The Rise of the New Pandora’s Box?: The Return of Biologism in France in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Résumé En

Over the last 50 years, one will have noticed the frenetic output of numerous best-sellers linking biological theories to the explanation of social systems or social behaviors. Books and essays such as Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) by Edward O. Wilson, The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins, or more recently The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994) by Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray, all generated a wide range of responses. In one sense, their success mirrors the rise and appeal of biologism, a phenomenon commonly associated with the explanation of social and educational inequalities in society through deterministic biological trends. Biologism manifests itself in popular science writings, such as magazines and books read by a mass audience that lean on a biological reasoning in order to tackle the explanation of societal problems. In other words, biologism has more to do with the mechanisms of cultural re-appropriation and the circulation of scientific schemes, than with naturalism or biological determinism per se. In his book entitled Le Singe, le gène et le neurone. Du retour du biologiste en France, Sébastien Lemerle, a sociologist at Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense, delivers a breakthrough analysis of the structure, dissemination, and reception of biologism in France from the 1960s until the 2000s, by appraising the interventions made by biologists such as Henri Laborit, Jacques Monod, Konrad Lorenz, and François Jacob as intellectuals in the public arena. Lemerle reveals the broad mechanisms that lie behind the biologization of social explanations, as well as the structures that are responsible for producing these new cultural goods.