A Short History of Sociology

Heinz Maus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317834342
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in English in 1962, this book presents in clear language an account of the growth of sociology from its earliest roots in the Enlightenment, through the 19th century philosophers in Germany, positivists in France, social workers in England, the theorists in America, through the pioneering days of the early and middle part of the 20th century.

1 The Development of Social Theory up to the First World War

I THE ANTECEDENTS OF SOCIOLOGY

DOI: 10.4324/9781315824260-1

The preliminary history of sociology covers to quite a considerable extent the days of the French and English Enlightenment.¹ The achievements and the exigencies of bourgeois society were criteria to which everything else necessarily had reference. All that opposed, or ran counter to, what was looked upon as the normal development of this society was regarded as unnatural. The Enlightenment as a whole had everywhere certain things in common: the desire for a social order freed of all feudal hindrances, an order clear and definite to the understanding and completely comprehensible; the confident belief that just as victorious progress was taking place in the sphere of the natural sciences, so it must also take place in economics, politics, and ethics, provided man's nature were allowed free rein; the discovery that strange, non-Christian civilizations could challenge the old, traditional civilization dominated by theology and absolutism; the realization that history did not really follow the decrees of Heaven or fulfil itself in changing dynasties, but could be explained rather by the actions of man, which, in their turn, were stimulated or hindered by Nature; the conviction that the happiness of the individual, which was really the most important thing of all, was consonant with a law resulting from his own thought and reflection; and, finally, the certainty that all that was required for organizing society in the best possible way was that man should use his own understanding to consider, intelligently and critically, existing circumstances, and act according to the dictates of reason.

¹ Cf. A. Espinas, La Philosophie sociale du XVIIIe Siècle et la revolution, Paris, 1898; J. P. Lichtenberger, Development of Social Theory, New York, 1923; Maxime Leroy, Histoire des idées sociales en France, Vol. I, Paris, 1946.

This exclusively political social philosophy regarded society as one whole; and it stressed this whole, despite the great variety of its manifestations, and underlined the connections which made it a whole. The social sciences, which were just beginning to deal individually with this great variety of manifestations, were enlightened enough to subordinate their efforts to the understanding of this whole according to natural necessity. However, it was the process of a Nature which already bore traces of civilization. The idea of the state of nature as the battlefield of a merciless struggle of all against all in which everyone was obsessed by fear had already been discarded, and the idea of the Social Contract which put an end to this struggle was changing too. The State, and its government, were entitled to exist only so long as the general consensus of opinion accepted them as safeguarding the natural and equal right of individuals to property, freedom, and independence. By nature Society was based on the division of labour and on mutual aid, which it naturally involved, for it could not exist without those fellow-feelings of sympathy which men have for each other.

According to DAVID HUME (1711–1776), Nature herself brings human beings together through the sexual relationship. This mutual sympathy is first engendered in the family, whose original spontaneity ultimately develops into fixed habits and customs. But men are also by nature egoistic, and their natural egoism must be curbed. History shows that the State is founded on the right of the stronger, and not on the Social Contract. The stability of Society is ensured by the obedience of the individual to the State. Such obedience is reasonable just so long as the State safeguards the common interests. It is the State's duty on its part to obey ‘Laws of Nature’, as otherwise the authority vested in it will degenerate into tyranny.

In 1718 CHARLES CASTEL, ABBÉ DE SAINT-PIERRE—chiefly known for his project to ensure peace for all time by a European Confederation (an idea, incidentally, which inspired KANT to write his famous treatise Zum ewigen Frieden (‘Perpetual Peace’)) proposed the foundation of a Political Academy.² Independent of the State, this Academy was to have the task of training reliable civil servants for the State, giving them the necessary all-round education. At the same time it was to encourage interest in, and further an understanding of, scientific politics. This carefully-thought-out project was never put into effect, and its interest today is that it is typical of eighteenth-century thought, being also reminiscent of the earlier Utopias of Bacon and Campanella, both of whom conceived of a society to be governed by an intellectual elite, and foreshadowed the real intentions of the subsequent sociology of Auguste Comte. The idea was regarded as an attack on absolutism, but in reality its sole aim was to secure better State administration.

² Cf. S. Siegler-Pascal, Les Projets de l'Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Paris, 1900.

In those days scientific politics meant accepting the guidance of the natural sciences. The ‘Natural Order’ discovered by Newton was regarded as the regulator of both Society and politics. Social phenomena were assumed to be subject like other phenomena to observable uniformities which can be studied, compared, and classified; in other words, social phenomena can be expressed by laws. Later on sociology was, rightly or wrongly, to do its best to comply with this demand, and some writers even went so far as to insist that it could be regarded as a science only to the extent to which it actually did so. Other writers stressed the connection with the social philosophy of the Enlightenment. But one way or the other, sociology certainly shares its preliminary history with a number of other subjects whose beginnings, no less vague and diffuse than its own, also go back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Ethnography, for example, is one such subject, though it is even older. Its descriptions of strange peoples and strange civilizations, unusual as they often were, were now deliberately compared with contemporary civilization, against the traditional theologically-determined criteria. J. F. LAFITAU in his Mœurs des sauvages amériquains compareées aux mœurs des premiers temps (‘The Customs of American Savages compared with those of the Earliest Times’) (1724), and JEAN DÉMEUNIER in his L'Esprit des usages et des differents peoples (‘The Spirit of Customs and of Various Peoples) (1778) both frankly did precisely this.

Another such subject was anthropo-geography, which was taken up very early on by the French political philosopher JEAN BODIN (1530–1596). MONTESQUIEU (1689–1755) also adopted it very effectively in his famous Esprit des Lois (1748). Indeed, the principles of sane policy seemed to follow very closely the laws of the natural order.

A third such subject was political economy, which in the hands of the Physiocrats it was simply proposed to build the Natural Order itself. A fourth such subject, the science of statistics, claimed to demonstrate this natural order even more clearly, but for quite a long time it was practically ignored by official sociology.³ ADAM SMITH (1723–1790), the classic political economist, occupied himself with the social sciences as a whole, and when he treated economic phenomena separately it was only for the sake of their demonstrative value. The history of commerce, from Montesquieu onwards, confirms the sociological assertion that commerce furthers those communications which enable peoples to emerge from ‘barbarism’.

³ Cf. Albion W. Small, The Cameralists, Chicago, 1909.

But above all, early sociology rubs shoulders with history, or at least with the philosophy of history, whose most important principles might have been formulated in this supposedly unhistorical century. Opposing Cartesian rationalism, GIAMBATTISTA VICO (1668–1744) in his Scienza nuova (1725) advanced the thesis that social development was a thoroughly intelligible process, and that all human civilizations must pass through its three main stages. These three stages recur regularly, and as mankind passes through each of them, so it is raised to a higher level. The Scot ADAM FERGUSON (1723–1816) insisted that ‘thinking itself, in this age of separations (i.e. division of labour) may become a peculiar craft’.⁴ JOHN MILLAR (1735–1801) wrote his remarkable book The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks in 1771.⁵ Montesquieu insisted in his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et leur décadence (‘Thoughts on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decadence’) (1734) that the world was not governed by blind chance, but that, on the contrary, the rise and fall of empires were due to general reasons of a moral and physical nature; while the great VOLTAIRE himself developed for the first time in his Essais sur les mœrs (‘Essays on Morals’) a non-theological universal history, which did two important things: it presented political, economic, social, and cultural history as mutually interdependent parts of one whole, and it insisted on the contribution which non-Christian civilizations had made to the total history of human civilization. Inspired by Voltaire, EDWARD GIBBON (1737–1794) wrote his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and sought to prove that the triumph of Christianity was due to sociological reasons.

⁴ Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Edinburgh, 1767. ⁵ Cf. W. C. Lehmann, A. Ferguson, London, 1930, and J. Millar, London, 1960.

In 1750 the young TURGOT (1727–1781) argued before the Sorbonne in favour of the unity of mankind, and the continuity of history, which was the vessel of man's wisdom handed on and increased from one generation to the next. He repeated this contention in 1751, and he even adumbrated Comte's famous three-stage law, though he did not attach quite the same overriding importance to it: ‘Before men understood the causal connections between natural phenomena, what was more likely than that they should have supposed them to be caused by supernatural spirits, which, though invisible, were like themselves—after all, who else should they have been like?’ This is nothing more nor less than Comte's ‘theological’ stage. And again: ‘When the philosophers recognized the absurdity of these deistic fables, but before they had won an understanding of natural history, they sought to explain the causes of these phenomena with the help of abstract expressions such as essence and quality.’ This is equally clearly Comte's ‘metaphysical’ stage. And finally: ‘Only later were hypotheses evolved on the basis of observing the interdependent mechanical influence of bodies, hypotheses which were developed by mathematics, and subjected to experimental verification.’ Here we have no less clearly Comte's ‘positive’ stage.

A belief in progress, derived by analogy from the undeniable advance in the sphere of the natural sciences, informed the whole century once FONTENELLE (1657–1757) had attempted to formulate it theoretically. And even at the end of the century we find CONDORCET'S Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (‘Draft of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit’) (1794) full of optimism about man's perfectibility. Condorcet (1743–1794) regarded the French Revolution—which cost him his life—as the beginning of the final phase of historical development, a phase in which the happiness of the individual and of the peoples would no longer, as in all previous phases, have to remain an empty promise.

All these social sciences found their place as parts of a whole, though in a disconnected form, in that general summary of contemporary knowledge aimed at by the Encyclopaedists, DIDEROT and his friends.⁶ But a very strict distinction was drawn between theory and its application in socio-political practice. In Durkheim's opinion it was this which first made systematic sociology possible. HOLBACH (1723–1789), a close friend of both Diderot and Helvetius, certainly tried to supplement his Sjstème de la Nature (1770) by a Sjstème Sociale (1773), but what d'Alembert called ‘the science of man’, by which he meant an all-embracing theory of the social sciences, was not achieved. The ‘ideologists’ Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Bichat and others, who sought to carry on the Enlightenment,⁷ believed that they could provide this theory with a physiological (biological) basis. Their influence extended beyond the Institut National and the École Polytechnique, at which they lectured, and affected Saint-Simon and others, including even Comte himself.

⁶ Cf. René Hubert, Les Sciences sociales dans l'Encyclopédie, Paris, 1923. ⁷ Cf. F. J. Picavet, Les Idéologues, Paris, 1891.

The social philosophy of the eighteenth century, with all its shades of meaning both expressed and implied, inspired the work of the natural and social sciences, and contributed to the Revolution, with which modern social philosophy really begins. Sociology, on the other hand, is the product of the Restoration— at least, it is in its first systematic presentation, which is that of Comte. It therefore betrays the same contradictions in its inevitable striving to reconcile the inevitability of progress with a social order opposed to it.

II THE BEGINNINGS: COMTE AND SPENCER

DOI: 10.4324/9781315824260-2

Some of those elements in the sociology of COMTE which he put forward as his most essential beliefs, derive in fact from HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON (1760–1825), whose secretary Comte was for some time. For example, Saint-Simon demanded essentially that science should be distinguished from its application, that the various branches of knowledge should be classified according to their inner complexity, and that the summit of this hierarchy should be a science yet to be created, namely political science: ‘science politique’ or ‘physique sociale’. Comte took over these terms, using them as synonymous with the word ‘sociology’. This crowning science was to be based on deductions made from the observation of history, and to be inspired by the idea of development and progress. The three-stage law adumbrated by Turgot is, for Saint-Simon as for Comte, the general law of progress itself.

Comte, however, was certainly acquainted with the ideas of the Enlightenment and of the Ideologists before he came to know Saint-Simon.¹ In fact, they were the ideas he actually sought to extend and consolidate critically and scientifically into a system of ‘positive philosophy’. But Saint-Simon's real importance for sociology lies rather in the fact that, enlightened and unprejudiced as he was, he introduced Comte to the writings of the Catholic counter-revolutionaries. In this way, the ‘anti-individualism’ of JOSEPH DE MAISTRE (1754–1821) and LOUIS DE BONALD (1754–1840), which was directed against the ‘individualistic’ social philosophy of the Enlightenment, found a place in sociology. According to these two writers, society is a reality in itself, having a life of its own, which proceeds independently of all individual persons, and is not subject to their interference.

¹ Cf. R. Texeiras Mendes, Auguste Comte, Evolution originate, 1798–1820, Rio de Janeiro, 1913. Cf. H. Gouhier, La Jeunesse d'Auguste Comte et la formation du Positivisme, Paris, 1933.

Society is thus an organism in itself, and takes precedence over the individual. It is the real creator of civilization. Its institutions, customs, and morals can no more be ‘invented’ by the individual than language can. In relation to society the individual is nothing; he has no rights, only duties. Authority is essential, since it is authority which enforces the individual to respect tradition in his behaviour. For de Maistre, therefore, it is the public executioner who represents ‘the real bond of society’, since through him the individual is gradually brought to accept the social ‘contract’, and to submit to the social ‘consensus’.

Apart from the ‘temporal’, or secular, power, there must also necessarily be a ‘spiritual power’—personified for de Maistre in the Pope of Rome, and for Comte in the High Priest of Humanity, who, in effect, is the wisest of the sociologists. There must also be religion, which is necessary to satisfy the irrational needs of man, and also to guarantee the stability of society.²

² Cf. D. Bagge: Les Ideéspolitiques en France sous la Restauration, P.U.F., Paris, 1952.

Comte worked all these points ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL THEORY UP TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR
• PART TWO: SOCIOLOGY IN MODERN TIMES
• PART THREE: WORLD-WIDE SOCIOLOGY
• INDEX