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).

“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)

• 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.