When we turn to the field of social theory we find that the central ideas which Hegel and Comte have in common are so closely related that we can almost express them all in one sentence, if we give due weight to every single word. Such a statement would have to run somewhat like this: the central aim of all study of society must be to construct a universal history of all mankind, understood as a scheme of the necessary development of humanity according to recognizable laws. It is characteristic of the extent to which their ideas have entered into the whole intellectual makeup of our time, that, thus baldly stated, they now sound almost commonplace. Only when we analyze in greater detail the meaning and the implications of this statement do we become aware of the extraordinary nature of the undertaking which it proposes.
The laws which both seek--and it makes little difference that Comte presents them as ``natural laws''17.25while for Hegel they are metaphysical principles--are in the first instances laws of the development of the human mind. They both claim, in other words, that our individual minds, which contribute to this process of development, are at the same time capable of comprehending it as a whole. It is the necessary succession of stages of the human mind determined by these dynamic laws which accounts for a corresponding succession of different civilizations, cultures, Volksgeister, or social systems.
Their common stress on the predominance of the intellectual development in this process, incidentally, in no way conflicts with the fact that the most influential tradition which they both inspired came misleadingly to be called the ``materialist'' interpretation of history. Comte, in this as in many other points nearer to Marx than Hegel, laid the foundation for this development with his stress on the predominant importance of our knowledge of nature; and the basic contention of the so-called materialist (or better, technological) interpretation of history is, after all, merely that it is our knowledge of nature and of technological possibilities which governs the development in other fields. The essential point, the belief that one's own mind should be capable of explaining itself, and the laws of its past and future development--I cannot explain here why to me this seems to involve a contradiction17.26--is the same with both, and it is derived by Marx, and through him by his disciples, from Hegel and Comte.
The conception of laws of succession of distinct stages in the development of the human mind in general, and in all its particular manifestations and concretizations, of course implies that these wholes or collectives can be directly apprehended as individuals of a species: that we can directly perceive civilizations or social systems as objectively given facts. Such a claim is not surprising in a system of idealism like Hegel's, that is, as a product of a conceptual realism or of ``essentialism.''17.27 But it seems at first out of place in a naturalist system like Comte's. The fact is, however, that his phenomenalism which eschews all mental constructions and allows him to admit only of what can be directly observed, forces him into a position very similar to Hegel's. Since he cannot deny the existence of social structures, he must claim that they are immediately given to experience. In fact, he goes so far as to claim that the social wholes are undoubtedly better known and more directly observable than the elements of which they consist,17.28 and that therefore social theory must start from our knowledge of the directly apprehended wholes.17.29 Thus he, no less than Hegel, starts from intuitively apprehended abstract concepts of society or civilization, and then deductively derives from it his knowledge of the structure of the object. He even goes so far, surprisingly enough in a positivist, as to claim explicitly that from this conception of the total we can derive a priori knowledge about the necessary relations of the parts.17.30 It is this which justifies it if Comte's positivism has sometimes been described as a system of idealism.17.31 Like Hegel, he treats as ``concrete universals''17.32 those social structures which in fact we come to know only by composing them, or building them up, from the familiar elements; and he even surpasses Hegel in claiming that only society as a whole is real and that the individual is only an abstraction.17.33