The Political Organism: Carl Vogt on Animals and States in the 1840s and 50s

How do the discourses of biology and politics interact? This article uses the case of Carl Vogt (1817-1895), a German zoologist, physiologist, and radical political activist in the German revolutions of 1848-49, to examine the traffic across the discourses before, during, and after the revolutions. It argues that the key metaphors of the “state-as-organism” (used largely by political theorists) and the “organism-as-state” (used mainly by biologists) did different work for each group in the 1840s and 1850s. Vogt himself was the rare individual who actively played with both metaphors, in defense of both his radical political views and his materialist biology. I examine especially closely his scholarly biological studies of siphonophores—marine invertebrates that looked like single organisms but were generally agreed to be collections of individuals (“states” or “colonies”), and his use of this creature for political satire after the revolution failed. More broadly, while attention to the organism-as-state peaked in the early1850s, the state-as-organism metaphor gained new possibilities. Whereas earlier it generally referred to an idealist or “ethical” meaning of “organism,” in the 1850s a new, “realistic” interpretation came onto the political scene, bearing a more strictly biological meaning of the term. The article ends with a brief analysis of the asymmetries between the two metaphors and their positions within nineteenth-century German natural science and politics.