Albert Schäffle and organicist sociology in the 19th century

Abstract

While the concept of the social organism was a central model for describing modern societies and their functional structure in the 19th century, organic metaphors are hardly used in sociology anymore or are even rejected as inappropriate. Early sociologists, like Comte and Spencer, used biological analogies to describe the structures and development of modern societies in a scientific manner, hoping that drawing on biology would lend legitimacy to sociology as a newly emerging science. By the end of the 19th century, however, criticism of organicist sociology and mismatched analogies was growing. The work of the German sociologist Albert Schäffle is notable because he responded to this criticism and attempted to develop approaches to social theory that did not rely on organicist imagery. Schäffle was the first to coin the concept of functional differentiation. He can therefore be regarded as a forerunner of sociological systems theory. Schäffle’s work provided productive inspiration for Émile Durkheim and Albion Small but fell into oblivion at the beginning of the 20th century.

Introduction

The organicist view on society was a very influential paradigm in the sociology of the 19th century. For modern ears it sounds bizarre to describe society as a social organism. But this idea helped sociology to become a specialized discipline of science (Levine, 1995). The founding fathers of sociology, such as Auguste Comte (Heilbron, 2015) and Herbert Spencer (Offer, 2010), described society as a social organism. Spencer justified the analogy between society and organism on the grounds that both are structured around the division of labor and become increasingly differentiated in their development (Offer, 2015). In France, this organicist sociology remained dominant until the fin de siècle, which shaped the work of Émile Durkheim and his concept of organic solidarity (Barberis, 2003). In Germany, Albert Schäffle developed a sociology of the social body around 1875. However, this organicist sociology was confronted with criticism at the beginning of the 20th century and then fell into oblivion (Martindale, 2001). But the intellectual development of Schäffle show, that the organicist view on society is not a bizarre fashion of the 19th century but in these days an innovative way to describe the modern and functional differentiated society.

At the end of the 19th century, Albert Schäffle was enormously influential in early sociology in German-speaking countries and beyond. In 1885, Émile Durkheim wrote a review of Schäffle’s main sociological work and was inspired by him to develop his concept of organic solidarity. Albion Small, one of the founders of American sociology, also read and reviewed Schäffle’s work (Small, 1896). Schäffle has since been almost forgotten. The organicist sociology in total was strongly criticized (Stark, 1962) mostly because of the danger of mismatched homologies (Cohen, 1993). Occasionally, however, Schäffle is referred to as a classic of sociology (Chriss, 2006). Hodgson et al. (2010) paid tribute to Schäffle’s economic work in an essay. But Schäffle distinguished himself not only as an economist, but also as a sociologist. Levine (1995: 248) and Cohen (1994: 55) summarized Schäffle’s work by saying that he merely described society using organic imagery, i.e. the economy as a digestive system, communication channels as nerve pathways, etc. However, this simplification does not do justice to the fundamental concern of Schäffle’s sociology.

For Schäffle’s achievement, as this paper will argue, was to have radicalized a trend toward abstraction in the organicist sociology. In the work of Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte, organic imagery served not merely as illustration (Levine, 1995) but was used in an attempt to identify certain functional structures of society. In his later works, Schäffle attempted to reduce the use of organic imagery and found a more scientific way of describing the social system. He thus refers to society not only as a social body, but also as a “system of interacting parts” (Schäffle, 1896: 9). He was also the first to use the concept of functional differentiation (funktionell differenziirt) of social sub-areas (Schäffle, 1875: 323). In this sense Schäffle can be characterized as a forerunner of sociological systems theory.

The following section the question will be discussed, why the organicist view on society was so influential in the sociology of the 19th century (1). The next chapter presents Albert Schäffle’s extensive sociological work, explains key concepts, and discusses his engagement with criticism (2). This is followed by a presentation of Schäffle’s contemporary reception. Émile Durkheim and Albion Small were inspired by Schäffle’s work (3). In the last chapter the Schäffles proto-system-theoretic views will be summarized, and the non-reception of Talcott Parsons and others will be discussed (4).

The emergence of sociology in the context of organismic thinking

Why was it so common in 19th-century sociology to describe society using an analogy to the human body? On the one hand, there is a long tradition, dating back to Plato, of comparing the structure of the state to the human body or the soul (Böckenförde and Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978). However, organicist sociology does not simply continue this tradition, because, on the other hand, it responds to the so-called second scientific revolution that took place in the 19th century. Following the first scientific revolution in the 17th century, a second scientific revolution took place in the 19th century, characterized by a strict orientation toward an inductive method within the framework of positivism, a more systematic conduct of experiments, and a differentiation of scientific disciplines. August Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive, in particular, was a reaction to this (Heilbron, 2017). Sociology, which was attempting to establish itself as a new scientific discipline at this time, faced enormous pressure to justify its legitimacy. Historians and political philosophers argued that there was no need for a new discipline like sociology because established sciences were already engaged in the task of describing social phenomena. Sociology therefore had to answer the questions: What is the specific subject matter of sociology? What is the specific method of sociology?

At that time, the emerging field of sociology answered these questions by stating that sociology would describe the social whole, which is divided into individual parts. Political philosophy and political economy, it argued, would be limited to specific areas of society. In addition, the concept of the organism had become established as a means of describing a structured whole. The idealist philosophies of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel reconceptualized the notion of the organism in this sense. At the same time, biology also significantly refined the concept of the organism empirically, as biological knowledge exploded in the 19th century through new methods and experiments, and many new subdisciplines of biology—such as physiology, histology, neurology, evolutionary theory, etc.—emerged. Around 1800, Xavier Bichat was the first to describe different types of tissue structures. Karl Ernst von Baer discovered the human egg cell in 1827 and founded embryology. At the same time, Johannes Müller founded physiology and studied the various bodily functions. An interesting aspect is that the Zoologist Herni Milne-Edwards transferred the concept of division of labor from economics to biology to describe the functional differentiation of the organism (Cohen, 1994: 51). And last but not least, Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 revolutionized biology and brought about a fundamentally different way of looking at the organism. During this period, biology succeeded in discovering many fundamentally new insights into the structure, development, and functioning of biological organisms. Sociology, which had to justify itself as a new scientific discipline, was not only guided by biology because it was a successful science, but also because, like biology, sociology wanted to describe the structure, development, and functioning of society in scientific terms.

In this discourse context, two main arguments converged: a positivist one and a conservative one. From a strictly positivist perspective, it was argued that society, too, is part of the natural world and can therefore be described as something natural. The aim was to find social laws (Barberis, 2003). From a more conservative perspective, it was argued that society is something that has developed naturally. The error of 18th-century Enlightenment philosophy was to assume that society had been artificially created through a social contract. However, society, as an entity with its own long history, largely defies political ideals of feasibility. Because of these differing aspects, the concept of the organism possesses a certain diversity of meaning. Martindale (2001) therefore distinguishes between an idealistic conception of the organism—which was prevalent among Hegel, Schopenhauer, and conservatives such as de Maistre and Bonald—and a positivistic conception of the organism, which shaped the thought of Comte, Spencer, Schäffle, Tönnies, and Durkheim.

August Comte wrote and published his six-volume work Cours de philosophie positive between 1830 and 1842, in which he drew on biology to describe society (Heilbron, 2015). Comte was guided by this second scientific revolution, which no longer pursues the goal of finding absolute truth, but instead limits itself to describing regularities as precisely as possible (Heilbron, 2017). Society should be guided as much as possible by scientific principles, following the example of experimental natural sciences. “I shall treat of the conditions of social existence as, in biology, I treated of organization under head of anatomy; and then of the laws of social movement, as in biology of those of life, under the head of physiology.” (Comte, 2000: 178). Between 1829 and 1832, Comte attended courses in general and comparative physiology taught by the anatomist Henri de Blainville, who described the self-regulation of the composition of its parts by the organism. In 1850, Comte delivered the eulogy for his former teacher (Canguilhem, 1981). Comte was also influenced by the physician Broussais, who coined the idea that a disease does not merely affect the body from the outside, but rather expresses a disturbance in the functioning of the organism (Canguilhem, 1991). Using the organism metaphor, Comte was able to describe the structure and development of societies as supra-individual social phenomena (Levine, 1995: 242 f.). At the same time, he attempted to use this analogy to describe pathologies of society. “These various disturbances are, for the social organism (l’organisme social), the exact counterpart of the diseases properly speaking of the individual organism [. . .].” (Comte, 1839: 431)

Herbert Spencer further developed the concept of the social organism. Spencer published the essay The Social Organism in 1860, and in his 1876 work Principles of Sociology one chapter is titled “Society is an Organism.” For him, society is not merely a collection of individuals, but “it is the permanence of the relations among component parts which constitutes the individuality of a whole as distinguished from the individualities of its parts.” (Spencer, 1898: 447). For Spencer the works of Blainville (Spencer, 1894: 60) and Karl Ernst von Baer on the development and self-regulation of organisms also play a central role. From this, he derives a general law of progressive differentiation, which he ultimately also applies to society (Offer, 2010: 62 ff.). In the progress of differentiation of the social organism the individuality in society grows. So, there are important differences between society and the biological organism: cells of the individual organism are bound together while the elements of the social organism, human beings, are free (Spencer, 1898: 457). Spencer emphasizes: “The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society.” (Spencer, 1885: 461). Spencer also contributed to evolutionary theory in biology by coining the expression survival of the fittest, which Darwin later adopted. Spencer described the development of social structures and their differentiation according to the rules of evolution (Offer, 2015).

This organismic thinking in early sociology was very influential. Ferdinand Tönnies described in his book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft from 1887 society with mechanical and community with organismic metaphors. And Émile Durkheim used in his De la division du travail social from 1893 the concept of organic solidarity to describe the division of labor in modern societies. For these authors central concepts are conceptualized in an organicist way. But at this time, there were radical sociologists, who described society in detail with organistic analogies. Paul von Lilienfeld asserted that society is a real organism (Lilienfeld, 1873). Following this idea to its consequences he compared a woman suffering from hysteria with the population of a large city during a financial crisis. For Cohen (1993) this is a good example for a mismatched homology.

Albert Schäffle’s organicist sociology

Albert Schäffle was born in 1831 in southwestern Germany near Stuttgart and was a professor of economics in Tübingen from 1860 and later also in Vienna (Prisching, 2020). In the 1860s, he published books on economics in which he laid the foundations for subjective value theory and emphasized the role of entrepreneurs in a market economy (Backhaus, 2010; Borchardt, 1961). In his book Kapitalismus und Socialismus, published in 1870, he critically examined ideas about socialist economic planning, anticipating arguments that would later emerge in the Socialist Calculation Debate (Hodgson et al., 2010). He made this criticism accessible to a wider audience with his popular book Quintessenz des Socialismus, published in 1874. At the same time, he also criticized Manchester liberalism, which is why Schäffle took a middle position between capitalism and socialism, which he further justified in his book Die Aussichtslosigkeit der Socialdemokratie (The Hopelessness of Social Democracy), published in 1885. In 1871, he served briefly as Austria’s Minister of Trade but returned to Stuttgart after the cabinet failed and devoted himself to his sociological studies.

Schäffle was not only an economist but also one of the early founders of German sociology. Between 1875 and 1878, Schäffle published his major sociological work Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers (The Structure and Life of the Social Body), which was reissued in a revised and abridged edition in 1896. As the title suggests, Schäffle uses the heuristic of viewing society as a social body. Analogous to a biological body, the social body also has different parts and organs that perform specific tasks for the life of the whole. The blood vessels are similar to the infrastructure that delivers important nutrients and goods to where they are needed. The brain and nerve pathways, similar to politics, control and move the body (Levine, 1995: 248).

Albert Schäffle was very influential in the sociology in the 19th century and was received in the English-speaking sociology too. In many books on the history of sociology Schäffle was mostly categorized as a proponent of the organicist sociology (Sorokin, 1928). Schäffle’s theory of the state also plays a role in the history of organismic theories of the state (Coker, 1910; Gettell, 1924). The literature frequently emphasizes that Schäffle’s approach differs from Spencer’s in that Schäffle characterizes the family—rather than the individual, as Spencer does—as the social unit (Levine, 1995; Merz, 1914). Because Schäffle emphasizes the mental connections between people, he is also referred to as a “psychical organicist” (Becker and Barnes, 1960). Sometimes, however, Schäffle is associated with Paul von Lilienfeld and described as an “extreme bio-organicist” (Martindale, 2001). In a simplistic manner, Stark (1962) offers a highly critical discussion of Schäffle’s allegedly anti-individualistic approach. In this literature, Schäffle’s extensive body of work has mostly been summarized in just a few pages, which hardly does justice to the scope of his work.

In the following, Schäffle’s social theory and his functional perspective will be reconstructed (2.1.), followed by a presentation of Schäffle’s concept of social evolution (2.2.). Organic sociology had already been met with criticism at that time (2.3.), to which Schäffle responded by attempting to reduce organic analogies in his work (2.4.).

The functional segmentation of society

In the preface to his 1874 work Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers, Albert Schäffle refers to Comte and Spencer, but claims that he developed his ideas independently of them. Comte and Spencer remain too general, while he will continue to pursue the elementary analysis of society (Schäffle, 1875: V). This means that Schäffle will systematically elaborate on the structure of the social body in all its details in his work.

The second edition from 1896 is a condensed version focusing on the key findings and is divided into a general and a specific section. The general section introduces the elements of society: individuals, families, and the goods that individuals take from nature, process, and consume. The social body is linked to its natural environment in many ways. The social body represents a “complex of persons and external goods” (Schäffle, 1896: 18). These elements combine to form different types of “social tissues” (“Socialgewebe”) that fulfill different tasks. These basic connections are functionally differentiated, as Schäffle puts it (Schäffle, 1896: 86). Different combinations of these types of social tissues form specific organs, that is, social institutions such as companies, civic organizations, associations, church organizations, etc. The general section concludes with detailed chapters on the temporal development of the social body, that is, social evolution. The specific section deals with the concrete parts of society, the family, the economy, the church, the state, and the relationships between states.

These diverse and precise descriptions of social institutions and organizations are of less interest to us here. This essay focuses on the concepts Schäffle developed in his sociology that characterize him as a precursor of sociological systems theory. What is characteristic of Schäffle is that, unlike Max Weber, who was active later, he takes a systemic perspective on society.

Schäffle regards the whole of nature as one large system in which everything is interconnected (Schäffle, 1896: 9). Society is only one part of it. And the individuals who make up society are themselves living contexts of millions of cells. The world is made up of a nesting of different systems.

Each of these systems is also embedded in its respective environment. Life on our planet depends on sunlight (Schäffle, 1896: 9). Animal and human organisms need light, air, and food. Society is the larger context of human interaction and has the task of organizing the physiological needs of individuals. Grain is harvested, other foods are produced and processed. Raw materials are extracted and transported to where they are needed. An intact climate is also one of the many conditions necessary for human life. Schäffle therefore writes: “All social sciences, not just economics, must therefore also take into account ‘nature’, i.e. the natural resources of the immediate environment of the social body, as defined by soil and climate, as the external sphere surrounding social life.” (Schäffle, 1896: 26) Schäffle also calls this relationship between society and nature social physiology. The economy is the subsystem of society that mainly serves to organize this social metabolism (Schäffle, 1896: 117).

However, society is not limited to mere interaction with the environment. Schäffle emphasizes that natural resources are further processed through art, craftsmanship, and science. And the production and distribution of goods involve planning, calculation, and evaluation. In the economy, the sustenance of individual organisms is “spiritualized” (“vergeistigt”) (Schäffle, 1896: 20). In human society, natural and spiritual elements are combined. Social life is the spiritual and universal integration, differentiation, and structuring of all inorganic and organic forces of the earthly world (Schäffle, 1896: 15). Schäffle therefore also refers to society as a “moral organism” (Schäffle, 1896:18). This emphasis on morality and ethics will influence Durkheim, as we shall see later.

Schäffle describes the structures of the social body in his “theory of social tissue” (“Socialgewebelehre”). There are certain (appropriately trained) groups of people in society who perform specific tasks and therefore represent a specific human-goods relationship. There are those who perform a protective function (police, military), organize the extraction, production, and transport of goods, operate technology and machinery (muscle tissue), and perform intellectual or administrative work (nerve tissue) (Schäffle, 1896: 103 ff.). These types of social tissue differ from each other in their function, that is, they are functionally differentiated.

Individuals, the social cells, possess functional versatility. At certain times, they are parts of different social tissues. The same individual is a family member, worker, citizen, church member, or a member of another civic organization (Schäffle, 1896: 107). The individual only becomes capable of action by becoming an active element of such a social context.

As in biological organisms, different combinations of these types of tissues form different organs. Society is not merely a collection of people but is organized and functionally structured. However, this organization of society does not follow an external plan but is the result of social self-organization (Schäffle, 1896: 141). For Schäffle, there are three types of organs: the family, private corporations, and public corporations. From a specifically German discourse context, the distinction between private law and public law relationships is characteristic (Schäffle, 1896: 142 ff.). These private connections are not only economic enterprises, but also cooperatives and associations.

The social evolution of society

Schäffle is not only concerned with describing the structure of a modern society and its functional differentiation, but also with depicting the transformation, that is, the evolution, of these social structures. In biology, a distinction is made between ontogenesis and phylogenesis. Karl Ernst von Baer had described the development of the embryo and its differentiation from the egg cell. Spencer applied his law of structural differentiation to society (Spencer, 1881: 234).

At that time, the discourse on the development of species was dominated by Darwin’s work The Origins of Species published in 1859. Inspired by Malthus, Darwin came up with the idea that more offspring could be produced than could be fed. By analogy with pigeon breeding, natural selection would take place in nature. In a later edition of his book, Darwin adopted the expression “survival of the fittest” coined by Spencer. What exactly was meant by “the fittest” was controversial. Thomas Huxley emphasized that the fittest did not necessarily have to be the best or strongest, but that survival depended on external conditions (Huxley, 1894).

Similar to Spencer, Schäffle also applies the principle of evolution to society in order to explain the transformation of its structures. In his 1879 essay Darwinismus und Socialwissenschaft Schäffle writes that the processes of evolution can be observed much better in society than in nature, since they do not take millions of years, but much shorter periods of time (Schäffle, 1885: 1–2). In contrast to biology, it is not the differentiation of species that takes place, but the functional differentiation of social structures, the division of labor (Schäffle, 1896: 296). Through better and more efficient organization of the division of labor, a group of people or a community can better defend itself against dangers from the environment or wild animals. But it is not only differentiation, but also integration that contributes to the survival of the fittest. Strong cohesion among people, solidarity, and morality promote the self-preservation of the group (Schäffle, 1896: 301 ff.). Schäffle criticizes those social Darwinists who want to abolish poor laws in the name of the principle of the struggle for existence. But it is precisely the improvement of the situation of the lower classes that strengthens social cohesion (Schäffle, 1896: 305). In the course of social evolution, humanity’s development progresses from primitive hordes of humans, through kingdoms and nation states, to a universal civilization (Schäffle, 1896: 306).

Competition between individuals is not abolished, but rather civilized and takes the form of economic competition and rivalry. Schäffle’s strongest criticism of socialism is that it seeks to abolish this competition. He elaborates on this argument in his Quintessenz des Socialismus. Socialism ignores the fact that peaceful competition drives actors to improve their adaptation. Weak or inefficient inventions, companies, and institutions are forced out of the market (Schäffle, 1885: 23). This is a form of social selection that drives the improvement of society. However, for competition to function well, it must be framed by legal and moral principles. Schäffle rejects the anarchy of laissez faire (Schäffle, 1885: 26). Schäffle defends a middle position between socialism and capitalism (Hodgson et al., 2010).

The social body is functionally differentiated and, due to areas of civilized competition, possesses internal dynamics that constantly generate innovation and variation (Schäffle, 1885: 9). The social division of labor serves divergent adaptation. Well-functioning social institutions are “inherited” and passed on from generation to generation. So, it is wrong, when Stark writes: “But the whole logic of his [Schäffle’s] organicism, which is, as we are trying to show, a form of anti-individualistic, collectivistic thinking, forced him in the direction of state-socialism [. . .].” (Stark, 1962: 71). The opposite is right: organicist sociology had worked out the self-organizing processes of the economy.

Criticism of organicist sociology

Criticism of organicist sociology was already being voiced in the 19th century. The Philosopher Ludwig Stein doubted that laws as strict as those found in biology could be discovered in society (Stein, 1898). Stein did not believe that it was possible for sociology every to become a nomothetic science. For Stein, sociology is located somewhere between nomothetic and idiographic science. Criticism was also leveled at the method of drawing analogies. Paul Barth differentiated between deductive, inductive and analogical conclusions (Barth, 1897). Analogical conclusions are justified, if the similarity between two objects can be described crystal clear. So, it remains questionable whether the analogy of the body cell is more applicable to the human individual or to the family, since the latter can reproduce like a cell. Analogical conclusions would be justified if they were used to show that the division of labor occurs in both organisms and societies.

At a conference held in 1897 by the Institut international de sociologie, founded by René Worms, a heated debate took place regarding the legitimacy of organicist sociology. Gabriel Tarde, in particular, stood out with his sharp criticism of the analogy between society and an organism. Unlike biological cells, human individuals are free in their will, can be active in multiple “organs” of society, and furthermore, the evolution of higher organisms leads to greater integration of cells, whereas the individuality of modern societies is constantly increasing (Barberis, 2003: 63). The Russian sociologist Novikov attempted to defend organicist sociology by repeating Spencer’s argument that organisms, too, follow a process of differentiation. However, following this conference, an increasing number of sociologists in Europe found the organicist metaphor less and less useful (Barberis, 2003: 64).

Georg Simmel used the concept “social organism” in his early work Über sociale Differenzierung (Simmel, 1989: 141) but later got in distance to this concept. Also Max Weber formulated a similar critique on the idea of social organism because organicist sociology is reifying society as an independent entity. Instead, Simmel and Weber spoke of socialization rather than society (Lichtblau, 2015). Max Weber characterized Schäffles main work as brilliant (“geistvoll”) (Weber, 2013: 162). But for him an organicist sociology is only able to describe functional connections but fail to understand (“Verstehen”) the praxis of individuals. We could not understand the behavior of organic cells but only capture in a functional way. Because of the influence of Max Weber on the Sociology in Weimar Republic, Schäffle fell in oblivion in Germany.

In early accounts of the history of sociology, such as Sorokin (1928), bio-organizational sociology is discussed as a bygone era. Frank Stark is also very critical of organicist sociology in his history of sociology, especially of Albert Schäffle (Stark, 1962: 63–72). He accuses Schäffle and other defenders of organicism of being anti-individualistic because the individual person is understood only as an abstraction of a complex social context. But Stark ignored Schäffle’s critique of socialism and Spencer’s extreme individualistic concept of social organism. Furthermore, Stark claimed organic analogies merely embellish simple sociological insights with metaphors. But we have seen this is a misunderstanding.

This criticism of organicist sociology became the consensus in the mid-20th century. It merely responds to the texts of the representatives of organicist sociology with astonishment and irritation but does not attempt to reconstruct the motives and arguments that spoke in favor of analogizing society and organism at the time.

Differences between organism and society and Schäffle’s last book

In his work, Schäffle sought to show that an orientation toward biology can positively stimulate sociology. Just as an organism is divided into organs that perform specific tasks for the preservation of the organism as a whole, society is also functionally differentiated. And the transformation of society can also be reconstructed in analogy to ontogenesis and phylogenesis.

However, Schäffle also emphasizes the differences. The elements of society are represented by individuals. Unlike biological cells, these individuals take on an active role and have goals, needs, values, and ideals (Schäffle, 1896: 19). Although muscle tissue can be compared to technical and productive work and nerve tissue to the state and administration, there are many areas of social activity that cannot be compared to the organism, such as science, education, and religious belief. Finally, unlike a cell, a human being is not always in the same organ, but there is an individual choice of profession, and, in addition, the same individual can be involved in different institutions and organizations (Schäffle, 1896: 22).

Although Schäffle emphasizes these differences, he was accused of drawing arbitrary analogies and using purely metaphorical embellishments that did not belong in a scientific work. In the preface to the first edition, he states that he has avoided the dangers of analogy, that is, blurring the differences and unscientific allegory (Schäffle, 1896: VII). In the preface to the second edition, he emphasizes that he has further reduced the biological analogies in the new edition (Schäffle, 1896: IV). At the same time, however, there are also structural similarities between organisms and society, which he calls real analogies.

Schäffle died in 1903, and in 1906 a book was published from his estate that claimed to have dispensed with all biological parallels. This means that Schäffle ultimately sought new terminology with which to describe systemic, structural, and processual phenomena in society. In the introduction to this Abriß der Soziologie Schäffle distinguishes between analogies and homologies and speaks of a homologous misuse of organic analogy (Schäffle, 1906: 6). There is a similarity (analogy) between the organism and society, but no identity (homology). By drawing analogies between the social world and biology, Schäffle was able to develop a comprehensive system of sociology. These crutches of analogy had to be discarded, but the results and findings remained (Schäffle, 1906: 5).

A similar conceptual distinction is also used by the historian of science Bernard Cohen. He refers to analogies as similarities between several phenomena on an abstract level. Homologies occur when the descriptions are still too closely tied to the model or are not abstract enough. Cohen took this distinction from biology. For example, is the forearm of a human homolog to the foreleg of a horse and of a bat. And the wing of a butterfly is analogous to the wing of a bird (Cohen, 1993: 11). So, Herbert Spencer, for example, used the mismatched homology that Great Britain was like a crustacean (Cohen, 1993: 29). And also, Lilienfeld had many of these inappropriate homologies. But Cohen also mistakenly accuses Schäffle of mismatched homology, even though Schäffle made great strides toward abstraction.

In his search for new terminology, Schäffle places in his Abriß der Soziologie greater emphasis on concepts such as institutions, function, community, and society, as well as interactions and interdependence. He now describes society as a “world unto itself” (“Welt für sich”) (Schäffle, 1906:33), by which he means something similar to Durkheim’s characterization of the social as a reality sui generis. Society is an association that endures beyond generational change (Schäffle, 1906: 12). But it is also nothing other than a network of individuals, communities, and their interactions. Mechanical descriptive approaches cannot capture this. “It is not a machine that receives all its movements from a single force, but rather remains the embodiment of independent, interacting individuals [. . .].” (Schäffle, 1906: 36) Above all, the mutual dependence and interdependence of all members of society (Schäffle, 1906: 212) cannot be described in mechanistic terms. To capture this, early sociology had turned to a non-mechanical, that is, an organicist, terminology. Schäffle writes that biological analogies are to be regarded as crutches of sociology that can be discarded once a systematic framework of sociology has been established with the aid of these crutches (Schäffle, 1906: 5). This reminds one of Wittgenstein’s image of the ladder that must be throw away after it has been climbed (Wittgenstein, 2021: 249).

Schäffle presents the results of his complete rejection of organic analogies in his theory of organization. Here, Schäffle attempts, as he himself says, to work out the functions of a national society based on the division of labor. In his Abriß der Soziologie Schäffle creates a system with which he sorts organ systems according to functional criteria. He writes: “A. The material institutions or those oriented toward the ‘outside world,’ namely (1) settlement and transportation, (2) protection security, (3) technology, (4) the national economy (as social metabolism); B. the institutions of intellectual public life, namely (5) social events, (6) education, upbringing, teaching (school), (7) science, (8) the fine arts, aesthetic public life, (9) religious public life, C. 19) the institutions of unified will and action (power), i.e., state and municipal institutions.” (Schäffle, 1906: 174).

Schäffle thus differentiates between three functional groups of social spheres and institutions: (a) institutions that are oriented toward the outside world (the economy), (b) cultural institutions, and (c) political institutions that pursue a goal (will). Schäffle thus attempts to overcome biological analogies by identifying certain basic functions of the social system. This allows him to transfer the description of the structure of society to a higher level of abstraction and thereby make more precise statements about the functioning of society than a comparison with biological organisms can.

Here lies another argument of Schäffle against the collectivist socialism. In his theory of social evolution, he already claims that economic competition is a peaceful form of struggle for existence. In his scheme of functional spheres of society, he argues that the economic and the political sphere of the society are not the same because they undertake different functions. The problem of collective socialism is that here the economy is totally ruled by a political plan. Instead of this Schäffle underline the economy as an autonomous sphere, which is able – in certain limits – to regulate itself following the aim adapting the society to the outside world. So, in Schäffle’s concept of economy there lies the idea of self-organization, equilibrium and homeostasis.

Contemporary reception of Schäffle’s work

Schäffle was a very influential sociologist and economist in German-speaking countries. Carl Menger was inspired by Schäffle’s preliminary work when developing his subjective theory of value (Menger, 1871:79). Marx also addressed Schäffle’s economic considerations in his Randglossen zu Wagner Schäffle also had an enormous influence on sociology. In an obituary for Schäffle, Othmar Spann wrote in 1904: “He was an incomparable, formidable figure in German sociology.” (Spann, 1904: 209) And in comparison to Marx, Spann wrote: “Marx was the master of the dynamic, Schäffle of the static problem of sociology.” (Spann, 1904: 225).

Émile Durkheim and the French sociology

Schäffle’s work was also received in other countries. In 1885, Émile Durkheim wrote a review of Schäffle’s Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers and praised the richness of detail in his work (Durkheim, 1885; Heilbron, 2015: 76). He positively emphasized that Schäffle had a focus on the ideal connections between members of human societies. Comte and Spencer rightly pointed out the importance of the division of labor and differentiation in modern societies. However, their analyses underestimated the moral aspect that Schäffle points out. The “wonderful ability to specialize and consequently to unite” (Durkheim, 1885: 87) is not sufficient to explain how societies function. An important aspect is the idea of the common good of humanity and the feeling of solidarity. Durkheim then expands on this approach 1893 in his book De la division du travail social. Thus, it can be said that Durkheim’s criticism of Spencer’s contractual individualism in chapter 7 of his Division du travail social was ultimately inspired by Schäffle.

In 1888, Durkheim wrote a short text on Schäffle’s economic program and defended it against critics who misinterpreted Schäffle as a collectivist (Durkheim, 1992). Durkheim, as he writes, was in correspondence with Schäffle and can therefore confirm that Schäffle rejects a bureaucratic-authoritarian system and instead advocates a welfare state that attempts to prevent poverty while preserving the free initiative of individuals.

René Worms, the opponent of Durkheim, also hold contact to Schäffle und published 1896 the book Organisme et Société. 1893 Worms found the journal Revue internationale de sociologie, which gathered organicist thinker from many disciplines, and Worms could win Schäffle as a co-editor for the journal among many others (Heilbron, 2015: 71). But Schäffle had not published an article in this journal. Worms also founded in 1893 the Institut international de sociologie, holding eight international conferences prior to the First World War (Heilbron, 2015: 72). Worms could win Spencer to become the first president of the institute. A few years later Schäffle was president too (Barberis, 2003: 55).

Albion Small

Among early American sociologists, Schäffle’s work was particularly important to Albion Small. In 1896, Small published a review of the second edition of Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers (Small, 1896). He wrote that the work was known to anyone who claimed to study sociology. However, there are many misunderstandings about this work, because organic analogies are not the essence of sociology. Small warns against pseudo-biology, that is, the use of supposedly biological knowledge, even though biologists themselves are still divided on biological facts. Small praises Schäffle for being cautious about adopting biological knowledge. Schäffle is primarily concerned with using biological analogies as a tool to describe the social structures of society and their transformation.

Small deals with Schäffle in more detail in his 1905 work General Sociology. Here, Small shows the extent to which Schäffle, independently of organic imagery, developed a useful way of describing society. Using the analogy of the organism, Schäffle was able to emphasize the aspect of function in social contexts. Just as individual organs perform specific functions for other organs and for the organism as a whole, so too do sub-sectors of society perform central functions. Compared to Herbert Spencer, whom Small discusses, Schäffle places greater emphasis on the role of function in society than Spencer, who tends to describe structures and their differentiation.

Small emphasizes that with this functional description of society, Schäffle developed an approach that focuses on praxis, “work,” and the active role of social actors. “He was interested in moving on from the elementary fact of how men are arranged to the more vital fact of what they are doing by means of these arrangements.” (Small, 1905: 170). According to Small, Schäffle manages to combine social analysis with an actor perspective. The functions of social structures can only be understood if one understands the orientation of the actions of individual actors. “[M]en are bringing things to pass – they are functioning.” (Small, 1905: 171).

In the decades after this reception the positive aspects in the sociology of Albert Schäffle, Durkheim and Small worked out, fell into oblivion. While Durkheim emphasized Schäffle’s focus on the moral and cultural aspects in the process of differentiation in modern society and defend Schäffle’s economic thinking, and while Small underline Schäffle’s concept of function and its individualistic view on social processes, Stark misinterpreted Schäffle totally, insinuated him collectivist thinking and made the false assertion, organicist thinking is always anti-individualist.

Albert Schäffle as a forerunner of sociological systems theory

Albert Schäffle was not only a leading figure in organicist sociology, as he is usually portrayed in the literature, but also a sociologist who sought to eliminate as many organic analogies and homologies as possible from his social theory. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, one might say that organic imagery is the ladder that must be throw away after one has climbed it up (Wittgenstein, 2021: 249). Organic imagery served as a useful terminology for describing structures and processes in society for which there are otherwise no words. In this way, one could describe the functional contribution of sub-sectors of society to the preservation of society as a whole, as well as the transformation of social structures, more effectively than with mechanistic terminology. Because of these advantages, Schäffle was compelled to create a new conceptual framework after the organic terminology had been pushed aside. However, this project remained in its infancy when Schäffle died in 1903. At the very least, with the concept of functional differentiation, he created a new term which is used in sociology till now (Schäffle, 1875: 323). But it was not until the mid-20th century that systems theory and cybernetics developed terms and concepts such as feedback loops, self-organization, and autopoiesis, which achieve what Schäffle had hoped for.

It is noteworthy that Schäffle has since fallen into obscurity. The founding fathers of sociological systems theory, such as Talcott Parsons, make no reference whatsoever to Schäffle’s work. In an autobiographical text from 1970 about his intellectual development, Parsons wrote: “Closely related to this was the conception of ‘system.’ Schumpeter and Whitehead were important in forming the background of this concept, but I think it crystallized above all in the influence of Pareto and Henderson. [. . .] Hence Henderson’s statement that perhaps Pareto’s most important contribution to sociology was his conception of the ‘social system,’ a dictum which I myself took so seriously that I used the phrase as the title of a book some years later.” (Parsons, 1970: 830). Walter Cannon’s concept of homeostasis also inspired Parsons. “This connected closely with the idea of W.B. Cannon of homeostatic stabilization of physiological processes [. . .]” (Parsons, 1970: 831).

Lawrence Joseph Henderson was a physician at Harvard Medical School but also contributed to the establishing of the Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1931 (Cross and Albury, 1987). Henderson popularized Pareto’s concept of system, which Pareto defined in § 2079 of his Trattato di sociologia generale from 1916. Walter Cannon, who taught physiology at Harvard from 1926, coined the term homeostasis to describe physiological self-regulation in organisms (Cross and Albury, 1987). In 1932, Cannon published the book The Wisdom of the Body in which he develops the idea of social homeostasis in the final chapter. “Once more, just as in the body physiologic, so in the body politic, the whole and its parts are mutually dependent; the welfare of the large community and the welfare of its individual members are reciprocal.” (Cannon, 1963: 310). For Henderson, Pareto is the main reference. Henderson refers to Spencer a few times (Henderson, 1970: 252). Schäffle is ignored by Henderson. And Cannon refrains from making any reference to sociology whatsoever. So, there is a gap in intellectual history.

Conclusion

This paper presented the sociological work of Albert Schäffle, who was enormously influential in Germany at the end of the 19th century. Although Schäffle made an important contribution to organicist sociology with his magnum opus Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers it would be wrong, as has been done in secondary literature, to interpret his work as a bizarre analogy between biological organisms and society. This paper therefore began by attempting to identify the reasons why 19th-century sociology found organic analogies so useful for describing society. At the same time, it demonstrated that criticism of organic sociology had already begun to emerge by the end of the century, and that the advantages and disadvantages of organic analogies were being debated. This paper showed that Schäffle grappled with criticism of organic imagery and developed the concept of the social organism. It was emphasized that in his latest work Abriß der Sociologie Schäffle pursued the goal of avoiding all organic metaphors.

Instead, in his latest book, Schäffle uses new terms such as institution, function, interaction, and interdependence. In the final version of his social theory, he then attempted to define functional sub-sectors of society and their specific roles in maintaining society as a whole. In addition, Schäffle coined the term “functional differentiation”. In doing so, he conceptually approaches a way of thinking that would be adopted 50 years later in sociological systems theory, for example by Talcott Parsons. Therefore, Schäffle could be interpreted as a forerunner of systems theory. It was shown that Albert Schäffle was not only received but also appreciated by Émile Durkheim and Albion Small. But the reception of Schäffle in the US reaches a dead end with Small.

There are many prejudices against organicist sociology. But the analogy between the biological organism and the society was not a curiosity of the late 19th century sociology but rather than an attempt to describe the functional structure and the development of societies in a scientific manner. Schäffle’s work demonstrates that innovative approaches to social theory, which were ahead of their time, emerged from the intellectual context of organic sociology.