Sociology (Routledge Revivals)

A guide to problems and literature

Tom B. Bottomore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136968761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1962, this seminal work is an introduction to sociology in a world context, and a sophisticated guide to the major themes, problems and controversies in contemporary sociology. The book remains unique in its organisation and presentation of sociological ideas and problems, in it s lack of insularity (its wide coverage of diverse types of society and of sociological thought from various cultural traditions), and in its systematic connection of sociology with the broad themes of modern social and political thought.

PART ONE
THE SCOPE AND METHODS OF SOCIOLOGY

CHAPTER 1
THE STUDY OF SOCIETY

For thousands of years men have observed and reflected upon the societies and groups in which they live. Yet sociology is a modern science, not much more than a century old. Auguste Comte, in his classification of the sciences, made sociology both logically and chronologically posterior to the other sciences, as the least general and most complex of all And one of the greatest of modern anthropologists observed that ‘the science of human society is as yet in its extreme infancy’.¹

It is true that we can find, in the writings of philosophers, religious teachers, and legislators of all civilizations and epochs, observations and ideas which are relevant to modern sociology. Kautilya’s Arthashástra and Aristotle’s Politics analyze political systems in ways which are still of interest to the sociologist. Nevertheless, there is a real sense in which a new science of society, and not merely a new name,² was created in the nineteenth century. It is worthwhile to consider the circumstances in which this happened, and to examine the characteristics which distinguish sociology from earlier social thought.³

The circumstances in which sociology appeared may be distinguished into intellectual and material, and I shall discuss them in turn. Naturally, they were interwoven, and an adequate sociological history of sociology, which has not yet been attempted, would have to take account of these interconnections. In this brief introduction I can only mention some of the more important factors.

¹A.R.Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952).

²It was Comte who named the new science Sociology. At one time he ‘regretted the hybrid character’ of the word, derived from the Latin socius and Greek logos, but later suggested that ‘there is a compensation…for this etymological defect, in the fact that it recalls the two historical sources—the one intellectual, the other social—from which modern civilization has sprung’. System of Positive Polity (trans. J.H.Bridges), Vol. I, p. 326.

³The histories of social thought emphasise unduly its continuity. It would be helpful and illuminating to have for sociology and the modern social sciences, an account similar to that which H.Butterfield has provided for the natural sciences in The Origins of Modern Science (London 1950), where he gives prominence to a radical change in attitude to the physical world.

The chief intellectual antecedents of sociology are not difficult to identify. ‘Broadly it may be said that sociology has had a fourfold origin in political philosophy, the philosophy of history, biological theories of evolution, and the movements for social and political reform which found it necessary to undertake surveys of social conditions.’¹ Two of these, the philosophy of history and the social survey, were particularly important at the outset. They were themselves latecomers in the intellectual history of man.

The philosophy of history as a distinct branch of speculation is a creation of the eighteenth century.² Among its founders were the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and Giambattista Vico. The general idea of progress which they helped to formulate profoundly influenced men’s conception of history, and is reflected in the writings of Montesquieu and Voltaire in France, of Herder in Germany, and of a group of Scottish philosophers and historians of the latter part of the eighteenth century, Ferguson, Millar, Robertson and others. This new historical attitude is clearly expressed in a passage in Dugald Stewart’s ‘Memoir of Adam Smith’,³ ‘When, in such a period of society as that in which we live, we compare our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners and institutions, with those which prevail among rude tribes, it cannot fail to occur to us as an interesting question, by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated.’ Stewart goes on to say that information is lacking on many stages of this progress, and that its place must be taken by speculation based on the ‘known principles of human nature’. ‘To this species of philosophical investigation, which has no appropriated name in our language, I shall take the liberty of giving the title of Theoretical or Conjectural History, an expression which coincides pretty nearly in its meaning with that of Natural History as employed by Mr. Hume, and with what some French writers have called Histoire Raisonnée.’

In the early part of the nineteenth century the philosophy of history became an important intellectual influence through the

¹M.Ginsberg, Reason and Unreason in Society (1947), p. 2.

²We must except the work of the fourteenth century Arab philosopher and historian, Ibn Khaldun. The Prolegomena to his Universal History are remarkable in expounding a theory of history which anticipates that of the European eighteenth century writers, and even Marx; but also as the work of an exceptional man who had neither predecessors nor followers. See C.Issawi, An Arab Philosophy of History (2nd ed. 1955).

³Dugald Stewart, Works, Vol. 10, pp. 33–4.

writings of Hegel and of Saint-Simon.¹ From these two thinkers stems the work of Marx and Comte, and thus some of the important strands in modern sociology. We may briefly assess the contributions of the philosophy of history to sociology as having been, on the philosophical side, the notions of development and progress, and on the scientific side, the concepts of historical periods and social types. It was the philosophical historians who were largely responsible for the new conception of society as something more than ‘political society’ or the state. They were concerned with the whole range of social institutions, and made a careful distinction between the state and what they called ‘civil society’. Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) is perhaps the best example of this approach; in its German translation it seems to have provided Hegel with his terminology and influenced his approach in his early writings on society. Ferguson, in this essay and in later writings, discusses the nature of society, population, family and kinship, the distinctions of rank, property, government, custom, morality and law; that is, he treats society as a system of related institutions. Furthermore, he is concerned to classify societies into types, and to distinguish stages in social development. Similar features are to be found in many of the writings of those whom I have called the philosophical historians; they represent a remarkable unanimity and an abrupt change in the direction of men’s interest in the study of human society. These features re-appear in the nineteenth century in the work of the early sociologists, Comte, Marx, and Spencer.

A second important element in modern sociology is provided by the social survey, which itself had two sources. One was the growing conviction that the methods of the natural sciences should and could be extended to the study of human affairs; that human phenomena could be classified and measured. The other was the concern with poverty (the ‘social problem’), following the recognition that, in industrial societies, poverty was no longer a natural phenomenon, an affliction of nature or of providence, but was the result of human ignorance or of exploitation. Under these two influences, the prestige of natural science and the movements for social reform, the social survey came to occupy an important place in the new science of society. Its progress can best be traced in the industrial societies of Western Europe, in such pioneer works as Sir John Sinclair’s

¹For accounts of the development of the philosophy of history and studies of some of the writers mentioned above, see R.Flint, History of the Philosophy of History (1893) and J.B.Bury, The Idea of Progress (1920).

Statistical Account of Scotland (21 vols. 1791–9), and Sir F.M. Eden’s The State of the Poor (3 vols. 1797), in Condorcet’s attempts to work out a ‘mathématique sociale’,¹ in Quételet’s ‘physique sociale’;² and in later studies such as Le Play, Les ouvriers Européens (1855, 2nd enlarged edn. 1877–9), and Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (1891–1903). The social survey has remained one of the principal methods of sociological enquiry.

These intellectual movements, the philosophy of history and the social survey, were not isolated from the social circumstances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Western Europe. The new interest in history and in social development was aroused by the rapidity and profundity of social change, and by the contrast of cultures which the voyages of discovery brought to men’s attention. The philosophy of history was not merely a child of thought; it was born also of two revolutions, the industrial revolution in England, and the French revolution. Similarly, the social survey did not emerge only from the ambition of applying the methods of natural science to the human world, but from a new conception of social evils, itself influenced by the material possibilities of an industrial society. A social survey, of poverty or any other social problem, only makes sense if it is believed that something can be done to remove or mitigate such evils. It was, I think, the existence of widespread poverty in the midst of great and growing productive powers, which was responsible for the change of outlook whereby poverty ceased to be a natural problem (or a natural condition) and became a social problem, open to study and amelioration. This was, at the least, an important element in the conviction that exact knowledge might be applied in social reform; and later, that as man had established an ever more complete control over his physical environment so he might come to control his social environment.

Thus, the pre-history of sociology can be assigned to a period of about one hundred years, roughly from 1750 to 1850; or, let us say, from the publication of Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois up to the work of Comte and the early writings of Spencer. The formative period of sociology as a distinct science occupies the second half of the nineteenth century.³ We can see from the brief survey of its origins some of the characteristics which early sociology assumed.

¹See G.G.Granger, La mathématique sociale du Marquis de Condorcet (Paris, 1956).

²A.Quételet, Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou essai de physique sociale (1835).

³On the history of sociology see H.Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (London 1959), and Heinz Maus, A Short History of Sociology (London 1962).

In the first place it was encyclopaedic; it was concerned with the whole social life of man, and with the whole of history. Secondly, under the influence of the philosophy of history, reinforced by the biological theory of evolution, it was evolutionary, seeking to identify the principal stages in social evolution. Thirdly, it was conceived as a positive science, identical in character with the natural sciences. In the eighteenth century the social sciences were conceived broadly upon the model of physics; sociology, in the nineteenth century, was modelled upon biology. This is evident in the preoccupation with social evolution, and in the widely accepted conception of society as an organism. The general concern with the scientific character of sociology appears most clearly in the attempts to formulate general laws of social evolution, both in sociology and in anthropology.

These wide claims naturally aroused opposition, especially from those who were working in narrower and more specialised fields; among them historians, economists, and political scientists. It is doubtful whether, even at the present day, sociology has altogether succeeded in living down its early pretentiousness. But we should distinguish among the different claims which were made, and also make a distinction between the claims as to the scope of the subject and the claims as to its discoveries. No-one believes any longer that Comte or Spencer discovered the laws of social evolution (though many believe that Marx did). But it does not follow from this that Comte and Spencer (or, for unbelievers, Marx) were entirely mistaken about the scope of sociology, or that they made no important contributions to its advancement. It seems clear that there is a need for a social science which is concerned with s...