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VI

The similarity of the treatment of social evolution by Hegel and Comte goes far beyond these methodological aspects. For both, society appears as an organism in a fairly literal sense. Both compare the stages though which social evolution must pass with the different ages though which individual man passes in his natural growth. And for both, the growth of the conscious control of his destiny by man is the main content of history.

Neither Comte nor Hegel was of course a historian, properly speaking--although it is not so very long since it was the fashion to describe them, in contrast to their predecessors, as ``true historians''17.34 because they were ``scientific,'' which, presumably, meant that they aimed at the discovery of laws. But what they presented as the ``historical method'' soon began to displace the approach of the great historical school of a Niebuhr or a Ranke. It is customary to trace to Hegel the rise of the later historicism 17.35 with its belief in the necessary succession of ``stages'' which manifest themselves in all fields of social life; but Comte's influence had probably more to do with it than Hegel's.

In the confused state of terminology on these matters,17.36 it is perhaps necessary to say explicitly that I draw a sharp distinction between the ``historical school'' of the early nineteenth century and the majority of the later professional historians, and the historicism of a Marx, a Scroller's, or a Sombart. It was the latter who believed that with the discovery of laws of development they had the only key to true historical understanding, and who in an altogether unjustified arrogance claimed that the earlier writers, and particularly those of the eighteenth century, had been ``unhistorical.'' It seems to me that in many respects David Hume, for example, had much more justification when he believed his ``to be the historical age and [his] to be the historical nation''17.37than the historicists who tried to turn history into a theoretical science. The abuses to which this historicism ultimately led is best seen by the fact that even a thinker so close to it as Max Weber was once driven to describe the whole Entwicklungsgedanke as a ``romantic swindle.''17.38 I have little to add to the masterly analysis of this historicism by my friend Karl Popper, hidden away in a wartime volume of Economica,17.39 except that the responsibility for it seems to me to rest at least as much with Comte and positivism as with Plato and Hegel.

This historicism, let me repeat, was much less an affair of the historians proper than of the representatives of the other social sciences who applied what they believed to be the ``historical method.'' Gustav Scroller's, the founder of the younger historical school in economics, is perhaps the best example of one who was clearly guided by the philosophy of Comte rather than that of Hegel.17.40 But if the influence of this kind of historicism was perhaps most marked in economics, it was a fashion which, first in Germany and then elsewhere, affected all the social sciences. It could be shown to have influenced the history of art17.41 no less than anthropology or philology. And the great popularity which ``philosophies of history'' have enjoyed during the last hundred years, theories which ascribed to the historical process an intelligible ``meaning'' and which pretended to show us a recognizable destiny of mankind, is essentially the result of this joint influence of Hegel and Comte.


next up previous contents
Next: VII Up: Comte and Hegel Previous: V   Contents