Organicism

What is organicism? Organicism is uniquely embodied in his organicismic concept of society........(biological and social organism).......

As against structural approach in sociology Herbert Spencer was a functionalist. According to him, “There can be no true conception of a structure without a true conception of its function”. “To understand how an organization originated and developed” he explained, “it is requisite to understand the need subserved at the outset and afterwards”. Social institutions arrive from the exigencies of social structure and functions. Change in social structure occurs due to change in functions. Increase in the size of social units results in progressive differentiation, in social activities. Therefore, social institutions and the society, as whole should be understood in terms of functions.

Spencer’s view concerning organicism is uniquely embodied in his organicismic concept of society. Spencer drew analogy between the society and the biological organism. “So completely is society organized on the same system as an individual”, he argued that “we may perceive something more than as analogy between them, the same definition of life applies to both (biological and social organism). Only when one sees that the transformation passed through during the growth, maturity and decay of a society, conforms the same principles as do the transformations passed through by aggregates of all orders, inorganic and organic, is there reached the concept of sociology as a science”.

According to Spencer, social structure is a living organism. It is made up of parts which can be distinguished but which cannot survive or exist except within the framework of society. Spencer wanted to explain nature of social structure by the help of this theory. He could understand that there are certain similarities between the individual living organism and society on account of which the individual may be regarded as micro-cosmic society and society as macro-cosmic individual. In this regard, we may quote from “Principles of Sociology – It is also character of social bodies, as of living bodies, that while they increase in size they increase in structure. Like a lone animal, the embryo of a high one has few distinguishable parts; but while it is acquiring greater mass, its parts multiply and differentiate. It is thus with a society. At first the unlikenesses among its groups of units are inconspicuous in number and degree; but as population augments, divisions and sub-divisions become more numerous and more decided. Further, in the social organism as in the individual organism, differentiation ceases only with that completion of the type which marks maturity and preceded decay”.

Spencer listed a number of similarities between biological and social organisms:

1. Society, like a biological organism, and in contrast to inorganic matter, grew and increased in size during the greater part of its existence (for example, the conversion of small states into empires);
2. As a society grew its structure became more complicated, just like the structure of an organism during biological evolution;
3. The differentiation of structure in both biological and social organisms was accompanied with a similar differentiation of functions;
4. The differentiation of the structure and functions of biological and social organisms was accompanied during evolution with development of their interaction;
5. The analogy between society and the organism could be reversed; one could say that each organism is a society consisting of separate individuals;
6. In a society, as in an organism, even when life as a whole stopped, the separate component parts could continue to live, at least for a certain time. All that, in his opinion, allowed one to treat human society by analogy with a biological organism.

But he also saw essential differences between them.

1. The component parts of a biological organism formed a concrete whole in which all the elements were inseparably united, while a society was a discrete whole, the living elements of which were more or less free and dispersed.
2. The differentiation of functions in an individual organism was such that the capacity to feel and think was concentrated in certain of its parts alone, while in a society consciousness was spread throughout the whole aggregate, and all its units were capable of enjoyment and suffering to approximately the same extent, if not equally.
3. Hence a third difference: in a living organism the elements existed for the sake of the whole; in a society, on the contrary,

“The welfare of the aggregate, considered apart from that of the units, is not an end to be sought. The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society. It has ever to be remembered that great as may be the efforts made for the prosperity of the body politic, yet the claims of the body politic are nothing in themselves, and become something only in so far as they embody the claims of its component individuals.”

The reservations introduced were most essential for Spencer, who repeatedly protested against the idea of the full identity of society and organism attributed to him (although he himself had given grounds for same). One must not forget that he was an individualist. Whereas the social whole, for Comte, preceded the individual, and the latter was not even an independent cell of society, for Spencer, on the contrary, society was only an aggregate of individuals. He considered dissolution of the individual in the social organism to be impermissible. Hence, also, the important refinement, that society was not simply an organism but a ‘superorganism’.

Any developed society, according to Spencer, had three systems of organs. The supporting system was the organisation of the parts that provided nutrition in a living organism, but was the production of necessary products in a society. The distributing system ensured connection of the different parts of the social organism through the division of labour. Finally, the regulatory system, in the person of the state, ensured subordination of the parts to the whole. The specific parts of "organs" of society were institutions. Spencer counted six types of institution: domestic, ritual, political, church, professional, and industrial. He endeavoured to trace the evolution of each of them by means of a comparative, historical analysis.

  

___________________________________________________________________

  

You can visit some significant Theories by some Great Theorists:
Voluntaristic Theory of Action (Voluntaristic Action), Generalized Media of Exchange, Four-Function Paradigm (AGIL Model in Systemic Model), Cynicism (Circulation of Elites), Hierarchy of the Sciences (The Classification of the Science), The Philosophy of Money, The Laws of Three Stages, Order and progress (Interrelation between Social Statics and Social Dynamics)

Reference:

• Igor Kon, A History of Classical Sociology
• George Ritzer, Sociological Theory
• Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought. 

___________________________________________________________________

Related Questions:

What is Organicism?

How could a living organism be compared with the society? 

what are the similarities and dissimilarities identified by Herbert Spencer in the theory of Organicism?

Aptitude Amplifier ©2017. All Rights Reserved.