This is my first post for my new blog, Vice Versa. In this post I expand on a project I began at EWP—a reconstruction of the languages of the inquiry into nature and society from Henry Buckle to the work of E. O. Wilson. At EWP, I detailed how socio-biology was in reality a number of related inquiries in constellation with distinct genealogies, methodologies, worldviews and rules of evidence. Here, I interrogate Robin Fox’s claim to the neologism of “biosocial” to describe his inquiry. Rather than take Fox at his word that his biosocial science is a unique invention, I trace the origins of the term to turn of the century discussions of biological determinism in Italian criminology and in the work of education reformer Maria Montessori.
Once there, I then follow biosocial to its embedding within behaviorist psychology and finally within post-war discussions of racial prejudice. My examination of the term biosocial is not exhaustive—Kingsley Davis used it to define his view of man as an evolved social organism—but I use a case study approach to emphasize how biosocial has always been used to highlight the importance of the social as well as the environmental and to interrogate the boundary between the biological and the natural. Much like social selection, biosocial has been utilized since the origins of the social sciences to contend with deterministic explanations.