Any form of explanation of politics by drawing an analogy to a human or animal body, or ecological system. For example, in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, the aristocrat Menenius Agrippa describes the plebeians' revolt by a parable beginning, ‘There was a time when all the body's members | Rebelled against the belly.’ In the philosophy of science, analogy has traditionally been regarded as a species of inductive reasoning. Consequently, the problem of the justification of analogical argument is usually understood in terms of the strength of inductive support. The new and unfamiliar is often explained analogically in terms of the familiar and intelligible. The notion that social entities are essentially like organic systems and capable of being explained by the laws of those systems is one of the commonest features of modern European thinking, a feature perhaps which reached its fullest development with Herbert Spencer. What Spencer and many other Victorian organicists tended to ignore, however, was that individual organisms have a centre of consciousness, society does not. And while societies may well be more than the aggregate of their parts, in itself this does not constitute an argument that societies are organisms.
— John Halliday
