Abstract
Auguste Comte, the creator and leader of the Positivist Society, a secular religious-cum-political movement, is now remembered chiefly as the inventor of the words “positivism” and “sociology.” The word “positive” is synonymous with “factual.” It entered philosophy I think with the contrast that Edmund Burke made in his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, as he condemned the ideology of the Revolution by declaring it speculative, namely, conjectural, using the prevalent, positivist condemnation of conjectures and the contrast between mere opinion and knowledge, on the supposition that knowledge rests on observed facts. It was a tour de force, as it rested on Francis Bacon’s philosophy that was most popular then. The word “positive” became synonymous with “based on facts” or “scientific” or “certain”; the early nineteenth-century writings of Henri Saint-Simon made it popular—he used the expression “positive philosophy” to mean science—as did Comte in his popular work, A Course in Positive Philosophy (published between 1830 and 1842). Unlike most rationalists of the time, Saint-Simon and Comte did not condemn speculations: on the contrary, their philosophies stand out, as they placed theology and metaphysics within their historical contexts as stages in the development of our intellectual heritage. Another peculiarity of theirs on this matter is the view of the diverse sciences as displaying degrees of positive character. Wilhelm Dilthey, an experimental psychologist of the end of the nineteenth century, overruled this with his demand for full positive foundations for all new theories. So did the leading philosophers of science of the time. The word “positivism” gradually came to mean, hostility to theology and to metaphysics. Around 1920 Wittgenstein claimed to have used modern logic to prove extreme positivism correct. This way, Wittgenstein made Comte obsolete quite unintentionally, limiting his influence to a minute circle of social scientists who found the positive as a religion more attractive than the hostility to religion that Wittgenstein spread, also unintentionally. Positivism became popular even among religious thinkers, as they endorsed the demand of Pierre Duhem to prise apart science and religion. This is the opposite of Comte’s positivism that was a secular religion and a view of all aspects of our culture as an interconnected unity.
The main point of the book at hand (Introduction) is that Comte’s philosophy anchors science in its socio-political settings. This was particularly interesting in view of the great social upheaval that the French Revolution and the industrial revolution heralded. This volume celebrates Comte’s idea of historical analysis, of stages in the development of philosophy from the primitive to the scientific, although he owes all this to Saint-Simon (if not to Hegel). It also praises him as one who strove for social harmony, although this was a prevalent theme in postrevolutionary France.
The book’s authors do not say what criterion of significance they employ when praising Comte. Yet, they systematically display one. They mention repeatedly points of agreement and some of disagreement between texts of Comte and texts that are today in fashion. This practice is not commendable. It is better to show that some texts are interesting and challenging; shallow ones matter little. Comparisons with the currently fashionable may easily abet shallow fashions. And so even comparison of significant ideas requires discussion of their significance. It is thus not enough to notice that Comte insisted that “no idea can be properly understood apart from its history” (130); after all, this idea is found already in Bacon’s claim that science is the same as its history properly recorded. The contrast is interesting between Bacon’s term that is strictly internalist (in isolation from theology and any other intellectual activity) with Saint-Simon’s and Comte’s view that all things cultural are interconnected. This requires some discussion of the way the interconnectedness of all science squares with Comte’s claim that sociology is a “perfectly distinct science, directly established on bases of its own” (54). This is enhanced by the observation, “For positive sociology, epistemological autonomy was no less important than encyclopedic dependence” (43). It is thus “an extraordinary difficulty” (46). Here it is left in mid-air.
The presentation of the philosophy of science in historical socio-political setting we owe less to Comte and more to Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Michael Polanyi, and Karl Popper. If the study of Comte’s contribution throws interesting light on this, then there is room for a new study of it. Such a new study may follow fashion; it will then pay much attention to famous studies of the socio-political historical settings of science, such as those of Alexander Herzen and of Paul Forman. Alternatively, it will ignore much and perhaps even present a criterion by which to evaluate studies and then try to use it and show what if anything these owe to Comte.
Comte’s invention of the term “sociology” is the expression of his insistence on its autonomy. This autonomy rests hardly on observations; mainly, it rests on the law of Saint-Simon’s and Comte of the three stages of scientific progress: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific proper. This law played several roles in Comte’s philosophy. It was methodological to begin with: he rejected Bacon’s idea that science begins with the collection of facts unaided by thought. Whether under the influence of Kant (whom he greatly admired) or not, he declared empirical research in need of a guiding principle. The three stages law seemed to him the best candidate for that. And, of course, if research into physics is to be guided by a sociological law, then there is no abiding by Bacon’s requirement that science be separated from theology.
Saint-Simon and Comte deviate from Hegel’s view of the Enlightenment Movement in two ways. Hegel accepted the traditional Baconian view of scientific method, whereas they modified it à la Kant. Hegel denied the traditional view of the possibility of a human science: there is no prediction possible of human affairs, and so no science of them; the adequate studies of humans must be historical and thus not universal and thus not egalitarian: human destiny is governed by the laws of history, as God reveals Himself on the battlefield. Saint-Simon and Comte were too decent to admit this philosophy. And so, they turned Hegel’s idea around: since history is governed by a law, there is a science of history. This idea, that there is a spirit of the age, was the basis of the social sciences as most of the nineteenth-century philosophers understood it (as John Stuart Mill noted in his The Spirit of the Age, 1831). The question was, what is this law? On this ideas proliferated.
Today, the very idea of a synthetically valid a priori principle like the ideas of history that circulated in the nineteenth century are a priori rejected in all rationalist circles, and as a matter of course. This is not such a forceful barrier as it sounds: it is very easy to reinstate any theory that went bust because it has lost its status as a priori valid: this status is not necessary: one may adopt a theory as a metaphysical conjecture and employ it as a guiding principle for research. Those who object to this suggestion as license to dogmatise should notice two very powerful responses to their objection. First, the best antidote to dogmatism is (not a positivist prohibition but) pluralism: a researcher may employ diverse metaphysical frameworks, and move freely from one alternative to another in search of interesting solutions to urgent problems. Tradition dismisses metaphysics by observing that it is too arbitrary, since anyone may suggest many alternatives for it. This holds only for silly metaphysical systems. A useful one has to be helpful in research; perhaps it should abide by some such reasonable desiderata. Yes, but that makes it very hard to invent a new metaphysics. The second response to the objection from a license to dogmatism is simpler: dogmatists do not ask for license. Everyone is free to be dogmatic; the reasons so many of us refuse to settle in a dogmatic system are too powerful and too obvious to invite much discussion.
We may thus consider the three-stage theory of Saint-Simon and Comte not a theory of history but a theory of the growth of the human spirit. Rather than viewing it as history, one may deem it a proposal for an idea of progress. Compare their three stages, theology, metaphysics, and science, with the similar idea of Sir James Frazer, of magic as a pseudo-science, giving way to religion and eventually to science proper. Surely the idea of Frazer is superior to its predecessor that lumps magic and religion in with theology. In its turn, it is less appealing than the idea of Edward Evans-Pritchard that magic is a part of some religion that encompasses a worldview. Yet, Evans-Pritchard’s move leads to the end of this game: the recognition that some magic is practiced even in the most advanced societies, which violates the idea of stages.
These arguments do not put to rest general discussions about magic, which are a different matter altogether, not mentioned here, as they entered the anthropological literature only after the demise of Comte. The question is, how did Comte think that the three-stage law could help sociology? I do not know. So, it behooves us to ask, when did sociology start and how does it look from the viewpoint of the three-stage law? When did sociology become an active science? An indicator as to how late this development was is the 1895 foundation of a school for the social sciences, the London School of Economics and Political Science that does not include sociology in its title. Its founders did not think of Comte’s term “social science.” The earliest sociological studies in Great Britain began two or three decades earlier; they concerned the life of the working class, an area that sociology, economics, and politics share. The earliest study on this was The Condition of the Working Class in England of Friedrich Engels that appeared only in German in 1845. Engels did not find it important enough to get it published in English until 1887! Not that the German reading public was more interested in sociology than the English one. What established publicly German-language sociology was Martin Buber’s ambitious forty-volume series of sociological studies titled Die Gesellschaft, of between 1906 and 1912. The German Society for Sociology was founded in 1909. The semi-official fathers of the new academic field of sociology were Durkheim and Weber who began publishing slightly earlier, not Comte, who wrote over half-a-century earlier. Georg Simmel’s path-breaking “The Web of Group-Affiliations” appeared posthumously in 1922 and broke from all traditional frames. Nineteenth-century sociology receded to the background, and Comte awaited his rediscovery. What then was his sociology?
The volume at hand is half about the philosophy of the social sciences and half about social affairs. The eighteenth-century literature on society was all utopian, quite against participants’ intention, merely because they described human conduct as rational. Just yesterday, the Nobel Prize in economics was granted to a discoverer of the fact that we do not behave rationally. No one ever thought we do; yet, the application of the rationality principle made the outcome utopian despite efforts to be realistic, as already Spinoza had noted. It was the reaction to the French Revolution that led researchers to limit the application of the rationality principle: Burke said, we are guided by tradition more than by reason. Hegel then described tradition as the spirit of the age that was guided by historical law. How did that influence Comte’s observations of social affairs?
At the very end of the book (303-40) we read: Comte’s “Positivism has been criticized by contemporary postpositivists and others for espousing a narrow empirical approach and for not recognizing that observations are theory-laden and that what constitutes a fact is problematic.” This sounds strange in view of the fact, aforementioned, that Comte wanted the law of three stages to guide research. He divided sociology into two: social statics and social dynamics: the study of the forces that hold society together and the study of the forces that change society. This is obviously under the influence of Hegel. Yet, in opposition to Hegel, he deemed the division of labor the force that keeps social cohesion but not without the contribution of the political system. This is reasonable, but it is neither the three-stage law nor the autonomy of sociology.
In this book, the discussion of the division of labor comes under the heading “Comte’s Political Philosophy” (169, 186) and “The Religion of Humanity and Positive Morality” (221). The question, then, as to how Comte viewed the impact of the three-stage law on sociological research is given an answer of sorts: the French Revolution came because the transition from the metaphysical to the scientific was delayed. So, the laws of history are somewhat loose. Perhaps this is how things should remain. But then mention of this fact is missing from the book.
This review is unfair insofar as it overlooks much in it that is interesting, such as Comte’s biology. Of course, much of his appeal is due to the comprehensiveness of his system. This comprehensiveness is far from appearing satisfactory today. We have given up the hope of finding a comprehensive system akin to the pre-Kantian ones. The efforts of Saint-Simon and Comte were the last, and even in their day they were suspect. Next came Marx, and he was the finale. This book reminds its readers of past glory.