History and Sociology in France

From Scientific History to the Durkheimian School

Robert Leroux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351595292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the late 19th century and early part of the 20th, with the coming of age of sociology in France, the idea that there could be a "science" of history was the subject of much and varied debate. The methodological problems surrounding historical knowledge that were debated throughout this period concerned not only scientific history, but the social sciences as well, and sociology more specifically.

Although sociology was from its origins in competition with the discipline of history, from the outset, it too was interested in history as a form of objective knowledge. Many of sociology's founders believed that by retracing historical processes, they could make a clean break with abstraction and metaphysics. For their part, historians generally remained hostile to any kind of systematization. And yet, at the end of the 19th century, the science of history would draw some valuable lessons from the emerging methodology of sociology. It was in large part under the impetus of the issues and problems raised by the philosopher Henri Berr and by the Durkheimian School, with the economist François Simiand as its lead protagonist, that the community of historians, increasingly aware of the limits of narrative history, turned so enthusiastically to social and economic history – just as Durkheim and his disciples consulted history in order to avoid the twin pitfalls of the philosophy of history and of introspective psychology. History and Sociology in France focuses on this dialogue of the two neighboring sciences.

Part I
The Idea of Scientific History

1
History and the Social Sciences

The enthusiasm for history that emerged at the beginning of the 19th century had a great influence on the social sciences. Born of the crisis of Western societies—caught up in what seemed a sudden acceleration of history—it is natural enough that these sciences should attempt to define the laws governing human destiny. The social sciences were historical by necessity: Comte, Cournot, Renan and Taine could not conceive of them in any other manner. The Revolution of 1789 can be considered to be the source of their social and political thinking. When romanticism began to run out of steam around the beginning of the 19th-century mark, the social sciences attempted to define themselves as true sciences, drawing inspiration in most cases from the model of the physical and biological sciences. It is often said that the 19th century was the century of history (le siècle de l’histoire) because of the large number of significant events which unfolded during its course. But one could also say that the 19th century is just as much the century of historical method, in the sense that history attempted to define itself as a science under the influence of a kind of positivism, but a form of scientific thought was often very far removed from that of Auguste Comte. This “scientific history” (histoire-science) defined itself at first in its break with the romanticism in the style of Jules Michelet and then in opposition to a philosophy of history, which was deemed to be too abstract and too remote from empirical facts. This new history, which was inspired by the model of the natural sciences, sought to provide a new interpretation of the French Revolution. Contrary to the historians of the day, the new generation of social scientists (or proto-sociologist) refused to see this event as a fortuitous, completely unforeseen event. Rather, they thought that it had been in preparation for centuries and that the coming together of all the necessary preconditions was the clearest illustration of this. Taine, for example, turned to the Revolution in the aftermath of the defeat of 1870. Many authors of the second part of the century, who developed each in their own way what one would later call “historical sociology”, were not, for all that, positivists.

Auguste Comte: The Progress of the Human Intelligence

The thinking of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was a perfect reflection of the intellectual ferment provoked by the shock of the Revolution. As he himself admitted, “without the Revolution there would have been no theory of progress and no social science”. In the wake of the Revolution, and indeed throughout the 19th century, there was one question that preoccupied many thinkers: what are the principles of social order? Comte believed that it was up to positive philosophy to discern those principles. And he considered that philosophy would become less and less interested in metaphysical speculation and that it would inevitably attempt to forge ever-closer links with science. But, he insisted, before it could be scientific, philosophy would have to be practical. As the sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl points out, Comte’s entire work was inspired by this social reform movement: “with Comte, the scientific interest, however lively it may be, is subordinate to the social interest”; in effect, “it asks philosophy to establish the bases of modern society”.¹ The science of society would thereafter have a supremely important function: it must preside over the reorganization of morals and manners. “I regard all institutions as pure nonsense, and they will remain so until the spiritual reorganization of society is complete or at least well under way”.²

The reform of society and the reform of knowledge were supposed to complement each other. If society was to be reorganized, the same must hold for science. On this point, Comte proposed a classification of sciences. His classification is highly selective: it leaves aside all the artistic disciplines (literature, philology, poetry etc.) as well as all the concrete sciences (geography, zoology etc.), and considers only the abstract or theoretical ones, i.e. those that have as their objective to discover and understand laws. In the end, Comte recognized only six sciences: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. And he placed these sciences within a strict historical timeframe.

As his classification of the sciences demonstrates so eloquently, Comte’s grand plan was to understand the progress of human intelligence. Which science is best equipped to grasp the main features of that progress? To begin with, Comte rejects introspective psychology à la Victor Cousin, which he deems unworthy of a place in his classification—as he saw it, the individual had no scientific rationale and was merely an abstraction. Thus, Comte argues that the movement in which humanity is caught up can be understood only through a collective psychology, which he named “social physics” or “sociology”. In his view, this justified the creation of a science of society which, like all the other sciences, would revolve around two aspects: the static and the dynamic. The static element, which is the science of order, is supposed to reveal the laws of coexistence, whereas the dynamic element, which is the science of progress, must examine the laws of succession. Sociology, according to Comte, becomes a real science only when it superimposes these two stages of knowledge.

This fundamental place of history in the work of Auguste Comte is so well known that we do not need to linger over it here: suffice it to say that the father of positivism was hostile to the narrative nature of the historiography of his time. “We do not yet have a true history conceived in a scientific spirit”, he writes in an early essay, “by which I mean a history that seeks to discover the laws that govern the development of the human species”.³ In his Cours de philosophie positive, Comte mentions that political and military history, so dear to historians of the time, was nothing more than a display of erudition that was “sterile and misdirected”, one that tended to distract from the study of social evolution.⁴ Thus conceived, history is superficial and not of much use; it is merely “an incoherent compilation of facts”.⁵ Assembling a multitude of heterogeneous facts runs counter to any serious scientific approach. Consequently, history is still far from the ideal stage, which Comte calls the positive stage, but history remains a fundamental method. The study of individual facts, he notes, helps to “maintain theological and metaphysical belief in the limitless and creative power that lawgivers wield over civilization […] This unfortunate effect results from the fact that, in great events, we see only people and never the things that drive them so irresistibly”.⁶ Hence this merciless judgment: “all the historical works written to date, even the most laudable, had never been, and by necessity never could be, anything more than annals, i.e. a description and chronological account of a certain sequence of particular facts, more or less important and more or less accurate, but always isolated from each other”.⁷

In history, of course, not everything is of equal importance: “We must look to the human past only for social phenomena that have obviously exerted real influence, at least indirect or remote influence, on the gradual unfolding of the successive phases that have brought the most advanced nations to their present state”.⁸ The law of the three stages [la loi des trois états], which is considered one of Comte’s most original propositions, establishes the principle of harmony between the history of thought, the general history of science and the history of society.

It was in 1822, in what he called his “plan for reorganizing society” (Plan des travaux pour réorganiser la société), that Comte set forth for first time, in an embryonic way, his famous law of the three stages of human development: the ideological and military stage, the metaphysical and legalistic stage and the positive and industrial stage. In the Cours de philosophie positive, he argues that the phases of social development depend more on the types of knowledge inherent to them: the theological stage corresponds to an archaic social structure, the metaphysical stage to a feudal social structure and the positive stage to an industrial social structure. In the end, there is only one dynamic law, and it governs all sociology and all human knowledge: “Do we not, each of us, in looking back on our own lives, remember that we were successively a theologian in our childhood, a metaphysician in our youth, and a physicist in adulthood?”⁹ In his Système de philosophiepositive, published at the end of his life, he devoted a volume to history. This volume is called Philosophy of history.¹⁰

From his first to his last works, Auguste Comte never changed his mind about history and the role that discipline plays in his system of thought. According to him, positivism “explains the mental evolution of Humanity, lays down the true method by which our abstract conceptions could be classified; thus reconciling the conditions of order and movement, hitherto to more or less variance. Its historical clearness and its philosophical force strength each other, for one cannot understand the connection of our conceptions except by studying the succession of the phases through which they pass. And on the other hand, but the existence of such a connection, it would be impossible to explain the historical phases”.¹¹

But Comte, as we could see, is opposed to history as an encyclopedic knowledge. For him, as his famous law of three stages reminds us, history is nothing else than a psychology of humanity.

Antoine Augustin Cournot: Between Chance and Necessity

Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801–1877) was a mathematician, economist and philosopher. He became familiar early with many authors from various disciplines, including Leibniz, Laplace, Darwin and Poisson, and was a keen follower of both natural sciences and emerging social sciences (especially political economy). His devotion to epistemology, as we will see, makes the core of his writings.

The vision of history that dominated Antoine Augustin Cournot’s thinking was the product of a culture shaped by mathematics and by philosophy. He did not, however, espouse a mechanical application of the mathematical model to the social sciences. He knew too well that social phenomena are specific in their nature, in that they are the result of strategic intentions and behavior. From this perspective, psychology, which he regarded as an unscientific discipline, seemed to him of little use. He preferred to fall back on philosophy and on history. Yet these disciplines, taken in isolation, seemed to him incomplete. He set out therefore to tie philosophical speculation and historical narration together with close links of reciprocity. “If...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I The Idea of Scientific History
• PART II Henri Berr and Historical Synthesis
• PART III The Durkheimian School and History
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index