Essays on Neuroscience and Political Theory

Thinking the Body Politic

F. Vander Valk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415782012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136344039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The past 20 years have seen increasingly bold claims emanating from the field of neuroscience. Advances in medical imaging, brain modelling, and interdisciplinary cognitive science have forced us to reconsider the nature of social, cultural, and political activities. This collection of essays is the first to explore the relationship between neuroscience and political theory, with a view to examining what connections can be made and which claims represent a bridge too far.

The book is divided into three parts:

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• Part I: places neuroscience as a social and political practice into historical context

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• Part II: weaves together the insights from contemporary neuroscience with the wisdom of major figures in the history of political thought

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• Part III: considers how neuroscience can inform contemporary debates about a range of issues in political theory

This work brings together scholars who are sceptical about the possibility of integrating neuroscience and political theory with proponents of a neuroscience-informed approach to thinking about political and social life. The result is a timely and wide-ranging collection of essays about the role that our brain might play in the life of the body politic. It should be essential reading for all those with an interest in the cutting edge of political theory.

Part 1

History and Concepts

1

On the Growing Intellectual Authority of Neuroscience for Political and Moral Theory

Sketch for a Genealogy¹

Maurizio Meloni

Insofar as neuroscientific references daily penetrate countless disciplinary fields, creating their own plethora of “emerging neuro disciplines” (Vidal 2009: 9) and neurocultures (Ortega and Vidal 2011), and popularizing expressions such as “neural correlates,” “neural bases,” and “neural markers of,” then questions about what makes this trend so irresistible also grow. Why do we find neuroscientific explanations so compelling? What is the particular appeal of brain-based arguments? Just to give here an example of the current enthusiasm for a neurobiologization of the human experience: in a situation where, only in 2007, “an average of eight peer-reviewed articles employing fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging] were published per day”² (Lehrer 2008), the list of the psychological and “cultural” phenomena that have been “turned neurobiological” has become impressive: it goes from the A of “altruism” to the Z of “zeal,” passing from “criminal behavior” to “hope,” from “love” to “problem gambling,” from “neuroticism” to “wisdom,” from “trust” to “yawning” (Vrecko 2010). When novelists too are starting to make use of the iconic force of the brain in their works (for instance, McEwan 2005; Powers 2006; Gennero 2011) it seems fair to conclude that a certain “way of thinking has taken shape” today (Rose 2007: 220), one for which everything that is relevant for human beings has to pass through and leave a trace in the brain: nature and nurture, for this new neurocentric mentality, are “simply two different ways of making deposits in the brain synaptic ledgers” (LeDoux 2002: 5).

The aim of this chapter is to investigate such a “neuromania” scenario (Legrenzi and Umiltà 2009; Vidal 2009) of our days from a global perspective, trying to shed light on some background reasons for the current attractive force of neuroscientific explanations, especially when they come to the moral and political field. A methodological qualification is necessary here, however. In my chapter, I will mainly focus on the present-day perspective, addressing what has happened over the last three decades or so. This may be a justified choice, as scholars have emphasized the originality and discontinuities of the current neurobiological wave, interpreted as an “‘epistemological shift’ in the long trajectory of the sciences of the brain and the nervous system” (Abi-Rached and Rose 2010: 17; Changeux 2002: 331–32). But this radically novel character of the present³ should nonetheless not make us forget that what is under the lens of this book, that is an emerging neuropolitics, was after all in a rudimentary form already there at the time of George Combe’s System of Phrenology (1836) – where the organ of Veneration “in the genuine Whig or republican” was considered “generally smaller” than the one “in the head of the genuine Tory” (Combe 1836: 266) – not to mention more extensive neuro-biopolitical meditations at the time of psychiatrists and neurologists like August Forel and Oskar Vogt, some decades after Combe (Hagner 2001). This longue-durée perspective (Canguilhem 2008; Meloni 2011a) and an emphasis on the “relationship of mutual constitution” between neurology and modernity (Salisbury and Shail 2009), will remain silent in this chapter, but have to be kept in mind in order to put into historical perspective (and probably mitigate) some of the emphatic over-expectations surrounding our age of neuro-enthusiasm.

The New Biological Turn

The current proliferation of neuroscientific arguments is to be located first on the broader horizon of a dramatic shift in the conceptualization of what it means to be human which has characterized Western culture since the last quarter of the twentieth century. To place this shift in a historical perspective, let us remember that mainly as a reaction to the catastrophic abuse of biologization (racism, sexism, eugenics, and the Holocaust) in Western societies during the period approximately 1860–1940, a certain “environmentalist/culturalist paradigm” (Segerstråle 2000: 30) in the definition of the idea of human emerged across disciplines (Kaye 1986; Degler 1991) immediately after the Second World War. In this period of intense anti-naturalistic thought (approximately 1945–75), human beings came to be seen mainly as “culture-transmitting animals” (Kaye 1986: 45) and discourses about biological underpinnings or brain-based features of their behaviors were decidedly put off the table.⁴ It is in response to this mainstream “culturalist” interpretation that, taking 1975 as terminus a quo,⁵ we have witnessed a revival of biological arguments in the interpretation of what makes us human (Richards 1987; Degler 1991; Laland and Brown 2002; Meloni 2011a). The most relevant research programs that contributed to this new shift in the direction of biology include among others the achievements of molecular biology and the creation of disciplines such as behavioral genetics; the advent of cognitive and neurocognitive sciences; Chomskyan linguistics and its consequences for the biologization of language; the increasing recognition of the work of ethologists; the rise of sociobiology, and more recently of evolutionary psychology.⁶ Unquestionably, the disciplinary field that has been most massively invested by such biologizing discourses over the last three decades has been psychiatry. Here, having the US context as a starting point, we have witnessed the “displacement” of the psychoanalytic vocabulary (with its emphasis on the symbolic dimension of the human, and its engagement with the historical, linguistic, and biographical features of the psyche) “by postpsychoanalytic and/or biological-evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior” (Leys 2007: 12). It is the rise of the so-called “second biological psychiatry” (Shorter 1997) with its slogans “from blaming the mother to blaming the brain” (Valenstein 1998: 3), its intimate link with pharmacology, and its molecular diagnostic style (Rudnick 2002; Andreasen 1994; Kandel and Squire 1999). This biologization or, better, “rebiologization” of psychiatry has been put into practice

through a variety of linkages: through psychoactive drugs that connect diagnostic classifications to specific biochemical processes …; through imaging technologies … that give pictures of the brain’s pathoanatomy and pathophysiology; through a standardized nosological system that models psychiatric diagnosis after medical diagnosis; and through a division of labor that shifts the psychiatrist’s gaze away from the psyche and psychotherapy … onto the medical management of psychoactive drugs.

(Young 1995: 270, 271)

This biologizing framework in psychiatry has constituted over the last decades “like Freud in his day, a whole climate of opinion under which we conduct our different lives” (Kramer 1993: 300), thus decidedly contributing to the emergence of a “neuropsychiatry” (Trimble 1996: ix) for which even the classical “distinction between ‘organic’ and ‘functional’” seems to “melt away stripped of its Cartesian dualism” (Trimble 1996: 10).

However, if psychiatry has been the tip of the iceberg of this new wave of biological arguments, it seems important to document here how a certain “swinging of the pendulum” in favour of evolutionary and naturalistic theories has occurred also in disciplinary fields traditionally resistant to the seductions of biological and neurobiological discourses. It is the case for instance of sociology and political theory (but similar points can be made for philosophy, see Meloni 2011b), fields where the penetration of a vocabulary drawn from the life sciences and the emergence of a new sensibility toward biological arguments can be documented in many ways.

Sociology⁷

“Mistrust and even outright hostility” (Franks and Smith 1999) have typically characterized the relationship between the biological and the social in the twentieth century. With its rigid “society/biology dichotomy” (Dickens 2001) and its consideration of biology and nature as “almost dirty words” (Jenkins 2002: 113), a certain “bio-phobic” attitude (Freese et al. 2003; Bone 2009) has been traditionally part of the vocabulary of sociology, for instance in social constructionist, hermeneutics, and post-modernist traditions solely concerned “with … questions of language, meaning, and understanding” (Shilling 2003: 26). Clearly, the revival of an interest toward nature and biology has mainly challenged similar approaches for which “‘all is talk’” (Newton 2007: 23), producing an in-depth re-examination of the “relationship between nature and society” (Newton 2007: 1) that can be documented today in several strands of sociological research:

1. First of all, as a new look at the problem of nature, the great “repressed” of the sociological tradition (Benton 1991). This new attitude toward nature, and the invocation of “a re-alignment of the human social sciences with the lifesciences” (Benton 1991: 25) have taken many forms in recent years, from the support of a non-dualist Eliasian perspective for which biology is “the possibility of culture” (Newton 2007: 80), to the diffusion of an intellectual trend such as the Actor Network Theory, whose desire for a “generalized symmetry” between human and non-human actors can be also seen as “a creative attempt to avoid the relegation of nature to a secondary category” (Newton 2007: 33; Murdoch 2001).
2. Second, this farewell to an anti-biological attitude has taken the form of a rethinking of the role of the body in sociology and the urge for an “embodiment” of sociological themes (for instance, B. S. Turner 1984; Freund 1988; Shilling 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005; Williams and Bendelow 1998; Williams 1999; Williams et al. 2003; Cromby 2004, 2005, 2007; Newton 2007). This agenda, against the social constructionist tendency “to evacuate the embodied agent from social theory,” has emphasized the importance of considering the body “not only as a location for social classifications” but as “generative of social relations and human knowledge” (Shilling 2003: ix). Such a new approach in sociology forms an excellent basis for a dialogue with some key findings in contemporary neuroscience, for instance the works of Antonio Damasio on the emotional, embodied dimension of thinking and morality (Damasio 1999, 2003, 2006; Cromby 2005, 2007). Similar concerns have emerged also from a new generation of feminist authors who, in polemics against a social constructionism always suspicious of material explanations, have invoked a new feminism, one that is capable of engaging “more seriously, less incredulously” (Wilson 2004: 83) with contemporary science, and in particular with the findings of genetics, psychopharmacology, and neuroscience (Wilson 2006; see also Valentine 2008). In a similar tone, a recent generation of authors from cultural and social theory has urged a “corporeal turn” (Tamborino 2002; Sheets-Johnstone 2009), that may replace the linguisticism and textualism of late twentieth-century philosophy and put an end to the anti-naturalistic cycle (Haber 2006; Schaeffer 2007), which was typical of the European tradition of thought (Marconi 2001; Vogel 1996; Meloni 2011b).
3. More directly, projects aimed to use neuroscientific insights have recently emerged in the sociology of health (Williams 2010), inequalities (Wilkinson 2005), and emotions (J. H. Turner 1999; see a complete cartography in Martin and Williams 2011), along with a broader attempt to reconcile sociological research and neuroscience in what has been named “neurosociology” (Franks and Smith 1999; TenHouten 1997, 1999; Franks 2010).⁸ In the recent work of sociologist D. D. Franks, neurosociology is meant as an attempt to find a neurobiological embodiment and a neuroscientific correspondence for concepts coming from the pragmatist and symbolic interactionist tradition on the grounds that “symbolic processes are firmly dependent on brain processes” (Franks 2010: 64). According to Franks, neuroscience is today in the condition to help sociology formulate a conceptualization of intersubjectivity finally “free from the ambiguity of symbolic interpretation” thus favoring an access to the “social nature written into the very biology of our brains” (2010: 90). For this reason “sociologists,” Franks concludes, “must become familiar with the confirmations of their subject matter discovered by neuroscientists” (2010: 203; see also Franks 2003).
4. Finally, as a fourth strand of this cartography, one can mention here the emergence of a neo-naturalistic agenda that, as in the work of the American sociologist Stephen Turner, has argued in a more radical vein than Franks’s neurosociology for an in-depth revision of the “core concepts” of the discipline “in light of the lessons and implications of cognitive science, especially connectionism” (S. Turner 2002: 1). The key strategy here is to mobilize themes and concepts from the neurocognitive sciences against the deeply neo-Kantian models of mental life that are seen as still dominating social theory (S. Turner 2002: 1, 2007a). By supporting a strongly “individualist social ontology” (Gunnell 2007: 707), Turner’s goal is to reject the Durkheim-like notions of collective psychology, objective social mind, and “shared premises,” which are all concepts that he sees today as fitting “badly with what we have come to understand about these brain processes” (S. Turner 2002: 4). For Turner’s strongly naturalistic epistemology “cognitive science and its development is a reality to which social theory needs to adjust” (S. Turner 2002: 20).

This constellation of authors and agendas, despite their different and sometimes even irreconcilable perspectives, can however be taken as a partial realization of that “(Cautious) Welcome” to nature and biology in social theory auspicated two decades ago by Ted Benton (1991). Similarly, a rethinking of the relationship between humans and their biological dimension also seems documentable in the (anti-biological) tradition of political theory.

Political Theory

Exactly like in sociology, the “emancipation from biological factors” (Heller in Fehér and Heller 1994: 37) has been traditionally regarded as a practical and a theoretical imperative in political theory. It is therefore highly relevant that even there we have witnessed recently a “life sciences boom” (La Vaque-Manty 2006) whose origins, however, go back the last three decades or so (Somit 1972; Somit and Peterson 1998). This recent trend can be taken as an indication of a certain shift in the general temper surrounding the study of politics (Gunnell 2007), or at least a turn toward a greater openness to the possible relevance of “biological facts” (Pinker 2002: 299), and more recently neurobiological ones, for the explanations of political phenomena.

However, this reference to a “life sciences boom” in political theory should be taken only as a very general category, one that contains many different and often contrasting elements. It is useful to distinguish here at least three intellectual projects in this new possible alliance of biology and politics.

1. The first agenda can be defined as a strong program of naturalization and biologization of the political field, renewed these days by a reductionist desire of planting the findings of genetics, physiolog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: History and Concepts
• Part II: Neuroscience and Political Thinkers
• Part III: Issues in Neuroscience and Political Theory
• Index