Du déterminisme biologique au déterminisme social

• Main Author: Marc Joly
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Les Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme 2016-05-01
• Series: Socio
• Subjects: historical determinism; conceptual regime; the humanities and social sciences; historical semantics
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/socio/2143
• ISSN: 2266-3134; 2425-2158

Historical semantics, while being opposed to the idea of linear progress, does enable us to show that notions of biological determinism and social determinism were broadly conceived as being complementary. The development, towards 1900, of a conceptual regime specific to the humanities and the social sciences (HSS) and initiated by the requirement of an articulation of the biological, psychological and sociological dimensions of human existence (each dimension having to be studied and conceptualised according to appropriate procedures) sheds light on this complementarity. Strategies of resistance to the logical development of this regime have been endorsed, and in various different manners, just as, similarly, support strategies along with adequate control of the institutional interplay, have generally proved to be successful (as witness the example of the Durkheimians). In the last resort, the problem of biological determinism has only been posed in the social sciences in so far as the conceptual tools supplied by the model of the laws of nature as well as by religious and philosophical traditions prevented us from correctly grasping the idea of “historical determinism.”