Editorial

“We should beware anyone who thinks they’ve got an easy application of biology to society” – an interview with Chris Renwick

Des Fitzgerald

History and Philosophy of Science scholars -- most of whom have an undergraduate background in the natural sciences -- are generally instrumental when it comes to sociology: they use the intellectual tools when they need them but tend not to think of the history of those tools as something of interest. When I started my PhD I shared the common HPS assumption that the interesting questions about the relationship between biological and social science are on the biology side. I quickly realised that wasn't true and that the hope and expectation around sociology -- the desire for it to make people's lives better -- was what drove the project forwards

We are delighted that Chris Renwick has joined the editorial team at History of the Human Sciences. Chris is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; he is a historian of modern Britain, specialising in the intersections of politics, biology and society during the nineteenth century. His first book, British Sociology's Lost Biological Roots appeared in 2012, and was shortlisted for the Phillip Abrams Memorial prize ; his second, Bread for All, a history of the welfare State, will be published by Penguin in 2017; he is us currently working on a new book on the intellectual origins of social mobility studies in Britain. To mark Chris's cooption onto the editorial team, HHS web editor, Des Fitzgerald, caught up with him for a short interview.   Des Fitzgerald: Chris, as a historian, you work on the intersection of social science, biology, and politics in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What first drew you to this area (I guess as a

PhD student?) - and, in particular what made you situate it in a study of the discipline of *sociology* particularly, which of course was the topic of your first book?   Chris Renwick: Practically speaking, I came to work on sociology via my MA dissertation, which I wrote on the Scottish biologist and sociologist Patrick Geddes’ early career. I’d started out my MA with a broad interest in the social dimensions and applications of Darwinism, which I’d acquired through a number of modules I took with Paolo Palladino, Steve Pumfrey, and Peter Harman when I was an undergraduate at Lancaster. To be honest, I can't remember precisely how I got to Geddes. But a good friend of mine was working on Lewis Mumford -- the American social and architectural critic who was Geddes' main, if reluctant, disciple -- so Geddes was part of the intellectual furniture around me for a while. I could easily have carried on…

Editorial

“We see the contingency and uncertainty that underlies the term ‘human sciences’ not as a source of anxiety but as the grounds for celebration.” – New Editors’ Introduction

The Editors

On the one hand, the journal’s success over the last 28 years has established the human sciences as a field, and made clear its intrinsically historical basis. In the last quarter century, the long-standing neglect, on the part of historians and philosophers of science, of the human sciences in comparison with the natural sciences has given way to an investigation of their often intertwined (as well as times opposed) epistemic projects, practices and commitments. On the other hand, the porous boundary between the natural scientific approach pursued in many of the life sciences and the historical approach promoted by this journal has largely dissolved.

The central problem of the human sciences remains unresolved. Despite the new claims championed within molecular biology, evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence and the cognitive neurosciences, one of the central organising categories of each of those disciplines – the human – has resisted definition. This resistance has a long history. When Kant asked the last of the four key philosophical questions posed in his Logic of 1800 – ‘Was ist der Mensch?’ – he likely knew that nineteenth-century theory would fail to provide a definitive answer. The category that came to define both the humanities and the human sciences in the German-speaking territories – that of Geist, the inherently un-measurable, unstable and speculative prefix to the Geisteswissenschaften – served only to produce provisional answers that would in turn only give rise to further questions. Towards the close of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Dilthey concluded that this resistance to definition was inevitable because the human being is

an ineluctably historical being whose attempts at self-understanding are always contingent upon a particular historical perspective and therefore always subject to variation (Dilthey 1991 [1883]). Within the German tradition of philosophical anthropology advanced by Max Scheler (1928) and Helmuth Plessner (1928), among others, and recently taken up in the writings of Hans Blumenberg (2006) and Peter Sloterdijk (2004), the human being is held up as a ‘cultural being’ that is able to survive only because of its non-biological adaptations and technologies. Human nature, these writers insist, is human culture, and the human sciences would thus require a methodology quite different from those of the natural sciences. This recognition that human nature is, in the last analysis, historical has been foundational to the post-structural turn in the human sciences. The acknowledgment of the radical problem that the question of the human posed underwrote the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault famously argued in The Order of Things that ‘Man, in the analytic of finitude, is…