots in Marx's conception of ideology. Mannheim moved it towards a meta-objectivity, and functionalist social scientists seem to have completed the process of attempting to take the ideology out of the sociology of knowledge, thereby eliminating its radicalism and assimilating it to the status quo. There are two paths to the relevant literature. The first is to dig into the antecedents of Mannheim, looking afresh at Marx and Engels, attempting to free ourselves from the interpretations of generations of emasculators, Weber and Mannheiin in particular. Lichtheim describes Mannheim's work as an epilogue to Weber and Weber as a 'bourgeois Marx'. He also points out that Georg Lukács' History and Class-consciousness (1923) was a crucial influence on Mannheim and that Mannheim appeared to the cognoscenti (not quite fairly) as a 'bourgeois Lukács'. (Lichtheim, op. cit., note 5, 170-1.) Similarly, Birnbaum's perceptive review of 'The Sociological Study of Ideology, 1940-1960' points out that while the debate provoked by Mannheim’s work seemed to be over, the Marxist revival in western countries, stressing the early writings of Marx, was producing a new interest in the question of ideology. (op. cit., note g,11 6-17 ).
The second path to the relevant literature is to notice the works which are currently exciting the interest of the New Left. They are the same works concerned with Marxism: the newly-translated writings of Althusser and Lukács, along with the writings of Marx and Engels which they are interpreting, viz. L. Althusser, For Marx, trans. Brewster (London, Allen Lane, 1969); L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London, New Left Review, 1970); L. Althusser, 'Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon', New Left Review, no. 64 (1970), 3-11 (Nov./Dec.); G. Lukács, History and Class-consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (London, Merlin, 1971). For recent developments in the tradition begun by Lukács, see G. Therborn, 'The Frankfurt School', New Left Review, no. 63 (1970), 65-96 (Sept./Oct.); J. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, trans. J. J. Shapiro (London, Heinemann, 1971; also paperback), esp. ch. 6, 'Technology and Science as "Ideology"'. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Milligan (Moscow, Foreign Languages, 1961); K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Dutt (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1965), abridged edition, ed. C. J. Arthur, containing 'Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy' and 'Theses on Feuerbach' (London, Lawrence and Wishart paperback, 1970); K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (London, Lawrence and Wishart paperback, 970). A related work is L. Goldmann, The Human Sciences and Philosophy, trans. White and Anchor (London, Cape paperback, 1969). Goldmann initially intended to call the work 'Methodological Problems in the Sociology of Knowledge', but saw that the relevant context was the relationship between the human sciences and philosophy. Those who still need to be told that Marxism is not the same as Russian Stalinism should also read R. Garaudy, The Turning Point of Socialism, trans. P. and B. Ross (London, Collins, 1970; also Fontana paperback). I should like to thank Grahame Lock of King's College, Cambridge, who has kindly allowed me to read a draft of his dissertation 'On the Production of Knowledge' in which he provides an exposition of Althusser's analysis of ideology and relates it to certain issues in epistemology and the philosophy of science as practised in Britain and America. Although, as Mr Lock says, the task of juxtaposing these philosophical traditions is just beginning, he has shown how important a task it is.
i It is clear that Berger and Luckmann did not intend that their analysis of The Social Construction of Reality should be pressed beyond social reality to nature itself. Similarly, Mannheim is equivocal on this point (e.g. op. cit., note a, 243), although he is certainly aware of the issue (ibid., 259-75); cf. Plamenatz, op. cit., note a, 55, 58). Nor would the ideological critiques of classical Marxists go this far. Indeed, they make strong claims on the concepts of 'scientific' and 'objectivity', sometimes with bizarre and extremely historically conditioned and dated results. See, for example, F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature (written 1873-6, 1878-83), trans. Dutt (3rd edition, Moscow, Progress, 1964). Most commentators agree that Marxism is supposed to be free of ideology (e.g. Plamenatz, 27). Bottomore says of Marx, 'He seems to have thought of alienation as resulting from the character of man's relation to Nature and the consequent social division of labour.... Marx thought of (non-alienated society as one in which the division of labour (which made of human beings, narrow and limited individuals) would have been abolished, and in which the relations between man and Nature and between man and man would be perfectly clear and intelligible (in which, therefore, social and political theories would be scientific and not ideological).' (op. cit., note g, 53.) Birnhaum says, 'A specific human group, a class, must so develop that the conditions of its liberation from ideology are identical with the conditions of human liberation generally. This coincidence is possible for the proletariat because its attainment of vision coincides with its termination of its existence as a class. This historical conjuncture also gives us the assurance that Marxism itself escapes ideological distortion.' (op. cit., note g, 93.) I find these claims rather implausible this side of the millennium, but accept the notion of ideologically conflicting views of man and nature.
I am suggesting, however, that we adopt the methodological strategy of pressing the ideological analysis as far as we can. In particular, the thesis of the socio-historical relativity of knowledge must be extended to the so-called 'Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century' (a conception which is itself finding decreasing favour among historians of science), and the analysis must be applied not only to the relatively easy cases cited here but also to the paradigm of explanation of modem science itself. This conception arose as a historical process in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and should be subjected to socio-political, historical and philosophical analysis like any other subject. There have been innumerable studies of the social and ideological influences in this process which complement the internalist historical writings about the 'Scientific Revolution'. Most of these have centred around a debate in the 1920s and 1930s between Marxists and neo-Weberians on the respective roles of strictly economic factors and the rise of the Protestant ethic. However, it is only recently that some historians have seen that their concern is not only with the causes and historical sources of the 'rational tradition' in modern science but also with the validity of the concept of scientific rationality itself in a given period. This debate in the history of science is of direct relevance to current issues in the debate on objectivity and the role of ideology in science, since the question in the balance is the allegedly privileged position of objectivity itself in the establishment of the paradigm of explanation of modern science. This debate can be approached through two essays, respectively defending and challenging the concept of a rational tradition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in M. Teich and R. M. Young (eds.), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (London, Heinemann, 1971, in the press): M. B. Hesse, 'Reasons and Evaluations in the History of Science', and P. M. Rattansi, 'Evaluations of Reason in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy'.
One perspective which may prove useful to scientists and historians of science in escaping from a polarized debate between 'internalists' and 'externalists', 'rationalists' and 'irrationalists', or 'objectivists' and 'ideologues', is the anthropological one. If we take the single step of replacing the sharp distinction between primitive and scientific thought with a continuum, we can adapt the approach of anthropology to the study of our own culture, including science. Professor Douglas has begun to make this move in Purity and Danger and more explicitly in her very illuminating essay 'Environments at Risk', Times Literary Supplement, no. 3583 (1970), 1273-5 (30 Oct.) where she writes: 'Tribal views of the environment hold up a mirror to ourselves.' '. . the view of the universe and a particular kind of society holding this view are closely interdependent.' 'When I first wrote my book Purity and Danger about this moral power in the tribal environment, I thought our own knowledge of the physical environment was different. I now believe this to have been mistaken. If only because they disagree, we are free to select which of our scientists we will hearken to, and our selection is subject to the same sociological analysis as that of any tribe.' (1273, 1274).
It may prove a useful exaggeration to treat our approach to nature as a system of rituals and myths, by analogy to the treatment of natural phenomena in 'primitive societies'. C. Levi-Strauss makes a small step in this direction in his juxtaposition of primitive science with our own in The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage) (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). Levi-Strauss seems only to be asking that we see 'primitive' ideas about nature as a distinct mode of scientific thought, operating at a different level from our own. (ch. I). If we set out to adapt the approaches of Douglas and Levi-Strauss for our own enterprise, it would be necessary to go much further and study the social role of the religion of science, the utterances of its high priests, and its ritual incantations about the realities behind appearances. A sourcebook for anthropological analogies which we may find helpful is R. A. Manners and D. Kaplan (eds.), Theory in Anthropology: A Sourcebook (London, Routledge, 1968). Once again, all deference to natural science must be ignored.
As Mannheim points out, the study of the history of art can also provide analogies for the study of the social and historical relativity of knowledge. (op. cit., note a, 243-4.) A particularly useful study for this purpose is E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 2nd edition (London, Phaidon, 1960). Gombrich's approach to the question of the history of representation is doubly useful, since it offers an antidote to any theory of an unencumbered rational mind perceiving and representing nature, at the same time that it draws attention to the point that art has a history which is not cumulative in a simple linear sense. It is extremely useful to see the history of science in the same light, both epistemologically and historically. In some ways his analysis illuminates science better than the literature in the history and philosophy of science. It should be noticed that it would have been a diversion from Gombrich's primary purpose to complement his analysis with a socio-political dimension. At the same time, what presents itself as a useful division of labour is not without ideological consequences, as Anderson points out (op. cit., note d, 38-41).
j Bell claimed that, although his argument is anti-ideological, it is not conservative. He thought that 'In the last decade, we have witnessed an exhaustion of the nineteenth-century ideologies, particularly Marxism, as intellectual systerm that could claim truth for their views of the world' (16). In the text he sets out to show the failure of ideological positions, with particular emphasis on America in the forties and fifties. In his revealing epilogue on 'The End of Ideology in the West, he concludes: 'Today, these ideologies are exhausted. The events behind this important sociological change, are complex and varied.... But out of all this history, one simple fact emerges: for the radical intelligentsia, the old ideologies have lost their "truth" and their power to persuade.' (402.) What had come to take their place? A 'dispassionate’ empirical', 'functional' approach to society and politics: 'the ladder to the City of Heaven can no longer be a "faith ladder", but an empirical one. . . .' (405.) As the McCarthy era ended, Bell saw a new form of agreement on fundamental issues-an era of consensus politics, a new positivism based on stability and lack of political polarization. 'In the Western world, therefore, there is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism. In that sense, too, the ideological age has ended.' (402-3.) This was written only a decade ago.
As Bell points out, 'Ideology is the conversion of ideas into social levers'. (400.) In the light of subsequent events this has turned out to be a very ironic remark. In 1960, Birnbaum wrote, 'the recent announcement-which appears on many counts to be premature-of "the end of ideology" may be viewed as an attempt by a number of thinkers to present their own ideology as a factual version of the world.' (op. cit., note g, 92.) The trail of evidence in support of this conclusion begins with a lengthy 'Acknowledgment' at the end of Bell's book. He says, 'A number of these essays appeared first in the pages of Commentary and Encounter, and my most enduring obligation is to lrving Kristol, who, as an editor of the two magazines, prompted these articles, and, as a friend, wrestled to bring order out of them.
'Three of the longer essays were first presented as papers from conferences sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international organization of intellectuals opposed to totalitarianism. I was fortunate in being able to work for a year in Paris, in 1956-57 (while on leave from Fortune), as director of international seminars for the Congress. I learned much in discussion with the seminars planning committee-Raymond Aron, C. A. R. Crosland, Michael Polanyi, and Edward Shils-and several of the essays, particularly on the themes of ideology, reflect these talks.' (408.) He also expresses gratitude for the 'practical political wisdom' of Michael Josselson, administrative secretary of the Congress, and for the 'stimulus of exhilarating, and exhausting, conversation' with Melvin Lasky. (ibid.) Lasky was also an editor of Encounter, while Shils was (and is) a member of the advisory board of Encounter and edits Minerva. These are two journals which the Congress financed for a period (Minerva is now published for the International Association for Cultural Freedom).
In 1963 Encounter issued a commemorative anthology which was reviewed by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the New Statesman. He later wrote of the review, 'I pointed out that the political side of Encounter was consistently designed to support the policy of the United States Government: "One of the basic things about Encounter is supposed to be its love of liberty; it was the love of liberty that brought together, we are told, the people who, in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, sponsored Encounter. Love of whose liberty? This is conditioned-as it would be for a communist, but in reverse-by the overall political conflict. Great vigilance is shown about oppression in the communist world; apathy and inconsequence largely prevail where the oppression is non-communist or anti-communist. This generalization needs to be qualified. Silence about oppression has been, if possible, total where the oppressors were believed to be identified with the interests of the United States".' O'Brien gives examples and continues, 'At the time I wrote this review, I knew nothing of any connection between the CIA and Encounter. This is significant at the present stage, because the present [1967] line of defence of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter is that, though indeed-as they now admit-they were taking money from the CIA this did not affect their policy which remained entirely independent and exactly what it purported to be. It is interesting therefore that a critic, analysing the content of Encounter, and not concerned with the sources of its finance, should have reached the conclusion that its policy was to support the American side in the cold war. That is to say, that even if we grant that the policy was independently formed, it was none the less exactly what the CIA must be presumed to have wanted it to be. This happy coincidence could, of course, come about without any pressure whatever on the editor, if the editor responsible for the political side of the magazine had been originally hand-picked by the CIA. Mr Braden has told us that in fact one of the editors of Encounter was "an agent" of the CIA.
'On April 27th, 1966, the New York Times, in the course of its series of articles on the Central Intelligence Agency, stated that the CIA "has supported anti-communist but liberal organizations, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and some of their newspapers and magazines. Encounter magazine was for a long time, though it is not now, one of the indirect beneficiaries of CIA funds." ' (C. C. O'Brien, 'Some Encounters with the Culturally Free', New Left Review, no. 44 (1967, 60-3.) O'Brien's account traces the ensuing assertions, denials, partial admissions, and a revealing lawsuit connected with these allegations, culminating in a public apology to him by the editors of Encounter. He relates that 'by a timely stroke of fortune, it was during this period that-following the disclosures in Ramparts magazine-the whole ramifications of the CIA politico-cultural operation involving the Congress of Cultural Freedom and Encounter surfaced in the United States press so thoroughly that denials were no longer possible.' (63.)
For further evidence on the ideological role of the claim that we have reached 'the end of ideology', which is also related to the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, see S. M. Lipset, Political Man (London, Heinemann, 1960; also Heinemann paperback), a standard work which is widely assigned in undergraduate curricula. Lipset added to the book 'A Personal Postscript: The End of Ideology?', in which he reported on a conference sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom held in Milan in 1955 on 'The Future of Freedom'. He was struck by the lack of disagreement across what he seems to have considered to be a wide spectrum of political views from 'socialists' (Hugh Gaitskell and Richard Crossman), to liberals (Sydney Hook and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) to conservatives (Michael Polanyi and Colin Clark). Lipset reports that 'the traditional issues separating the left and the right had declined to comparative insignificance'. (404.) 'The democratic class struggle will continue, but it will be a fight without ideologies, without red flags, without May Day parades.' (408.) The debate continued in the pages of Commentary, where Bell and H. D. Aiken shouted across a political distance which does not appear particularly wide from the vantage point of six years later (reprinted in Cox (ed.), op. cit., note 5, 134-72). It should be noted that the books and essays of Bell, Lipset and Aiken all appeared in the period 1960-4. It was in that year that the radical student movement began to achieve prominence as a result of events at Berkeley, that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution empowered President Johnson to take 'all steps necessary' to curb 'communist aggression' in South-east Asia, and Goldwater was nominated for President. Since then the student protest movement, other manifestations of the New Left, and complementary activities on the Right have brought about the end of the end of ideology.
Even so, it cannot be said that most recent writers have reflected this changed political atmosphere. There is clear evidence of continuity in the positions of some participants in the debate. At the beginning of his 'Personal Postscript', Lipset wrote, 'I have taken the chapter heading from the title of Edward Shils' excellent report' on the 1955 Milan conference (see above). 'See his "The End of Ideology?", Encounter, 5 (November 1955), 52-8'. (It appears that Shils' report is the origin of the phrase.) Lipset also notes 'the similarities of the observations' in his own report and Shils'. In an article on 'The Concept and Function of Ideology' which appeared in 1968 (and which was presumably written at least ten years after the Milan conference) Shils discusses ideology in terms which appear to me to make the concept largely inapplicable to the views of the controlling elites of contemporary western capitalist societies and uses conceptions drawn from religious writing ('sacred', 'charisma') to imply that ideology always involves an unrealistic secular religion which militates against dissent and development of one's views. Of the role of ideology in science and social science he says, 'But science is not and never has been an integral part of an ideological culture. Indeed, the spirit in which science works is alien to ideology.' '. . . the modern social sciences have not grown up in the context of ideologies, and their progress has carried with it an erosion of ideology.' He concludes, 'For all these reasons, assertions to the effect that "science is an ideology" or that "the social sciences are as ideological as the ideologies they criticize" must be rejected.' (in D. L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York and London, Macmillan and Free Press, 1968) vol. 7, 66-76, at PP. 74-5). Cf, below, note t.
For a complementary treatment of the concept of ideology as one which inevitably involves distortion, see Harry M. Johnson, 'Ideology and the Social System', in ibid., 76-85, where the author provides a revealing use of functionalist language to assert that ideology is somehow a form of intellectual psychopathology: 'Since social malintegration tends to generate ideology, the latter may be regarded, in many instances, as a symptom of malintegration.' (79). The use of such pseudo-biological functionalist terms robs the political debate of its moral and political validity and makes his conclusion inescapable but profoundly mystifying: 'Ideology by its very nature does not readily yield to scientific criticism.' (85).
The assumptions of the neo-positivist and functionalist orthodoxy are coming under increasing fire from radical social and political theorists. For an extended critique of sociological functionalism and its ideological basis which focuses on the writings of the leading functionalist, Talcott Parsons (with whom Shils collaborated for a time), see A.W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology (New York, Basic, 1970; London, Heinemann, 1971). For an analogous analysis of the writings of functionalist apologists of American foreign policy, see D. Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (London, McGibbon & Kee, 1968; also Penguin paperback). For a treatment which relates the ideological role of political and social scientists with the approach of liberal historians, see Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York, Pantheon, 1969; also Penguin paperback), esp. ch. I.
Turning briefly to the relationship between ideological issues in the social and political sciences on the one hand and traditional philosophy of science on the other, it should be noted that there is an important affinity which has as yet received little investigation across disciplinary boundaries. For a clear analysis of the concept of ideology from the point of view of positivist metaphysics which employs the fact-value distinction to oppose the views of Mannheim and, a fortiori, any position which seeks to extend his position into natural science, see G. Bergmann, 'Ideology', Ethics, 61 (1951), 205-18, reprinted in Brodbeck, op. cit., note c, 123-38. One can begin to appreciate the ideological role of the fact-value distinction by considering the argument of J. Habermas (which is itself an examination of some views of Marcuse; see below, note r) in his essay, 'Technology and Science as "Ideology",' loc. cit., note h. This issue has been one of the preoccupations of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and although many participants in the New Left have found its politics ultimately unsatisfactory (because of its tenuous relationship with political action), some of the writings of its adherents can serve a useful purpose in linking the literature of neo-Marxism with that of traditional philosophical and social theory. See G. Therborn, 'The Frankfurt School', New Left Review, no. 63 (1970), 65-96 (Sept/Oct.).
k See J. S. Wilkie, 'Buffon, Lamarck and Darwin: the Originality of Darwin's Theory of Evolution', in P. R. Bell (ed.), Darwin's Biological Work. Some Aspects Reconsidered (Cambridge, I959; also New York, Wiley paperback), 262-307; L. Eiseley, Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men who Discovered It (London, Gollancz, 1959; also New York, Anchor paperback); G. de Beer, Charles Darwin: Evolution by Natural Selection (London, Nelson, 1963; also paperback).
Of the standard works on the nineteenth-century debate the one which deals most subtly with this approach is J. G. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames, Iowa, 1959; also Mentor paperback). See also O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II (London, Black, 1970), ch. I. For a contemporary treatment of the debate in highly polarized terms, see J. W. Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (London, King, 1875; reprinted Gregg); cf. notes to papers listed below.
I have suggested a framework for reinterpreting the nineteenth-century debate on evolution and man's place in nature in 'The Impact of Darwin on Conventional Thought', in A. Symondson (ed.), The Victorian Crisis of Faith (London, SPCK, 1970), 13-35; 'Natural Theology, Victorian Periodicals, and the Fragmentation of the Common Context', Victorian Studies (in the press); 'The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man's Place in Nature', M. Teich and R.M. Young (eds.), op. cit., note i.
There is, as one would expect, a vast literature on Darwin's influence in various fields. I have cited the works which I have found most useful in 'Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select?', The Monist (in the press, July 1971), note 10. On 'Social Darwinism', see R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, revised edition (Boston, Beacon, 1955; also paperback); R. C. Bannister, ' "The Survival of the Fittest Doctrine" : History or Histrionics?', Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970), 377-98. On the relationship between evolutionism and the social sciences, see the perceptive study by J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1966; also paperback).
I have discussed the pervasive role of Malthus's theory in nineteenth-century social, biological, theological and political debates in 'Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory', Past and Present, no. 43 (1969), 109-45.
*insert
l Spencer published his first defence of evolution in 1852, developed it in the context of psychology, and generalized it in various writings between 1857 and 1861. Before any of these appeared, he based his belief in inevitable social progress on biological principles in his first book, Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London, Chapman, 1851). Since a great deal of subsequent functionalist social and political theory was heavily indebted to Spencer's later biologism of man and society, it may be worthwhile to recall his faith in its original form. His section on 'The Evanescence of Evil' concluded as follows: 'Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness. As surely as the tree becomes bulky when it stands alone, and slender if one of a group, as surely as the same creature assumes the different forms of cart-horse and racehorse, according as its habits demand strength or speed; as surely as a blacksmith's arm grows large, and the skin of a labourer's hand thick; as surely as the eye tends to become long-sighted in the sailor, and short-sighted in the student; as surely as the blind attain a more delicate sense of touch; as surely as a clerk acquires rapidity in writing and calculation; as surely as the musician learns to detect an error of a semitone amidst what seems to others a very babel of sounds; as surely as a passion grows by indulgence and diminishes when restrained; as surely as a disregarded conscience becomes inert, and one that is obeyed active; as surely as there is any efficacy in educational culture, or any meaning in such terms as habit, custom, practice;-so surely must the human faculties be moulded into complete fitness for the social state; so surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.' (65.) In the light of Spencer's faith and his examples, it is not surprising that he chose-and clung to belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Cf. R. M. Young, 'The Development of Herbert Spencer's Concept of Evolution', Actes du XIe congrés international dhistoire des sciences (Warsaw, Ossolineum, 1967), Vol. 2, 273-8; Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (London, Oxford, 1970), ch. 5; 'Malthus and the Evolutionists. . .', op. cit., note k, 134-7, 141. See also R. A. Nisbit, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (New York and London, Oxford, 1969; also paperback), ch. 3.
m In composing the lecture Huxley was labouring under serious restrictions. The benefactor of the series prohibited discussion of religion or politics, while Huxley wanted to attack the secular religion and the political extrapolations based on evolutionism. He solved his problem by saying what he had to say by discussing exotic religions, especially Buddhism. He later added some 'Prolegomena’ which make the argument much more explicit. The two essays should therefore be read together: T. H. Huxley, Evolution & Ethics and Other Essays (London, Macmillan, 1894), Chs. 1-2. The doctrines of Spencer were his chief targets, and he summarized his position succinctly in a letter: 'There are two very different questions which people fail to discriminate. One is whether evolution accounts for morality, the other whether the principle of evolution in general can be adopted as an ethical principle. The first, of course, I advocate, and have consistently insisted upon. The second I deny, and reject all so-called evolutional ethics based upon it.' Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (London, Macmillan, I900), Vol. 2, 360.
The literature of social generalization from evolutionism is very large. In the article on 'Darwin' in the 1931 edition of The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, F. Hankins wrote: 'Darwinism as an expression of a fundamental law of nature became a new orthodoxy to which appeal was made to justify diverse opinions in many spheres. It was invoked to explain social evolution in general and to support individualism and socialism, competition and cooperation, aristocracy and democracy, brute force and kindliness, militarism and pacifism, ethical pessimism and optimism, creative emergent evolutionism and evolutionary naturalism.' Quoted in L. Sklair, The Sociology of Progress (London, Routledge, 1970), 68. For an excellent brief analysis of evolutionary ethics and social theory, see A. G. N. Flew, Evolutionary Ethics (London, Macmillan Papermac, 1967), chs. 3-4; D. Macrac, Ideology and Society (London, Heinemann, 1961), chs. 11-12; G. Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (New York, Knopf, 1968), ch. 12; R. Mackintosh, From Comte to Benjamin Kidd: The Appeal to Biology or Evolution for Human Guidance (London, Macmillan, 1899).
One can find appeals to evolution and the survival of the fittest to justify political and social theories in places as disparate as A. Conan Doyle's 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', C. Kingsley's Water Babies, and the writings of Mussolini: see Mannheim, op. cit., note a, 13on. For the role of biological theory in Nazism, see D. Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London, Macdonald; New York, American Elsevier,1971).
n In Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels wrote: 'The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes' theory of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois economic theory of competition, as well as the Malthusian theory of population. When once this feat has been accomplished (the unconditional justification for which, especially as regards the Malthusian theory, is still very questionable), it is very easy to transfer these theories back again from natural history to the history of society, and altogether too naïve to maintain that thereby these assertions have been proved as eternal natural laws of society.' (3rd edition, trans. Dutt (Moscow, Progress, 1964), 313; cf. 311).
o For example, the United States Government joined with the Josia Macy Jr. Foundation and the National Science Foundation in translating and distributing free to scientists a collection of articles containing a number of Lysenkoist essays, the inclusion of which would be difficult to defend on scientific grounds: The Central Nervous System and Behavior: Selected Translations From the Russian Medical Literature (Bethesda, Md., US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1959). See also C. Zirkle, Evolutionism, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1959).
There is no doubt that Western scientists have exploited the Lysenko affair for their own ideological purposes and that the Soviet authorities have interpreted this activity as confirmation of their own position about the ideological role of Western genetics. However, it is also clear that Lysenkoism was part of a much wider pattern of the consequences of democratic centralism, as is shown in A. Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Hardy (London, Cape, 1940; also Four Square paperback), in A. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Guybon (London, Collins, 1968; also Fontana paperback), and by the reaction of the Soviet authorities when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The international aspect of the same pattern is shown in two documents, one relating to the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia: A. London, On Trial (L'aveu), trans. Hamilton (London, Macdonald, 1970); and the other a documentary history of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: R. Littell (ed.), The Czech Black Book (New York and London, Praeger, 1969). It is not fortuitous that there have been Lysenkoist tendencies in China, Cuba and North Vietnam: would that nature set no limits on socialists' determination to achieve abundance and equality.
p In her essay on 'Enviromnents at Risk', op. cit., note i, Mary Douglas points out that the spectre of classical economics and Malthusianism is still very much with us. (1273.) In paying due attention to the legitimacy of the ideological debate over genetics it is essential always to bear in mind that it was seldom genetics alone that was in dispute but that most parties to the controversy-East and West-had an eye on the generalizations about human nature and society which could be mounted on the basis of different genetic theories. Since no one can confidently draw the line between 'heredity and environment' or 'nature and nurture', there has been a persistent tendency to seek guarantees for one's social and political views in genetics itself. An analogy from psychology will help to make this point. The American psychologist, B. F. Skinner, once said at a seminar in Cambridge that it reassured him whenever he saw placards bearing the portraits of Marx and Mao. Since, he said, they completely failed to understand what Skinner took to be the scientific laws of learning ('the contingencies of reinforcement'), the ultimate survival of the American capitalist system was assured-by the laws of nature.
q There is a revealing aside in Medvedev's account of the controversy. As a young student in the mid-1940s-well before Lysenkoism became a government-sanctioned orthodoxy with complete control over research, teaching and publications he had a surprising awakening. 'The beginning of the new debates also changed my personal notions about Lysenko. Up to then, not really knowing genetics, I had viewed the controversy in genetics and Darwinism as a real scientific debate in which, as it appeared to me, both sides deserved respect. But, watching the renewal of the discussion on Darwinism, I understood that the main aim of Lysenko and his followers was anything but elucidation of scientific truth.' (106.) Like his Western counterparts, Medvedev sees the Lysenko affair as a deviation from the true path of scientific objectivity. His analysis therefore reveals as much as it says about ideology.
r The writings of Herbert Marcuse provide the most sustained and sophisticated radical critique of the problem of relating political and biological categories. He is at his best in discussing the repressive nature of liberal ideologies in politics, social theory and psychology. His most explicit treatments of the relationship between socialist political theory and bourgeois psychological and biological theory is Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, Beacon, 1955; also New York, Vintage paperback; and London, Allen Lane, 1969; also Sphere paperback). In a new Preface to the London edition, Marcuse says that the protest of young people against repressive capitalism 'will continue because it is a biological necessity "By nature", the young are in the forefront of those who live and fight for Eros against Death.... Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight'. (xxv.) In An Essay on Liberation (Boston, Beacon paperback, 1969; London, Allen Lane, 1969) he provides an analysis of the question of 'A Biological Basis for Socialism?' (7-22; cf. 3-6.) Marcuse's indictments of contemporary society are most clearly expressed in One-Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial Society (London, Routledge, 1964; also Sphere paperback) and more succinctly in his essay 'Repressive Tolerance', in R. P. Wolff et al., A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, Beacon, 1965; also London Cape paperback, 1969, with a 'Postscript 1968'). Marcuse's criticisms of the leading alternative interpretation of psychoanalysis appear in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston, Beacon, 1968; also paperback; London, Allen Lane, 1968), ch. 7, 'Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown and A Reply to Herbert Marcuse by Norman O.. Brown'. There is a useful introduction to the radical movement in psychoanalytic theory: P. A. Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse (New York, Harper Colophon paperback, 1969), published in Britain as The Sexual Radicals (London, Temple Smith, 1970). For an evaluation of Marcuse's theories, see Habermas, op. cit., note h, ch. 6.
s One of the clearest examples of the close analogies between Lysenkoist biological theory and ideology was the question of 'cluster planting'. Medvedev writes, 'The first and costliest of Lysenko's postwar enterprises was closely connected with his "abolition" of intraspecific competition. According to Lysenko, Darwin invented this competition when the book of the reactionary, Malthus, happened to fall into his hands.' Once he was convinced of this, Lysenko prepared instructions for applying his theory of the absence of competition within a species to the planting of trees. 'According to these instructions, clusters of thirty or forty acorns were to be planted. Thirty trees would arise from each cluster, and twenty-nine of them, according to Lysenko's theory, would, without mutual oppression, placidly die, filled with noble self-sacrifice for the prosperity of the fortunate shoot which they guarded, battling like soldiers with the surrounding grass. This new "law of species life" was termed "self-thinning-out" by Lysenko, and did not deny that the majority of plants in a cluster must perish. This was not the result of crowding, however, but for the glory of the species.' When asked, ' "Do you mean that one will turn out to be stronger and the others will weaken or perish?" ' Lysenko replied, "No, they will sacrifice themselves for the good of the species." ' (166-8; cf. 105-10, 12 7.)
R.Ardrey's views on natural inequality appear in his The Social Contract (London, Collins, 1970), which I have not read. Rather, like most of the lay public, I read the excerpts which he chose to publish in the colour supplement of a Sunday newspaper. This is (along with the reviews of such books) the way most laymen gain the impression that biological science sanctions this or that ideological position.
t Just as Marcuse can be regarded as the most sophisticated exponent of a radical approach to the relations between biology and culture, C. D. Darlington easily wins the complementary position on the Right. His dropsical study of The Evolution of Man and Society (London, Allen and Unwin, 1969) was served up in excerpts in a Sunday colour supplement and in a reputable historical journal (where his most extreme claims were not repeated) : 'The Genetics of Society', Past and Present, no. 43 (1969), 3-33 (May). At various points in the text of his book it is asserted that class distinctions and the masterslave relationship have a genetic basis (366, 547, 573, 592, 668-75). For example, he writes, 'In short, racial discrimination has a genetic basis with a large instinctive and irrational component. Its action may be modified by education or by economic processes. But it cannot be suppressed by law.' (606.) 'This policy [Black Power], leading to segregation of the two races and denying them a common evolutionary future, parallels the South African policy of apartheid. It is not to be lightly dismissed. But before we accept it we must look at its underlying assumptions. The, Negro writers condemn what they describe as racism. "By 'racism'," they say, "we mean the predication of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over that group." When we look back over history, however, what do we see? The application of this principle has governed the evolution of all advancing societies since soon after the beginning of agriculture. And it has been the means of their advancement.' (607.) In the conclusion he writes, 'The misfit may be a mental, social or sexual misfit. He may be delinquent or criminal. He is the price that has to be paid for hybridization. He is the burden that has to he carried by society as a whole in return for the most adaptable breeding system. Fortunately, he is, as a rule, of reduced viability and fertility. Natural selection has in this way so far prevented the burden from becoming intolerable.' (678.)
When one begins to notice ideological affiliations, they turn up regularly, just where one would expect. For example, Darlington's book has received some praise and some very gentle criticism at the hands of one of the advocates of educational policies which lie to the right of the Conservative party, Professor Max Beloff, and again at the hands of Professor F. A. von Hayek, whom Lipset described as 'the arch-conservative economist', the only person at the Congress of Cultural Freedom's Milan conference on 'The Future of Freedom' who deplored the putative anti-ideological homogeneity and sought to retain cleavages in 'the democratic camp' (op. cit., note J, 404-5). Both of these discussions appeared in Encounter (October 1970 and February 1971).
u Most students of political theory and history would agree that the promise of Mannheimian sociology of knowledge has not been fulfilled, and it would be grotesquely misleading to suggest that scientists can turn directly and straightforwardly to the literature of the sociology of knowledge for help. Indeed, Ideology and Utopia carries in its argument the seeds of its own absorption into a new level of 'objectivity' in Mannheim's concept of 'relationism' (which he employs to avoid the abyss of relativism, e.g. 70-1, 76-7, 253-4, 269-70). This conception makes it very easy to choose consensus rather than conflict as the way out of the interplay of ideologies. Presumably this is the basis of its appeal to (and its emasculation by) American functionalist sociologists and political 'scientists'. Recent work under the banner of 'the sociology of knowledge’ has gone in two main directions, neither of which serves my purpose in recommending it: further into philosophy in an effort to base political theory and historical research on an analysis of the concept of 'action'; and towards phenomenology and social psychology in an effort to explain the social construction of (social) reality.
It is in some ways fortunate that students of science from the ideological point of view can turn to Mannheim, Merton, Berger and Luckmann, etc., with their minds unencumbered by the history of the sociology of knowledge. They can gain insights useful to the ideological analysis of science without disappearing without trace into consensus politics, the philosophy of action, or social psychology. These paths are open, should people find it ideologically convenient to take them, but my recommendation of these works extends only to, the hope that they can help us to see the role of evaluative, social and political factors in the motives, theories and extrapolations of scientists. The same caveat applies to the literature cited above in the social sciences, the history of art, and the history and philosophy of science.
v Once again, morality, rationality and politics cannot be clearly distinguished. I am well aware that the argument of this paper runs the twin risks of committing the 'genetic fallacy' on the one hand and indulging in 'historicism' on the other. I can only reply by compounding these errors, if errors they be; until we explore the extent of rationalization we will be in no position to chart the domain of reason ' and unless we explore the analogies between the present and the past, we will be in no position to have confidence in the alleged open-endedness of the future and to address ourselves to the future with much hope of mastering ourselves without subordinatiing others. Finally, I hope that by putting the issue in this politically aligned way I have, unlike Mannheim, faced squarely the problem of self-reference. Of course, it is likely that my approach will be ideologically unpalatable to many.
w The structure of the argument of the paper and the commentary is, in conclusion, relatively simple: Scientists-both as men and as scientists-are finding that they need to become political. However, in order to do so, they need to see that science is already more or less covertly so. They are prevented from seeing this by their own official myths, and in order to see this they must become metaphysicians. It follows that social responsibility in science cannot be coherently conceived until a hybrid discipline which we may call 'social metaphysics' generates an approach which can allow working scientists-and not just another group of 'specialists'-to perceive the intimate intermingling of scientific and social assumptions. Only then can they become socially responsible. At the bottom of this conundrum lies the primary-secondary quality distinction, which presents itself to the physico-chemical sciences (and to the ambitions of the biological and human sciences) as the fact-value distinction. In working our way out of our self-imposed labyrinth, we may begin by grasping that all facts are theory-laden; all theories are value-laden; therefore all facts are value-laden. If we further agree that all values are intimately related to ideologies, which in turn reflect the conflicting power interests within and between societies, we begin to see both the complexities and the dangers of taking social responsibility seriously. Many will undoubtedly prefer to attend an occasional conference on the subject to announce their concern, which, of course, is conclusively demonstrated by their mere presence there.
1 These phrases are taken from the prospectus setting out the aims of the conference and are quoted to indicate the particular issues among the many listed there to which my remarks are addressed.
2 This point is most clearly expressed in Albrecht von Haller's A Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals (1752). A contemporary translation with a modern introduction by Owsei Temkin appeared in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 4 (1936), 6.51-99. It has been argued that von Haller's manifesto provided the basis for modern experimental biology. It certainly provides a clear argument for the conceptual flexibility which has been characteristic of modern biology.
3 The best single source for entering into the debate on the organic analogy and its political consequences for the social sciences is N. J. Demerath III and R. A. Peterson (eds.), System, Change, and Conflict: A Reader on Contemporary Sociological Theory and the Debate over Functionalism (London, Collier-Macmillan, 1967). For an extremely illuminating (and funny) critique of the major American functionalist theorist, Talcott Parsons, see T. Bottomore, 'Out of this World', New York Review of Books, 13 (1969), 34-9 (6 Nov.). See also Mills, The Sociological Imagination, op. cit., note a.
4 The clearest discussion of the relationship between the concept of a person and the mind-body problem is P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London, Methuen, 1959), Part I.
5 Berger and Luckmann, op. cit., note a (Anchor edition), 6, 123. For a historical analysis of the concept of ideology, see G. Lichtheim, 'The Concept of Ideology', History and Theory, 4 (1965), 164-95, reprinted in G. H. Nadel (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of History (New York, Harper paperback, 1965), 148-79. For a selection of the literature on ideology, see R. H. Cox (ed.), Ideology, Politics, and Political Theory (Belmont, Calif., Wadsworth paperback, 1969), including a usefui selected bibliography; cf. Plamenatz, op. cit., note a.
6 F. Picavet, Les idiologues, essai sur I'histoire des idies et des theories scientifiques, philosophiques, riligieuses, etc. en France depuis 1789 (Paris, Alcan, 1891); cf. Mannheim, op. cit., note a, 55, 62-7, on the pre-history of the concept in Bacon's 'idols' and from the Idiologues to Marx. See also Foucault, op. cit., note c, 240 sqq.; R. Bendix, 'The Age of Ideology: Persistent and Changing', in D. E. Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (London, Free Press, 1964), 294-327.
7 G. Rosen, 'The Philosophy of IdeoIogy and the Emergence of Modern Medicine in France', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 20 (I946), 328-39; 0. Temkin, 'The Philosophical Background of Magendie's Physiology', ibid., 10-35: cf. Lichtheim, op. cit., note 5, 147-54.
8 Mannheim, op. cit., note a, ch. 5, CSP. P. 269; Berger and Luckmann, op. cit., note a (Anchor edition), 1-18.
9 K. Mar-x, from 'Preface to a Critique of Political Economy' (1857), quoted in Mannheim, op. cit., note a, 11 2; cf. 104-19.
10 Berger and Luckmann, op. cit., note a (Anchor edition), 9.
11 Mannheim, op. cit., note a, 54, 237-47.
12 D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, revised edition (London, Collier-Macmillan,1962; also Free Press paperback).
13 Darwin wrote to Henry Fawcett in 1861, 'About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service !' F. Darwin (ed.), More Letters of Charles Darwin (London, Murray, 1903), v01. 1, I 95.
14 The work which Wallace found most congenial to his own views was Henry George's Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Causes of Industrial Depression and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth ... the Remedy (New York, 1879; reprinted New York, Schalkenbach Foundation, 1962). George's study is a socialist classic which was very influential in Britain and America and which is of considerable current relevance. See R.C. Bannister ' 'The Survival of the Fittest . . .', op. cit., note k, 377, 383-8, 394-5, 397. I have discussed the relationship between Wa]Iace's evolutionism and his socialism in 'The Impact of Darwin . . .', op. cit., note k, 29-31; 'Malthus and the Evolutionists. . .', op. cit,. note k, 130-4; ' "Non-Scientific" Factors . . .', op. cit., note k.
15 For a contemporary assessment of the debate on the mechanism of evolution, see G. J. Remanes, Darwin and After Darwin, 3 vols. (London, Longmans, Green, 1892-7), esp. vol. 2, ch. i; cf. R. M. Young, 'Darwin's Metaphor. . .', op. cit., note k. Of course, there are still some defenders of the inheritance of acquired characteristics who are not Lysenkoists.
16 See R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism . . . , op. cit., note k, ch. 2; R. L. Cam (ed.), The Evolution of Society: Selections from Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology (Chicago and London, Chicago, i 967), esp. Editor's Introduction.
17 H. Spencer, The Principles of Biology, revised edition (London, Williams & Norgate, 1898), vol. 1, 650, 672.
18 Flew, Evolutionary Ethics, op. cit., note m; Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, op. cit., note a, xviii n; Mills, The Sociological Imagination, op.cit., note a, ch. 4.
19 Francis Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (London, Murray, 1887), v01. 3, !2 3 7.
20 Quoted in R. L. Meek, Marx and Engels on Malthus (New York, International, 1954; also paperback), 71 ; cf. 72-88 for other expressions of the views of Marx and Engels on Darwin's theory; cf. R. L. Meek, 'Malthus-Yesterday and Today', Science and Society, 18 (1954), 21-51.
21 Z. A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. Lerner (New York and London, Columbia, 1969); M. W. Mikulak, 'Darwinism, Soviet Genetics, and MarxismLeninism', journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970), 359-76.
22 Medvedev, op. cit., 113- I 8, 213-23; cf.67, 134-5, 196, 199, 204-5, 248-9, 269, 271,.
23 'The successful caricature distorts appearances but only for the sake of a deeper truth.' I... the likeness thus produced may be more true to life than a mere portrayal of features could have been.' E. Kris and E. H. Gombrich, 'The Principles of Caricature', in E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (London, Allen & Unwin, 1953), 198, 190. See also E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays in the Theory of Art (London, Phaidon, 1963), esp. chs. 1 & 3, 12.
24 Medvedev discusses in detail the lengths to which the supporters of Lysenkoism had to go. For instance, in 1948 there was an order 'to destroy all stocks of Drosophila. All genetic literature was removed from libraries.... In all publishing houses, standing type of books that did not praise Lysenko was broken up.' (125-6.) Another ordered the replacement of 'all previous curricula and texts on cytology, histology, embryology, biochemistry, microbiology, general pathology, and oncology....' (182.) In medicine Medvedev observes that 'Twenty-five successive classes of physicians have been graduated from medical school without the slightest notion of the laws of heredity.' (194; cf. 65, 104-5, 24-7,131, 136, 191-2, 198, 251).
25 Medvedev, op. cit., 11 9-20, 167, passim. I have given further examples of the continuity between the Malthusian debate and Lysenkoism in 'Malthus and the Evolutionists . . .', op. cit., note k,137-40. Medvedev provides a fascinating account of Lysenkoism as seen from inside the Soviet Union, while Mikulak offers an illuminating historical and ideological perspective on it. A more recent study of The Lysenko Affair by D. Joravsky (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard, 1970) analyses the issues in terms of the relationships among science, ideology, political power, and the 'criterion of practice' in agriculture; cf. Joravsky's essay on Medvedev's book: 'Cracked Wheat', New York Review of Books, 14 (I970), 48-52 (29 Jan.), and his earlier essay, 'Soviet Marxism and Biology before Lysenko', Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 85-104.
26 J. D. Bernal, 'The Abdication of Science', Modern Quarterly, 8 (1952-3), 44-50; cf. J.Fyfe, 'Malthus and Malthusianism', ibid., 6 (1951), 200-11.
27 B. Bettleheim, 'Obsolete Youth: Towards a Psychology of Adolescent Rebellion', Encounter, 33 (1969), 29-42 (Sept.). For a less transparent view, see E. H. Erikson, 'Reflections on the Dissent of Contemporary Youth', International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 51 (1970),11-22. Professor Lorenz's ethological 'explanation' of student protest was given at a Nobel conference and again at an ethological conference in Rennes, France in the summer of 1969. It was described to me by participants at the conference and reported in The Observer's 'Back Page'. I have not seen his argument in print.
28 I have discussed this literature in a review of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization: 'The Naked Marx', New Statesman, 78 (1969), 666-67 (7 Nov.). For scientific criticisms of the generalizations of Lorenz and Ardrey, see M. F. A. Montagu (ed.), Man and Aggression (New York and London, Oxford, 1968; also paperback).
29 R. M. Young, 'Understanding it All', New Statesman, 78 (1969), 417-18 (26 Sept.).