Biologies of Scale and Historical Theory in 20th-Century France

In this paper I show how two French thinkers, Raymond Aron and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, used the biological findings of their time to theorize historical scale in different ways.  In his 1938 Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire, Aron approached historical temporality through evolutionary theory, which in France at this time was dominated by neo-transformism.  This theory was characterized by the rejection of both Darwinian selection and Mendelian genetics, and claimed furthermore that evolution involved the inheritance of acquired characteristics.  Aron’s approach to the distinction between human and natural history in neo-transformist theory decisively shaped his account of scale and objectivity in history.  He argued that it was out of the very limits of human-scale perspective that history drew its potential for objectivity.  Two decades later, Merleau-Ponty also turned to biology with history in mind, as his nature courses from the late fifties and unfinished, posthumously published 1964 Le visible et l’invisible reveal.  Merleau-Ponty had turned away from Marxism and humanism, and was rethinking the relationship between causality and scale after his renunciation of Marxism and humanism.  Surprisingly, he did not look to evolutionary thought, which had undergone a rapid transformation since Aron’s Introduction, but instead to embryology.  It was through embryological descriptions of organismic totality that Merleau-Ponty began to articulate his concepts of the “proximate” and the “global” as mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive.  As these two examples reveal, the move from scientific to historical scale is by no means transparent or free from the peculiarities of the local.