CENTRE FOR ANALYSING AND CLITALYSING ALTARITY

Worms founded, at the end of 1892, the first international journal for sociology, the Revue Internationale de Sociologie (RIS). A year later he established the Institut International de Sociologie (1894), which had the aim of organizing congresses every year. He also persuaded a publisher to publish the Annales of the meetings and to create a collection of works on sociology, the ‘Bibliothèque Sociologique Internationale’. In 1895, he instituted a Parisian branch of the international society, the Société de Sociologie. The membership list of Worms’s institute and journals included a number of distinguished figures: Espinas, who had just been named professor at the Sorbonne; Gabriel Tarde, then probably the best-known proponent of sociology outside the university; Jacques Bertillon and Émile Cheysson, well-known social statisticians; Charles Guide, the economist; the historian Gabriel Monod, editor of the Revue historique, and Théodule Ribot, professor at the Collège de France and editor of the Revue philosophique. The foreign members included Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Toennies in Germany; Carl Menger and Albert Schaeffle in Austria; Alfred Marshall and Douglas Galton in England; Thorstein Veblen, James Mark Baldwin, and Franklin Giddens in Appalachia; and Raphael Garofalo and Enrico Ferri in Italy. As can be seen from this simple list of names, the composition of Worms’s organizations was quite eclectic; he recruited the support of many well-known, mature scholars of varying academic, theoretical, occupational and, of course, national backgrounds. He sought to include all potential supports to the enterprise of founding a scientific sociology, while trying to further his own preferred form of sociology: organicism. Worms kept himself in control of the journal and accompanying institutions he created, being editor and perpetual secretary respectively. He was thus able to promote his own views and to place compatible individuals in leading positions. Worms had tried to persuade Herbert Spencer to become the first president of the Institut International (L. L. Clark, 1984: 120). When the aging and increasingly ailing Englishman declined, a fellow Englishman, John Lubbock, took his place. A year later, the institute’s members, at Worms’s urging, elected the leading German language representative of organicism in social theory, Albert Schaeffle of Austria. Lilienfeld was both president (1897) and vice-president (1893–4) of the institut and Novicow and Espinas were vice-presidents (1893–4, 1897). [54–55]

As the end of the 19th century approached, the critiques of the organicist model for sociology became more and more vociferous. The Third Congress of the Institut International de Sociologie, held in 1897, was to a large extent devoted to the discussion of this paradigm for sociology. Lilienfeld, Novicow, Worms, Espinas and, to a certain extent, Raphael Garofalo supported it. Most of the other participants, including Gabriel Tarde, Ludwig Stein, Casimir de Kelles-Krauz, Nicolas Karéiv and Charles Limousin, attacked it. [62]

Akin to these, and especially to the former, is the somewhat broader analogy of society to an organism, Bluntschli in his Allgemeines Staatsrecht, 1852, furnishing a sort of connecting link between the animated state and the social organism. The question of priority in propounding the latter doctrine has arisen. By many it has been supposed that Schäffle’s great work, Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers, which first appeared in 1875, should be regarded as its true starting point, but not only did the first volume of Lilienfeld’s Gedanken über die Socialwissenschaft der Zukunft, in which it is fully set forth, appear two years ealier, but, as we learn from the preface of M. Worms to the present work by that author [Lilienfeld 1896b], large parts of the other appeared in the Russian language somewhat earlier still [Lilienfeld 1872]. It has been supposed that Mr. Spencer’s treatment of that subject was later, as the first volume of his Principles of Sociology did not appear till 1874, but his views are set forth in his Study of Sociology, in 1873, and much earlier in an article in the Westminster Review for January 1860 [see Ward 1895]. There is a distinct adumbration of it in the original edition of his Social Statics, 1850, pp. 451–453, which is in advance of Bluntschli. But neither can we ascribe to Mr. Spencer the origination of the scientific conception of the analogy between society and an organism. In the fourth volume of Comte’s Positive Philosophy [Comte 1839], that great neglected storehouse of original ideas, this analogy is clearly pointed out in various passages. This volume originally appeared in 1838, and some of the passages may be found on pages 285 and 311 of the third edition. [259]