Lamarckism and the Emergence of 'Scientific' Social Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France

Snait B. Gissis has been teaching at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University since early 1990s. For the last couple of decades, she has been working on the interactions between the social and the biological in three sub-fields: a) Lamarckism and the constitution of social sciences; b) Race and racism from eighteenth century until present-day genetics/genomics; c) Collectivities.She has published in various  journals and collections of history and philosophy of science, and particularly of the life sciences; she is the co-editor of two volumes published  in The Vienna series in Theoretical Biology, MIT Press: Transformations of Lamarckism (With E. Jablonka) , and Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences (with E. Lamm and A. Shavit).

• Acknowledgements.- Introduction.- Chapter 1. Jean Baptiste Lamarck: La marche de la nature.- Chapter 2. Herbert Spencer: The tripartite model.- Chapter 3. Interlude: The cluster of plasticity and the impact of its transfer.- Chapter 4. John Hughlings Jackson: A clinical scientist.- Chapter 5. Théodule Armand Ribot: ‘Scientific psychology’ in France.- Chapter 6. Interlude: ‘Hierarchy’ in nineteenth century Spencerian Lamarckism / neo-Lamarckism and its transfer.- Chapter 7. David Émile Durkheim: Founding ‘scientific sociology’.- Chapter 8. Sigmund Freud, a neo-Lamarckist – Short Coda.- Chapter 9. Interlude: ‘Collectivity’ in the nineteenth century between the biological and the social.- Concluding reflection.- Appendix: Concise biographical portraits.- Notes.- Index.

“Book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the role that Lamarckism played for the construction of new scientific social disciplines and the interplay between their different model-organisms. Gissis successfully connects in-depth case studies of discipline founders with greater socio-historical movements and the overall impact of the deployment of the Lamarckian ‘problématique’ in the nineteenth century. … this study could be considered a powerful starting point for historical and conceptual reflections of the recent generation of scholars … .” (Tobias Cheung, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Vol. 46 (4), 2024)