On the evolution of social scientific metaphors: A cognitive-historical enquiry into the divergent trajectories of the idea that collective entities – states and societies, cities and corporations – are biological organisms

A long line of philosophers and social scientists have defended and extended the curious idea that collective entities – states and societies, cities and corporations – are biological organisms. An almost equally long and no less vigorous succession of critics have attacked the proposal. In this dissertation, I trace the evolution of that contested metaphor from its relatively simple beginnings in ancient philosophy, to its rather complex manifestations in the modern social sciences. In order to get the story right, I draw upon resources as diverse as classical rhetoric and contemporary corpus linguistics, but my basic intellectual stance is that of the historian of ideas. By adopting a historically-minded perspective, I try to render visible aspects of metaphorical reasoning that are consistently overlooked and chronically undertheorized by most of the analytic philosophers and cognitive linguists who dominate contemporary debates about metaphor.