STUDENT'S LIBRARY ee
A History of Classical Sociology
Edited by Prof 1. S. Kon Translated by H. Campbell Creighton, M.A. (Oxon)
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PROGRESS PUBLISHERS MOSCOW
Student's Library
Editorial Board: F.M. Volkov (Managing Editor), Ye. F. Gubsky (Deputy Managing Editor), V. G. Afanasyev, Taufik Ibrahim, Zafar Imam, 1.8. Kon, I. M. Krivoguz, A. V. Petrovsky, Yu. N. Popov, Munis Reza, N. V. Romanovsky, V. A. Tumanov, A. G. Zdravomyslov, V. D. Zotov KonnekTHs asTopos (ore. pedaxrop H. C. Kon)
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© H3natrenscrso «HayKa», 1979 English translation © Progress Publishers 1989 Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
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ISBN S—01—001102-6
CONTENTS
Page Introduction (by Igor Kon). ... 0.0.0.0... . 000 cece eee 5 1. From Social Philosophy to Sociology (by Igor Kon)... 9
2. Auguste Comte and the Ongin of Positivist Sociology (by Elena Osipova) 2.6006 os ce eee ee ews 22
3. Herbert Spencer’s Sociological Conception (by Jgor RON) OSes ca RUSS arco ee bo rend eee Oi 43
4. Naturalism in Sociology of the Turn of the Century (by Alexander Hofman and Alexander Kovalev) ..... 57
5. The Psychological Sociology of the Turn of the Century (bY Igor Kon) «. 3-Fea0% Tae pity ve ie EE es 96
6. Empirical Social Studies in the Nineteenth Century (by Marina Kovaleva)... 0.6.0.6 .0 0c eee eee 122
7. The Crisis of Evolutionism and the Antipositivist
Trends in Sociology at the Turn of the Century (by IOP ROM) v4 es bol At 8 A EERE OR EA 151
8. Ferdinand Ténnies’ Sociological Conception (by Leonid TOnin) ois6c ae 6. UR SR ee arena 173 9. Georg Simmel’s Sociology (by Leonid Ionin) ....... 189 10. Emile Durkheim’s Sociology (by Elena Osipova)..... 206 11. The Sociology of Max Weber (by Piama Haidenko) . . . 255
12. The Sociological System of Vilfredo Pareto (by Elena OSIDOVG): & cacaiats Mocs S oleed Ene Ei eres at cM arelds We, Sele 312
13. Sociology in Prerevolutionary Russia (by Igor Golo- $CNKO) 6% sintea ye dab Hedd B DRS 28S ote Rare ee es 337 Conclusion (by Igor Kon)... 0... 0. eee eee 357
Subjet Index: 24.543 seus 5 ow ee RA ee a et Name Index 3.0 vice i crace whereas Mae Rat
INTRODUCTION
Igor Kon
A necessary element of any science’s self-awareness is its his- tory. By tracing the historical development of their disciplines scholars and scientists understand their contemporary state and their contradictions and problems better. Not surprisingly, interest in the history of a science grows as the latter develops. And that fully applies to sociology.
In contrast to the natural sciences, sociology’s own history is not a side issue but a serious problem studied by the same methodological means (including quantitative procedures) as other social problems.
Of late, the proportion of historical sociological studies in the sociological literature has risen considerably. And its themes have broadened. Alongside the history of sociological theory there has arisen the history of empirical sociology, and much attention has begun to be paid to the history of the institu- tionalisation of sociology and to study of its social functions and of its relations with other sciences.
In 1970, at the Seventh World Sociological Congress, a research committee on the history of sociology was set up on the initiative of the Soviet delegates within the International Sociological Association. In 1978 publication began in the United States of a special journal on the history of sociology. Matters of its history now have a notable place in the pro- ceedings of international sociological congresses and symposia on the history of science.
There are great difficulties, however, in the way of develop-
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ing a scientific history of sociology. The history of any science includes the history of the forming of its subject-matter, methods, conceptual apparatus, inner logical structures, the sphere of its practical application, its institutionalisation and relations with other disciplines, and the relations of the various schools and currents in the science itself. But interdisciplinary boundaries are mobile and shifting. Even today the subject- matter of sociology is by no means defined in an identical way. And unity has been impossible, furthermore, throughout its history. An author’s ideological and theoretical stance, and his understanding of the contemporaneous state of sociology, also affect his historical conceptions. The very principles of the structure and periodisation of the history of sociology is very different with different writers.
Without going into the historiography of the subject, which still awaits study, one can list a number of principles underly- ing monographs and courses in the history of sociology:
(1)a simple exposition of the views of various sociologists and schools in chronological order, with a minimum of analysis of their content;}
(2) organisation of the material on a space-time principle, i.e., by separate countries and periods;?
(3) examination of sociological ideas and theories as an aspect and element of a broader history of socio-political thought on a background of changes in socio-economic, polit- ical, and ideological attitudes?
(4) the history of the succession and development of so- ciological theory as a specialised system of knowledge, the various currents of sociological thought being treated either as a stage in the moulding and preparation of an author’s own conceptions, or as alternative, mutually supplementing streams:4
(5) a history of the shaping or manifestation in sociology of some definite, quite general philosophical orientation, for example, positivism;*
(6)the history of the evolution of certain fundamental sociological categories, whose content and functions have changed in the various stages of society’s development;®
(7) a series of monographic essays on outstanding sociologists of the past, each being studied in relation to the features of his
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time, personality, and scientific activity, and in a certain histor- ical perspective;”
(8)a series of essays on separate, most important concrete studies, tracing the evolution of the relationship of theoretical conceptions and empirical methods of research;*
(9) the biographical approach, in which the content of so- ciological conceptions is deduced from a sociologist’s personal features and life;?
(10) the history of empirical social studies, with reliance on the development of the methodology and technique of research;)°
(11) the history of the institutionalisation of sociology and its conversion into a university discipline, the founding and development of scientific institutions, university chairs, journals, etc.;'?
(12)a retrospective analysis of certain very important contemporary problems as they have been posed by major sociologists of the past.!?
In the present volume we trace the forming and development of non-Marxian sociology in Western Europe, the USA, and Russia in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. This, of course, is thematically, chronologically, and geographically incomplete, but such a division of the subject seems legitimate to us since the period singled out was specially important for the establishing of sociology as an idependent science, while the most intensive development of Marxist sociology took place later in the post-1917 period and needs to be treated in a sep- arate volume.
The authors hope that these essays on the history of so- ciology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West and in pre-revolutionary Russia, written from a Marxian standpoint, will interest readers in the West.
Notes
1 V_ I. Lenin. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. In: Collected Works (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), Vol. 14.
2 Heinz Maus. A Short History of Sociology (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962); G. Duncan Mitchell. A Hundred Years of Sociology (Duckworth, London, 1968).
3 Jan Szczepanski. Socjologia. Rozw6j Problematyki i Metod (Panstw. Wydawn. Naukowe, Warsaw, 1969); Howard Becker and H. E. Bares. Social Thought from Lore to Science, Vol. 3. (Dover Publications, New York, 1961).
* Nicholas S. Timasheff, Sociological Theory, Its Nature and Growth, 3rd ed. (Doubleday, New York, 1955); Talcott Parsons. The Structure of Social Action, 2nd ed, (The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1949); Don A. Mar- tindale. The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (Houghton & Mif- flin, Boston, Mass., 1960).
5 ].S.Kon. Der Positivismus in der Soziologie (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1968); Anthony Giddens, Positivism and Sociology (Heinemann, London, 1974).
* Robert A. Nisbet. The Sociological Tradition (Basic Books, New York, 1966).
7 Lewis A. Coser. Masters of Sociological Thought. Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 2nd ed. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1977); Franco Ferrarotti. /1 Pensiero Sociologico da Auguste Comte a Max Horkheimer (Milan, 1974); Gianfranco Poggi. Images of Society. Essays on the Sociological Theories of Tocqueville, Marx and Durkheim (Stanford U.P., Stanford, Cal., 1972).
® John Madge. The Origins of Scientific Sociology (Tavistock Publica- tions, London, 1970).
° Arthur Mitzman. Iron Cage. An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970).
*® Bernard Lécuyer and Anthony R. Oberschall‘‘The Early History of Social Research”. In: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 15 (The Macmillan Co., and The Free Press, New York, 1968), pp. 36-53.
1 Terry Nichols Clark. Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Harvard U.P., Cambridge, Mass., 1973); A. Oberschall (Ed.). The Establishment of Empirical So- ciology. Studies in Continuity, Discontinuity, and Institutionalisation (Harper & Row, New York, 1972).
'? Luciano Cavalli. J] Mutamento Sociale. Sette Ricerche sulla Civilitd Occidentale, 2nd ed. (11 Mulino, Bologna, 1971).
1 FROM SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY TO SOCIOLOGY
Igor Kon
1. The Ideological and Theoretical Premisses of Sociological Knowledge
Sociology arose in the middle of the nineteenth century as an independent science of the patterns of development and func- tioning of social systems, not because a new object of study had appeared, but because problems had developed in other social sciences that could not be tackled by the traditional means and within the bounds of the existing system of knowledge.
The sociological vision of the world (or sociological style of thinking) presupposes (1) a view of society as a systemic whole functioning and developing according to its own laws, ‘and not as something mechanically concatenated and therefore per- mitting all sorts of arbitrary combinations of separate social elements’;! (2) a conscious stance on study of actually existing social relations in contrast to the utopian constructing of an ideal social system; (3) reliance on empirical methods of research (although the understanding of these methods may differ) in contrast to speculative philosophical constructs.
The elements of this approach were built up gradually within the context of social philosophy and the philosophy of the history of modern times, and as empirical studies and the dif- ferentiation of social and humanitarian sciences developed (the process being strongly affected, moreover, by a powerful flow to the social sciences from the natural sciences).
The problem of society as a system had already been posed by seventeenth-century theories of ‘social physics’. Insofar as society was represented as part of nature, social science became methodologically a part of natural science. While the stellar world was depicted in these theories as a mechanical interaction of celestial bodies, society was regarded as a kind of astronom- ical system of individuals connected by social attraction and repulsion.
The ‘natural theory of society’ was rationalistic. Its aim was not to describe social facts but to reduce them to a small number of general laws immanent in nature (including the na- ture of man) the validity of which raised no doubts. The think- ers of the seventeenth century, having taken mathematics (geometric method), astronomy, and mechanics, as the model of science, endeavoured to make broad, deductive constructs, and treated not only history scornfully but also social statistics (which was making its first significant advances at that time).
The social philosophy of the eighteenth century, which was orientated to Newtonian physics rather than to astronomy and geometry, was already not so mechanistic and was more careful about its generalisations.
Mediaeval philosophy and its ideological heirs (Romantic traditionalists) represented society as an organic whole, as a community in which socio-economic ties were inseparable from moral ones and were personified and hallowed by traditions and religion. The Enlighteners counterposed to that idealised image of mediaeval ‘communalness’ a ‘mechanistic’ model of society based on division of labour and rational exchange between individuals. The likening of society to a machine that constitut- ed a kind of structural equivalent of philosophical-historical Crusoism was naive and in the final analysis idealist. But it opened up a possibility of analytical singling out and clarifica- tion of the real functions of separate social institutions and subsystems (the state, law, the economy, culture) which had hardly been differentiated in the ‘organic’ model.
The difference between socicty and the state was first of all clarified. The first step toward that had already been made by the theorists of ‘natural law’ and of the contract origin of the state. For all the idealist character of their views the delimi- tation of the ‘natural’ social structure and ‘artificial’ legal estab-
lishments opened the way to understanding of the nondepend- ence of business and economic affairs on politics.
The English materialists of the seventeenth century (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke), the Scottish moralists (David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson), and the French materialists of the eighteenth century (Holbach, Helvetius) were in accord in considering human behaviour as egoistic in principle, directed to attaining some personal advantage. But it was only a step from reducing the motives of the social behaviour of the indivi- dual or group to the interests of the latter to establishing the dependence of those interests on the individual’s or group’s real socio-economic position. The thesis of the clash of social in- terests led logically to a conclusion about the non-correlativity or incompatibility of the conscious motives of individual ac- tions and their social results. The Scottish moralists stressed that people’s social behaviour, not to mention its results, was de- cisively governed by irrational, instinctive forces and inclina- tions, and that people’s deeds, while interweaving and clashing, generated results quite indeterminate and unexpected for all the parties of this interaction. From that it followed that the structure and dynamics of the social whole could be explained without their being correlated with the consciousness of the individuals comprising this whole, politicians included. As a result the postulate of a “social contract”, necessary for awareness of the human (and not divine) nature of authority, itself became superfluous and was subjected to sharp criticism.
The Physiocrats, thanks to whom “political economy... was raised to the rank of a special science”,’ started consciously from the principle of the autonomy of economic affairs as regards law, suggesting that the spontaneous play of economic forces led more truly and surely to socially useful results than administrative, bureaucratic measures.
Clarification of the significance of economic property rela- tions led social thought, beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau, to the problem of class differences and the functional role of social inequality. The English classical economists deduced the social division of society from the social division of labour. This led, at the end of the eighteenth century, to the concept ‘class’ coming into use, which did not coincide with the concept ‘estate’ in use until then. Augustin Thierry, the French historian
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of the Restoration period, made the concept of class struggie popular. Although the new terms did not yet have the strict meaning they have received in Marxism, they clearly implied a new social structure based primarily on property differences rather than on mediaeval estates.
The ‘real’ world of spontaneously shaped social relations came to be called civil society in contrast to the world of polit- ical and legal relations. That was linked terminologically with the traditional difference between civil (private) law and public law. But Hegel had already examined this matter more deeply, seeing civil society as simultaneously united (since no individual could get along in such a society without others), and divided, torn by contradictory selfish interests. And since he stressed that civil society was not always sharply counterposed every- where to political society proper, but only in ‘modern’ epoch, the term also acquired a historical sense signifying, on the one hand, a certain sphere, a part of the social whole, and, on the other hand, capitalist society as a stage of historical develop- ment.
The attempt made by Vico at a conceptual delimitation of society and culture, and the Enlighteners’ development of the idea of progress were very important achievements of eigh- teenth-century philosophy.
The Enlighteners’ theory of progress, which played the role of the ideological foundation of the capitalist, bourgeois epoch, largely paved the way for the evolutionist schemes of the nine- teenth century. But the linear conception of social development often took on a frankly teleological character: the goal postulat- ed by the philosopher in fact played the role of the Providence. In addition, the establishing of profound social changes was harmonised at every step with the principle of the invariance of ‘human nature’, treated in an anthropological spirit.
In its application to historical material the idea of ‘eternal, immutable’ laws was very shaky. Attempts to explain both the general structure of society, and its concrete state at a certain moment of time, by one and the same formula, inevitably failed, while the identification of the concepts of social change, development, and progress created an illusion of the movement of history along a predetermined route.
Thus, although the social philosophy of modern times de-
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veloped important theoretical problems, its constructs proved to be speculative and unspecific. But, parallel with the speculative philosophy of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies, empirical social studies began to develop, above all social statistics. These investigations, arising from the practical needs of government, were originally local, imperfect in methods, and different in various countries.* But they gradually gathered scope and force. In France the technique of mass statistical surveys and economic censuses was developed. The English ‘political arithmeticians’ of the seventeenth century, William Petty, John Graunt, Gregory King, and Edmund Halley, laid the foundations of modern demography and worked out methods of quantitative investigation of social patterns.
Looked at separately, the empirical studies of the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries seem only descriptive, without a general theoretical basis. But in default of a sociological theory these investigations were based on the conceptions of natural science and general philosophy. It is characteristic that there were many outstanding natural scientists among the founders of empirical sociology (for example, Halley, Laplace, Buffon, and Lavoisier), whose study of social processes was organically linked with their scientific activity.
These scientists did not simply ‘apply’ the ready-made methods developed in the natural sciences to the study of social problems; many general scientific methods and theories were developed in fact on social material. Laplace’s Essai philoso- phique sur les probabilités (1814), for instance, was largely the result of a sociodemographic study by himself and his col- leagues. A desire to get a rigorous mathematical formula of population growth explains the popularity of Malthus’ Essay on Population (1798) to no small extent, in spite of the clearly reactionary character and unsoundness of his theory.
In addition to social statistics the development of ethno- graphic studies at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries had great significance for sociology. The ‘savage world’ discovered by the first historians, travellers, and settlers was not so much just an object of study as an object of influence. But the Enlighteners’ theories about ‘natural man’ stimulated a more and more active comparison of ‘civilised morals’ and ‘savage’; the savage was now primitive man in whom
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Europeans could recognise features of their own history.
In the middle of the eighteenth century the word ‘anthropol- ogy’ still belonged to the lexicon of anatomy and meant ‘study of the human body’. But Buffon was already defining it as the general science of human kind (including linguistics, study of cultures, etc., in it).
The first attempts at a systematic description and com- parison of the ways of life of various nations (often with a historical twist) were made in the eighteenth century (Joseph Lafitau, Francois de Volney). Speculative philosophical con- structs continually clashed as a result with checked and record- ed scientific facts that indicated the complexity of the problem of the unity and diversity of human culture.
The comparative historical method was being applied not only to study of ‘primitive’ peoples but also to jurisprudence, folklore, and linguistics.
In the early nineteenth century speculative social philosophy was everywhere being counterposed by the idea of scientific ‘positive’ investigation. The differentiating and ‘hiving off of scientific disciplines itself was also accelerated. Hard on the heels of jurisprudence and history, political economy, ethnography, statistics, and linguistics were separated off from philosophy. That was a model and precedent for the rise of new disciplines, and at the same time increased the need for some new intellectual synthesis and a generalising, but at the same time non-philosophical (in the sense of non-speculative) science of man and society.
2. The Social and Class Premisses of Sociology
The birth of sociology was also linked with certain social needs. Just as the social philosophy of the Enlighteners reflected the breaking-up of the feudal order and the rise of a new, capitalist society (which it anticipated in many ways), sociology arose as a reflection of the inner antagonisms of capitalist society and the social and political struggles generated by it.
The early nineteenth century was a period not only of stormy growth of capitalism, but also of the first clear display of its contradictions. The growth of industry and of towns was
1A
accompanied with mass ruin of the peasantry, handicraftsmen and artisans, and of small property owners. The extremely hard conditions of factory work and of the workers’ life contrasted sharply with the growth of the bourgeoisie’s wealth, provoking a sharpening of class struggle. The uprising of the Lyon weavers in France, the Luddite movement in England, and later Char- tism, were evidence of the entry into the arena of a new social class, the proletariat. Disillusionment with the results of the bourgeois revolution and the ‘Kingdom of Reason’ proclaimed by it swept broad strata of the intellectuals. The lost illusions were succeeded by bitter scepticism; the need for a realistic analysis and evaluation of existing society, and of its past, present, and future, was intensified .
The mode of that analysis depended on the thinker’s class position. In the first third of the nineteenth century, three main orientations, and correspondingly three groups of thinkers, became clearly outlined in the socio-political thought of Western Europe: conservative traditionalists, bourgeois liberal utili- tarians, and utopian socialists, who not only embodied different intellectual traditions but also expressed the interests of dif- ferent social classes.
The conservative traditionalists (also called reactionary romantics), like Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Louis de Bonald (1754-1840), and Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821), held a frankly negative position in regard to the French Revolution of 1789 and its results. They associated the post-revolutionary develop- ment with chaos and destruction, which they counterposed to an idealised harmony and order of the feudal Middle Ages and prerevolutionary times. Hence their polemic against the ideas of the Enlightenment and the specific theory of society .*
In opposition to the individualism and social nominalism of the Enlightenment, which treated society as the result of interactions between individuals, the traditionalists regarded society as an organic whole with its own internal laws rooted in its remote past. Society not only preceded the individual historically, but also stood above him morally. Man’s existence was impossible in principle without society, which moulded him, in the direct sense of the term, only for its own ends. Society did not consist of individuals but of relations and institutions in which each person was allotted a certain function
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or role. Since all parts of this whole were organically inter- connected and interdependent, a change in any of them inevit- ably disturbed the stability of the whole social system.
Satisfaction of fundamental, immutable human needs under- lay the functions of social institutions. Disruption or weaken- ing of the activity of any social institution therefore inevitably caused a disordering and disorganisation of the corresponding functions. It proved nothing that the social function of any institution or belief was harmful. Even prejudices sometimes performed a useful social role, uniting a group and strengthening its members’ sense of safety and reliability. It was specially necessary for the stability of society to maintain those groups and institutions by which the individual was linked with other people and with society as a whole. Urbanisation, industrialisa- tion, and commerce, which were undermining these traditional foundations of social being, did not lead to a higher form of social organisation but to social and moral disintegration.
The reactionary ideological sense of that conception, which retrospectively justified and substantiated any ‘historical’ determinations, is obvious. But it is also indisputable that the traditionalists anticipated many later sociological conceptions aimed at bringing out the inner relationships of the social whole.
Whereas the traditionalists regarded society as an organic whole that had to be understood in order to adapt to it better, the liberals saw in it an ‘artificial body’, a more or less me- chanical aggregate of parts that could be altered and improved by people’s conscious activity. Priority was definitely given to the individual methodologically, if not ontologically . Metho- dological individualism was closely linked with a programme of laissez-faire, directed against guild and sectional regulation and regimentation, and feudal, bureaucratic arbitrariness, etc. The existence of any social institution was justified solely by its usefulness.
But what benefit precisely should be made the cornerstone of the appraisal of social institutions? The benefit of society? Or of the separate individual? Or of certain definite social groups and classes? While the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary class and objectively expressed the interests of the majority of the population, these questions were not so urgent. Holbach and Helvetius could still suggest that personal interest correctly
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understood automatically included concern for the social whole. But English authors, who were more closely observing the es- tablishing and development of capitalist relations, had already seen the contradictoriness of this development in the eighteenth century.
The further development of capitalism fostered a polarisa- tion of scholars’ class positions. In the theories of the English utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and James Mill (1773-1836), social interest was wholly reduced to the sum total of private interests; ‘the bourgeoisie is no longer presented as a special class, but as the class whose conditions of existence are those of the whole society’.’ Society, for Bentham, was a fictitious body made up of individuals who were regarded as its constituent members. While putting forward the principle of achieving the maximum good for the greatest number as a general ethical law, he at the same time considered socially normal and morally acceptable when people strove to achieve their own private interests, even when that did harm to others. The utilitarian doctrine was converted
into a mere apologia for the existing state of affairs, an attempt to prove that under existing conditions the mutual relations of people today are the most advantageous and generally useful.®
While recognising the possibility of partial improvement and reform of the existing society, bourgeois liberalism resolutely opposed every kind of innovation of a revolutionary character; and the idea of social evolution, from having been a means of condemning feudalism, became a means of justifying already victorious capitalism.
Social thinking did not develop just within the framework of bourgeois ideology. The utopian socialism of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen was also based on a definite social philosophy on whose banner were the demands of scientific character, sobriety, and positiveness. The works of Saint-Simon (1760-1825) were particularly important on that plane.
In his Mémoire sur la science de lhomme (Note on the Science of Man), 1813, which largely anticipated the path of development of social thought, Saint-Simon remarked that ‘there has not been a science of man up to the present, only a
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conjectural science’, and proposed to give it ‘the stamp of the observational sciences’,’ to give ‘the science of man a positive character by basing it on observations and by treating it by the method employed for other branches of physics’.® As a coun- terweight to speculative philosophical constructs he proposed ‘to occupy himself in all parts of his work in establishing the series of facts, being persuaded that this is the only solid part of our knowledge’.?
But utopian socialism was incompatible in principle with scientific investigation.
The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticised the existing capi- talistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad [Frederick Engels wrote]. The more strongly this earlier socialism denounced the exploitation of the working class, inevitable under capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it
arose. a
The real revolution in the science of society, which laid the foundation of scientific sociology, was made by Marx and Engels.
Just as Darwin put an end to the view of animal and plant species being unconnected, fortuitous, ‘created by God’ and immutable, and was the first to put biology on an absolutely scientific basis by establishing the mutability and the succession of species, so Marx put an end to the view of society being a mechanical aggregation of individuals which allows of all sorts of modification at the will of the authorities (or, if you like, at the will of society and the govern- ment) and which emerges and changes casually, and was the first to put sociology on a scientific basis by establishing the concept of the economic formation of society as the sum-total of given production relations, by establishing the fact that the development of such formations is a process of natural history.! :
The similarity of the theories of Marx and Darwin noted by Lenin consisted in their both being, on the one hand, theories of the historical development of nature and society and, on the
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other, theories of the functioning of systems.
The materialist understanding of history was hostile, right from the start, to speculative, history-of-philosophy constructs; it developed in very close connection with study of concrete social processes and of the history of society. ‘We wish to con- struct our exposition solely on factual material, endeavouring, as far as we can, to present only facts in a general form,’ Marx wrote.!? But purely descriptive investigations satisfied him just as little as abstract metaphysics.
Crass empiricism turns into false metaphysics, scholasticism, which toils painfully to deduce undeniable empirical phenomena by simple formal abstraction directly from the general law, or to show by unig argument that they are in accordance with that law [he wrote].
While rejecting the reification of ‘social forces’ and ‘essences’ typical of idealist philosophy, Marx stressed that people were at once actors and authors of their world-historical drama, and that the structure of society coincided in that sense with the structure of their joint, combined activity. But these were not the abstract individuals, taken separately, who figured in the Robinson Crusoes of the eighteenth century, but individuals who found themselves in a definite, historically concrete system of social relations.
The understanding of society as a whole, law-governed, innerly connected system entails the principle of objective scientific investigation:
Its task [Engels wrote} was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.14
But, in opposition to the traditionalist and positivist kowtow- ing to ‘facts’, including the ‘wholeness’ of the social system, Marx initially fixed its inner contradictions. The stability of a social system described in structural terms was only a moment in a more general process of historical development. Any systems model of society required historical concretisation, and it was impossible to understand the laws of the development
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and functioning of a specific society, ‘by using as one’s master key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical’.15
While stressing the leading role of material production in the development of society, Marx was, at the same time, far from a theory of social automatism. It was not simply a matter of recognising the ‘feedback’ of ideas on the economy; in deducing the social division of society and its class structure from the economy, above all from property relations, Marx showed that this determination was ambiguous, and that different potentials of development were inherent in one and the same society and were displayed in the interests of different social classes and realised in their activity. Recognition of class struggle as the driving force of history took sociological theory out of the framework of structural-functional relations between separate social institutions and standards, and brought to the fore the problem of the subject of social action, and evaluation of its real opportunities. Sociology thus became an element and the theoretical foundation of scientific socialism.
Lenin, calling the materialist understanding of history ‘a synonym for social science’,'® wrote that ‘this hypothesis for the first time made a scientific sociology possible’.17 The principles of the materialist conception of history were bril- liantly applied by Marx and Engels to investigation of capitalist society as a whole, and to a number of partial social objects. ‘Now,’ Lenin wrote, ‘since the appearance of Capital—the ma- terialist conception of history is no longer a hypothesis, but a scientifically proven proposition.” ®
Separate aspects of Marx’s and Engels’ sociological concep- tion were developed further and concretised in the works of Plekhanov, August Bebel, the early Kautsky, and Labriola. And Lenin made a colossal contribution to a Marxist sociology.
Both the theoretical-methodological and ideological prin- ciples of Marxian sociology were unacceptable to the ideologists of the capitalist class. At the same time the dominant class needed a certain dose of sociological realism so as to explain
social processes, and concrete empirical information on various |
aspects of social life, since it would otherwise become increas- ingly difficult to govern society. But the sociological theories that the bourgeoisie needed had to be such as not to threaten
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the foundations of the capitalist order. Sociology was created as an alternative to socialism. Positivism became its philosophical and methodological basis.
Notes
1 Vv. I. Lenin. What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats. Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1986), p 165.
2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976), p 436.
3 Bernard Lécuyer and Anthony R. Oberschall. The Early History of Social Research. In: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (David L. Sills, Editor), Vol. 15 (The Macmillan Co., and The Free Press, New York, 1968), pp 36-53.
“ For more details see: Irving M. Zeitlin. Ideology and the Develop- ment of Sociological Theory (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968), pp 54-55.
5 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Op.cit., p 437.
§ [bid., pp 437-438.
7 Oeuvres choisies de C.-H. de Saint-Simon (Van Meenen et cle, Brussels, 1859), p 100.
® Ibid., p 144.
® Ibid., p 18.
1° Frederick Engels. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978), p 57.
11 V_ I. Lenin. Op.cit., p 142.
'? Karl Marx. Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel. In: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1986), p 343.
'3 Karl Marx. Theories of Surplus- Value, Part I (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978), p 89.
14 Frederick Engels, Op.cit., p 132.
‘5 Marx to the Editorial Board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski. In: K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1982), p 294.
'6 VI. Lenin. Op.cit., p 142.
17 Ibid., p 140.
8 Ibid. p 142.
nf. Ss
2
AUGUSTE COMTE AND THE ORIGIN OF POSITIVIST SOCIOLOGY
Yelena Osipova
1. Comte and His Time
Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism in philosophy and so- ciology, was born in Montpellier in 1798 in the family of a civil servant. The first half of the nineteenth century was an ex- tremely important period in the history of France. The rapid development of capitalism and the moulding of a new class structure of society were accompanied with frequent changes of the forms of political power. The Directory, the Consulate, the Empire, the Restoration, the Revolution of 1830, the July Monarchy, the Revolution of 1848, the Second Republic, and the Second Empire were the main political milestones of the period. Parallel with growth of the bourgeoisie’s wealth and power, the poverty and strength of resistance of the working class also grew. The development of science and engineering was combined with a crisis of the traditional ideological systems and intense philosophical quests.
All that had its effect on Comte’s outlook. Early abandoning the Catholicism and monarchism of his father’s family, he de- veloped an agnostic stance on traditional religion. His education in science, received in the Ecole polytechnique in Paris, and republican sympathies opposed both to Napoleon and the Bourbons, conditioned the character of his theoretical views. Expelled from the Ecole as a free-thinker, he became a tutor in mathematics. His first small works were devoted to mathemat-
22
ical matters. While studying the works of important French mathematicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries like Louis Lagrange and Gaspard Monge, he became familiar with the problematic of the philosophy of science. Montesquieu and Condorcet, out of the broad range of authors whose works the young Comte read, had a special influence on him; the former by his affirmation of the dependence of polit- ical and legal phenomena on natural laws, and the latter by his formulation of the law of mankind’s progressive development and his conception of history in which the evolution of social ideas, institutions, and relations had a main place. While having a lively interest in political economy, Comte was critical of the doctrines of bourgeois liberal economists who preached freedom of competition, which should, in their view, bring about social harmony of free and independent individuals. He opposed to these doctrines the idea of social unity and the political integra- tion of individuals and classes, basing himself on the concep- tions of the traditionalists and their treatment of social order.
In 1817-1824 Comte worked as Saint-Simon’s secretary, and was undoubtedly receptive of many of his ideas. But the disagreements between them on root theoretical and political matters led to a breach. Saint-Simon’s ideas about class struggle of exploiters and producers, and his high appreciation of the role of labour remained incomprehensible and unacceptable to Comte. Whereas Saint-Simon spoke of a society of free and equal producers, Comte propagandised a centralised state with a hierarchical structure. While Saint-Simon put the idea of social progress in the foreground, Comte stressed the importance of social statics. His system of positive philosophy, although it contained elements resembling Saint-Simon’s conception, was based on quite other ideological and theoretical foundations. His six-volume Cours de philosophie positive,’ published between 1839 and 1842, developed the principles of the classifi- cation of sciences, positive philosophy, and sociology. His second work was devoted to the foundations of the politics and religion of the future. This was Le systéme de politique Positive ou Traité de sociologie? published in four volumes (1851-1854). During his lifetime he also published his Traité d'astronomie populaire (1845), Discours sur l'ensemble de Positivisme (1848), Catéchisme positiviste (1852), Appel aux
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Conservateurs (1855), and Synthése subjective (1856).
Giving lectures for workers at the Polytechnical Society, Comte made personal contacts with them, and in 1848 organ- ised the Positivist Society on the basis of this group of the audience, and students drawn to him; the aims of the society were education of the people in the spirit of the positivist outlook on the world. At the same time he and his supporters sharply opposed the revolutionary actions of the Parisian pro- letariat. Not getting support, in the conditions of the revolution- ary situation, from either of the belligerent parties, Comte found himself completely isolated. His appeal to the intellectual elite to found a party of order and progress was also not crowned with success. He died in 1857, lonely, neglected, and thought to be a madman.
Despite the seeming contradiction between the first and second periods of his work, they were based on one and the same ideas and premisses. Ideas of the moral unity of mankind, and of the reorganisation of society on the basis of a new ‘religion’, positivism, which was at the same time a theory of social science, ran through all his works. He considered the functions of the social science he strove to create, and of the new ‘religion’, to be identical, suggesting that there could be a ‘true’, ‘scientific’ religion or, which was the same thing, a moral science that performed the religious functions of social integration. Hence one of the paradoxes characteristic of his views.
2. The Classification of the Sciences
The separation of the sciences from metaphysics and theology was the main idea of Comte’s positive method.? In his opinion true science was characterised by renouncing ‘unanswerable’ questions, i.e., ones that could not be confirmed or refuted, relying on facts established by observation. He considered questions of the essence and causes of things to be such ‘metaphysical’, unscientific matters. It was the task of science, according to him, to discover laws, understood as constant, repeated connections between phenomena. This limitation was due to a striving to gain precise, definite knowledge that could
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provide a basis for predicting the future.*
Comte came forward as the abolisher of philosophy in the old, traditional sense of the word. In his notions it had no special subject-matter of its own, nor a method different from those of science. The positive philosophy was a systematisation of sciences or the ‘scientific in the sciences’. In order to expound the positive philosophy it was necessary to expound an all- embracing system of sciences that included analysis of their subject-matter, methods, laws, similarities and differences.
When developing his classification of sciences, Comte based himself on their objective attributes. First of all, he divided them into the abstract and the concrete. The former studied the laws of certain categories of phenomena, the latter applied these laws to partial fields. Biology, for example, was the general abstract science of life, and medicine a concrete science ap- plying the general laws of biology. Comte distinguished five abstract, theoretical sciences: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology, and supplemented the main categories of natural phenomena (astronomical, physical, chemical, and biological) with the category of social phenomena, thus giving his classification the ‘character of universality indispensable to its definitive constitution’.® His ‘encyclopaedic ladder’ was built on the principle of the growing complexity of the phenom- ena studied by the respective sciences. Social phenomena were distinguished by the greatest complexity and at the same time depended on all the others, which explained the later rise of sociology. Nevertheless these were natural phenomena governed by natural laws specific for the field. Comte first called the po- sitive science of society social physics, but later sociology, explaining the need to introduce the new term not by a passion for neologisms but by the need to create a special discipline devoted to positive investigation of the fundamental laws proper to social phenomena. He stressed that sociology must be a theoretical discipline in contrast to the Adolphe Quételet’s descriptive ‘social physics’. The conversion of sociology into a Positive science completed the system of positive philosophy, thus marking the onset of the positive stage of development of the human mind and human society. It meant, in Comte’s view, a real ‘positive revolution’, the victory of science over the scholasticism of past epochs.
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Comte’s views on science corresponded to the metaphysical (antidialectical) method of thinking predominant in natural science in the first third of the nineteenth century. Natural science had not yet then provided convincing facts in favour of the idea of the development of nature, and put forward only separate brilliant guesses, that could not yet be converted into scientific theories. The metaphysical mode of thinking decided Comte’s classifying the sciences as existing side by side, and not as arising from each other. He discovered only structural links between them, and not genetic ones; his classification was based on the principle of co-ordination, not of subordination.°
In spite of the general metaphysical character of his outlook on the world, there were certain elements of dialectical thinking in it all the same. While he denied the possibility of knowing separate facts isolated from one another, he insisted on their relations being investigated, and called for examination of their functioning in the context of the greater entities they formed part of. Thus, it was necessary, when investigating the activity of separate organs, to bear in mind the structure and properties of the organism as a whole, and to relate every phenomenon of social life with such wholes as the epoch, civilisation, and humanity.
The integral approach was Comte’s main methodological postulate from which he criticised contemporaneous psychology and political economy. He considered the integral or whole (organism, society) more accessible to direct investigation than the phenomena functioning within it. And whereas the knowl- edge in sciences that studied inanimate nature was always rela- tive, and could not be full, it could be much more complete in the biological and social sciences, since there were certain con- crete wholes in them, amenable to study. Such an entity as humanity concerned man most of all; knowledge of it was most accessible to him, that is why it had attained the highest logical fulness and had become absolute.
Comte’s positive method played a certain role in the struggle against spiritualism. His stressing of the great value of science, and demand for its autonomy, and his opposing it to official religion and metaphysical speculations had progressive signific- ance as a protest against open idealism and clericalism. Many naturalists interpreted positivism in the spirit of natural-science
materialism. As an ‘anti-philosophical’ trend in philosophy that strove to rise ‘above’ the basic philosophical question and the struggle of the two principal trends in philosophy, positivism, by its appearance, marked a crisis of bourgeois spiritual culture and presaged its further deepening. But in Brazil, China, Japan, Poland, Russia, and Turkey, and other countries, the ideas of Comte, Spencer, Taine, and their disciples and interpreters were antidotes to religious mysticism, speculation, and loose methods of argument. Positivist evolutionism was sometimes misin- terpreted in the spirit of materialism (I. M. Sechenov) or found an analogue in the form of certain scientific constructs (Thomas Huxley, Le Dantec, and others).
Comte’s methodology united diverse trends. While it played a certain progressive role in its day, it later became more and more a brake on the development of science, since it was based on an untrue, historically limited interpretation of it. As the French historian of science, André Cresson put it: ‘Science seems everywhere to show that Comte clipped its wings too much. It can do more than he thought and said’.’
3. The Subject-matter and Tasks of Sociology
Comte counterposed sociology as a positive science to theolog- ical and metaphysical speculations about society and man. On the one hand, he criticised theologians, who, by regarding man as a being different in principle from animals, considered him created by God or Providence. On the other hand, while criticis- ing the philosophers who preceded him as ‘metaphysicians’ who created ‘social utopias’, he reproached them for understanding society as the creation of human reason and the rational will of individuals. Sociology, according to him, was the sole science that studied how man’s reason and mind were improved by the influence of social life. This idea developed into a whole concep- tion of the individual as an abstraction and of society as reality governed by natural laws. Social phenomena, unlike biological Ones, were in a constant state of change and transformation, and developed in time. Their essence was historicity. Comte‘there- fore had exceptional respect for Condorcet who had looked On society from a historical point of view.
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While focussing attention on the natural, law-governed character of social phenomena, Comte opposed voluntarism and exaggeration of the role of ‘great men’, and pointed out the correspondence of a political regime to the level of development of civilisation. While not denying the role of the economic factor, he all the same considered civilisation primarily a spiri- tual, psychological community, a community of ideas. Ideas, he wrote, governed and overturned the world, and the whole mechanism rested ultimately on opinions.® The main content of social development and evolution was scientific thought, and the ‘scientific spirit’? His picture of the development of the history of society was built on that. -
Comte’s argument about sociology as a science, and about its subject-matter and range of problems, had a very abstract character. He outlined the field of sociological investigations very broadly and indefinitely; it included all investigations that did not come within the purview of the other sciences named in his classification. The principal, primary reality from which the investigator started was society taken in its integrity and wholeness. Comte understood by that the organic unity of all mankind or of any of its major parts, connected by a consensus omnium, characterised by a harmonious func- tioning of its structural elements. The extraordinary com- plexity of society was due to the contemporary factors operat- ing in it being merged with historical ones, and to past genera- tions influencing contemporary ones. Society, or as he began to call it, humanity, was the supreme reality (sui generis) and the supreme being.
One can see rudiments in Comte’s views of what subse- quently began to be called the systems approach to social life. But Comte did not understand the real dialectic of social ele- ments and structures and treated the elements of social life as simple, eternal, and immutable, and social development as the result of various combinations of one and the same elements. His seminal ideas about the objectified products of human activ- ity that could become the subject of the sociologist’s study were drowned in a flood of general arguments about humanity as the supreme being. Comtean sociology was an idealist philosophy of history that included many metaphysical, speculative ele- ments.
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4. The Methods of Sociology
An essential part of Comtean sociology was the development of methods applicable to the study of society. While opposing speculation on the one hand, and the extremes of empiricism on the other, Comte substantiated the applicability in sociology of observation, and of experimental, comparative, and historical methods.
Observation, he said, was the main method of investigation in sociology. But he could not define what demands social ob- servation should meet, so as to be considered reliable and exact. The observation of social facts should put sociology on the level of science, and give the material the sociologist worked with the character of objectivity. Empirical material should be amassed under the control of theory, otherwise the sociologist would achieve nothing except a conglomeration of a mass of isolated, haphazard facts that said nothing in themselves. ‘It was obvious,’ he wrote, ‘that any social observations, either static or dynamic, should require the continual use of funda- mental theories.”!°
Absence of a positive theory relying on what one could gather and generalise the facts, was the main difficulty of sociology in Comte’s opinion; it was consequently caught in a vicious circle since it needed a theory in order to make observa- tions, and observations in order to create a theory.
Among the less important difficulties connected with ob- servation Comte noted the complexity of getting the scientific training needed to free the investigator from obstacles of an unscientific character—prejudices, common opinions, etc. Here, too, a scientific theory that prevented speculation and provided the investigator with the needed concepts was a help.
Comte noted the great importance not only of direct ob- servations but also of indirect evidence. Study of historical and cultural memorials, customs, and rituals, for example, and analysis and comparison of languages could give sociology con- tinually useful means of positive exploration .'?
Comte considered experiment the second method in impor- tance of sociology. Direct experiment in sociology consisted in observing the changes of a phenomenon under the impact of
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research conditions specially created for the purpose. Indirect or mediated experiment he understood as investigation of pathological deviations of society, deviations that arose through social upheavals, mainly of a revolutionary character. Social perturbations that shook the social organism were similar, in his opinion, to the illnesses of the individual organism. They clearly revealed the social organism’s fundamental laws, since the illness made it possible to discern the normal better.
A third method of the positive sciences also applicable in sociology was the comparative one by which the life of peoples living in the same time in various parts of the world were compared so as to establish general laws of the existence and development of societies.
In Comte’s view comparisons of animal societies with human ones, so as to show their similarities and differences, could also be useful. Finally, one could compare the social position of the various classes of one and the same society, but a conclusion about how far they were influenced by the main phases of de- velopment of civilisation was obscured by the influence of the general spirit of the times, which smoothed out differences.
The weakness of the comparative method, in Comte’s view, was that it did not show the sequence of social states, but repre- sented them as co-existing. That could create an incorrect notion of the stages of evolution. The comparative method could therefore only be successfully employed if it were gov- erned by a definite theory of the development of humanity.
The specific method of sociology most corresponding to the nature of social phenomena, Comte considered to be the historical, i.e., the method of historical comparisons of various consecutive states of humanity.!* Only by comparing a whole series of social phenomena taken in their sequence, could the scientist note the growth of some physical, intellectual, moral, or political feature or tendency, and the corresponding weaken- ing of the opposite tendency, and on that basis scientifically predict the final result, provided that it fully conformed to the system of the general laws of human development.! ;
Such a peculiarity of sociology as the necessity to proceed habitually from the general effect to the parts was best ex- pressed in the historical method.1* According to Comte there was no difference between history and sociology, which he
30
sometimes called the political science.'15 Comte considered the predominance of the historical point of view a sign of the times and at once the essential principle and general result of positiv- ism.'°
Discussion of the methods of sociology belongs to the most rational part of Comte’s system. He started from a thesis about the existence of natural laws of social life, discovery of which would make it possible to create a science of society. He did not, moreover, deny the uniqueness of society compared with nature, and looked for specific methods of investigating it. The fruitfulness of the idea of the natural-history character of social patterns was particularly obvious when one remembers that theological and spiritualist conceptions that denied the possibility of scientific knowledge of society were predominant at that time. The posing of the question of the need to rely on a firm theoretical foundation for carrying out sociological research was also important. It was Comte’s misfortune that he could not propose anything as this foundation except his theories of social statics and dynamics, the laws of which had a speculative, abstract character that in no way corresponded to his own initial precepts.
5. Social Statics
Comte divided sociology into two major sections, social statics and social dynamics. The first studied the conditions of exis- tence and laws of the functioning of a social system, the latter the laws of the development and change of social systems. Social statics was a theory of social order, organisation, and harmony. Comte regarded society as an organic whole all of whose parts were interconnected and could be understood only in unity. That conception was aimed directly against individu- alistic theories and attempts to regard society as the product of a contract between individuals. Exploration of the principles that determined the structure of society, and guaranteed har- mony and order, was inseverably connected, for Comte, with the social policy, which could realise them. He treated the main social institutions (the family, state, and religion) from the standpoint primarily of their social functions and their role in
31
social integration. His reasoning was thus coloured by conserva- tive tones, and he painted the future in the form of a romantic- ally idealised past.
Comte defined family relations as a moral and emotional union based on attraction and mutual sympathy. The role of the family was to mediate between the individual and the kin, to bring up the young generation in a spirit of altruism, and to teach it to overcome innate selfishness. The family figured with him as either a spontaneous source of our moral education or as the natural basis of our political organisation. In its first aspect each family of the present time prepared the society of the future; in its second aspect a new family extended present society.17 _
When examining the main family relations, i.e., those be- tween the sexes and between the generations, he did not deny the historical variability of the family. But he argued essentially about the contemporaneous bourgeois family, idealising it, and not linking analysis of it with problems of property, inheri- tance, money, etc. He expressed himself sharply, in a patriarchal spirit, against women’s equality, and everywhere stressed the need to consolidate the authority and power of the male—father and husband. Women, in his view, were beneath men intellectu- ally, and were inferior to them in will power. Woman’s social role was determined by her emotional and moral qualities, her capacity to unite people and to educate them morally. It was the task of women to exert an elevating influence on coarse male natures, and to awaken social feelings in them, based on solidarity. So the positive theory of the human family came down to systematising the spontaneous influence of feminine sentiment on masculine activity .'®
Women’s role in the upbringing of the rising generation was just as great. The family was the guardian and transmitter of traditions and of the experience of past generations. In the family the individual was socialised and acquired qualities needed for successful service to mankind, got rid of natural individualism, and learned to live for others. Good relations between the generations maintained equilibrium and the balance between traditions and innovation, whose bearers were the old and the young.
Co-operation, based on division of labour, was an analogue
of family relations on the broader social plane. In it each did that to which he was most inclined; all were interested in one another. So the consensus universalis arose and the spontaneous interaction of individuals.
By stressing the significance of emotional and moral ties, and putting the accent on the element of consensus, Comte pushed economic relations and connections into the back- ground, although he did not deny their importance. He con- sidered the principle of laissez-faire absurd, as promoting display of the worst, selfish sides of human nature. Social harmony could not be established where competition and exploitation prevailed .'?
Comte also saw the negative aspects of the division of labour. It promoted development of the capacities of each and sup- pressed general aptitudes; specialisation narrowed a person’s outlook; social feelings united only persons of the same voca- tions, creating hostility to other professions and trades, etc.?° Excessive division of labour could lead to the breaking down of society into separate corporations, disrupting its unity, generating competition, and arousing the basest instincts.
From his stating that there was a tendency toward the dissolution of society and disruption of its organic unity, Comte deduced the need for the political power of government as ex- presser of the ‘general spirit’. The social purpose of government, according to him, was to prevent as far as possible this fatal tendency to a fundamental scattering of ideas, feelings, and interests, an inevitable result of the principle of human develop- ment, and which, if it were able to pursue its natural course, would inevitably end by stopping social progress in all im- portant respects.?! The state was thus an agent of social solidar- ity, and submission to it was the sacred duty of the individual. The guardian of social order, the state, performed economic, political, and moral functions, the last of which Comte consid- ered to be the chief one. When demonstrating the necessity of a division of moral and political power to prevent intellectual and moral terror, which could hold back the development of thought and subordinate it to the narrow practical interests of tulers, Comte gave a high appreciation of the Middle Ages for the division of authority that existed then between state and Church. When lauding in every way the value and merit
33 3-1147
of the spiritual dictatorship exercised by the mediaeval Church, he saw an analogue of it in positivism as a set of ideas, prin- ciples, and conceptions supplemented by a kind of cult—a series of civil rites and rituals meant to replace the old, tradi- tional Church rituals.
The working out of the problems of spiritual life, the slogan of ‘live for others’, and his ethic of responsibilities did not attract many supporters. Comte could not correctly pose, let alone decide, the most important social problems. He idealis- tically underestimated the role of economic relations and exaggerated the role of spiritual ones. He regarded the division of labour not so much as an economic institution, as a kind of moral and psychological relation, without correlating it with a certain level of development of the productive forces, and furthermore with the character of the relations of production. He treated the formation of social groups, above all of voca- tional ones, abstractly, without deducing them from property relations. From that logically stemmed his justification and recognition of the need of the existing social structure.
6. Social Dynamics
Comte said that study of the dynamics of humanity’s collective life necessarily constituted the positive theory of social pro- gress.2* By consciously abstracting himself from the diversity of the concrete forms of historical development, he created a scheme based on examples taken from the history of the ‘most civilised’ European nations. According to him progress meant development along an ascending line, although, in trying to free the concept of progress from ties with ‘metaphysical values’, he stressed that it included simple development without any sense of perfecting or improvement. Science, he wrote, could not answer whether social progress was also moral progress, although he himself was convinced that it was.
When sorting out the role of ihe various factors that influ- ence social development, Comte divided them into primary and secondary. The primary, decisive factor was spiritual, mental development. He classed climate, race, life expectancy, growth of population, which conditioned the division of labour and
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stimulated development of man’s intellectual and moral features, as secondary. The secondary factors could only accelerate or slow down society’s progress, which occurred in a regular way and could not be altered.
By subdividing progress into the material (improvement of external living conditions), the physical (the perfecting of human nature), the intellectual (the development of intellect, the transition from a religious and metaphysical outlook on the world to a positive one), and the moral (development of collectivism and of moral feelings), Comte attached special significance to the last two. The social organism, he wrote, was based on an aggregate of views, ‘opinions’, which while gradually changed affected all other aspects of social life. That being the case, social dynamics should be based on the history of the human spirit.
The most general abstract concepts were the most important indicators for him of the development of reason; the degree of development of society could therefore be judged by the corres- ponding philosophical systems. For each stage in the develop- ment of human reason, which proceeded regularly through three main stages (theological, metaphysical, and positive), there corresponded definite forms of art, economy, politics, and social organisation.
The law of three stages, the cornerstone of Comte’s social dynamics was at once a historical and a logical law; the three stages of the development of the human mind corresponded to three similar stages of the development of history.
Comte divided the theological or fictitious stage, which embraced antiquity and the early Middle Ages (to 1300), into three periods: fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. During fetishism people ascribed life to external objects and saw gods in them. During polytheism, which was most widespread in Greece and Rome, ‘fictitious beings’, by whose intervention all phenomena were explained, were endowed with life. A ‘poetical world outlook’ was created that encouraged development of artistic creation but was incapable of guiding practice. And he saw in that the reason for the weak development of material culture in antiquity.
The epoch of monotheism was the age of Christianity. The religion of one god altered the image of the world, political
35 3°
and social relations, customs, and morality. Comte described at length the allegedly unusual harmony between the mediaeval state and religion, and considered Catholicism the author of that ‘precious creation of humanity’s political genius’.?* The model of certain social institutions should be sought precisely in the Middle Ages.
The metaphysical stage, embracing 1300 to 1800, seemed to Comte to be a transitional period in which disruption of the old beliefs, the foundation of social order, was characteristic. The Reformation, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, revolu- tions (‘the political triumph of the metaphysicians and legists’?*) were the most important events of that time. ‘Negative’ critical philosophy led to the decline of all authority, of the power of the ruling classes, and of religion. But revolution (in Comte’s opinion), while emancipating the individual and oppressed’clas- ses, did not create a doctrine that could unite minds. The con- ceptions of the French revolutionaries, he considered, were based on ignorance of history and its laws. Striving for revolu- tionary changes meant going against the laws of history, disrup- ting its regular course, plunging society into a morbid state, and so on. The ‘metaphysical spirit’ born in that period, sanc- tioned philosophical doubts, moral turpitude, and political disorder. Contemporaneous society, sunk into anarchy, was experiencing a need for a new ideology to replace the false, fictitious doctrines and perform an integrating social role.
Evidence that society was gradually entering the final, positive era was the spread of the sciences, growth of their social significance, and creation of the theory of positivism. The industrial system was replacing the military one charac- teristic of the theological epoch. The use of scientific discoveries for the good of all humanity guaranteed harmonious, equal development of all the elements of life. Characteristic features of the positive epoch were the victory of altruism over selfish- ness, growth of social feelings, and rapid development of ma- terial culture, which ensured an easier, more pleasant life for all, justice, and peace.
Compared with certain contemporary and preceding histor- ical and philosophical-sociological works, Comte’s social dy- namics was not without certain merits. He tried to bring out the pattern of social evolution, which voluntarist historians had not
noticed. He opposed a historical approach to theories of natural law and social contract, and the point of view of society as a whole to liberal individualism. His historico-evolutionary ap- proach to religion was also fruitful; he linked the development of religion with a broad range of socio-political relations, although he deduced the unity of society and the link between certain forms of religion and socio-political organisation from a community of ideas rather than from economic structure.
But, having based his social dynamics on the law of three stages, Comte refrained from analysing the diversity of the concrete forms of nations’ historical development, adducing as illustrations only facts that supported the scheme he had constructed. His theory of social development was no more than a metaphysical, speculative scheme. He could not define either the true specifics of social life or the driving forces of history, let alone the direction of society’s future development.?*
7. The Positive Polity
The fundamental weakness of Comte’s theory became parti- cularly obvious when he passed from the general theses of social dynamics to substantiation of his positive programme, ‘social polity’. He attached great significance to that part of his work. In contrast to the objective method aimed at discovering truth, the core of the positive polity should be subjective values and human interests and ideals. Accordingly he preached a subjec- tive method in politics. One of his works, he said (having in mind The Positive Philosophy) had drawn a philosophy from science, while the other (The System of Positive Polity) had converted into a complete, definitive religion? °
In this new religion the place of God was taken by society, which the individual should recognise as the Supreme Being to which he owed everything.
As the ‘religion of humanity’ positivism preached the com- plete submergence of the individual in society, universal love, and brotherhood. Comte deduced the great social role of scien- tists and artists from the idea of the unity of emotions and reason; they would be the new priests, the guardians of positiv- ist dogmas, and the custodians of the new cult. The idea of a
positivist church was also not alien to him; its aim was to be an association initially of co-religionists, and later of the people of the whole world. The positivist federation of nations with headquarters in Paris was to have the purpose of ensuring last- ing peace on Earth.
Comte attached great importance to the proletariat in his discussion of this vague programme. ‘Our proletarians,’ he wrote, ‘alone are capable of becoming the auxiliaries of the new philosophers.’?7 But to be that they had to break completely with socialist doctrines that infringed the institution of property (which positivists considered sacred). He sharply opposed the idea of communism and the thesis that the regulation of himan activity depended on the mode of ownership.?® In the positivist society property was to be treated as the accumulation of social wealth, and people who knew how to create and multiply pro- perty as servants of humanity. Comte put forward a vague idea of an industrial patriciate made up of industrialists and techni- cians, from whom three dictators (the triumvirate) were to be chosen to direct the affairs of industry, agriculture, and finance, concentrating legislative and executive power wholly in their hands. Moral authority was to be separated from political and economic administration, and to be in the hands of people specially appointed to exercise it, viz., philosophers and artists.
Comte’s ‘systematic socialism’, which he counterposed to the ‘spontaneous socialism’ of the workers, was in fact a very vague, petty-bourgeois utopia.
Prolix arguments about universal love, order, and progress covered the reactionary political sense of the idea of the cor- porate system in which spiritual authority was concentrated in a caste of philosophers, material possibilities and power in capitalists, while work that gave the proletarian moral satisfac- tion and social recognition remained his lot. The social reforms and transformations proclaimed by Comte were not aimed at liquidating the antagonistic social relations engendered by private property, but rather at changing relations between people, and an intellectual-moral reform of consciousness. Comte’s teaching was the antithesis of Marxism, which was more and more widely penetrating France, and a typical doc- trine of the ‘centre’.
38
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8. Comte’s Place in the History of Sociology
During Comte’s lifetime his philosophical and socio-political ideas were comparatively uninfluential. But interest in positiv- ism as a philosophical doctrine grew from the 1860s. Its appeal to rigorous positive knowledge in contrast to speculative meta- physical constructs, which corresponded to the needs of the de- velopment of science, was especially important. Many leading naturalists proclaimed themselves positivists. There arose a positivist historiography (Buckle and Taine), a positivist theory of culture (Ernest Renan), a positivist criminology (Cesare Lombroso), a positivist logic and psychology, and theory of literature and art, and even a positivist ‘metaphysics’ (Vacherot and Fouillée).
Comte’s role in the history of sociology is very contradic- tory. Having almost completely synthesised many of the main ideas of the social science of his time, he aimed them against the speculative-abstract approach to social life and theological conceptions. The appeal to positive knowledge, recognition of the law-governed nature of history, attention to study of social institutions and of the structure of society—all had a strong influence in his time on the development of social sci- ence. Historians of sociology remark on his creative mind,?? and his encyclopaedic knowledge; some authors have even drawn a parallel between him and Hegel.2° According to a modem French commentator, reading Comte leaves an impres- sion of reading a contemporary and his work is still topical.
Many of the ideas and concepts put forward by Comte have in fact firmly become currency of bourgeois sociological thought. They include the idea of society as an organic whole, developed in organistic theories, and in the sociological concep- tion of Comte’s major follower in France, Emile Durkheim, and later in Parsons’ structural functionalism.?! The delimitation of the laws of the-development and functioning of society, and the search for factors determining historical development, social integration, and the stability of social systems were seminal. This theme became a leading one in the French sociological school. Comte’s idea of the objective nature of sociology as a science developing along the principles of natural science, had a great influence on social science.
39
But many of the ideas associated with his name had in fact been put forward by his predecessors, in particular by Saint- Simon. In addition there were two root faults in his sociological conception, as in all positivist sociology, viz., idealism, which was expressed in his law of three stages and his attempts to explain historical changes primarily by the influence of ideas; and its metaphysical and antidialectical character.?? The latter was expressed, in particular, in the speculative nature of his theory of progress.
Comte’s sociology is full of contradictions. While calling for reforms based on positive knowledge of society, he, in fact, at the same time, rejected the possibility of intervention in the course of history. His programme of socio-political reorganisa- tion of society was inspired by a conservative social ideal. As Coser aptly puts it, he ‘was torn between the twin demands of order and progress’.>°
In trying to make social science ‘positive’, Comte dares assert, in spite of the extreme difficulty of his grand subject, that, properly treated, it permitted conclusions just as certain as those of geometry itself.?* He included elements of religious thinking in social science as well, calling for the postulates and dogmas of sociology to be applied without reflection and analysis, and for them to be believed without doubt. That teduced the principles of science to the level of everyday consciousness. Comte himself often asserted that positive philos- ophy was only a modification of ordinary common sense. Science was thus deprived of one of its most essential qualities, namely, antidogmatism.
Notes
' The Cours was translated and condensed into two volumes with Comte’s approval by Harriet Martineau, and published by J. Chapman in London in 1853 (3rd edition, 1893) under the title The Positive Philos- ophy of Auguste Comte (hereinafter referred to as The Positive Philos- ophy). Another edition in three volumes was published by George Bell & Co. in London in 1896.
? The Systéme was translated by J. H. Bridges and published by Long- mans, Green in London in four volumes in 1875-77, under the title System of Positive Polity.
3 Comte explained that the word ‘positive’ (positiv) had several meanings: (1) the real or opposed to the chimerical; (2) the useful as opposed to the useless; (3) certainty in contrast to indecision; (4) the exact as opposed to the vague; and (5) the positive as the contrary of the negative (‘In this case, it indicates one of the most prominent proper- ties of the true modern philosophy, by showing it destined, by its nature, not to destroy but to organise’ (Discours sur esprit positif. Ordre et progrés. Paris, 1905, pp 64-66).
The term ‘positive’, in the sense of ‘organic, definite, exact’, had been jntroduced by Saint-Simon, and is met in his works.
* For more details of Comte’s conception of a science, see: B. M. Ked- rov. Klassifikatsiya nauk (Classification of the Sciences), Book 1 (Nauka, Moscow, 1961).
5 Auguste Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, 31d ed., Vol. 1 (Bailliére et Fils, Paris, 1869), p 21.
° B. M. Kedrov, Op.cit., p 141.
7 André Cresson. Les courants de la pensée philosophique francaise, Vol. II (Colin, Paris, 1927), p 172.
® See: Auguste Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, Vol. 1 (Bail- liére et Fils, Paris, 1869), pp 40-41.
° See: August Comte, Op.cit., Vol. 4, p 268.
° Tbid., p 301.
't Ibid., p 306.
2 Ibid., p 322.
'3 [bid., p 328.
4 Ibid., p 260.
'S [bid., pp 206-207.
16 See: Auguste Comte. Systéme de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, Vol. 3 (Chez Carilian-Goery and V. Dalmont, Paris, 1853), pl.
7 Ibid., Vol. 2, p 183.
‘8 Ibid., p 204.
*® Auguste Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, Vol. 1, pp 426-429.
2° Ibid., p 429.
*1 Ibid., Vol. 4, p 430.
23 Ibid., p 232.
23 Auguste Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, Vol. 5, p 230.
24 Ibid., Vol. 6, p 287.
75 See: Otwin Massing. Fortschritt und Gegenrevolution. Die Gesell- Sschaftslehre Comtes in ihrer sozialen Funktion (Klett, Stuttgart, 1966).
26 August Comte. Systéme de politique positive, Vol. 1, p 448.
27 Ibid., p 129.
28 Ibid., p 152.
29 Lewis A. Coser. Masters of Sociological Thought, 2nd Ed. (Har- court Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1977), p 40.
3° See: F.S. Marvin. Comte. The Founder of Sociology (Russell & Russell, New York, 1965).
3. Paul Kellermann. Organizistische Vorstellungen in soziologischen Konzeptionen bei Comte, Spencer, und Parsons (Dissertation, Munich, 1966).
32 1.S. Kon. Der Positivismus in der Soziologie (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1968), p 19.
33 Lewis A. Coser. Op. cit., p 41.
34 Auguste Comte. Discours sur l'esprit positif, p 111.
cia
3
HERBERT SPENCER’S SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTION
Igor Kon
1. Spencer and His Time
The birth of sociology in England is linked with the name of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). In the middle of the nineteenth century, when his scientific activity was beginning, British capitalism was at the zenith of its prosperity. England, having completed the industrial revolution before all other countries, had far outstripped them in level of economic development. In the eyes of mid-century world opinion, she was the symbol of prosperity and liberalism. In spite of acute class contradic- tions, the British middle classes were complacently proud of the progress made, and looked to the future with con- fidence. That mood had its effect, as well, on Spencer’s social philosophy.
Spencer worked from 1837 to 1841 as an engineer and technician on a railway, simultaneously studying mathematics and natural sciences. Then, for several years, he contributed to the press. In 1853, having inherited a tidy legacy from an uncle, he resigned his post and began the modest life of an independ- ent scientist and publicist. Even after he had attained fame, he refused all official honours.
In the early 1860s Spencer made a tremendous effort to create a system of synthetic philosophy that would unite all the theoretical sciences of the time. This work included ten volumes, consisting of five separate titles: First Principles
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(1862), Principles of Biology (two volumes, 1864, 1867), Principles of Psychology (1870-1872, three volumes, the first edition of which appeared in 1855); Principles of Sociology (three volumes, 1876, 1882, 1896), which was anticipated in 1873 in an independent book The Study of Sociology, and Principles of Ethics (two volumes, 1892, 1893).
What were the sources of his ideas?
In his youth he was not interested in philosophy; later he did not read philosophical and psychological books, preferring to derive the necessary information from conversations with friends and popular editions. According to his secretary, there was not a single book by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, or Kant in his library. His knowledge of history, too, was very weak.
Spencer borrowed much more from the natural sciences, especially from those parts in which the idea of development was being born or worked out. When Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1858, Spencer warmly welcomed it. Darwin in turn highly valued Spencer’s theory of evolution, acknowledged its influence, and even placed Spencer intellectually above himself. Yet, in spite of this respect and influence, Spencer’s evolution- ism was more Lamarckian than Darwinian.
A second line of influence, perceived and acknowledged by Spencer himself, was the works of English economists of the eighteenth century, especially those of Malthus and Adam Smith. As we know, not only Spencer, but also Darwin deduced their idea of survival of the fittest precisely from Malthus, although they both gave this theory an optimistic, ‘progressive’ ring, it did not have with Malthus.
Finally, the ideas of the English Utilitarians, in particular of Bentham, whose individualism Spencer intensified even more, had quite a clear influence on him. As an apostle of extreme bourgeois liberalism, he consistently followed the principle of laissez-faire all his life. He had already, in his first book Social Statics (1851), formulated a ‘law of equal freedom’,! according to which ‘every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other man’.? Freedom of individual actions, competition and survival of the fittest were all that were needed for the develop- ment of society. Consistently working up that idea, Spencer opposed not only laws to aid the poor but also any state inter-
ference in public affairs. His ideological position was militantly antisocialist. He considered the principle of collectivism disas- trous from the biological standpoint and psychologically absurd, seeing in it encouragement of the worst at the cost of the best.
Spencer’s attitude to Comte presents special interest. His own ideas had already been formed in the main when he became acquainted with Comte’s works. On the whole he highly appre- ciated Comte, ascribing to him ‘the credit of having set forth with comparative definiteness, the connexion between the Science of Life and the Science of Society’.? Comte’s ‘way of conceiving social phenomena’, he wrote, ‘was much superior to all previous ways; and among other of its superiorities, was this recognition of the dependence of Sociology on Biology’ .*
Later, however, there began to be serious disagreements. Spencer was, first of all, much more naturalistic than Comte. The latter’s messianism, the ‘law of three stages’, and other of his attempts to arrive at social development from spiritual development were profoundly alien to Spencer.
What is Comte’s professed aim? To give a coherent account of the progress of human conceptions. What is my aim? To give a coherent account of the progress of the external world. Comte proposes to describe the necessary, and the actual, filiation of ideas. 1 propose to describe the necessary, and the actual, filiation of things. Comte professes to interpret the genesis of our knowledge of nature. My aim is to interpret, as far as it is possible, the genesis of the phenom- ena which constitute nature. The one end is subjective. The other is objective.
Spencer rejected the idea of uniform, linear progress, in the light of which
the different forms of society presented by savage and civilised
races all over the globe, ate but different stages in the evolution of
one form.®
In his view the truth was
that social types, like types of individual organisms, do not form a series, but are classifiable only in divergent and re-divergent groups.”
45
Finally, Spencer posed the question of the relation of the individual and the social whole quite differently to Comte.
2. The Subject-matter of Sociology
Spencer did not provide a developed, formal definition of sociology or of its relation to other social sciences. But in The Study of Sociology he paid much attention to demonstrating the possibility of its existence as a science. This possibility depended on the existence (1) of a universal law of ‘natural causality’ which operated in society to the same extent’as in nature, and (2) of a regular connection of the elements and structure of any phenomenon. By examining in detail the ob- jective and subjective difficulties (including class prejudices) of shaping sociology as a science, Spencer anticipated a number of the theses of the future sociology of knowledge.
The most complicated methodological task for him was to demarcate sociology from history. When studying the laws of the development of society, sociology is, in spirit, a historical science. But in Spencer’s opinion, it was related to traditional, naffative, descriptive history in the same way as anthropology to biography. While biography recorded all the chance circum- stances in a human life, anthropology studied the state and conditions of the development of the organism. In the same way sociology, even though it rested on historical facts, was closer methodologically to biology.
In contrast to Comte, Spencer not only set out his under- standing of the subject-matter and tasks of sociology but also, in fact, realised the principles he proclaimed. His Principles of Sociology was essentially the first attempt to construct an integral sociological system on ethnographic material. Under the heading ‘The Data of Sociology’ he tried to reconstruct theoret- ically the physical, emotional, intellectual, and especially the religious life of primitive man, and to bring out the origin of his main ideas and notions. Later, as ‘the inductions of sociol- ogy’, which consisted in a kind of general theory of society, he analysed the concepts of society, social growth, social structure, social functions, various systems and organs of social life. In the second volume of Principles of Sociology he examined,
46
employing an immense amount of ethnographic material, albeit uncritically assembled, the evolution of domestic relations (primitive sexual relations, forms of the family, the position of women and children), ritual institutions (including customs), political institutions (under which he examined not only polit- ical institutions proper, ie., the state, representative institu- tions, courts, and law, but also property, types of society, religious institutions, public professions, and industrial institu- tions, ie., production, exchange, division of labour, etc.). His sociology was thus an all-embracing science that included anthropology, ethnography, and a general theory of historical development.
3. Organicism and Evolutionism
Spencer’s sociological theory was built around two main princi- ples: the conception of society as an organism and the idea of social evolution. The first principle was connected with the necessity of comprehending the unity of the social whole.
He clearly asked himself the following question, whether society was a real ‘entity’, or only a collective name for des- ignating a certain number of individuals, which had only a nominal existence. Since the nominalist point of view on so- ciety was unacceptable to him, he had to admit that society was a special kind of entity that really existed. He suggested that we have every right to regard it as a special entity, because, although it was made up of discrete units, the constant main- tenance of a certain general similarity in the grouping of these units within the locality occupied by each society over the course of several generations and even centuries, however, indicated a certain concreteness of the aggregate formed by them. It was this feature that gave us our idea of society. Be- cause we do not give this name to the transient gatherings that primitive peoples form, but only employ it where a settled life has led to a certain permanence in the distribution of its components within society.
But, if society was a real object, with its own individuality, should it be classed as inorganic or organic? Although Spencer widely employed mechanical analogies (society as an ‘aggregate’,
47
etc.) they seemed unsatisfactory to him for constructing a gener- alised model of the social whole, and he called an organic model to his aid that was more complex and dynamic. One of the chapters of Principles of Sociology was entitled ‘A Society Is an Organism”.
Spencer listed a number of similarities between biological and social organisms: (1) society, like a biological organism, and in contrast to inorganic matter, grew and increased in size dur- ing the greater part of its existence (for example, the conversion of small states into empires); (2) as a society grew its structure became more complicated, just like the structure of an organism during biological evolution; (3) the differentiation of structure in both biological and social organisms was accompanied with a similar differentiation of functions; (4) the differentiation of the structure and functions of biological and social organisms was accompanied during evolution with development of their interaction; (5) the analogy between society and the organism could be reversed; one could say that each organism is a society consisting of separate individuals; (6) in a society, as in an or- ganism, even when life as a whole stopped, the separate com- ponent parts could continue to live, at least for a certain time. All that, in his opinion, allowed one to treat human society by analogy with a biological organism.
But he also saw essential differences between them. (1) The component parts of a biological organism formed a concrete whole in which all the elements were inseparably united, while a society was a discrete whole, the living elements of which were more or less free and dispersed. (2) The differentiation of func- tions in an individual organism was such that the capacity to feel and think was concentrated in certain of its parts alone, while in a society consciousness was spread throughout the whole aggregate, and all its units were capable of enjoyment and suffering to approximately the same extent, if not equally. Hence a third difference: in a living organism the elements existed for the sake of the whole; in a society, on the contrary,
the welfare of the aggregate, considered apart from that of the units, is not an end to be sought. The society exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society. It has ever to be remembered that great as may be the efforts made for the
48
prosperity of the body politic, yet the claims of the body politic are nothing in themselves, and become something only in so far as they embody the claims of its component individuals.®
The reservations introduced were most essential for Spencer, who repeatedly protested against the idea of the full identity of society and organism attributed to him (although he himself had given grounds for same). One must not forget that he was an individualist. Whereas the social whole, for Comte, preceded the individual, and the latter was not even an independent cell of society, for Spencer, on the contrary, society was only an aggre- gate of individuals. He considered dissolution of the individual in the social organism to be impermissible. Hence, also, the im- portant refinement, that society was not simply an organism but a ‘superorganism’.
Any developed society, according to Spencer, had three systems of organs. The supporting system was the organisation of the parts that provided nutrition in a living organism, but was the production of necessary products in a society. The distribut- ing system ensured connection of the different parts of the social organism through the division of labour. Finally, the regulatory system, in the person of the state, ensured subordina- tion of the parts to the whole. The specific parts of “organs” of society were institutions. Spencer counted six types of in- stitution: domestic, ritual, political, church, professional, and industrial. He endeavoured to trace the evolution of each of them by means of a comparative, historical analysis. But what were the laws of this evolution?
The concept of evolution had a central place in Spencer’s theory. According to him, phenomena occurring anywhere were part of the general process of evolution. There was only one evolution, and it took place in the same way everywhere.
Any process of development, according to him, included two aspects: integration and differentiation. It began with simple, quantitative growth, increase in the size or number of the component elements. The quantitative growth and compli- cation of the structure of social aggregates entailed a process of functional and structural differentiation of the whole. In primi- tive social organisms their separate parts and functions were weakly differentiated and similar to one another. One and the
49 4-1147
same partial structure could perform several different social functions in them, and one and the same function could be performed by several different structures. As society grew its parts became more and more unlike one another. These dissim- ilar parts began to perform ever more different, specialised functions, which had to be co-ordinated.
The division of labour, discovered first by economists as a social phenomenon, and later also recognised by biologists as a ‘physiological division of labour’, was thus a universal mechan- ism of development. But the more differentiated functions were, the more important became the existence of a certain regulating, governing mechanism capable of co-ordinating the partial structures. Hence the complication and differentiation of the regulating processes themselves. In the earliest stages of social evolution a differentiation had already begun between tulers and governed, which gradually became more and more marked. The power of the ruler was supplemented by a religious authority arising simultaneously with it and by the power of generally accepted rules of behaviour and customs which gradually became differentiated from both of them.
So that beginning with a barbarous tribe, almost if not quite homo- geneous in the functions of its members, the progress has been, and still is, towards an economic aggregation of the whole human race; growing ever more heterogeneous in respect of the separate functions assumed by the local sections of each nation, the separate functions assumed by the many kinds of makers and traders in each town, and the separate functions assumed by the workers united in producing each commodity.°
The evolutionary approach to society, however, raised a number of complex problems. (1) What was the relation of quantitative and qualitative changes in the process of develop- ment? (2) What was the relation of the concepts of evolution and progress (a problem already posed by the romantics of the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries)? (3) Should the evolution of society be regarded as a single, unidirectional process, or as a series of relatively autonomous processes of development?
Spencer answered the first of these questions in the spirit
50
of typical ‘flat evolutionism’. Social evolution, for him, was a contradictory, but mainly smooth, gradual, and largely automat- ic process that did not permit of conscious ‘acceleration’ and ‘outside’ interference; ‘the processes of growth and develop- ment may be, and very often are, hindered or deranged, though they cannot be artificially bettered’.!° That was a direct sub- stantiation of the spontaneity of the development of capitalist society, and of maintenance of the status quo. By stressing the organic character of social evolution, and drawing numerous analogies between society and nature, Spencer sharply con- demned any attempts at a revolutionary reorganisation, seeing in revolutionary destruction of definiteness an unnatural breach of the law that any evolution ‘follows lines of least resist- ance’!
Spencer’s position as regards the relation of evolution and progress, was much more complicated. He concerned himself much with this matter. The idea of the universality of progress, understood as the perfecting of man and society, was common in the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘Ameliorism’, the philosophy of the gradual improvement of life, was an inal- ienable part of the social credo of Victorian liberalism. Young Spencer also delimited progress as a value concept, and evolu- tion in a natural-science sense. In the second chapter of Social Statics he had stressed that
progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity... so surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect.! ?
But later he turned away from this point of view, and the very concept of progress, considering the term too anthropo- centric. When speaking of the ‘law of evolution’, the mature Spencer already had in mind not ‘improvement of life’ but only the regular, law-governed, and ever accelerating movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity. He no longer claimed that ‘universal progress’ applied to any given society. He was quite conscious of the possibility and even inevitability of regressive Processes. He understood that if the theory of regress, in its current form, should be considered bankrupt, the theory of Progress, too, applied without limitations, would seem unsound.
Si 4*
It was very possible, and even very probable, that regress took place as often as progress. Hence, the notion of the development of society no longer as global Evolution but as a series of rela- tively autonomous processes. Like other types of progress, he stressed, social progress was not linear, but divergent.
As Perrin justly noted, Spencer had not one but at least four interpretations of ‘social evolution’: (1) ‘as progress toward an ideal ‘‘social state” ’; (2) ‘as the differentiation of social aggregates into functional subsystems’; (3) ‘as an advancing division of labor’; and (4) ‘as the origin of species of socie- ties’.'? He never succeeded in combining them all.
4. Spencer’s Place in the History of Sociology
Spencer’s contribution to the development of sociology, and the evaluation of his works by succeeding generations have been as contradictory as his creative work.
His ideologically important service was his fight against clericalism and defence of the principles of objective investiga- tion of society based on the principles of scientific research. Progressive thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth cen- tury were attracted by his confidence in the irresistibility of social evolution, his recognition of the law-governed character of everything that exists, and the seeming rigour and scientific character of his conclusions. It was not by chance that these ideas impressed such people as Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.
But Spencer’s agnosticism also opened the road to compro- mise with religion, while his sociological doctrine had a bour- geois individualist and antisocialist character and was easily converted (in Spencer himself, and his followers) into a direct apology for capitalism. It was not for nothing that Spencerism was warmly welcomed in the USA by such pillars of rising monopoly capital as John D. Rockefeller and James J. Hill.!*
Spencer’s service, as regards theory, was his attempt to com- bine the historico-evolutionary approach to society with a struc- tural, functional one. With his conception of structural dif- ferentiation, and understanding of society as a self-regulating system, and his analysis of the relation of social functions with
the structure of society, he anticipated many propositions of structural functionalism in sociology and ethnology. He was the first in sociology to begin systematic use of the concepts ‘system’, ‘function’, ‘structure’, and ‘institution’. His superior- ity to Comte was his much more consistent reliance on empir- ical, above all comparative, historical investigations. He was one of the first to try and demarcate the concepts of evolution and progress and overcome the shortcomings of the linear concep- tion of development, throwing a bridge from sociology to ethnology. The systematisation of ethnological material that he carried out, and to an ever greater extent the very mode of classifying and typologising societies, furthered raising of the theoretical standard of ethnological research and the appearance of a number of historico-evolutionary and culturological con- ceptions. It is not without reason that he has been given an important place in the history of anthropology and ethnography , and psychology. Many of his special observations and conclu- sions, irrespective of their degree of factual substantiation, stimulated fruitful scientific discussions and disputes.
On the whole, however, Spencer’s sociological conception suffered from crude naturalism and mechanicism. He tried, in the interests of his synthetic philosophy, to reduce complex social phenomena to their simplest elements. The concrete content of social life thus escaped his attention. His attempts to apply the general concepts ‘differentiation’ and ‘integration’ to society, bypassing formalisation of the concepts, and relying on pre-scientific definitions of society, personality, and mass, generated unclarity and misunderstanding.
As Lenin wrote in this connection,
Abstract reasoning about how far the development (and well-being) of the individual depends on the differentiation of society is quite unscientific, because no correlation can be established that will suit every form of social structure. The very concepts ‘differentiation’, ‘heterogeneity’, and so on, acquire absoletely different meanings, depending on the particular social environment to which they are applied .!5
For all his thirst for concreteness, Spencer’s theory of evolu- tion remained speculative. Empirical facts illustrated the con-
53
ception, but it was not based on them. The vast factual material contained in the 17 volumes of his Descriptive Sociology was selected by his assistants quite uncritically and from different sources. ©
While outwardly describing the cultural and functional connections of the social whole, Spencer’s organic model of society did not disclose its real foundations. He did not see either the dialectic of the productive forces and relations of production or the basic position of the latter as regards politico-ideological phenomena. He treated the leading role of the social division of labour in the forming of classes in a conservative, protective spirit, and ascribed an exclusively destructive role to class struggle. Furthermore, he also could not theoretically resolve the contradictions between organicism and individualism.
The contradictoriness of his influence on sociological thought follows from that. Although not recognised by official univer- sity science, his sociology had acquired great popularity at the end of the nineteenth century among a broad readership, es- pecially in the United States, where nearly 369,000 copies of his books were sold between 1860 and 1902.!7 According to Charles Cooley, Spencer’s The Study of Sociology ‘probably did more to arouse interest in the subject than any other publica- tion before or since’.!® Spencer’s visit to the USA in 1882 was a real triumph. His influence on U.S. social thought became less marked in the early twentieth century, not so much because his ideas had reached their limit as because his language had become (as Hofstadter put it), ‘a standard feature of the folk- lore of individualism’ .1?
The attitude to him, however, was never unequivocal. He was seen at first mainly as a theorist of naturalistic evolutionism; he enjoyed his greatest influence among spokesmen of social Darwinism (W.G.Sumner). Proponents of a psychological onentation, on the contrary, criticised him for his naturalism. The crisis of evolutionism at the turn of the century evoked sharp criticism of Spencer. But Durkheim had already seen in him the forerunner of the functionalist trend. According to Luther Bernard’s poll, 258 American sociologists in 1927 considered Spencer the most influential European sociologist. ° Later, however, he was cited less and less. In 1937 Talcott
Parsons unambiguously wrote: ‘Spencer is dead’?! Historians of sociology of 1940-50 agreed with that. The advent of neo- evolutionism, on the one hand, and of cybernetics and the systems approach, on the other, again raised interest in the West in him, and he was seen as a precursor of these new cur- rents, although they were not born, of course, on foundation of Spencerism.
Notes
‘1 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics; or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness (Appleton & Co., New York, 1882), p 105.
2 [bid., p 94.
3 Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (Henry S, King & Co., London, 1875), p 328.
* Ibid., p 330.
5 Herbert Spencer. An Autobiography, Vol. 2 (Watts & Co., London, 1926), p 488.
® Herbet Spencer. The Study of Sociology, p 329.
7 Ibid.
® Herbert Spencer. The Principles of Sociology, Vol. 1 (Williams and Norgate, London, 1885), pp 449-450.
° Herbert Spencer. First Principles (Williams and Norgate, London, 1890), pp 346-347.
1° Herbert Spencer. The Study of Sociology, p 401.
11 Herbert Spencer. First Principles, p 239.
1? Herbert Spencer. Social Statics, p 80.
43 Robert C. Perrin. Herbert Spencer’s Four Theories of Social Evolution, In: The American Journal of Sociology, 1976, 81, 6: 1339- 1359,
14 Richard Hofstadter. Social Darwinism in American Thought (The Beacon Press, Boston, Mass., 1955).
18 VI, Lenin. The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr. Struve’s Book. Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1986), p 412.
16 See: Robert G. Perrin. Art. cit.
'T Richard Hofstadter. Op. cit., p 34.
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*® Charles H. Cooley. Reflections upon the Sociology of Herbert Spencer. In: The American Journal of Sociology, 1920, 26,2: 129.
1® Richard Hofstadter. Op. cit., p 50.
2° D.N. Levine, E. B. Carter, and E, M. Gorman. Simmel’s Influence on American Sociology. In: The American Journal of Sociology, 1976, 81, 4: 840, 841.
7! Talcott Parsons. The Structure of Social Action (The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1949), p 3.
4
NATURALISM IN SOCIOLOGY OF THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Alexander Hofman and Alexander Kovalev
1. Evolutionism—the Basis of the Naturalistic Schools of Sociology
The middle and second half of the nineteenth century was a time in the intellectual history of Europe of an almost universal enthusiasm for the advances of natural science and the flourish- ing of the positivist-naturalistic outlook, under whose deter- minant influence the sociology of the time developed.
Darwin’s theory of evolution forced scientists to pay atten- tion to the simple fact (previously ignored because of the dominance of the theological outlook), that there was not only a difference between man and animals but also a similarity, that man was the product of a long biological evolution and one of the links in its chain. The theory of evolution became a main factor in the ideological climate of the second half of the cen- tury. Evolutionism, as the leading trend of the social thought of the time, was based on the ideas of the unity of the laws of the history of nature and of man, the unity of the method of the natural and social sciences, so undermining providentialist and finalist explanations of development.
Evolutionism closely linked sociology with ethnology, solv- ing their common problems of the genesis of society and cul- ture. To that was due the exceptional attention of sociology then to primitive history and comparative study of the origin and development of the social institutions of peoples without
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a written language, whose culture was transmitted predomi- nantly by oral tradition. The idea of the intrinsically determined natural evolution of human society was given its classical form in the historical and ethnological works of E. B. Tylor (1832- 1917).
Social evolution began to be regarded in the biologico- evolutionary schools as a continuation or component of biolog- ical evolution. Spokesmen of this trend suggested that there was an organic law of the development of social institutions simililar to the law governing the growth of organism, that de- termined the gradual, regular character of their changes, iden- tical for the whole world. The influence of this linear concep- tion of social evolution was strengthened by the fact of Dar- win’s evolutionary ideas having long had an effect on sociology through the medium of Spencer’s philosophical evolutionism and its universal ‘hypothesis of development’ and principle of differentiation.
Evolutionary sociology also inherited from social philos- ophy a metaphysical posing of the problem of the ‘prime mov- ers’ of history. The positivistically oriented naturalistic trends, which were united by an approach to society as a part of nature governed by its universal Jaws, endeavoured to make this con- cept to some extent empirical, and began to explain the de- velopment of society by the action of certain determinant factors understood as natural objective forces. But the concept of a factor remained in general polysemous and contradictory, not least because of the uncritical empiricism of these trends. In spite of the positive significance of the quest for natural laws of social development, and of the orientation on objective science, which undermined the positions of voluntarism, the cult of great men, and theological and spiritualist conceptions in sociology, the weak point of naturalistic evolutionist sociol- ogy was precisely the one-sided naturalisation (usually biolog- ical) of social ‘forces’ and ‘factors’ to the detriment of under- standing history as a process of human activity.
The bringing to the fore of certain natural factors or driving forces of social development and sometimes of methodological models of a certain natural science, is the basis for classifying the naturalistic schools.
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2. The Mechanistic School
The prestige of the methodology of classical natural science in sociology, and the influence of the mechanistic understanding of the world and of vulgar materialist tendencies on it, are most clearly seen in the mechanistic school, which was the latest ideological basis for many naturalistic trends.
Sociological conceptions that equate social processes and phenomena with physical ones, and employ the concepts of mechanics, physics in the broad sense, energetics, etc., to ex- plain the social world, can be conditionally assigned to the mechanistic school.
Mechanists developed an understanding of society as a statis- tical aggregate of parts (in contrast to the organic concep- tion of society), the prototype of which was the concept of a mechanism as distinct from a living organism. The ‘aggregate’ conception of society encouraged application of statistical methods in sociology based on a corresponding concept of a whole.
Quantitative data and graphic presentations of them were widely employed by the American economist and sociologist H.C. Carey (1793-1879), author of one of the first developed mechanistic theories in nineteenth-century sociology.
Carey’s principal sociological works, the three volumes of The Principles of Social Science (1858-60) and Unity of Law (1872), shared the monism and principles of Spencer’s mech- anistic evolution.
Following the reductionist logic of mechanism, Carey looked for simple laws governing matter in all its forms and identically true for physical and social sciences, differing only in the ob- jects of their application and mode of expression. The physical laws of gravity, attraction, and repulsion, for example, received corresponding social forms of the association and concentration of population. For Carey man was a molecule of society, and association a variety of the ‘great law of molecular attraction’. He often resorted in his reasoning to naive mechanistic generali- Sations and analogies, greatly exaggerating their explanatory force. It was obvious, in his view, from the principle of the in- destructibility of matter, that production and consumption were simple conversions of matter, trade and commerce the
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shifting of matter in space, and so on.
The revolution in science at the beginning of the twentieth century did not prevent attempts to explain the social in a quan- titative, mechanistic way. Certain naturalists, in particular the eminent chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932), developed a ‘physiosociology’.
In his Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft,' Ostwald suggested that energetics could provide the social sciences with certain fundamental heuristic principles, though not all the explanations they were in need of. The cultural proc- ess, from the very general, energetic point of view, was a trans- formation of free energy into bound. The greater the amount of bound energy obtained in this transformation, the more significant the progress of culture was.
This universal criterion, based on the laws of the dissipation of energy and growth of entropy, made it possible not only to measure social progress but also to measure the increase in the viability (progress) of an organism or biological species as a whole, which followed from the fundamental unity of the world evolutionary process. Evolution was characterised by a mount- ing differentiation and complication of the organisation and functions of an organism, animal species, human group, society, etc. The ultimate argument for social progress, Ostwald suggest- ed, was that, because of the gradual perfecting of the organisa- tion of the human groups, man made increasingly better use of the free energy of the world, which happened in two ways that seemed to be the essence of social evolution, viz., the division and combination of labour.
Ostwald translated other sociological and economic catego- ries (in particular social order and the state), regarded as condi- tions of the best transformation of energy, into the language of energism in the same way.
The authority of mathematical natural science helped spread the mechanistic type of thinking in the early part of this cen- tury. Ideas of social physics were developed in one way or another by Vladimir Bekhterev, Vilfredo Pareto, and others.
Theorists less competent in natural science simply introduced any laws of physics, mechancis, chemistry, and biology that they knew or considered appropriate into the explanation of social phenomena. It was a common fault of the mechanistic
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school to ‘dress up’ current popular ideas of sociology and the philosophy of history in a physical terminology, which gave rise only to pseudo-explanations. Such were the attempts at a ‘ther- modynamic’ interpretation of history, which sometimes em- ployed physical theories, mistaken, but popular in their day, like that of ‘the thermal death of the universe’. Motion, life, change, and history existed while there was inequality of energy. A state of social entropy in the future as a dead, inert equality, like the thermal death of the universe, was predicted from the thermodynamic laws of the constancy of the quantity of energy and the irreversibility of the transfer of energy from a higher level to a lower. The conservative romantics’ old his- tory-of-philosophy conception will be readily recognised in this energetics clothing.
Many of the theories of mechanists logically infringed the law of the adequacy (equality of number) of subject and pred- icate. The statements of Carey and other ‘social physicists’ about energy and gravitation, for example, were made as if they specially applied to social phenomena, whereas they were applic- able to a much broader class of phenomena and to all objects of a physical nature. As a result the really specific features of the social world that belong to it alone were lost sight of.
Certain aspects of the heritage of the mechanistic school found reflection, however, in attempts to employ cybernetics and the general theory of systems in sociology from the stand- point of the tendencies of modern science to bring fields of knowledge closer together that are very remote from one another, and to look for universal principles and analogies of them, and for a structural community of heterogeneous systems and phenomena. As proponents of quantitative analysis in so- ciology the mechanists made a significant contribution to the theory of social measurement and statistics by creating a method of numerical estimates of the scale of man’s transforma- tion of natural energy into socio-economic energy.
3. The Geographical School
The socio-philosophical idea evolved from a global comparison of society and nature into a special study of the influence of
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various environmental factors (climate, relief, natural wealth, etc.) on separate social processes and phenomena (growth of population, the productive forces, the political system, etc.).
Reflections on the significance of the geographical environ- ment for human society went to two logical extremes. Pro- ponents of mechanical geographical determinism asserted that all man’s activity was exclusively governed and conditioned by his natural surroundings. Exponents of absolute cultural deter- minism claimed that culture determined the very perception of the environment and its significance for man, and therefore that the explanation of human activity should be culturological; they underestimated the fact that people’s cultural possibili- ties and opportunities are still different in different natural conditions. The denial of any influence of the environment, reduced to the absurd, led to a kind of socio-cultural solipcism. It is important to emphasise that the geographical trend in so- cial thought did not in any way coincide with narrow geograph- ical determinism, which was only a part of it. Attempts had already been made in the nineteenth century at a ‘systems’ (as we now call it) way out of the difficulties generated by dichot- omies of the type of ‘man—nature’, and ‘culture—environment’, by treating man, culture, and the environment as a whole, as a single characteristic of a geographical region. Man had firmly become a part of nature for science, and not a divine exception to it.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, an excessively broad interpretation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection became the prototype of a theory of the unidirectional evolu- tion of social structures depending on the geographical environ- ment. The theory of geographical determinism was very broadly accepted then and seemed well grounded from the scientific point of view. A useful result of this theorising after the manner of biology was the attention given to the areal distribution of population, and to human ecology (in which one can see rudi- ments of today’s social ecology).
Natural factors like climate, soils, relief, the distribution of water resources and minerals, flora and fauna, geophysical and cosmic processes, the change of the seasons, and so on, also came into the field of view of social geography and the geo- graphical currents in sociology. The following were regarded as
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among the principal social phenomena that depended on these
factors: (a) the distribution and density of population over the globe, and its health and fertility; (b) physical and psychological racial differences in constitution, temperament, forms of moral- ity, frequency of cases of great talent, etc.; (c) types of occupa- tion and economic activity, the organisation, rhythm, and cycles of the latter, and the population’s level of prosperity and well- being; (d) types of socio-political organisation, social institu- tions, and marriage; (e) possibilities of cultural contacts and borrowings, rates of economic and cultural development; (f) religion, mythology, art and literature—in short almost all the manifestations of social life.
Both positivist history and philosophy, and geography, pro- moted the forming of a geographical school in sociology in the nineteenth century. The credo of geographical determinism, fascinated by the methodology of classical natural science, was formulated for a long time by the eclectic French philoso- pher Victor Cousin (1792-1867):
Give me the map of a country, its configuration, climate, waters, winds, and all its physical geography; give me its natural products, its flora, its zoology, and I will undertake to tell you @ priori what the man of that country will be like, and what role that country will play in history, not accidentally but necessarily; not in this period, but in all; and, finally, the idea it is called on to represent!”
Naturalism and geographical pseudodeterminism had pene- trated all branches of the social sciences then, even systems of an idealist hue. From the middle of the century a solar-meteoro- logical theory flourished in religious studies (Max Miiller and others) that interpreted myths as allegories of astronomical and atmospheric phenomena and traced the sources of faith and gods to majestic natural catastrophes. Ernest Renan argued about the ‘spirit of monotheism’ in the desert landscape. And Hippolyte Taine explained, in his Philosophie de l'art, the dif- ference between Florentine and Flemish painting, for example, by differences in the geographical conditions of Italy and the Low Countries.
The English positivist historian Henry Buckle (1821-1862), trying to substantiate the objective pattern of historical develop-
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ment, adduced numerous, at first glance, plausible examples of how a specific landscape, climate, soil fertility, and nutri- tion determined differences in consciousness, physique, accumu- lation of wealth between nations, and later in social organisation and ultimately in historical destinies.» He made the reserva- tion, however, that mental factors gradually acquired superior- ity over physical ones at the highest levels of development. His ideas affected certain trends in economic geography and sociol- ogy, whose spokesmen claimed it was enough to know a so- ciety’s natural wealth, energy sources, and natural lines of com- munication, to define the character and volume of its produc- tion, its main economic functions, etc.
Buckle ignored a number of intermediate relationships between the social factors themselves, and the functional rela- tions between them and the environment when drawing conclu- sions about the direct, unambiguous dependence of economic, psychic, and social facts on the physical environment. At the same time he tacitly or openly adopted, as a general scientific ideal, physical monism and mechanistic determinism and their notions of the human mind’s passive copying of the external world. He underestimated, moreover, the results of cultural diffusion and mutual influence, since he often depicted the effect of the environment as if a society always lived in com- plete isolation, as a culturally independent entity.
Geographers, who shared many of the mistakes of positivist historiography, also endeavoured to bring out the role of physical factors of the environment in the development of so- ciety.
One eminent sociogeographer was Karl Ritter (1779-1859), who is considered a founder of modern geography along with Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859). His methodology was based on the idea of an interaction of nature and culture, and of the interconnected nature of all the elements that formed a histori- cally concrete geographical region.* The land was a single ‘organ- ism’, divided into internally linked, integrated regions. A correct determination of the boundaries of these regions called for a thorough description of the landscape and relief, climate, vege- tation (especially the cultivated vegetation), the animal king- dom, and man in his historical interaction with these elements of the environment, etc.
4
The philosophical organicism of the German romantics and their belief in a world order that united polar relations in a higher synthesis was the basis of Ritter’s world outlook, rather than naturalism.
His significance for the social sciences was due to man and history having an important place in his geography. In his view geography should explain how man influenced the space he in- habited, and how he himself was ‘brought up’ and ‘educated’ by working in favourable or harsh conditions. The periods of maximum cultural flowering of each region had a special in- terest for him, because, in his view, the highest degree of har- mony between nature and culture was attained then.
Problems that were later differentiated, and became the sub- ject-matter of investigation in various fields of geography and sociology, were organically merged in Ritter’s work. After him there was a clearly marked tendency to split geography into two parts, physical geography, and social or anthropogeography, in which economic, political, historical, cultural, and statistical geographies made their appearance in turn at various times in different countries.
Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), the German zoologist, travel- ler, journalist, and sociologist, a professor of Leipzig University, played a leading role in shaping anthropogeography and, in particular, political geography.°
He defined the subject-matter of anthropogeography, in line with the general tradition of the century, as study of the human tace to the extent that the latter’s vital manifestations were determined by the geographical environment. Ratzel, a biologist by education, strove to unite the methods and concepts of biol- ogy, ethnography, and geography in accordance with the ideol- ogy of naturalism. He considered that anthropogeography should be part of a general biogeography and should employ the usual, ordinary ecological and evolutionary concepts when studying political and economic development.
His Politische Geographie (1897) combined a scientific description of the differentiation of cultures in accordance with the properties of the geographical environment with biologiser speculations, especially when explaining the areal expansion or contraction of states. And he had an inherent mistaken ten- dency, typical of geographical determinism, to see direct causal
65 $~1147
connections between the properties of the natural environment and human practice, bypassing the mediating social links and mechanisms.
He divided all the consequences of the influence of the en- vironment into static (fixed in the main in the constant bio- psychic properties of individuals) and dynamic (the changing historical results of socio-political organisation). The direct effect of geographical factors lasting for millennia, especially of climate and spatial situation, were the cause of somatic and psychic differences between groups of people living in different territories. Mountains and spatial seclusion, for example, de- veloped traditionalism in people, and narrow nationalism, while plains and seas developed such psychic features as a nostalgia for space and a spirit of expansion and bold initiative. Natural boundaries (mountains and seas) promoted the development of isolated social groups with an underdeveloped political author- ity, while plains promoted centralisation and a strong authority for defence against the raids of nomads, which later carried over into a strong socially and culturally integrated state organisa- tion. The spread of languages and culture was governed by the same laws.
States functioned as living organisms subject to natural processes of growth and decay, and as such could not be con- fined to rigid boundaries. Area, space (Raum), and location (Lage) were necessary factors for the rise of states. The survival of nations or cultures was linked with their capacity for expan- sion and improvement of their geographical position.
It was only a step from that to conversion of the biological analogies into a political ideology. That step was taken by the so-called school of German geopolitics headed by Karl Haus- hofer (1869-1946), who created a ‘teaching’ of allegedly geo- graphically determined trends in the development and expansion of states.° The notorious arguments about Germany’s lack of ‘living space’ (Lebensraum), and the unnaturalness of her po- litical boundaries employed to justify fascist aggression were drawn from the arsenal of geopolitics.’ The author of the term ‘geopolitics’, the Swedish sociologist Rudolf Kjellén (1864- 1922) also interpreted it, under the influence of Ratzel, as a doctrine of the state as a geographical organism, eclectically combining concepts of geographical determinism, social Darwin-
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ism, biological, organic, racial and anthropological theories.®
A very typical feature of vulgar geographical determinism in the explanation of historical events was the broad enlistment of trite ‘psychological truths’ of common sense as intermediate factors. That in particular distinguished many political geogra- phers who employed, as needed, both age-old prejudices and the ‘latest’ racial inventions about the ‘spirit of the people’ alleged to be moulded by the geographical environment.
The content of political geography, however, was not just dubious pseudogeographical explanations and forecasts of po- litical events, willy-nilly covering up certain political sympathies. Many political geographers made substantial historical studies of the formation, expansion, and decline of various ‘political zones’ and their administrative centres, frontiers, and defence lines. There was sense in asking how to appraise the ‘political potential’ latent in the interaction of a political community and its environment. In the West political geography successfully studied the influence of political power on the physical and social aspects of the landscape, the shaping of linguistic and cultural associations, and other topics.
In the early part of this century American environmentalism bacame the continuer of the old geographical trend in the social sciences. What was relatively new in it was a partiality for statistical and other ‘rigorous’ methods of testing the popular hypotheses of geographical determinism. Ellen Semple, the founder of environmentalism, an orthodox populariser of Ratzel, developed the idea of the physical environment’s ‘con- trol’ over man’s life activity in a certain territory.”
A leading spokesman of environmentalism was the American geographer, Ellsworth Huntington (1876-1947), a geologist by education. Employing the methods and data (often unreliable) of statistics, paleobotany, climatology, history, demography, and other sciences, he endeavoured to substantiate the existence of close correlations between changes (‘pulsations’) of climate and the progress or decline of civilisations.!°
Huntington established the following mediating links: (1) climate influenced a population’s health (to estimate this he studied the coincidence of monthly curves of mortality and temperature, and relied on contemporaneous experimental research, etc.); (2) climate influenced physical and mental ac-
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tivity, and labour productivity, and consequently caused fluctua- tions of the business and economic variables of society (his main empirical basis for that was data on the parallelism of the death rate and the cycles of business slumps and booms); (3) insofar as civilisation was a function of the energy and productivity of a nation, favourable or adverse fluctuations of climate deter- mined the growth, decline, and shifting of civilisations.
Huntington also developed old ideas of the gradual geo- graphical shifting of civilisations from the Afro-Asian cradle to the colder and more varied climate of North-Western Europe. The theory of the ‘northern drift of civilisation’ had already been defended in various versions-by the Frenchmen Camille Vallaux,!1 Pierre Mougeolle,’? Edmond Demolins, and many others. But the criteria for compiling the comparative maps and correlations by which Huntington consolidated this theory, were extremely subjective and Europe-centred. He based his ranking of civilisations on ‘activism’, repeating the old prej- udices (whose source was the works of the fourteenth-century Arab historian ibn-Khaldun), that a higher culture and more complex forms of socio-political organisation could only arise in a temperate climate, and not in a subtropical or polar one. He suggested that the abundance of the gifts of nature in the sub- tropics did not call for large outlays of labour and led to the inertness and laziness of the people of the south, while the struggle against cold and hunger in a polar climate developed resignation and left no forces for the development of culture. In the end the law of the shifting of the focal centres of culture to the north remained speculative and based on a one-sided selection of facts. The introduction of elements of technological determinism also did not save it; Vallaux, for example, saw the cause of shifts of culture to the north in the development of techniques to defend man against cold.
The ‘eternal laws’ of Huntington and other environmental- ists did not stand up to the test of rigorously established facts, but their many valuable observations and even certain hypoth- eses got indirect support from specialists (biologists, climatol- ogists, psychiatrists, etc.). The environmentalists’ attempts to link business cycles in the economic affairs of society with pe- tiods of solar activity, for instance, collapsed, but many psy- chologists and criminologists have noted complex dependences
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between this activity, fluctuations of atmospheric pressure, and other climatic phenomena, on the one hand, and physiological processes, nervous excitability, and through them certain psychological and social processes, on the other hand. Adolph Quételet, and later Cesare Lombroso, noted ‘seasonal’ fluctua- tions of certain crimes. The influence of cosmic and planetary processes on social psychology was studied in Russia by Chi-
zhevsky’s school.! 9
In modern American sociogeography there is still a striving toward a rigorous determinism and a quantitative approach, but in more limited models with a high probability of prediction. The problematic of environmentalism is not studied on its old global plane, but more specifically.’ 4
A ‘cultural geography’ was developed in the USA at the end of the last century, partly as a reaction to environmentalism, employing the anthropological idea of culture (Alfred Kroeber and others).!° It paid close attention to man’s activity that altered his habitat. It regarded the earth’s surface as the imprint of man’s way of life, and of his historical past, and as material evidence of the spread of a culture.
An accentuating of the active role of man in his interaction with nature was particularly characteristic of the tradition of French sociogeography, beginning with the school of Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882), one of the founders of modern social ecology. He put forward a triad formula of the determinant factors of human life, viz., habitat, work, and family.
The leading spokesmen of Le Play’s school were Henri de Tourville (1843-1903) and Edmond Demolins (1852-1907). When the school was compiling its family household mono- graphs (well known in the history of social research), it neces- sarily studied the physical geography of the household or so- ciety: soil, relief, climate, distribution of water, etc. Demolins’ main work Comment la route crée le type social (1901-03), based on extensive historical material, which was not free of the usual mistakes of geographical determinism, traced the main links between geographical location and various characteristics of social organisation, forms of labour, property, etc. According to him, their living on plains, for instance, determined the oc- cupation of pastoralists and the absence of land appropriation at an early stage of historical development, since it was more
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important for nomads to be able to travel freely over the plains than to be owners of land, and also determined other features of the ‘social type’. Tourville, studying the origin of society of the Western type, pointed to Scandinavia and its isolated fiords as a “world laboratory” where a private, particularity type of man, family, and society could be moulded.
The French ‘possibilists’ were opponents of geographical pseudodeterminism. Their spokesmen considered that an iden- tical environment did not exist in reality either for individuals (by virtue of differences in their reaction to one and the same natural conditions, and innate properties) or for cultures of dif- ferent levels of development. Possibilism broke up the static conception of the environment as given once and for all with no relation to the active, historical subject. The historicism of this trend prompted it always to pose the matter concretely: an en- vironment for what? and for whom? what were the possibilities of employing a given culture in it?
The founder of the French school of social geography was the geographer and historian Pau! Vidal de la Blache (1845- 1918), who suggested that it was not a given environment that determined a way of life but rather the gradual historical changes that it underwent as a result of a changing way of life. For him the landscape was not simply the product of a natural sequence of events but rather the result of man’s labour, which created new conditions of existence for future generations.! °
The merit of French social geography was its exposure of the reactionary pseudodeterminism of German geopolitics. The possibilists showed that the latter often constructed evidence post factum (from the historical existence of a certain politico- social phenomenon to the geographical conditions allegedly responsible for it) and against the facts. Elisée Reclus (1830- 1905) and Leo Mechnikov (1838-1888), who also belonged to the French school of social geography, had even earlier fought against the antihuman conclusions and racism of certain trends of anthropogeography.!”
The weak side of possibilism, compared with American environmentalism (the crudeness of whose principles it justly criticised), was its scorning of a quantitative evaluation of the probabilities that characterised the links of certain cultural or economic possibilities with the distribution of geographical
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factors.'® In that sense the methods of contemporary Western social geography, in both its applied and its quantitative branches, are closer to environmentalism than to possibilism.!?
In our day, when man’s impact on nature has grown to an unprecedented extent, the significance of the geographical trend in the social sciences is becoming increasingly greater. It has become obvious that this impact can only be successful when it is governed by the laws of nature and allows for the main links and relations of the whole; otherwise the adverse consequences will tell on man himself as part of nature. A continuity is observable between the geographical trend and present-day ‘human ecology’, which studies the relationship of man and his environment (in the broad sense), in particular the spatial rela- tions of people and social organisations.
4. The Racial, Anthropological School
The racial, anthropological trend was ideologically one of the most reactionary versions of naturalism in sociology. Racism has existed as a socio-psychological phenomenon since time im- memorial, but in the nineteenth century it broadly appealed, for the first time, to the authority of science. The main ideological functions of this trend were to substantiate the privileges of the ruling class in the capitalist state, and imperialist colonial expan- sionism in foreign policy. One must also remember that the science of races, i.e., physical anthropology, was still in a rudi- mentary state, and that there was room for various kinds of myth-making and speculation that converted immature scientif- ic knowledge into the pseudoscientific, or even antiscientific.
In spite of the host of differences and nuances inherent in certain racial-anthropological conceptions, they all boiled down to several basic postulates: (1) that social life and culture were a product of racial and anthropological factors; (2) that the races were not equal, and that that was the cause of the inequal- ity (‘superiority’, ‘deficiency’, ‘danger’) of the corresponding cultural creations; (3) that people’s social behaviour was wholly or predominantly determined by biological heredity; (4) that Tacial mixing (miscegenation) was harmful.
All these theses were first put forward in developed form by
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the French philosopher, writer, and diplomat Joseph-Arthur Gobineau (1816-1882) in a four-volume work Essai sur l’inéga- lité des races humaines.
Gobineau endeavoured to show that social institutions did not condition the life activity of races but, on the contrary, were determined by it. They were the consequences, not the causes, he declared. The central theme of his work was that the inequality connected with racial differences, and the struggle of races stemming from it, were the cause of the decline and death of civilisations.
Being a pessimist he started from the fatal inevitability of the death of all civilisations, including the European. Misce- genation (necessarily with participation of the ‘white? race), which figured initially as a necessary source of the development of civilisation, subsequently led inevitably to its degeneration and death. Gobineau’s main assertions were tautological; the mixing of races figured in his conceptions simultaneously as a sign of the degeneration of civilisations and as its cause, so that it turned out that he was in fact concerned with the ‘viability’ of races rather than the ‘viability’ of civilisations, since the former was the true subject, for him, of the socio-historical process.
Racism was a direct continuation of Gobineau’s elitist out- look; he was an opponent of all forms of social equality and strove to distinguish ‘true’ hierarchies, and of ‘true’ élites within them. Since racial inequality was most fundamental, initial, and ineradicable for him, Gobineau brought it to the fore in his ex- planations of history. He represented the racial hierarchy in the form of a three-rung ladder, on the top rung of which was the ‘white’ race, on the middle ming the ‘yellow’, and on the bottom rung the ‘black’. He asserted the superiority of the ‘white’ race, since its had allegedly been the main role in the creation and development of all civilisations. But, according to him, there was a hierarchy within the ‘white’ race, at the pinnacle of which were the ‘Aryans’.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English Germanophile (1855-1927), who lived most of his life in Germany, created another racist ‘historiosophy’. His main work, endlessly repub- lished in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, was Die Grundlagen des 19 Jahrhunderts, in which he gave a superficial, contradictory,
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and highly tendentious survey of European history2° The supreme ‘achievement’ of this history, according to him, was the creation of ‘teutonic’ culture, the ‘highest’ of all existing cul- tures. The ‘teutonic’ culture was the heir of the ‘Aryan’, revival of whose ‘spirit’ he called for.?!
Chamberlain made a highly significant contribution to crea- tion of the misanthropic myths of German fascism. It was not without reason that Nazi ‘theorists’ awarded him the title of ‘people’s thinker’ and ‘prophet’ of the Third Reich.??
One version of the racial, anthropological trend was ‘an- throposociology’. Its main spokesmen were the French anthro- pologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) and the German Otto Ammon (1842-1916).
Lapouge considered Gobineau the pioneer of anthropo- sociology, but he classed Chamberlain as a ‘caricaturist’ of it.?* Lapouge’s works were based on interpretation of anthropomet- ric data, primarily a comparative statistical analysis of cranial indices. (In anthropology the cranial index is the percentage relation of the maximum width of the head to its maximum length. It was introduced by the Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius in the 1840s.) According to Lapouge anthroposociology ‘had for its object study of the reciprocal reactions of race and the social milieu’.2* Under the influence of social Darwinism and of the concept of natural selection, he introduced the con- cept of social selection, six main forms of which he distinguished : military, political, religious, moral, legal, and economic.”* All of these ultimately had a pernicious influence on social de- velopment as a whole, he thought, since the number of members of the most ‘valuable’ racial type—the dolichoblonds—was steadily reduced by their effect, and furthermore was threat- ened with complete extinction. One of Lapouge’s numerous ‘laws’, the ‘law of epochs’, read: ‘the cephalic index has tended to increase constantly everywhere since prehistoric times’.? °
Lapouge’s profound historical pessimism was linked above all with that ‘law’, which postulated disappearance of the ‘best’. In another ‘law’ he tried to establish a universal link between a person’s cranial index and his class connection.?”
Similar theses are to be met in the other spokesman of the anthroposociological school, Otto Ammon, who made a number of anthropometric studies among army recruits and students.
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In his Die Gesellschaftsordnung und Ihre natirlichen Grund- lagen (1896) he endeavoured to combine the principles of so- cial Darwinism and racism in the analysis of social institu- tions.?8
The artificiality of the constructs of anthroposociologists showed up very obviously when they were compelled to ascribe outstanding brachicephalic people, whose existence refuted the ‘laws’ of anthroposociology, to ‘a brachycephalic error’.??
The works of Ludwig Woltmann (1871-1907) contained an attempt to synthesise racism and social Darwinism. His many books were distinguished by a crude primitivism and a frank parodying of science in order to substantiate the myth of the superiority of the ‘Germanic’ race. His conceptions were no more than a rationalisation of initial racial prejudices.
In proclaiming the necessity of developing society by ‘cul- tivating’ races, the proponents of the racial, anthropological trend called for provision of the most favourable conditions, ie., privileges, for the ‘highest’ race, represented either by the ‘highest’ social strata or by ‘chosen’ peoples. In other words their endeavours to put anthropological factors at the service of society and culture concealed its opposite: society and culture should serve a certain ‘race’. Since the real facts, more- over, did not confirm the racist postulates, the concept ‘race’ was given a symbolic sense, rather than being interpreted as an aggregate of real physico-anthropological attributes. All of that made racial, anthropological conceptions a handy instrument of the home and foreign policy of imperialism and fascism.
While treating social processes as the product and inverted form of the ‘blood game’, the racial-anthropological trends was not only a reactionary current within sociology but was also, essentially, an antisociology, because the subject-matter of sociology, society, was itself dissolved in race treated as the main subject of social and historical action.
5. The Bio-Organic School There have been many varieties of organic conceptions in the
history of social thought. In the nineteenth century alone one can note the following: philosophical organicism (Hegel, Schel-
ling, and the Romantics), which opposed the nominalism and mechanicism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its contract conceptions of society; social-psychological organicism, which saw the integral character of society in social reason, opinion, and expression of will as an independent reality; and finally bio-organic theories.
Society had already been likened to an organism in the depths of antiquity.2° But a very strong orientation to the evolutionary biology of Comte and Spencer was characteristic of the bio-organic school. Historians of sociology usually combine this school with those for which the concepts ‘society’ and ‘organism’ are synonymous, and which start from the point that society, like an organism, is not a simple sum of separate individuals (cells), but is a supra-individual whole. Society acquired new qualities, as a whole, and in that sense is greater than the sum of its parts. There is thus a primacy of the whole over the part. The functions of the parts can only be understood through the functions of the whole to which they belong.
In the scheme of this school’s theorists, comparative correla- tions of social systems and biological organisms should help bring out the structure (anatomy) and functions (physiology) of the social organism, and of its organs (institutions) and elements (ordinarily individuals or families) both in relation to the whole and in relation to one another. That methodology was based on a notion of the unity of the laws of evolution, which passed at a certain stage from the individual to the creation of ‘super- organisms’, ie., of communities of animals and people.?! Social evolution was thought of as the same irreversible, linear, and internally conditioned process as the growth of an organism (although there were often more cautious formulations in the school’s theories allowing for the specific nature of historical movement).
Extreme organicists likened the development of society to that of a biological organism in accordance with the ‘funda- mental biogenetic law’ of Miiller and Haeckel (that ontogenesis repeated phylogenesis) in its simplified interpretation. In their view the stages of the universal history of civilisation (social phylogenesis) were ontogenetically reproduced in the individual histories of young nations, states, and colonies that were in new conditions.3?
By combining Spencer’s idea of differentiation and the bio-genetic law, sociologists of the bio-organic school endeav- oured to predict the future stages of social development and to reconstruct past ones. The most highly differentiated and complex social phenomena and functions were usually considered to be the latest in time of origin, while also being those most sensitive to social upheavals, vulnerable, and change- able.
The Russian dignitary (of German origin) Paul Lilienfeld (1829-1903), who published mainly in German, employed the organic methodology in extreme form in sociology. According to him, human society, like other natural organisms, was a real entity. Society differed from an organism in being less integrat- ed. But the great mobility of the elements (individuals) in the social organism meant only that it belonged to a higher class of organisms. Society, being a system of the interactions of people, performed the same functions as organisms of reproduction, growth, differentiation, sickness, death, regeneration, integra- tion of parts, etc. Sociology was based on biology and should apply its laws.
The German economist and sociologist Albert Schaffle (1831-1903) was a leading exponent of the organic school. While sharing with the whole school a conviction of the superi- ority of the wholist approach to social phenomena, he differed from it by adhering to the traditions of German idealism.
He declared mental relations between people, and ideal and technical modes and forms of intercourse, the subject-matter of sociology. That will be seen in his definition of society, which (according to him) was an indivisible community of organic individuals that arose on the soil of purely mental acts whose outward manifestations were symbols expressing ideas and technical actions that created utilities and embodied the products of human thought in external objects. The social com- munity of individuals differed from the organic, biological links of cells. The essence of the social was not the physico-chemical and biological ties of individuals but their ideal connections (i.e., psychic ties), expressed in their symbolical and technical actions (in ‘practical art’).
Sociopsychic links were not purely ideal for Schaffle. The sharing of mental activity among separate individuals in society,
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given preservation of its integrity, evoked a need to create symbols, means of communication, and special auxiliary institu- tions to maintain them. Only then did mental, spiritual interac- tion serve as a co-ordinator of the ‘social body’ and as a means of preserving its wholeness and the coherence of the func- tionally separate parts.>4
The development of material symbols capable of existing relatively independently made their accumulation, transmission, universality, and long life (tradition) possible. Social memory arose, which could measure the advance of society. The ex- istence of a collective consciousness in the succession of genera- tions was another feature of the socium not inherent in organic communities.
Schaffle divided the whole study of social forms and func- tions into social anatomy, social morphology, and social physi- ology, concerned with ‘social organs and tissues’, i.e., with or- ganisations, institutes, and other mass associations of popula- tion, and their connections, and social psychology, whose object of study was the mental life of society.
Properly speaking, Schdaffle’s organico-biological analogies had less significance and interest than his socio-psychological notions. His doctrine of five general types of ‘social tissue’, some of which were homologues of the tissues of an organism, evoked most criticism. The fifth type, for example, i.e., psycho- physical tissue, had the character of institutions operating in the mental sphere and exercising public or private control. Its organic homologue was nerve tissue. He treated the other types of ‘social tissue’ in a similar way.
But these ‘social tissues’ were formed by an ‘ideal’ uniting of active elements (people and their accumulated practical ex- perience) and passive ones (material wealth). The general organi- sation of the ‘social body’ was an increasingly complicated structure of these main elements. The ‘social body’ performed its ‘physiological’ life activity (functions) only through its active components (individuals and groups of the population), and only for them.
Schaffle himself, like other organicists, incidentally, con- stantly made the reservation that he was employing organic analogies solely for a more evocative and striking unfolding of the sociological concepts, that the ‘social body’ was not an
oie |
organism in the biological sense, that even the biophysiological element of the social link in marital unions acquired an ever more mental, spiritual character, etc. Under the influence of criticism, he employed organic-biological comparisons much more moderately in the third, two-volume edition of his main work Bau und Leben des socialen Kérpers (1896),?*° than in the first four-volume edition (1875-78); and later he almost refrained from these comparisons, while retaining the principle of the integral approach.
Almost all organicists went through a similar evolution, in particular Réné Worms (1869-1926), the editor of The Interna- tional Sociological Review. In his Organisme et société,?® he came forward as a typical member of the vulgar wing of the school. Like Lilienfeld, he widely employed such terms as ‘social pathology’ and ‘diseases of society’ (to signify social unrest and disturbances), ‘social hygiene’, and ‘improvement’ (for social reforms), ‘proliferation of society’ (for colonial ex- pansion), etc.
In his last works he criticised his own earlier views and concluded that organic theories were only suitable for simple societies, since new factors came into action later that were better described by contract theories. ‘Spiritual contact’ be- tween people became the principal social factor for him in that period.2”7 He thus passed from asserting the biological unity of society to a psychological, social understanding of its wholeness.
The bio-organic school gave struggle for existence a more modest place in the development of society than social Darwin- ism did, although both schools saw society as part of nature in its highest expression, in which this law of nature should be manifested. For Worms, for example, struggle for existence (which took the form of competition in society) was derived from the law of biological adaptation. The laws of nature and society, in spite of their unity, were manifested differently in nature and society. Natural selection and the struggle for exist- ence were less violent among people. Worms considered that the main, necessary thing was not conflict and clashes but labour and creative activity, not struggle but living effort.
The many works of the sociologist and publicist Jacques Novicow (1849-1912), who lived in France, were devoted to
struggle against social Darwinism and to preaching ideas of the organic solidarity of people and pacifism. For him progress was a special manifestation of the general law of equilibrium; from the political point of view it was the achievement of full unity of views and agreement among people, i.e., mental equilibrium.
The French eclectic philosopher and sociologist Alfred Fouillée (1838-1912) and the biologist and sociologist Alfred Espinas (1844-1922) are usually included in the bio-organic school.
Fouillée tried to combine positivism with idealism, and the principles of determinism with free will and personalism. He held it to be impossible to reduce the psychological to the collective and the moral to the social. For him society was a psychic, ‘contractual’ organism that existed only through in- dividuals, and was governed by collective heredity, social de- terminism, and free contract 28
Espinas can be considered one of the early predecessors of zoopsychology and ethology. In his opinion zoology, by studying the associations between individuals of the animal kingdom, had promoted the birth of social science. The analo- gies between these associations and societies were much closer than between associations of cells and society.3°
The general methodology of the organic school contained both true principles that have penetrated the history of sociolog- ical science and false ones that have long been rejected by it.
The attempt to conceptualise the structures and functional links of the social whole was valuable. The problem of combin- ing the ‘organismic’ picture of the social whole and evolution- ary, genetic views was lasting in its modified form that passed into structural functionalism and other systems-oriented trends in sociology. Although evolutionism was one of the main sources feeding the school, its synthesis of synchronic organis- mic views was unsuccessful. As a result the organicists were not able to give a satisfactory explanation of social changes.
At the beginning of the school’s activity the host of possible types of social and cultural entities was reduced to one model, namely the wholeness of the biological organism. But it did not follow from the fact that society was not a simple sum of individuals and formed a certain unity that its wholeness was
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identical with or like the wholeness of a biological organism, and its socio-cultural dependencies similar to the biological. The applicability of some of the general formulas to different objects still did not signify their identity in other respects.
The mistaken trend toward ontologising the unity of society, peculiar to the organic school, or toward treating this unity as a standard, had a reactionary political sense; any revolutionary movement seemed a breach of the organic unity of society, an abnormality and pathology. By replacing the openly metaphys- ical form of the conception of ‘the social organism’ (for ex- ample, the Hegelian, romantic form) by a pseudopositive one, and putting laws of nature and of the biological organism in the place of the Providence and the ‘objective spirit’, the bio- organic school was also unable to reflect the significance of the personality and the individual will in its theories.
While posing important problems of similar, elementary features in the evolution and organisation of communities of animals and people, the school underestimated the specific qualitative features of human society.
Marxist sociology employs the concept of social organism in order to stress the wholeness of society as systems and rela- tions of social processes, while never replacing social laws by biological ones.
6. The Social Darwinist School
The influence of Darwinism was felt one way or another in the conceptions of the most varied spokesmen of sociological thought, in particular of Gabriel Tarde, Lester Ward, Franklin Giddings, and Emile Durkheim. For them, and a number of other sociologists, Darwinism played the role either of a stim- ulus of hypotheses or of an auxiliary methodological instru- ment. But certain non-Marxian scholars made the theory of biological evolution the direct basis of their sociological the- ories, treating natural selection and the struggle for existence as the main factors of social life. Darwinism was thus converted from a theory of natural science into social Darwinism.
One must emphasise that Darwin himself, and other founders of Darwinism like Alfred Wallace and Thomas Huxley, were
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opponents of the direct transfer of biological concepts to the field of the social sciences. Darwin, therefore, cannot be con- sidered the founder of the trend that subsequently came to be called social Darwinism. The person who first systematically introduced the principles of evolutionary theory into the field of the social sciences was Spencer, who treated natural selec- tion, the struggle for existence, and survival of the fittest not only as biological phenomena but also as sociological ones. It was he who was really the creator of the social-Darwinist school. Social Darwinism was not just a sociological trend but also became widespread in other social sciences, publicistic literature, fiction, and belles lettres.
The idea that there was a single social Darwinist ‘school’ with common theoretical principles is an oversimplification. Among spokesmen of social Darwinism one meets vulgar ma- terialists and idealists, social ‘realists’ who treat the social whole as independent of the individuals comprising it, and ‘nominal- ists’ who accept only individuals as real, racists and antiracial- ists, liberal reformists, and proponents of spontaneity in social development.
The extent to which social Darwinists likened social proc- esses to biological ones was different. Some built their con- ceptions directly on the principles of natural selection, struggle for existence, and survival of the fittest. Others argued about the specific nature of the manifestation of these principles in the realm of social life, but remained within the context of this conceptual scheme. The Italian sociologist Michele Angelo Vaccaro (1854-1937), for instance, tried to show, in his The Struggle for Existence and Its Effect on Humanity (1885), what was the difference between the struggle for existence among animals on the one hand, and among people on the other.*° But the sociologists who can be called social Darwin- ists in the narrow sense had no substantial influence on the subsequent development of sociological thought.
Spokesmen of the other version of social Darwinism did not reduce social processes directly to biological ones; some of them were even opposed to biological analogies. Their concep- tions were close to the psychological trend; the terms of evolu- tionary theory were less often met with them. Nevertheless they also had an orientation to a certain way of interpreting evolu-
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tionary theory, which was displayed primarily in their giving social conflicts the principal place in their conceptions. Treat- ment of social life as an arena of ruthless struggle between in- dividuals and groups was the most common attribute uniting all social Darwinism. The increase in attention to the problem of conflict at the end of the nineteenth century was by no means accidental, since class antagonisms and conflicts between capi- talist states had become unusually sharp in that century.
While the conception of conflict followed directly from the theory of biological evolution in the first variety of social Darwinism, it was indirect in the second, or even followed in general from other sources. The sociologists whose conceptions I shall now examine in detail belonged to this second variety of social Darwinism.
Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), the English publicist, econo- mist, and political scientist was one of the first to try to apply the principles of Darwin’s theory in social science, in his Physics and Politics (1872). He stressed the immense role of natural selection mainly in the initial period of human history.
Whatever may be said against the principle of ‘natural selection’
in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in
early human history: the strongest killed out the weakest as they 41
could,
According to him, the struggle in the world of people was mainly waged between groups, rather than individuals. He considered the striving of some nations to dominate others, and within nations the drive of some social groups to dominate the other groups, to be the main social laws.*?
While stressing the very important role of intergroup con- flicts, Bagehot paid great attention at the same time to intra- group solidarity, a factor of which was imitation. He thus came forward as a forerunner of Tarde, who made ‘imitation’ the central concept of his conception. Bagehot considered that imitation had its most significant place in the life of ‘primitive’ societies, that it was linked with the undifferentiated nature of the various spheres of social life, with detailed regulation of individual behaviour, and the cruelty and brutality of the sanc- tions against deviations from established patterns.
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Along with tendencies to imitation, Bagehot noted the existence of an opposite tendency, viz., people’s striving to differ from their predecessors, which provided the possibility of progress. He considered the optimum conditions for progress to arise in societies in which there was a proper relation of the two trends, viz., the tendency to variation, which opened the way to innovations, and that to imitation, which ensured social solidarity.
In contrast to Bagehot, the Austrian sociologist and lawyer Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838-1909) did not deduce his concep- tions directly from evolutionary theory. He was an opponent of biological analogies and criticised those sociologists (Comte, Spencer, Lilienfeld) who employed them as an explanatory principle; for him biological analogies had no significance for sociology but provided only comparisons and images, and in no case ever yielded knowledge. Gumplowicz’s conceptions have often been characterised by historians of sociology as social Darwinism, mainly because of his approach to society as an aggregate of groups struggling ruthlessly among themselves for domination.
The naturalistic conception of history that Gumplowicz shared considered humanity a particle of the universe and nature, a particle governed by the same eternal laws as the whole. The alpha and omega of sociology, its highest truth, and its last word, he suggested, was human history as a natural process.
A fatalistic interpretation of social laws and a fetishising of historical necessity were inherent in Gumplowicz’s concep- tions. The individual and his freedom figured as a pseudoreality in his interpretation, or as a reality of the second order. Society, on the contrary, was real, and the supreme reality that de- termined the behaviour of the individual. In this case we meet one of the most extremist versions of ‘social realism’, i.e., the view of society as a reality not only irreducible to its com- ponent individuals but existing apart from and above them.
For Gumplowicz sociology was the philosophical basis of all the social sciences, whose job it was to realise the link between them. Unlike the philosophy of history, whose ‘task was to explain where mankind had come from, and was going, sociology was concerned with investigating social groups and the
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relations between them. He considered continuous and ruthless struggle between different social groups the main factor in so- cial life. He declared the main social law to be the drive of each social group to subordinate to itself every other group it en- countered in its path, i.e., the drive to enslave and dominate.
According to Gumplowicz the initial, original groups operat- ing in history were hordes united by anthropological and ethnic attributes. In his treatment of the relations between hordes he was a forerunner of Sumner. He introduced the concept ‘ethno- centrism’, subsequently employed by Sumner, and defined it as the reasons by virtue of which each people believed it had always occupied the highest point not only among contempora- neous peoples and nations but also in relation to all peoples of the historical past.4* Gumplowicz found a state of con- tinuous hostility between hordes. While the result of clashes between them was at first the physical annihilation of the de- feated, later, in the course of social evolution, the defeated were enslaved by the victors. As a result the state arose. But inter- group conflicts did not disappear. The fundamentally inerad- icable struggle between groups continued in a new form; what had been a struggle between anthropologically different hordes at the most primitive level was turned, at the highest stages of development, into a struggle of social groups, classes, estates, and political parties.
The most common division of social groups in Gumplowicz’s conceptions, and the main one was that into rulers and ruled. Both had a drive for power; in the ruling classes this was ex- pressed in exploitation, as intense as possible, and consequently in enslavement of the subordinate classes; in the latter this drive was manifested in an increase in the strength of resistance, in a lessening and weakening of dependence.
Why did the relations between groups continually acquire the character of an antagonistic conflict? In reply to that Gumplowicz introduced a solid dose of vulgar economic mate- tialism and naturalism. He explained the ultimate cause of all social processes, including the conflicts that constituted the essence of them, as man’s striving to satisfy his material needs. In that connection he claimed that economic motives were always and everywhere the cause of any social movement, and governed all state and social development. Needs, according to
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him, could not be satisfied in any other way than through some groups’ compulsion and violence against others.
Gumplowicz often employed the term ‘race’ (in particular in the initial period of his work), and even used it in the titles of his principal works Rasse und Staat (Race and State) (1875) and Der Rassenkampf (Race Struggle) (1883). He understood race as a social and cultural, rather than a biological phenom- enon. He treated ‘race struggle’ as the struggle of heteroge- neous social entities, groups, and communities.44 He stressed in every way the immeasurably small role of biological heredity and the decisive role of the social environment in the determina- tion of human behaviour, noting that pure races did not exist at the present time, while the mixing of races had a positive significance.
Did that mean that he did not, in general, recognise the significance of racial differences (in the physical, anthropologi- cal sense) in social evolution? One must answer that in the nega- tive. He considered these differences determinant in the early stages of social development. The racial factor figured then as a factor of socio-psychological alienation, which was prompted by other causes in the course of subsequent social evolution.
Gumplowicz’s conceptions were extremely contradictory. He claimed, for instance, that the problems of the initial stage of society’s development did not come within the competence of sociology and other social sciences. At the same time he constantly appealed to the initial, original moments of this development, following on the whole Spencerian evolutionism, which treated complex social formations as aggregates of simple ones.
Gumplowicz showed that the object of sociology (in distinc- tion to the philosophy of history) was not humanity but social groups; at the same time he perceived that humanity could be called the proper subject-matter and scientific object of so- ciology.
The main contradiction in his theory was that, on the one hand, it proclaimed the specific nature of social phenomena and their irreducibility to the individual and to species man, and on the other hand the ultimate basis of social phenomena was always and everywhere invariant human nature and its incessant striving to satisfy wants, the drive to domination, etc. His claim
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that there was a special class of social phenomena that differed from the other phenomena of reality remained purely declara- tive; the naturalisation of social processes led him to the same biopsychic reductionism that he himself opposed.
Gumplowicz’s conceptions were mistaken because they were based on an underestimation of the internal factors of the functioning and development of social groups, so that he saw the reason for the rise of the state in the subordination of some ethnic groups to others, ignoring the role of intraclan and intratribal differentiation in this process.
While treating conflicts and violence as basic factors of social life, Gumplowicz paid no attention to the significance of solidarity and co-operation.
His conceptions were consonant with those of another Austrian sociologist, Gustav Ratzenhofer (1842-1904), author of the books Wesen und Zweck der Politik (1893), Die soziolo- gische Erkenntnis (1898), and the posthumously published Soziologie (1908). He considered the main phenomena and processes of social life to be the following: the self-preserva- tion and multiplication of individuals; change of individual and social types; struggle for existence; the absolute hostility of races; spatial distribution; racial differentiation; dominance and subordination; alternation of the individualisation and so- cialisation of structures; change of interests; the state; and global society.*® Like Gumplowicz he considered himself a proponent of monism, claiming that the same regularities operated in society as in nature; in that connection he denied the opposing of the sciences of nature to the sciences of the mind. Sociological regularities, according to him, were close to chemical, and especially, biological ones. Sociology was a philosophical science whose purpose was to provide the basis of all social sciences and politics.
While regarding conflict as the main social process, Ratzen- hofer made the category of interest the keystone. Interest was the main principle governing social processes, and contained the key to understanding them. Social life was presented in his interpretation as a play of various interests. He distinguished five main types of interest: procreative (stimulating continua- tion of the species), physiological (connected with nutrition), individual (connected with the drive to self-assertion), social
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(kinship and group), and transcendental (religious). Interests were nothing else than consciousness of inborn biological needs and impulses, which governed the struggle for existence. Social groups arose as an organisation of individuals for the purposes of this struggle. Unlike Gumplowicz, he interpreted social processes in the final count as interindividual, and the group as the product of interactions between individuals.
Ratzenhofer’s conceptions influenced the American sociolo- gist Albion Small (1854-1926). Small, following him, treated interest as the main entity of sociological investigation; from his point of view, the notion of interests had to serve ‘the same purpose in sociology which the notion of atoms has served in physical science’.*® ‘The whole life-process,’ he wrote, ‘is at last the process of developing, adjusting, and satisfying in- terests.’*7
Small defined interest quite vaguely as follows: an interest is an unsatisfied capacity, corresponding to an unrealized condition, and it is predisposition to such rearrangement as would tend to realize the indicated condition.7°
The most general classes of interests were the following: ‘health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and right- ness’.*° Interest had two aspects: subjective (desire) and objec- tive, i.e., that in which a need, ‘the desired thing’ made itself felt. Social phenomena as a whole, according to him, were the result of the interaction of three chief factors: ‘1. nature; 2. in- dividual; 3. institutions, or modes of association between in- dividuals’ .5°
Of ali the social Darwinist theories in sociology, Small’s contains its specific features least and is most penetrated by psy- chologism, which was due to Ward’s influence. Although Small considered biological analogies a necessary stage in the history of social science, he linked sociology’s further progress with a transition from biological analogies to direct analysis of real social processes. !
For him, conflict was not a universal factor of social life. He treated it as a form of people’s relationships, dominant mainly in the early stages of historical development.
His constructions lacked conceptual rigour: while analysing
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a vast number of concepts (association, social process, physical environment, spiritual environment, subjective environment, social functions, social aims, social forces, values, appraisals), he did not try to tie them up into a single system.
An indication of the need for a complex approach to social facts was of essential importance in the methodological part of Small’s theory, but he did not develop that idea clearly and consistently enough.>? He distinguished four phases in research: the descriptive, analytical, evaluative, and constructive. The last phase clarified his view of the purpose of sociology. In his view it should not refrain from value judgments; on the con- trary, that was its direct task. Sociology, according to him, should have practical application in ‘social technology’, i-., in ‘adapting means to ends in practical improvement of so- ciety’.5* Hence his political reformism aimed at criticising the most obvious faults of capitalist society from liberal positions.
Small’s conceptions did not have any substantial influence on the development of American sociology, but he played a great part in institutionalising it.
One of the most eminent figures in American sociology was Prof. William Graham Sumner of Yale University (1840-1910), He took the basic principles of his sociology from Spencer. These consisted in assertion (1) of the automatic, undeviating character of social evolution, and (2) of the omnipotence and universality of natural selection and the struggle for existence, and defined Sumner’s stance on various economic, political, and moral issues, sometimes even very partial ones.
Starting from a notion of the steady, automatic character of social evolution, he rejected any attempts to reform, let alone revolutionise social relations. The title of one of his essays, ‘The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over’ (1894) was ex- tremely characteristic in that respect 54
Sumner opposed all forms of state control of social life. While a most zealous proponent of the principle of laissez-faire, he defended not so much maintenance of the status quo as the need for spontaneity in development; that was the specific character of his conservatism. One could formulate his credo as ‘evolution knows what to do’.
Evolution, according to Sumner, hewed out its way through the struggle for existence, which was as ‘natural’ as evolution
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itself. Competition can no more be done away with than gravita- tion, he asserted. In that connection he regarded social inequal- ity as a natural state and necessary condition of the develop- ment of civilisation. The idea of natural selection figured in his interpretation as the idea of the naturalness of social selec- tion. As Hofstadter has remarked, we find in Sumner a new version of the Calvinist idea of predestination.>> The difference lay only in Sumner’s putting providentially understood ‘evolu- tion’ in place of providence, ensuring with iron necessity triumph of the strongest and defeat of the weakest. He con- sidered the accumulation of social wealth in the hands of the few a condition of social progress and not an obstacle to it.
One must stress that the specific features of social Darwin- ism were mainly manifested in Sumner’s publicistic utterances. As for his sociological works, its weight in them was much less. His chief work Folkways (1906) analysed much ethnographic material. He considered customs to be ultimately the product of people’s fundamental biological needs, in striving to satisfy which they developed certain modes of activity that became a routine and functioned as customs (at the level of the group) and habits (at the level of the individual). He treated folkways or folk customs unusually broadly, including all standardised forms of behaviour in them. He examined two groups of factors as the direct causes of customs. The first was interest .°° People struggled either with one another or with the surrounding fauna and flora. Customs were thus certain types of defence and attack during the struggle for existence. Secondly, folkways were the product of four motives, which Sumner considered the ‘four great motives of human action’ in general (thus antici- pating William Thomas’s ‘four wishes’). They were ‘hunger, sex passion, vanity, and fear... Under each of these motives there are interests’.>7 Folkways, he stressed, ‘are not creations of human purpose and wit. They are like products of natural forces which men unconsciously set in operation’ .>*
Sumner’s concepts of ‘we-group’ or ‘in-group’ and ‘they- group’ or ‘out-group’ acquired very great popularity. Relations within a ‘we-group’ were ones of solidarity, while hostility prevailed between groups. Hostility was associated with ethno- centrism, which he defined as the ‘view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others
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are scaled and rated with reference to it’.5?
On the whole Sumner created a simplified picture of rela- tions between groups in ‘primitive’ societies. In fact, co-opera- tion and mutual help are found in the relations between clans and tribes as well as hostility. The biological reductionism of Sumner’s conception of custom did not stand up to criticism; if folkways were solely the result of people’s biological needs, it would be impossible to explain the existence and long func- tioning of customs that were harmful as regards biological needs.
Sumner’s conception also had undoubted merits. He was one of the first to pose the problem of the normative aspects of social life. If one rejects the initial premisses of his concep- tion of folkways (struggle for existence, etc.), one can find a number of important considerations in it about the character- istic features of customs. The concepts of ethnocentrism, ‘we- groups’, and ‘they-groups’ had considerable significance for social psychology and ethnography. But the positive aspects of his conceptions were depreciated by its social Darwinist foundations and the chaotic piling up of ethnographic material not united by any methodological principles. Furthermore, the problem of method itself did not exist for him. When we evaluate his place in the history of sociology as a whole, we must note that when rational propositions are found in his conception they are not only not associated with the under- lying principles of his social Darwinism but on the contrary are very distant from them.
Thus, however the conceptions of social Darwinists differ, reductionism is inherent in all of them, i.e., reduction of the laws and patterns of one level of reality to another one. The notion of groups constantly warring with one another, as a new version of Hobbes’ conception of ‘war of everyone against everyone’, was as bankrupt as the opposite notion of people living in harmony and concord.
Social Darwinists drew attention to social conflicts but ignored the leading role of class struggle. Not seeing the connec- tions of conflicts with certain social relations, and ascribing a status of ‘naturalness’, eternity, and insuperability, to them, social Darwinists came to a one-sided, and biased evaluation of social conflicts.
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In spite of the seriousness of some of the problems posed, the naturalistic and biological-evolutionary conceptions in nineteenth-century sociology were largely unscientific and un- historical. In his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin showed the impermissibility of substituting ‘eternal’ laws of nature for historical laws and regularities. Many non-Marxian sociologists sharply criticised these conceptions in the first half of the twentieth century, though from other standpoints. The biologising of social phenomena began to be a clear anach- ronism, and naturalistic schools a blind alley in the history of sociological thought.°° But the disputes have been revived once more in connection with the latest advances of genetics, ecol- ogy, and ethology.
Much has also been written in the West about ‘sociobiology’ as the ‘new synthesis’ of the biological and social sciences—from molecular and population genetics to the psychology of behav- iour and ergonomics.°! This ‘new synthesis’ is counterposed to the old one and to the attempts to integrate social and bio- logical knowledge in the old biological, evolutionary schools. But there is a certain continuity of the problems and modes of posing them. The idea of the ‘superorganism’ has been resur- rected and made the object of research. Serious attention is being paid to the system of communications in the collective behaviour of animals and to the similar mechanisms of beha- viour in people’s social life. This research is necessary in itself, and fruitful. But in that connection there has also been a revival of old naturalistic conceptions, for example, in attempts to make the historical evolution of human society, and the forms of its social organisation, dependent on its gene fund, which is said to determine social behaviour.°? Dubious attempts are also being made to transfer observations of the behaviour of animals mechanically onto man, although these attempts are based on more cautious scientific descriptions and theoretical constructs than before.
In that connection the philosophical, ideological foundations of the biological, naturalistic, and socio-historical interpretation of the problem of man, and possible points of rapprochement and disagreement between the programmes of social research
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stemming from these interpretations, are being discussed again in the contemporary critique of social biology.°*
The topicality, and theoretical and practical significance of this problem have arisen in connection with the fact that the latest advances of biology, in particular of genetics, are creating conditions for investigating diverse concrete forms of the in- teraction of the biological and the social in the development and life of man and society. Under the present second industrial revolution the very complex task of the optimum combination of society’s scientific and technological, and production activ- ity, with processes taking place in the biosphere is again being posed.
Notes
' Wilhelm Ostwald. Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft (Klinkhardt, Leipzig, 1909).
? Cited from: Lucien Febvre. La terre et l’évolution humaine. In- troduction géographique a l'histoire (La Renaissance du livre, Paris, 1922), p 12.
3 Henry T. Buckle. History of Civilisation in England (Appleton, New York, 1862).
* Karl Ritter. Die Erdkunde im Verhaltniss zur Natur und zur Ge- schichte des Menschen oder allgemeine, vergleichende Geographie. 21 Vols. (G. Reimer, Berlin, 1822-1859).
5 Friedrich Ratzel. Die Erde und das Lieben, Vol. 1 (Bibliographi- sches Institut, Leipzig, 1901); Anmthropogeographie. 2 Vols, (J. Engel- horn, Stuttgart, 1891-1899); Politische Geographie, 3rd ed. (Munich, 1923).
6 Karl Haushofer. Erdkunde, Geopolitik und Wehrwissenschaft (Hueber, Munich, 1934).
7 See Giinter Heyden. Kritik der deutschen Geopolitik (Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1958).
® Rudolf Kjellén. Der Staat als Lebensform (Vowinckel, Berlin, 1924).
° Ellen C. Semple. Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography (Constable & Co., London, 1937).
*° Ellsworth Huntington. Civilization and Climate (Yale U.P., New
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Haven, Conn., 1924); The Character of Races as Influenced by Physical Environment, Natural Selection and Historical Development (Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1925); Mainsprings of Civilization, (Chapman & Hall, London, 1945).
11 Camille Vallaux. Géographie sociale: le sol et l'état (Octave Doin et Fils., Paris, 1911).
12 Paul Mougeolle. Statique des civilizations (Leroux, Paris, 1883).
13 A.L. Chizhevsky. Fizicheskie faktory istoricheskogo protsessa (Physical Factors of History), (Kaluga, 1924).
14 John A. Stewart, William Warntz. Macrogeography and Social Science. In: The Geographical Review, 1958, 48, 2: 167-184.
'5 Environment and Cultural Behaviour. Ecological Studies. In: Andrew P. Vayda (Ed.). Cultural Anthropology (The Natural History Press, Garden City, N.Y., 1969).
'6 Paul Vidal de la Blache, Principes de géographie humaine (Librarie Armand Colin, Paris, 1922).
17 Elisée Reclus. L’homme et la terre, 6 vols. (Librairie universelle, Paris, 1905-1908); L. I. Mechnikov. Tsivilizatsiya i velikie istoricheskie reki (Civilisation and the Great Historical Rivers), (Moscow, 1927).
1® George Tatham. Environmentalism and Possibilism. In: Griffith Taylor (Ed.). Geography in the Twentieth Century, A Study of Growth, Fields, Techniques, Aims and Trends (Methuen, London, 1957), pp 128- 162.
12 David Harvey. Explanation in Geography (Arnold, London, 1969).
20° H. S. Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des 19 Jahrhunderts, 1899.
2t Houston S. Chamberlain. Avische Weltanschauung (Bruckmann, Munich, 1912).
22 Hugo Meyer. Houston Stewart Chamberlain als vélkischer Denker (Bruck mann, Munich, 1939).
23 Georges Vacher de Lapouge. Race et milieu social (Librairie des sciences politiques et sociales, Paris, 1909), pp VIII, 172.
24 Ibid., p VIAL.
25 Georges Vacher de Lapouge. Les sélections sociales (A. Fontemo- ing, Paris, 1896).
26 G. Vacher de Lapouge. Race et milieu social, p. 233.
*7 Ibid., pp 206-211.
28 Otto Ammon. Die Gesellschaftsordnung und Ihre Natirlichen Grundlagen (Fischer, Jena, 1896).
2° G. Vacher de Lapouge. Race et milieu social, p 212.
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3° Tadeusz Szczurkiewicz. Studia Socjologiczne (Panstw. Wyd-wo nauk, Warsaw, 1970).
31 Judith E. Schlanger. Les métaphores de l'organisme (Librairie Vrin, Paris, 1971).
32 Réné Worms. Organisme et société (Giatd et Briére, Paris, 1896).
33 Guillaume de Greef. Le transformisme social. Essai sur le progrés et le regrés des sociétés (Felix Alcan, Paris, 1895).
34 Albert Schaffle. Die geistanstaltlichen Grundverkniipfungen., In: Werner Sombart (Ed.). Soziologie (Pan-Verlag Rolf Heise, Berlin, 1923), pp 60-75.
35 Albert Schaffle. Bau und Leben des sozialen Korpers. 4 Vols. (Laupp, Tiibingen, 1881).
36 Réné Worms. Organism et société (Paris, 1895).
37 Réné Worms. La sociologie. Sa nature, son contenu, ses attaches (Marcel Giard, Paris, 1926).
38 Alfred Fouillée. La science sociale contemporaine (Hachette et ci€., Paris, 1880). :
3° Alfred Espinas. Des sociétés animales. Etudes de psychologie comparée (Bailliére, Paris, 1877).
*° Michele Angelo Vaccaro. La lotta per l'esistenza e i suoi effetti nell’ umanita (Tib. Tiberina di F. Setth, Rome, 1886).
*! Walter Bagehot. Physics and Politics. In: The Works of Walter Bagehot, Vol. 4 (The Travellers Insurance Co., Hartford, Conn., 1891), p 442.
42 Ibid., p 457.
*3 Louis Gumplowicz. La lutte des races. Recherches sociologiques (Guillaumin et C'®., Paris, 1893), p 349.
** Ibid., p 193.
*5 Gustav Ratzenhofer. Die soziologische Erkenntnis. Positive Philo- sophie des socialen Lebens (Brockhaus, Leipzig, 1898), pp 244-250.
“6 Albion W. Small. General Sociology. An Exposition of the Main Development in Sociological Theory from Spencer to Ratzenhofer (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1905), p 426.
47 Ibid., pp 433-434.
*® Ibid ., p 433.
*° Ibid., pp 434-435.
5° Ibid., p 552.
51 Albion W. Small. The Meaning of Social Science (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1910), pp 79-80.
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52 Albion W. Small. General Sociology, p 15; idem. The Meaning of Social Science, p 160.
53 Albion W. Small. General Sociology , p 34.
54 See W.S. Sumner, War and Other Essays (Yale U.P., New Haven, Conn., 1911).
55 Richard Hofstadter. Social Darwinism in American Thought (The Beacon Press, Boston, Mass., 1955), p 66.
56 W.G. Sumner. Folkways. A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Dover Publications, New York, 1959), p 3.
57 [bid., p 18.
58 Ibid., p 4.
5° Ibid., p 13.
6© Nicholas S. Timasheff. Sociological Theory. Its Nature and Growth (Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1955).
61 Pierre L. Van den Berghe. Man in Society. A Biosocial View (Elsevier, New York, 1975); Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology. The New Synthesis (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1975).
62 C.D. Darlington. The Evolution of Man and Society (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1969); Francois Jacob. La logique du vivant. Une histoire de UVhérédité (Gallimard, Paris, 1971).
63 Walter Hollitscher. Aggression in Menschenbild. Marx, Freud, Lorenz (Globus, Vienna, 1979).
5
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIOLOGY OF THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Igor Kon
1. Psychology and Sociology in the Nineteenth Century
The crisis of biological, naturalistic theories at the end of the nineteenth century promoted a strengthening of the psycholog- ical trend in sociology. The idea of reducing the social to the psychological was not, of course, new. Locke and Hume, the French Enlightenment, and the English Utilitarians had cited the ‘universal laws of psychology’ and the ‘properties of human nature’. John Stuart Mill asserted, in polemics against Comte, that all social laws were reducible to ‘laws of individual human nature’.
Men are not, when brought together,converted into another kind of substance, with different properties; ... Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual man.’
Sociology, therefore, as the science ‘of the actions of collective masses of mankind, and the various phenomena which constitute social life’, had its own base in psychology.”
As we have seen, biology also served only as a methodolog- ical model (organic analogy, the principle of evolution, etc.) for many naturalistic conceptions, while their meaningful
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premisses rested on ‘everyday’ psychology’. The birth of the experimental psychology, and its institutionalisation as an independent discipline separate from both philosophy and physiology, raised its academic prestige and encouraged spread of psychologism in other branches of knowledge. While psychol- ogy had been considered a simple concretisation of philosophy in the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), the founder of experimental psychology, endeavoured to alter that attitude, claiming that all the philosophy of his day was modern psychology.
At the end of the century psychologism, as a general! trend toward psychological substantiation of scientific knowledge and explanation of the most diverse phenomena, became wide- spread. Psychological substantiation of epistemology, logic, aesthetics, linguistics, history, literary studies, and other disci- plines became the academic fashion. Psychologism was a charac- teristic feature of the ‘second positivism’ (Machism, empirio- criticism). Sociology, too, did not escape this epidemic.
The psychology of the early nineteenth century was exclu- sively that of the individual and did not take social processes into account.
The position changed in the last third of the century. On the one hand, psychologists discovered that it was impossible to reduce higher psychic functions to physiological processes, and that these required complex social factors to be taken into account. On the other hand, sociologists, who were not satisfied with primitive biological, organic analogies, evinced a growing interest in problems of motivation and the psychological mechan- isms of social behaviour. The merging of these two opposite movements formed, as a result, what we conventionally call the psychological trend in sociology.
Like other trends in ideas of that period, psychological sociology was by no means a single whole. The sole feature that constituted it as a trend was a striving, not always con- scious, to reduce the social to the psychological. But that was expressed by various authors with unequal force, while the type of psychology they appealed to was not the same. Certain more or less independent ramifications can be seen, depending on the problems advanced and the explanatory categories: psychological evolutionism; instinctivism; ‘folk psychology’,
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closely linked with ethnography; group psychology; and inter- actionism which made interpersonal relations the primary unit of sociological research.
2. Psychological Evolutionism
Psychological explanation of social processes did not necessitate an immediate break with the ideas of the biological, evolution- ary school. Originally it was a matter only of ‘supplementing’ the evolutionary scheme by study of the psychological mechan- isms of the development and functioning of society. These mechanisms themselves, moreover, were treated in a very broad, amorphous way. The spokesmen of psychological evolutionism, the American sociologists Lester Ward (1841-1913) and Frank- lin Giddings (1855-1931), following Spencer, regarded the development of society as part of cosmic evolution, each succes- sive stage of which accumulated the advances of the preceding ones. But, whereas the proponents of the biological orientation considered social evolution a direct continuation and part of the organic, and stressed the features of automatism in it, the psychoevolutionists saw in the more complex forms of social life a result of the development of conscious element, putting forward, in contrast to Spencer’s /aissez-faire, a slogan of pur- posive evolution, or rational control of social processes.
Lester F. Ward was a geologist and palaeobotanist by profes- sion, who turned to sociology in his mature years. His main works were: Dynamic Sociology (1883), Psychic Factors of Civilization (1893), Outlines of Sociology (1898), Pure Sociol- ogy (1903), Applied Sociology (1906), and Textbook of Sociol- ogy (1905) in collaboration with J.Q. Dealey. In 1906 he was elected the first president of the American Sociological Soci- ety. Ward’s ideas were not particularly original. He considered that the Spencerian principle of cosmic evolution should be supplemented as regards man by the value idea of progress. Social institutions were the result of the development of psychic forces rather than of vital ones. ‘The social forces are the psychic forces as they operate in the collective state of man.’? From that it followed that psychology should be the foundation of sociology, and not biology as with Spencer. Sociogenesis
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was the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder, a synthesis of all natura! forces formed during cosmogenesis, biogenesis, and anthropogenesis. The qualitative difference of this new, social reality was the existence of emotion and aim, which did not exist in the actions of blind natural forces. These new factors gradually altered genetic natural processes that lacked aim into telestic ones (from Gr. tele—end) or, what is the same thing, into social processes with the form of man’s purposive action.
Ward developed a view in his main work Dynamic Sociology and several others that the primary social force was desires (in particular hunger and thirst) connected with maintenance of the individual’s life, and sexual desires which ensured continuation of the species. More complex intellectual, moral, and aesthetic desires were built up on the basis of these primary ones, by which he tried to explain the progressive development of society and its ‘improvement’ (the principle of ‘meliorism’).
Apart from individual end-posing Ward recognised the exist- ence of ‘collective telesis’, the agent of which was the state. Social consciousness could not yet, at that time, he suggested, neutralise forces harmful for society, like private monopolies, whose activity he equated with robbery. But competition and monopoly inust yield in the future to conscious co-operation. Ward’s petty-bourgeois democratic spirit, and his diatribes against monopolies, repeatedly drew the anger of reactionaries down onto him. In fact, however, he did not encroach on the foundations of capitalism at all in defending the principle of peaceful elimination of class inequality and of attainment of universal harmony; his ideas were frankly eclectic.
Eclecticism also characterised the opinions of Giddings, the founder in 1894 of the first chair of sociology (in Colum- bia University). His chief books were The Principles of Sociol- ogy (1896), the textbook The Elements of Sociology (1898), Inductive Sociology (1901), Studies in the Theory of Human Society (1922), and The Scientific Theory of Human Society (1924).
According to him sociology is ‘a science that tries to con- ceive of society in its unity, and attempts to explain it in terms of cosmic cause and law’.* While arguing about the equilibrium of energy and constancy of force quite in the spirit of Spencer,
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Giddings made it precise, however, that society was not simply an organism but ‘an organization’ that arose partly as a con- sequence of ‘unconscious evolution, partly as a result of con- scious planning’.® It was ‘a psychical organism essentially’, ac- cording to him, ‘but witha physical basis’.° Sociology, therefore, ‘must combine the subjective and the objective interpreta- tions’.’ He himself concentrated on the subjective, psycho- logical aspect.
‘The original and elementary subjective fact in society,’ Giddings held, was ‘the consciousness of kind’, i.e., a ‘state of consciousness in which any being, whether low or high in the scale of life, recognizes another conscious being as of like kind with itself”.®
Consciousness of kind or, as Giddings sometimes called this phenomenon, ‘the Social Mind’, meant the spiritual unity of rational beings, which made their conscious relationship with one another possible while preserving the individuality of each. In essence it was a matter of group and collective consciousness whose products were public opinion, cultural traditions, collective moods, and social values. Giddings did not, however, delimit the content of social consciousness and the psychic processes and mechanisms by which the relation- ships of individuals were realised.
In his later works, written after World War I, he partly revised his original positions. In trying to combine them with the then popular behaviourism, and stressing the significance of quantitative methods in sociology, he asserted that sociology was a ‘science statistical in method’.’ That allows the historian to consider him one of the heralds of neopositivism in American sociology.'® On the whole, however, his influence on American sociology was due, rather, to his administrative possibilities.
3. Instinctivism
The psychological evolutionism of Ward and Giddings did not leave much of a mark on the history of sociological thought. Instinctivism proved to be much more influential. The problem of ‘social instincts’ did not arise in the nineteenth century by chance. By painting society in the image and likeness of the individual, nineteenth-century psychology endeavoured to find
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an inner personal psychic determinant or number of determi- nants that could simultaneously explain both individual and group behaviour.
The tradition of the Enlightenment had relied predominant- ly ona ‘rational’ model of man, deducing his behaviour from a rational reckoning and considerations of utility. The Romantics, on the contrary, stressed the emotional, instinctive principle, the influence of biological, irrational factors. The rationalism of the Enlightenment, with its naive optimism, was seriously compromised when the ‘realm of reason’ to which it appealed turned out to be more like Hobbes’ ‘war of everyone against everyone’. Irrationalism greatly increased in the philosophy of the late nineteenth century, and a tendency to explain human behaviour mainly by irrational, unconscious impulses, be it Max Stirner’s ‘egoism’ or Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’. Biology, by disclosing the mechanisms of animals’ instinctive actions, seemed to provide this trend with a natural-science basis. Experimental studies of the human psyche also revealed the existence of powerful unconscious processes and structures in it. T. A. Ribot laid the foundations of experimental study of emotions. The psychologists of the Wurzburg School introduced the concept of attitude, a state of consciousness, indeterminate and not readily amenable to analysis, that controlled the choice and dynamics of mental operations and impressions. Study of hypnotic states and psychopathology also brought scholars up against the problem of the unconscious.
Taken together all that encouraged a frequent interpreting of social phenomena at the end of the nineteenth century in terms of ‘instincts’, ‘drives’, and ‘impulses’. The concept ‘in- stinct’ was used in that connection in a broad, general, everyday sense, signifying both the biological needs of the organism and inherited programmes of behaviour and, even, simply desires. Group, ‘social’ instincts were also written about, as well as the individual’s biological instincts. Giddings, for example, advised treating his conception of consciousness of kind as a developed form of the theory of instincts.
William McDougall (1871-1938), an English psychologist who worked in the United States from 1921, and the author of the very popular An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908), is considered the foremost spokesman of instinctivism. In his
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view the ‘psychology of instincts’ was the theoretical founda- tion of all the social sciences. He understood by instinct an innate or natural psychophysical predisposition that compelled the individual to perceive or pay attention to certain objects and thereby experience a specific emotional stimulation, and to act in a certain way or, at least, to experience a stimulus to so act, in regard to that object. A definite emotion corresponded to each primary instinct, according to him, and this emotion, like the instinct itself, was simple and indivisible. To the instinct of flight, for instance, there corresponded an emotion of fear, to the instinct of curiosity an emotion of wonder, to the instinct of pugnacity an emotion of anger, to the parental instinct an emotion of gentleness, and so on.
In extending his theory to society, McDougall put a definite instinct, or group of instincts, under every social phenomenon. He explained war, for instance, by people’s predisposition to pugnacity, and the accumulation of social wealth to an inclina- tion to money-grubbing and miserliness. Religion was based on a combination of the instincts of curiosity, self-humiliation, and flight taken together with the emotional reactions intrinsic in the parental instinct. He attached very great social signifi- cance to the herd instinct that held people together and underlay most of the institutions of society. A direct manifestation of the herd instinct was the growth of towns, the collective charac- ter of human leisure, mass gatherings, etc.
The success of McDougall’s book, which was reprinted many times, stimulated the appearance of many followers. The Eng- lish surgeon Wilfred Trotter (1872-1939) became famous for a book in which he claimed that all social phenomena were ultimately explainable by ‘herd instincts’. The English Fabian socialist Graham Wallas (1858-1932) extended psychological analysis to the sphere of politics, paying special attention to the instinct of loyalty, which ensured the functioning of state power.'? The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856- 1939) considered sexual desire, or libido, the universal de- terminant of human behaviour. From study of neuroses and the inner conflicts of the individual psyche, he subsequently, begin- ning with his Totem and Taboo (1913), extended his theory also to the history of culture. Later, on the basis of the experi- ence of World War I, he was already speaking of a struggle of
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two principles of the human psyche—Eros, or the instinct of life, and Thanatos, or the unconscious desire for death (death wish or death instinct).
Instinctivism had a definite influence on the science of man by drawing attention to the unconscious components of the psyche and also by its polemic against behaviourism. But its own theoretical basis was more than unstable. Instinctivism replaced social, historical regularities by individual, psycholog- ical ones, and tried to give the latter a biological foundation. Not only the content, but also the number of ‘basic instincts’ varied from one author to another. McDougall named 11 at first, then 14, and finally 18, which he later renamed ‘inclina- tions’ under the impact of criticism by behaviourists. William James reckoned them at 38; Freud reduced them to two. When Lister Bernard'* analysed the meaning of this term in the literature, he counted 15,789 separate instincts, which con- densed into 6,131 instincts of independent ‘essence’. Precepts, habits, needs, affects, and psychic processes figured under to term ‘instincts’.
It is not surprising that, as sociology and psychology devel- oped, the influence of instinctivist theories rapidly died away. The exception was Freudism, but its influence on sociology came later in time, so that I shall not discuss it here.
4. Folk Psychology
All the theories I have named looked for a very simple ‘cell’ of social behaviour in the psyche of the individual, and in that sense were subjective idealist. But in nineteenth-century science there was also an objective idealist treatment of social conscious- ness, which had its ideological roots in Hegel’s theory of the ‘objective spirit’ and the German Romantics’ conception of the ‘folk spirit’. These conceptions were based not so much on psychology as on the history of language and literature, and especially folklore, which convincingly demonstrated the exis- tence of certain stable, repeated elements and structures of a supraindividual character in the development of culture. What was the nature of this ‘fold spirit’, or ‘national character’? The Romantics interpreted it in an objective idealist, substan-
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tional sense, as a special mental or spiritual reality. But the concept gradually acquired another, naturalist content.
The German scientists Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899), having made a synthesis of the data of linguistic and ethnography with the psycho- logical theory of J. F. Herbart, announced in 1860 the cre- ation of a new discipline ‘folk psychology’. According to Stein- thal, all individuals of a nation (folk) bore the impress of its special nature on their bodies and minds, because of the unity of their origin and habitat, the effect of the bodily influences on the mind, moreover, evoking certain bents, tendencies, predispositions, and properties of the mind, identical for all of them, as a consequence of which they all possessed an identical folk spirit. He understood folk spirit as the psychic similarity of the individuals belonging to a certain nation, and at the same time as their self-awareness; the content of the folk spirit was disclosed through study of language, myths, morals, and culture in the context of the historical psychology of peoples and psychological ethnology.
Although Steinthal and Lazarus could not fulfil this pro- gramme, their ideas were taken up and developed by Wilhelm Wundt. In his opinion physiological psychology did not embrace the true content of mature consciousness. Higher psychic pro- cesses, above all thinking, were the result of the development of a community of people, and should therefore be studied by a special science. He objected to his predecessors’ direct analogy of the individual and folk consciousness. Just as the conscious- ness of the individual was not reducible to the initial elements of sensation and feeling, but was a creative synthesis of them, so folk consciousness was a creative synthesis of individual consciousnesses, through which a new reality arose that was discoverable in the products of suprapersonal activity, i.e., language, myths, and morals. Wundt devoted the last 20 years of his life to investigating them; the results of this work were embodied in the ten volumes of his Vélkerspsychologie (Folk Psychology).
Like his predecessors Wundt did not manage to fulfil his programme. The historical, cultural, and ethnographic material did not fit into the simple psychological schemes, the more so that Wundt, wanting to demonstrate the universality of the
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laws of physiological psychology, in fact tried to subordinate the supraindividual reality of the folk spirit to them. In one of his works he wrote that it had been ruled out from the very beginning that any universal laws appeared in folk psychology that were not already fully contained in the laws of individual consciousness.'* He treated the separate forms of social con- sciousness as ‘psychological’ and not as ‘socio-logical’ phenomena. He thus brought out the laws of language by analogy with the laws of the association of notions, myths as the result of the processing of notions by emotions, and morals as a consequence of the inclusion of will among the primary elements of con- sciousness.
Folk Psychology was one of the first attempts to concep- tualise and begin a concrete study of the interaction of culture and individual consciousness. The orientation to bringing to- gether psychological, ethnographic, linguistic, historical-phil- ological, and anthropological research was itself above all valu- able. Historical psychology, cultural anthropology, ethno- psychology, and even sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics find their sources, not without grounds, in the Vdlkerpsychologie. But its influence on sociology seems to have been minimal. The theoretical problem of the relation of culture and individ- ual consciousness remained fundamentally unresolved in it, while the descriptive material actually had nothing in common with the explanatory conceptions.
5. Group Psychology and the Theory of Imitation
At the end of the nineteenth century it had become increasingly clear that neither the psychology of the individual nor the abstract ‘folk spirit? could provide the key to inderstanding social phenomena. Hence the mounting interest in direct study of phenomena of group and mass behaviour and the psycho- logical and social mechanisms that made possible transmis- sion of social norms and beliefs, and adaptation of individuals to one another.
The interest of sociologists in the psychology of the masses also had its ideological sources. The ruling classes, terrified by the revolutionary actions of the working people in 1789,
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1830, and 1848, saw a terrible, destructive force in the masses. The Romantic traditionalists of the early nineteenth century warned that the turning of society into a mass society entailed death of creative individuality and culture. The actions of the Parisian proletariat in 1848 and 1871 strengthened that mood even more. In the second half of the century ideas about the irrationality of the masses became very common both in positiv- ist philosophy (Taine, especially in his treatment of the French Revolution) and an antipositivist philosophy (Nietzsche). The Italian criminologist Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) gave this idea a pseudoscientific psychological substantiation in his La folla criminale (The Criminal Crowd) (1891) and La psychologie des sectes (Psychology of Sects) (1895). Man, he wrote, was brutal and criminal by nature. The weakening of rational self-control inevitable in a crowd, unleashed those instincts, heightening the individual’s suggestibility and his receptivity to any evil.
At the turn of the century the books of the French publi- cist, Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a doctor by training, became very popular: La psychologie des foules (The Psychology of Crowds) (1895) and Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (The Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples) (1894). In his opinion European society was entering a new period of development, the ‘crowd age’ in which the rational critical principle embodied in the individual would be over- whelmed by irrational mass consciousness. The ‘crowd’ or ‘the mass’ was a group of people gathered together in one place, inspired by common feelings, and ready to follow its leader wherever he liked. No rational force could control the violent impulses of mass consciousness. Le Bon stressed that the course of each person’s thought in a crowd was directed by its common mood. The longer a person remained in a crowd, the weaker his feeling of reality became and the more he became subject to the influence of the leader. People were often found among the leaders with sharply expressed features of psychic devia- tions. Le Bon sharply condemned any revolutionary movement, especially socialism from that position.
Knowledge of the psychology of crowds is a resource of the statesman who wants not to govern them—that has become very
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difficult today—but at least not to be too completely governed by them.’ *
The theoretical problems posed by Le Bon—the anonymity, psychological contagion, and the suggestibility of the ‘crowd man’—gave an impulse to serious social psychological studies. But his theory was reactionary and scientifically unsound on the whole, above all his identification of the masses of the people and the irrational ‘mob’. His ‘ideal crowd’, i.e., a com- pletely chance, amorphous gathering of individuals, was seldom encountered in practice, in any case as a socially significant force, and not just as a simple street crowd of idlers; the latter was the most elementary, and the lowest, possibly, initial form of all of socio-psychological entity. Modern social psychologists note a number of other flaws in Le Bon’s conceptions: the extremely blurred character of his basic concepts; the unsub- stantiated counterposing of the irrational mob to an idealised image of the rational individual; the substitution of terms, as a consequence of which observations of the behaviour of crim- inal gangs were extrapolated onto qualitatively different forms of group behaviour; the arbitrary postulate of the ‘collective spirit’; the unsystematic character of the proofs, which served rather as illustrations of an a priori thesis.’ °
The group psychology of the turn of the century was not just speculative constructs of that type. Not only was the amorphous ‘crowd’ studied, but also concrete human groups, diads and triads, and also such processes of interpersonal rela- tionship as mental contagion, suggestion, and imitation.
This orientation drew inspiration from very diverse sources, including experimental studies of hypnosis, observations of the imitative activity of children, ethnological studies, and observations of such phenomena as fashion or panic. The first studies of this kind were not distinguished by either method- ological or conceptual rigour. Some authors (N. K. Mikhai- lovsky) were inclined to consider mental contagion as a funda- mental process underlying people’s uniform social behaviour in groups; others (V. M. Bekhterev, Gustave Le Bon) assigned this role to suggestion; others still (Gabriel de Tarde,J. M. Bald- win) gave preference to imitation. The relation of these pro- cesses was also defined differently. Whereas Vigouroux and
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Juquelier considered mental contagion a form of imitation,'’ Le Bon, on the contrary, saw in it a partial case of mental contagion. In all cases, however, the object of study was group processes, which were assigned a specific methodological and ontological status.
The outstanding figure of this school was the French lawyer and sociologist Gabriel de Tarde (1843-1904), author of Crimi- nalité comparée (1886), Les lois de limitation (1890), Logique sociale (1895), Les lois sociales (1898), Etudes de psychologie sociale (1898), L’opinion et la foule (1901), Psychologie écono- mique (1902). Apart from philosophers and sociologists (among them Montesquieu, Comte, Spencer, Mill, and Cournot), the Italian criminalist school (Cesare Lombroso, Raffaele Garofalo, Enrico Ferri, and others) had a marked influence on his views. But in opposition to these Italians, who traced crime from racial and geographical conditions, Trade attached decisive importance to its social and psychological factors.
For many years Tarde waged a bitter polemic against his junior contemporary and intellectual rival Emile Durkheim. Both thinkers had risen from polemics against bio-organic theories and utilitarianism; both attached great significance to ethnographic data and the comparative method; both were interested in the nature of social standards, seeing in them the force that integrated society. But behind this similarity there were profound differences. For Durkheim society was a social system sui generis, a product of which was the separate in- dividual.
Tarde, on the contrary, spoke from the standpoint of nomi- nalism; for him society was only a product of the interactions of individuals. He considered any analogies between society and a biological organism or mechanical aggregate to be fruit- less. Consciousness, according to him, was a postulate of me- chanics. He also rejected the evolutionist model of society. The trouble with sociology, according to him, was that it confused ‘laws of society’ and ‘laws of history’; but the first were essen- tially laws of the reproduction of phenomena, while the second were laws of their development. They were two different classes of laws; the laws of history, moreover, were much more com- plex, and could only be formulated from the laws of society.
Hence he substituted an analytical approach for the evolu-
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tionary one. Sociology was ‘simply ... collective psychology’, ® which should answer two questions.
Sociology, as just defined, must attack two major problems: 1. What is the cause of inventions, of successful initiatives, of the social adaptations analogous to and no less obscure in their origin than biological adaptations? 2. Why were these initiatives imitated, and not others? Why was the preference accorded to such and such a model, among so many others which did not find any imitators? In other words, what are the laws of imitation?! °
Tarde consistently rejected every attempt to postulate the existence of independent spiritual entities of the type of ‘group consciousness’ or ‘spirit of the crowd’, considering such doc- trines survivals of mysticism. But he could not base sociology either on the principles of individualist psychology. If the vari- ous ‘I’s’ were completely heterogeneous and had nothing in common with one another, how could they transmit or com- municate anything to each other? And how could they associate and form an ‘ourself’, a ‘we’ (un ‘nous’)?
Collective psychology, inter-mental psychology, that is, sociology, is thus possible only because individual psychology, intra-mental psychology, includes elements which can be transmitted and com- municated from one consciousness to others, elements which, despite the irreducible hiatus between individuals, are capable of uniting and joining together in order to form true social forces and quantities, currents of opinion or popular impulses, traditions of national customs.?°
The elementary social relation, according to Tarde, was the transmission, or attempt to transmit, a belief or wish. The simplest model of that was the state of hypnotic sleep. ‘Society is imitation, and imitation is a kind of somnambulism,’?!
Any innovation, he considered, was the product of individual creative work, the sole source of which was a creative act of the imagination of a gifted individual. Successful adaptation of the innovation gave rise to a wave of repetitions taking the form of ‘imitation’. Tarde drew a schematic picture of the way an innovation was spread by imitation in