Studies in Social and Political Theory (RLE Social Theory)

Anthony Giddens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317650638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The studies which comprise this book are essentially organized around a critical encounter with European social theory in its 'classical period' – i.e. from the middle years of the nineteenth century until the First World War – and have the aim of working out some of the implications of that encounter for the position and prospects of the social sciences today. The issues involved relate to the following series of problems: method and epistemology; social development and transformation; the origins of 'sociology' in nineteenth-century social theory; and the status of social science as critique. In each of these areas, Giddens develops views that challenge existing orthodoxies, and connects these ideas to a reconstruction of social theory in the contemporary era.

1 Positivism and its critics

‘Positivism’ has today become more a term of abuse than a technical term of philosophy. The indiscriminate way in which the term has been used in a variety of different polemical interchanges in the past few years, however, makes all the more urgent a study of the influence of positivistic philosophies in the social sciences.

I shall distinguish two main ways in which ‘positivism’ may be taken, one quite specific, the other much more general. In the more restrictive sense, the term may be taken to apply to the writings of those who have actively called themselves positivists, or at least have been prepared to accept the appellation. This yields two major phases in the development of positivism, one centred mainly in social theory, the other concerned more specifically with epistemology. The earlier phase is that dominated by the works of the author who coined the term ‘positive philosophy’, Auguste Comte. Although there are obvious contrasts between Comte’s positivism and the ‘logical positivism’ of the Vienna Circle, there are equally clear connections – both historical and intellectual – between the two. Second, the term may be employed more broadly and diffusely to refer to the writings of philosophers who have adopted most or all of a series of connected perspectives: phenomenalism – the thesis, which can be expressed in various ways, that ‘reality’ consists in sense-impressions; an aversion to metaphysics, the latter being condemned as sophistry or illusion; the representation of philosophy as a method of analysis, clearly separable from, yet at the same time parasitic upon, the findings of science; the duality of fact and value – the thesis that empirical knowledge is logically discrepant from the pursuit of moral aims or the implementation of ethical standards; and the notion of the ‘unity of science’: the idea that the natural and social sciences share a common logical and perhaps even methodological foundation. Below I shall use the term positivism without qualification to refer, in the appropriate context, to the views of Comte and subsequently to those of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle, i.e. to those who have been prepared to call themselves positivists. I shall use positivistic philosophy to designate views that embody important elements among those mentioned in the second category. In this sense, positivistic strains are much more widely represented in the history of philosophy, overlapping with empiricism, than would be suggested if attention were confined to self-proclaimed ‘positivism’.

I want also, however, to distinguish a third category, which I shall call, for want of a better name, ‘positivistic sociology’. We owe to Comte both the term ‘positivism’ and the term ‘sociology’; in his writings, the two are closely conjoined, since the coming into being of sociology is supposed to mark the final triumph of positivism in human thought. The connection has been a fateful one for the subsequent development of the social sciences, for certain leading traditions in social thought over the past hundred years have been considerably influenced by the kind of logical framework established by Comte in his Cours de philosophie positive. As mediated by Durkheim, this framework is closely tied in to modern functionalism. But the influence of positivistic philosophy, as defined above, in sociology (and in Marxism) has ranged much more widely than this. Here sociology is conceived of as a ‘natural science of society’, which can hope to reproduce a system of laws directly similar in form to those achieved in the natural sciences. In positivistic sociologies, as formulated over the past four or five decades at least, especially in the United States, all three senses of ‘positivism’ I have just distinguished to some extent recombine. Certain of the prominent members of the Vienna Circle emigrated to the United States, and have exerted a strong influence over the development of philosophy there, particularly in regard of the philosophy of science. Their conception of the philosophy of science has in turn been appropriated, explicitly or otherwise, by many authors writing in the social sciences: and it has proved particularly compatible with the view of those drawing heavily upon the sorts of views expressed by Comte and by Durkheim.

In this essay, I shall begin by discussing the positivism of Comte, and its similarities to and its differences from, the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. From there, I shall move to a consideration of two partly convergent critiques of positivistic philosophies more generally conceived: one, the so-called ‘newer philosophy of science’, emanating mainly from within the English-speaking world, the other, ‘Frankfurt philosophy’ or critical theory, originating primarily in long-established German philosophical traditions.

Auguste Comte: sociology and positivism

In crude summary, we may differentiate several major elements in the intellectual background of Comte’s writings. One is the frontal assault on metaphysics undertaken in eighteenth-century philosophy, above all in the works of Hume and his followers in British empiricism, and sustained in different form in Kant’s ‘critical idealism’. Comte went further than such authors, in not only accepting the success of the destruction of transcendental illusions, but in formally embodying the metaphysical stage in the evolution of humanity as a phase superseded by the advent of positivist thought. In this respect, he accepted one of the fundamental aims of the writers of the Enlightenment, as he did important aspects of the rationalist critique of established religion. In Comte’s scheme of history, the theological stage of thought is relegated to a phase prior to the metaphysical – both, to be sure, being regarded as necessary stages in social evolution, but both being dissolved once and for all when positivism triumphs. If Comte himself came to the rediscovery of religion, it was because to his acceptance of these aspects of Enlightenment philosophy was conjoined a deep-rooted aversion to the methodical critique of inherited authority that was basic to the writings of the philosophes. Comte rejected the essential idea of Enlightenment itself: that the Middle Ages were also the Dark Ages, whose repudiation opens up the way to revolutionary changes in human intellectual and social life. In place of this Comte substituted a progressivism influenced by the ‘retrograde school’ of authors – conservative apologists for Catholicism, reacting against Enlightenment radicalism and against the 1789 Revolution which was its heir: Bonald, de Maistre and others. Comte’s positivism preserves the theme of progress, but undercuts the radicalism with which this was associated in Enlightenment philosophy. ‘Progress’ and ‘order’ are more than reconciled: the one becomes dependent upon the other. Positive thought replaces the ‘negative’ outlook of the philosophes, the perspective that a new dawn can be achieved through the shattering of the past.

Of course, Comte owed many of his ideas most immediately to Saint-Simon, who in turn was considerably indebted to Condorcet and Montesquieu, both of whom had tempered the enthusiasms of the Enlightenment with a rigidly applied version of the subservience of society to natural laws of development. Condorcet assigned to history the same kind of potentialities that Comte was later to allocate to the positive science of sociology, expressed in the famous phrase savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour pouvoir Condorcet looked to the past to supply the moving principles of evolution whereby the future could be made open to human intervention. Hence he took to task those who arrogantly supposed that it is possible to achieve social change in massive fashion ex nihilo. The progress of mankind achieves equilibrium in such a way that, while the pace of development can be speeded or retarded by active human intervention, it has the character of an autonomous force for betterment. I shall not take up the vexed issue of just how directly Comte plundered Saint-Simon’s ideas in constructing his own system, a matter of great acrimony in the relations between the two thinkers after Comte broke away from the tutelage of his mentor. Whatever their immediate provenance, it can be remarked without undue simplification that Comte’s writings constitute one direction of development out of Saint-Simon, that which gave ‘sociology’ its name, and established a logical framework for the supposedly new science; the other direction is that taken by Marx, in which elements of Saint-Simon’s ideas are reconnected to revolutionary social transformation.¹

That Comte entitled the first of his two major works Cours de philosophie positive should not blind us to the fact that the work actually declares an end to philosophy as previously practised: as an independent enterprise separable from the achievements of science. ‘Positive philosophy’ is perhaps not, as Marcuse suggests, a contradiction in adjecto.² But it does reduce philosophy to expressing the emergent synthesis of scientific knowledge. The ‘true philosophic spirit’, Comte says, incorporates the ‘essential attributes … summed up in the word positive’. These include, first of all, an orientation to ‘reality’ and to ‘utility’: the useless endeavours of speculative philosophy to penetrate behind appearances are disavowed. But the term also implies – in all the European languages, according to Comte – ‘certainty’ and ‘precision’, attributes which similarly distinguish the intellectual life of modern man from his predecessors. Finally, also suggested by the term are an ‘organic tendency’ and a ‘relativist outlook’. The former of these refers to the constructive character of the positivist spirit: by contrast, ‘the metaphysical spirit is incapable of organizing; it can only criticize’. The latter seals the rejection of absolutism, as practised in metaphysical philosophy: the laws that govern the co-variance of phenomena always retain a provisional character, since they are induced on the basis of empirical observation, rather than being posited as ‘absolute essences’.³

In the Cours, the relation between the various sciences is claimed to be hierarchical, in both an analytical and a historical sense, the second being explained in terms of the renowned law of the three stages of human intellectual development. Analytically, Comte makes clear, the sciences form a hierarchy of decreasing generality but increasing complexity; each particular science logically depends upon the ones below it in the hierarchy, and yet at the same time deals with an emergent order of properties that cannot be reduced to those with which the other sciences are concerned. Thus biology, for example, presupposes the laws of physics and chemistry in so far as all organisms are physical entities which obey the laws governing the composition of matter; on the other hand, the behaviour of organisms, as complex beings, cannot be directly derived from those laws. Sociology, at the apex of the hierarchy of sciences, logically presupposes the laws of each of the other scientific disciplines, while at the same time similarly retaining its autonomous subject-matter.

The logical relations between the sciences, according to Comte, provide the means of interpreting their successive formation as separate fields of study in the course of the evolution of human thought. The sciences which develop first, mathematics and astronomy, then physics, are those dealing with the most general or all-enveloping laws of nature, that govern phenomena most removed from human involvement and manipulation. From there, science penetrates more and more closely to man himself, moving through chemistry and biology to its culmination in the science of human conduct – originally labelled by Comte ‘social physics’, then redubbed ‘sociology’. The process is not achieved without struggle; scientific understanding lies at the end of the progression of intellectual life through the theological and metaphysical stages, through which all branches of thought have to move. Human thought as a whole, as well as each science taken separately, progresses through the theological, the metaphysical and the positive stages. In the theological stage, the universe is comprehended as determined by the agency of spiritual beings; this stage, l’état fictif, as Comte calls it, is ‘the necessary point of departure of the human intellect’, and it reaches its climax in Christianity with its recognition of one all-powerful deity.⁴ The metaphysical phase replaces these moving spirits with abstract essences, thereby however clearing the ground for the advent of science, l’état fixe et définitif of thought. The enunciation of the law of the three stages, Comte says, is enough ‘that its correctness should be immediately confirmed by anyone who has a sufficiently profound knowledge of the general history of the sciences’. (Comte later claimed to have achieved personal verification of the law of the three stages in his periods of insanity, which he had experienced, he claimed, as a regression back through from positivism to metaphysics to theology on the level of his own personality, in his recovery retracing these stages forwards again.)

The task of the Cours is not only to analyse the transmutation of human thought by science, but also to complete it. For man’s understanding of himself is still in substantial part in its pre-scientific phase:

Everything can be reduced to a simple question of fact: does positive philosophy, which over the two past centuries has gradually become so widespread, today embrace all orders of phenomena? It is evident that such is not the case and that consequently there still remains the major scientific undertaking of giving to positive philosophy the universal character that is indispensable to its proper constitution … Now that the human mind has founded astronomy, and terrestrial physics – both mechanical and chemical – and organic physics – both botanical and biological – it remains to finalize the system of the sciences by founding social physics. Such is, in several capital respects, the greatest and the most pressing intellectual need today …⁵

Positivism supplies a general ground-plan for the formation of sociology: that is to say, the new science of society has to share the same overall logical form as the other sciences, as it is cut free of the residues of metaphysics. But since the phenomena with which it is concerned are more complex and specific than the sciences lying below it in the hierarchy, it also has to develop methodological procedures of its own. Like biology, sociology employs concepts that are ‘synthetic’ in character: that is to say, concepts which relate to the properties of complex wholes, rather than to aggregates of elements as in the lower sciences. The two also share a division into statics and dynamics. In sociology, the first consists in the study of the functional interrelationship of institutions within society, the second in the study of the process of social evolution. The significance of dynamics in sociology, however, is more profound than in biology because – via the law of the three stages – it examines the intellectual development of positive thought as a whole. Sociology relies on three methodological elements, each of which involves features that are particular to it: observation, experiment and comparison. Comte holds that a commitment to the essential importance of empirical observation is not equivalent to an advocacy of empiricism. ‘No logical dogma,’ Comte says, ‘could be more thoroughly irreconcilable with the spirit of positive philosophy, or with its special character in regard to the study of social phenomena, than this.’⁶ Consequently, theory is basic to sociological investigations. On the other hand, the context of Comte’s discussion makes it apparent that ‘empiricism’ here is understood in a limited sense; his point is not that all observations of objects or events are (to use Popper’s term) ‘theory-impregnated’, but that ‘scientifically speaking, all isolated empirical observation is idle’. ‘Scientific and popular observation’, Comte says, ‘embrace the same facts’; but they regard them from different points of view, because the former is guided by theory whereas the latter is not. Theories direct our attention towards certain facts rather than others.’⁷ While experimentation in the laboratory sense is not possible in social physics, it can be replaced by indirect experimentation, i.e. ‘natural experiments’ whose consequences can be analysed. But this is less important than the comparative method, which is the crucial foundation of sociological research.

Comte always intended sociology to be directed towards practical ends. If it is true that the strange extravagances of the immanent social future envisaged in the Système de politique positive are largely absent from Comte’s earlier writings, it is still the case that the main elements of his political programme already appear there. These are perhaps stated with greater clarity, in fact, in the Cours than they are in the later work. The overriding theme continues that of the intellectual diagnosis of the origins of positive philosophy: the mutual necessity of order and progress. For Comte it is precisely his insistence upon the conjunction of the two that allows positivism to supersede both the ‘revolutionary metaphysics’ of the philosophes and the reactionary connotations of the Catholic apologists. The latter school wanted order, but was against progress; the former sought progress at the expense of order. The ‘order’ desired by the ‘retrograde school’ was nothing but a reversion to feudal hierocracy; while the ‘progress’ aspired to by the revolutionaries was nothing less than the subversion of any form of government as such. The sort of society Comte foresees as guaranteeing order and progress none the less places a heavy enough em...