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Thesis ID: CBB001561991

Darwin contra Rousseau: Evolutionary Narrative and the Discourse on the Social Bond in Nineteenth-Century France (2003)

Sadagopan, Shoba (Author)

University of Southern California
Kamuf, Peggy

Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Kamuf, Peggy
Physical Details: 241 pp.
Language: English

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Darwinism Evolution Behavioral sciences 19th century France Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

My thesis is on evolutionary narrative in nineteenth France in the context of the discourse on the social bond. Thinkers and writers such as Hippolyte Taine in the mid-century, to Charles Maurras at the fin-de- sicle , believed Rousseau to be the source of the recurrent revolutions that beset France throughout the nineteenth century. These conservative thinkers used the language of the organic and of evolutionary theory, known in France as Lamarckian transformisme, to oppose the idea of the social contract. In Part 1, Giraffes and Ancestors, I trace evolutionary theory back to Buffon and Rousseau, and show how Rousseau's influence is discernible in Lamarck's privileging of will and intention. I discuss Darwin's Origin of Species and the social-Darwinist reading of evolutionary theory in France, particularly in the work of Taine. I take up the metaphor of the tree used by Darwin in the Origin, and show how it reappears in Taine's historical work and Maurice Barrs' Les Dracins. In Part II, Degeneration and Regeneration, I examine another strand of organicist discourse, that of degeneration. In Chapter III, A Rebours, I show how bio-medical theories of degeneration and heredity articulated by the psychiatrists Prosper Lucas and Benedict Morel used transformiste notions to account for a range of social ills. I then show how the two strands converge in Taine's account of the Jacobin conquest in his Origines de la France contemporaine. I also discuss Max Nordau's reading of J-K Huysman's A Rebours in his work Degeneration. I then consider the regenerative value brought to organicist discourse by Emile Durkheim in his early work. I discuss the notion of organic solidarity that he articulates in De la Division du travail social as a counter to what he calls anomie, social disorder; I also suggest that Durkheim's silence on Marx and the Paris Commune of 1871 was a way of neutralizing class struggle. Finally I discuss the movement known as solidarism where many of the reforms suggested by Durkheim were translated into reality.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2004): 3320. UMI order no. 3103963.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561991/

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