ABSTRACT
In the year 1900, the Exposition Universelle drew 50 million visitors to the streets of Paris—a global showcase by which Europe’s soaring scientific and technological achievements would “worthily inaugurate the twentieth century and thus mark a new stage in the forward march of civilization”. Modern solidarity language thus emerged in fin de siecle Europe, especially France, at the border of the religious and the scientific, with some hoping it would allow moral life to leave Christian charity behind, cutting a path toward a purely empirical grasp of the underlying bonds of social life. The solidarity-dehumanization nexus also brings into view a second methodological problem that Celia Deane-Drummond describes as the ‘conceptual ditch’: there is a gap between what the evolutionary biological sciences suggest and the sheer complexity of culture as understood by the social sciences, including critical animal studies and cultural anthropology.
