Rieppel, Lukas (Author)
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 33
Issue: 1
Pages: 232-252
This essay engages a classic debate about the way nineteenth-century biology was informed by contemporaneous developments in political economy, and vice versa. However, rather than argue for a convergence between classical liberalism and Darwinian evolution, this essay traces the way that the concept of organization moved between both fields of discourse. Compared to the theory of evolution by natural selection, the logic of organization was far more teleological and, often, authoritarian. Instead of asserting that competition for access to scarce resources among autonomous agents yields adaptive outcomes in the population at large, it held that organic entities inexorably tend to develop from a state of simplicity to one of complexity. Moreover, it stressed the production of hierarchical structures wherein the whole was privileged over its constitutive parts, in biology as well as society. It is my thesis that the logic of organization proved especially attractive in debates about the transition from free-market to corporate capitalism, providing a powerful means to describe, discuss, and dispute the centralization, rationalization, and bureaucratization that contemporary observers often took to be characteristic of a distinctly modern political economy.
...MoreArticle Lukas Rieppel; Eugenia Lean; William Deringer (2018) Introduction: The Entangled Histories of Science and Capitalism. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-24).
Similar Citations
Article
Wegener, Daan;
(2011)
“Das politische Welträtsel”: Ernst Haeckel en het Duitse liberalisme 1859--1900
Article
Mischa Suter;
(2017)
Debt and Its Attachments: Collateral as an Object of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Liberalism
Article
Xiaoxing Jin;
(2022)
The Evolution of Social Darwinism in China, 1895–1930
Book
Avner Offer;
Gabriel Söderberg;
(2016)
The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn
Book
Foster, John Bellamy;
(2000)
Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature
Article
Zarrilli, Adrian Gustavo;
(2001)
Capitalism, Ecology, and Agrarian Expansion in the Pampean Region, 1890-1950
Article
Sullivan, Gregory;
(2010)
Tricks of Transference: Oka Asajiro (1868--1944) on Laissez-faire Capitalism
Book
Dara Orenstein;
(2019)
Out of stock : The warehouse in the history of capitalism
Article
Rosenthal, Caitlin;
(April 2017)
Forum: The Paper Technologies of Capitalism -- Numbers for the Innumerate: Everyday Arithmetic and Atlantic Capitalism
Article
Stephen J. Rockel;
(2019)
The Tutsi and the Nyamwezi: Cattle, Mobility, and the Transformation of Agro-Pastoralism in Nineteenth-Century Western Tanzania
Book
Magee, Gary Bryan;
Thompson, Andrew S;
(2010)
Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850--1914
Article
Kaloustian, David;
(2013)
Dialectic of Enlightenment in Don DeLillo's White Noise
Book
Fournier, Marcel;
Macey, David;
(2013)
Émile Durkheim: A Biography
Book
Pande, Ishita;
(2010)
Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire
Article
Ruprecht Mattig;
(2020)
Ethnography and liberty: a new look at the anthropological work of Wilhelm von Humboldt
Thesis
Kelly, Larissa Kennedy;
(2011)
Waking the Gods: Archaeology and State Power in Porfirian Mexico
Article
Dejan Lukic;
(2022)
Science Education and Bureaucratization of Fieldwork: Creating a Geological Collection in Nineteenth-Century Serbia
Chapter
Bernardini, Jean-Marc;
(2004)
Des sciences de la vie aux sciences de l'homme: le darwinisme social au XIXe siècle comme analyseur de situation
Chapter
Puig-Samper, Miguel Ángel;
(2001)
Darwinism in Spanish Physical Anthropology. Part Two: Eugenics, Degeneration and Social Darwinism
Book
Kolchinskii, Eduard I.;
(2006)
Biologiia Germanii i Rossii-SSSR v usloviiakh sotsial'no-politicheskikh krizisov pervoi poloviny XX veka: mezhdu liberalizmom, kommunizmom i natsional-sotsializmom
Be the first to comment!