[Animal Societies Or Animal Colonies?]

In 1877, Alfred Espinas defended his PhD dissertation Animal Societies. In 1881, his former fellow student at the École normale supérieure, Edmond Perrier, meanwhile a full professor at the National Museum of Natural History, published Animal Colonies. Because of their similar views on the equivalence of social and organic structures, the two books were often equated posthumously despite the tense relationship between their authors, which received little to no scrutiny. Taking a socio-historical perspective on institutions and academic careers, this paper examines Espinas’s bitter criticism of Perrier’s book and sorts out the genuine intellectual divergences from the mere expression of despite, from an author who felt unrecognized, if not plagiarized. It proved easier for a biologist to venture into sociology, than for a sociologist to do the same with biology ….