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

VI

The exposition of Comte's sociology, which was to constitute the fourth volume of the Cours, extended in fact to three volumes, each considerably longer than any of the first three dealing with all the other sciences. The fourth volume, published in 1839, contains mainly the general considerations on the new science and its static part. The two remaining ones contain a very full and detailed exposition of sociological dynamics, that general theory of the history of the human mind, which was the main aim of Comte's labors.

The division of the subject into statics and dynamics,16.40 a division Comte believes to be appropriate to all sciences, he takes over, not directly from mechanics, but from biology to which it had been applied by the physiologist De Blainville, whose work had influenced Comte to an extent equaled only by Lagrange, Fourier, and Gall.16.41 The distinction, which according to De Blainville in biology corresponds to that between anatomy and physiology, or organization and life, is made to correspond in sociology with the two great watchwords of positivism, order and progress. Static sociology deals with the laws of coexistence of social phenomena, while dynamic sociology is concerned with the laws of succession in the necessary evolution of society.

When it comes to the execution of this scheme it proves, however, that Comte has extraordinarily little to say on the static part of his subject. His disquisitions about the necessary consensus between all the parts of any social system, the idée mère of solidarity as he often calls it, which in social phenomena is even more marked than in biological, remain pretty empty generalizations, as Comte has no way (or intention) of establishing why particular institutions, or which kinds of institutions, should necessarily go together, or others be incompatible. The comments on the relations between the individual, the family, and society, in the single chapter devoted to social statics, rise little above the commonplace.16.42 In the discussion of the division of labor, although a distant echo of Adam Smith,16.43 there is no trace of a comprehension of the factors which regulate it; and how little he understands them becomes evident when he expressly denies that a division of intellectual labor similar to that applying to material labor is possible.16.44

The whole of his statics is, however, no more than a brief sketch and of minor importance compared with the dynamic part of sociology, the fulfillment of his main ambition. It is the attempt to prove the basic contention, which Comte, as a young man of twenty-six, had expressed in a letter to a friend when he promised to show that ``there were laws governing the development of the human race as definite as those determining the fall of a stone.''16.45 History was to be made a science, and the essence of all science is that it should be capable of prediction.16.46 The dynamic part of sociology was therefore to become a philosophy of history, as it is commonly but somewhat misleadingly called, or a theory of history as it would be more correctly described. The idea which was to inspire so much of the thought of the second haff of the nineteenth century, was to write ``abstract history,'' ``history without the names of men or even people.''16.47 The new science was to provide a theoretical scheme, an abstract order in which the major changes of human civilization must necessarily follow each other.

The basis of this scheme is of course the law of the three stages and the main content of dynamic sociology is a detailed elaboration of the law. It is thus a curious feature of the Comtian system that this same law which is supposed to prove the necessity of the new science is at the same time its main and almost sole result. We need not trouble here with its elaboration in detail, beyond saying that in Comte's hands human history becomes largely identified with the growth of the natural sciences.16.48 What are relevant to us are only the general implications of the idea of a natural science which deals with the laws of intellectual development of the human race, and the practical conclusions drawn from it with regard to the future organization of society. The idea of recognizable laws, not only of the growth of individual minds, but of the development of the knowledge of the human race as a whole, presupposes that the human mind could, so to speak, look down on itself from a higher plane and be able not merely to understand its operation from the inside, but also to observe it, as it were, from the outside. The curious thing about this proposition, particularly in its Comtian form, is that although it explicitly recognizes that the interactions of individual minds may produce something in a sense superior to what an individual mind can ever achieve, it yet claims for the same individual mind not only the power to grasp this development as a whole and to recognize the principle on which it works and even the course it must follow, but also the power to control and direct it and thereby to improve upon its uncontrolled working.

What this belief really amounts to is that the products of the process of mind can be comprehended as a whole by a simpler process than the laborious one of understanding them, and that the individual mind, looking at these results from the outside, can then directly connect these wholes by laws applying to them as entities, and finally, by extrapolating the observed development, achieve a kind of shortcut to the future development. This empirical theory of the development of the collective mind is at the same time the most naive and the most influential result of the application of the procedure of the natural sciences to social phenomena, and of course based on the illusion that the phenomena of the mind are in the same sense given as objective things, and subject to external observation and control as physical phenomena. It follows from this approach that our knowledge is to be regarded as ``relative'' and conditioned by assignable factors--not merely from the point of view of some hypothetical, more highly organized mind, but from our own point of view. It is from this point of view that the belief springs that we ourselves can recognize the ``mutability''16.49 of our mind and of its laws and the belief that the human race can undertake to control its own development. This idea that the human mind can, as it were, lift itself up by its own bootstraps, has remained a dominant characteristic of most sociology to the present day,16.50 and we have here the root (or rather one of the roots, the other being Hegel) of that modern hubris which has found its most perfect expression in the so-called sociology of knowledge. And the fact that this idea--the human mind controlling its own development--has from its beginning been one of the leading ideas of sociology also provides the link which has always connected it with socialist ideals so that in the popular mind sociological and socialist often mean the same thing.16.51

It is this search for the ``general laws of the continuous variations of human opinions''16.52 which Comte calls the ``historical method,'' the ``indispensable complement of the positive logic.''16.53 But although, partly under Comte's influence, this is what the term historical method increasingly came to mean in the second half of the nineteenth century, we cannot leave this subject without pointing out that it is, of course, nearly the opposite of what historical approach really means or did mean to the great historians who in the beginning of the century tried by the application of the historical method to understand the Genesis of social institutions.16.54


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