If we examine the professionalisation of the social science disciplines during the Nineteenth Century, we see a leveraging of the more established and more prestigious natural sciences. In order to establish knowledge claims and epistemological legitimacy in the new research universities, some of the nascent social sciences made extensive use of physics and mathematics for example. In the case of Sociology, some schools aligned themselves with what we would term today the life sciences – biology, physiology and evolutionary theory. Here the figures of Compte, Durkheim and Spencer are central, as well as the struggle to create chairs of Sociology in France and Britain. In this paper I will map out this alignment and speculate about its effects on contemporary Sociology.

Catherine Waldby is a Research Professor in the School of Sociology, at the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS), Australian National University. From 2015 to 2022 she was the Director of RSSS. Her researches focuses on social studies of biomedicine and the life sciences. She is the author of over sixty research articles and seven monographs. Her recent books include Clinical Labor: Tissue donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (with Melinda Cooper, Duke University Press 2014) and The Oöcyte Economy: The Changing Meanings of Human Eggs Duke University Press (2019). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the History and Philosophy committee of the Academy of Science. She has received numerous national and international research grants for her work on stem cells, embryology, blood donation and biobanking, from the Australia Research Council, the National Health and Research Council, the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the European Union FP7 program. Her work has been translated into Italian, Chinese, Korean and German.