Positivism and Sociology

Explaining Social Life

Peter Halfpenny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317651383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Any serious attempt to explain social life has to come to terms with sociology's positivist legacy. It is a heritage on the one hand from the seventeenth-century political arithmeticians and the later moral statisticians who believed that quantification would provide the basis for a dispassionate analysis of social affairs; and on the other hand from the nineteenth-century post-Enlightenment social philosophers who were eager to develop an empirical science of society that would enable them to control social conduct – just as the physical sciences had provided the knowledge to tame nature. Yet every debate about the relation between positivism and sociology is clouded by the diversity of uses of the term 'positivism' – uses that are so varied that some can pronounce positivism dead while others find it still the vital force that dominates sociology.

The particular merit of Peter Halfpenny's book is that it makes this diversity of uses its central theme. In order to provide a clear basis from which to assess controversial questions about the contribution of the positivist traditions to sociology, the book reviews twelve different important uses of the term 'positivism' that have emerged at different times since the mid-nineteenth century, when Auguste Comte coined both 'positivism' and 'sociology'. This review is conducted by examining the historical development of the two independent roots of modern sociological positivism – positivist philosophy and statistics – and by analysing logical positivist philosophy, which in many ways defined the course of twentieth century philosophy of the social (as well as the natural) sciences.

1

Comte and the Early Period

The name ‘positivist philosophy’ was originally coined by the Parisian Auguste Comte (1798–1857) to describe his systematic reconstruction of the history and development of scientific knowledge. His ideas were initially sketched out in essays (1822, 1824), and then presented comprehensively in a series of lectures, the ‘Cours de philosophie positive’, begun in 1826 and completed in 1829, and then published in six volumes over the years 1830 to 1842. Positivist knowledge, Comte maintained, was the inevitable outcome both of the progressive growth of the individual mind and of the historical development of human knowledge. Comte believed that in his extensive reading over the whole range of scientific disciplines he had discovered a great and fundamental historical law, his famous law of three stages. According to this law, individual thinkers in all branches of knowledge necessarily begin by accounting for phenomena theologically, by explaining mundane occurrences as willed by unfathomable gods. This is the necessary starting point of all knowledge for two reasons. First, without some theoretical guide one could not begin to make systematic observations (for there would be no way of discriminating between important or theory-relevant observations and unimportant ones), and it is, according to Comte, theological theories which arise spontaneously in the primitive human mind. Secondly, sciences in their infancy research the most intractable questions, about the essences of phenomena and their ultimate origins and destinies, to which theological answers are most appropriate.

Theology provides the attractive chimera that excites curiosity and stimulates intellectual inquiry, but this first stage of knowledge is inevitably followed by the second, metaphysical stage, where it is not spiritual agents but abstract forces, powers and essences that are posited as responsible for worldly affairs. This second stage is a necessary transitional interlude, a period of negative criticism of the first theological epoch, before the appearance of the third and final positive or scientific era. Here, unresolvable issues about ultimate origins, inaccessible powers and final purposes are relinquished in favour of the more limited but attainable end of describing relations observed to hold between phenomena. The fundamental character of the positive philosophy is to consider all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws. The exact discovery of these laws and their reduction to the least possible number constitutes the goal of all our efforts’ (Comte, 1830, p. 8). The Newtonian law of gravitation is, for Comte, the paradigm case of a positive law. It provides the standard against which to measure the maturity of all fields of inquiry, and the ideal they should seek to emulate.

In their rate of development, Comte argues, the sciences fall into a natural order, his hierarchy of the sciences. The lower sciences develop first: a form of inquiry progresses to the positive stage at a rate that is greater the less complex it is, the less its dependence on other sciences, and the greater its distance from human affairs. In his Cours Comte presented a vast review of contemporary knowledge to show that astronomy (celestial physics), mechanics and chemistry (terrestrial physics) and biology or physiology (organic physics) had arrived at the positive stage, in that order, and he concluded that all that remained to complete the system of the observational sciences was to found the positive science of society, which he originally called social physics, but for which he later coined the name sociology. This task he set himself to accomplish.

Notable for its absence from his hierarchy of sciences is psychology, which Comte rejected as a metaphysical remnant because, he argued, ‘interior observation’ of intellectual phenomena, on which the psychology of his day was based, is not possible, for ‘the thinking individual cannot cut himself in two – one of the parts reasoning, while the other is looking on’ (Comte, 1830, p. 21). Even if it were possible, it is not an objective source of knowledge of mental phenomena, for ‘it gives rise to almost as many divergent opinions as there are so-called observers’ (ibid., p. 22). Encouraged by the phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), Comte believed that psychology would be replaced by ‘cerebral physiology’, which gave mental operations a physical location in the brain and put an end to metaphysical speculations about thought being the essence of the soul.

For Comte, sociology was the queen of the sciences, for without the guidance of its laws, the discoveries of the lower sciences could not be utilised to their maximum advantage for humanity. But although Comte’s avowed aim in the Cours was to construct positive sociology, the natural science of society, his study is in the main devoted to arguing that the fulfilment of this aim is possible and necessary. He does not there present any newly discovered empirical sociological laws, other than the law of three stages (and the empirical justification for that law was doubted by later writers).

As propounded in the Cours, Comte’s positive philosophy has three parts, and it provides the first three conceptions of positivism. Positivism₁ is a theory of historical development in which improvements in knowledge are both the motor of historical progress and the source of social stability. Positivism₂ is a theory of knowledge, according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to humankind is that of science, grounded in observation. Positivism₃ is a unity of science thesis, according to which all sciences can be integrated into a single natural system.

Comte’s achievement lay in bringing together under the new name of ‘positivism’ a variety of themes current in early nineteenth-century thought, themes which stemmed from the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment and the conservative reaction to it. Indeed, in Comte’s eyes, it is the Enlightenment that constitutes the metaphysical stage, the period of negative criticism of the old theological order, that paves the way for the new positive scientific age.

The most obvious Enlightenment theme in Comte’s Cours is the belief in the power of human reason to grasp the workings of the world and, concomitantly, the rejection of the traditional teachings of the church that reality is knowable only by and through God. Moreover, the world that is within the reach of human reason includes both nature and humanity. No longer was it accepted that human beings, because they are potentially spiritual (or for any other reason), are discontinuous with brute nature. All phenomena, natural, mental and social, are equally amenable to human investigation. But although Comte concurred with the Enlightenment philosophes that it is necessary to break with the idea that knowledge is constituted by divine decree (Becker, 1932; Nisbet, 1973), his positive philosophy marked the end of philosophy in the traditional sense of metaphysics, of analysis that goes beyond physics, beyond the science of observable reality. He could not agree with the radical Cartesian rationalists of the Enlightenment when they claimed that knowledge was the result of deductions from ‘self-evident dictates of pure reason’, that human thought alone, freed from theological interference, could construct knowledge. Rather, Comte insisted, thought must be guided by experience, reason subjugated to reality. Any suggestion that there are a priori principles that guarantee knowledge is mere speculation. It is empirical evidence that secures knowledge. Positive philosophy restricts itself to the empirical study of this empirical knowledge, with the aim of formulating laws like any other positive science. Comte’s own study in the Cours of the history of the sciences, culminating in his law of three stages, is a prime example of this new positive philosophical attitude.

The knowledge that human experience reveals is unified, and the division of phenomena into different disciplines is an arbitrary convenience. Although the sciences arrive at the ultimate positive stage at different times, there are no essential differences between branches of knowledge. This theme, too, Comte took from the eighteenth-century philosophes, who, collaborating under the editorship of Denis Diderot (1713–84) and Jean le Rond D’Alembert (1717–83), sought to compile a systematic compendium unifying all prevailing ideas in the arts, sciences and crafts. Comte’s Cours is a descendant of their twenty-eight volume Encyclopédie, published over the period 1751–72 (Hazard, 1954).

Despite founding and unifying knowledge in human experience, Comte disapproved of the Enlightenment thinkers’ celebration of the individual, which he believed was the source of the post-revolutionary crisis of civilisation in France and other European countries. Individualism, which he described as the disease of Western civilisation, fails to recognise that social order, and society itself, rest on moral consensus, on an organic unity, and any attempt to understand society by dissecting it into its component individuals is fatal. Although opposed to religion as a theory of knowledge, Comte recognised the importance of religion as a unifying moral force. Given the contemporary challenges to religious authority, the answer to social upheavals, thought Comte, lay in the moral regeneration of the population by strengthening existing institutions such as the family and providing new ones such as a scientific (positivist) leadership. Interestingly, despite his belief that re-establishing social stability requires that individuals submit to the moral regulation of the group, Comte did not provide a theory of the state or of other specifically political institutions. He shared in the growing nineteenth-century realisation that society was more than the state (Runciman, 1965), and so his positive philosophy was not a science of politics, analysing the origin and uses of government, but a science of society in general.

In his antagonism to individualism, Comte sided with the conservatives such as Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) and Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) in their reaction against the philosophes (Nisbet, 1967). Yet Comte was no conservative, harking back to the old order. Following Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–81) and the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), he believed in the necessity and desirability of progress, which was to be achieved in exactly the same way that order was established: through the development and application of scientific knowledge (Becker and Barnes, 1938, ch. 13). Just as nature had been tamed once its laws were known, so societal disorder was to be controlled by discovering the laws which govern its course. Social conflict is due to ignorance, and it is overcome when people learn the laws of society and learn to accommodate to them. Only on the basis of empirical sociological laws, Comte insisted, could social harmony be established and social reforms rationally planned and introduced, and the disorder that results from attempting to fulfil impossible aspirations, among which he included individual liberty, be avoided. Comte’s positive sociology was a science of stability and social reconstruction. It linked together order and progress, which earlier had been thought to be implacably opposed.

In sum, for Comte the enemies of positive philosophy were religion (as a dogma, not as a moral system), metaphysics (in which he included psychology), individualism and revolutionary utopianism. Religion made the world mysterious and so inhibited empirical inquiry. Metaphysical speculations were uncontrolled by experience and so disputes between rival opinions were undecidable and of no practical value to humankind. Psychology was founded on unreliable self-knowledge gained through introspection. Individualism made the mistake of suggesting that society could be constructed by individuals, and failed to recognise that individuals are constituted by society. Revolutionary Utopians dreamed up visions of society that took no account of what science revealed to be possible or impossible.

In opposition to these ideas, Comte’s positive philosophy was empiricist, sociologistic, encyclopaedic, scientists and progressivist: empiricist because human experience was the arbiter of knowledge; sociologistic because psychological study of human subjectivity was ousted by sociological study of social phenomena, which precede and constitute the individual psyche (Benoit-Smullyan, 1948); encyclopaedic (or naturalistic) because all the sciences, natural and human, can be integrated into a unified system of natural laws; scientistic because knowledge has practical value and the growth of science is for the benefit of humankind; progressivist (or social reformist) because the crisis of civilisation could be solved and social stability restored by adjusting human desires to the scientifically established laws of society, by re-establishing a scientifically based supra-individual moral order to replace the deposed authority of the Catholic Church.

It is these features of Comte’s system, or a selection from them, that are today identified as having had the most significant influence on his contemporaries and successors, rather than any substantive contributions he might have made to what is nowadays meant by sociology. This is for a number of reasons. One is that, despite his antipathy towards utopianism and cosmogony, Comte’s science of society consisted of a millenarian cosmology, a universal history of humankind, culminating in predictions about the perfectibility of society if people were prepared to submit themselves to science. Since Comte’s death in the middle of the nineteenth century sociology has become more specialised, more narrowly construed as the study of the structured social relations that constitute social institutions and societies: it has been separated from general social philosophy. The contrast between the present conception of sociology and Comte’s more grandiose science of social reform is most pronounced when considering his later work, especially the four-volume Système de politique positive (1851–4), where positivism took on another form, separate from both the theory of history and the theory of knowledge that it had earlier been. The Système embodies positivism₄ which is a secular religion of humanity devoted to the worship of society, to be promulgated and administered by the priesthood of the positivist church, headed by Comte as high priest. Although this movement was popular with some of his followers (W. M. Simon, 1963), for others it was an aberration that violated the precepts of positive science that Comte himself had expounded in his earlier work.

This latter was the view, in particular, of John Stuart Mill (1806–73), the English empiricist philosopher, who had been impressed by Comte’s Cours and had been responsible for introducing its ideas to British audiences. Although he dissented from Comte’s sociologism, being a staunch defender of empirical psychology and individual liberty, Mill agreed with Comte that the study of society had been retarded by its failure to employ scientific methods. Mill also agreed that the goal of science was the production of laws summarising the regular association of phenomena. Consequently, he was in sympathy with the empirical methods of data collection that Comte recommended: observation, experiment, comparison and, unique to sociology, historical method, through which the units compared in the comparative method are assembled into an historical progression. But Mill felt that Comte had paid insufficient attention to methods of data analysis, specifically the logic of induction through which the truth of laws is empirically justified. The Cours prompted Mill to complete his System of Logic (1843), a study of the methods used to justify laws, particularly in the moral sciences (see Chapter 5). Mill’s early enthusiasm for Comte’s work faded, however, as Comte came to concentrate increasingly on the religion of humanity, and by the time the eighth edition of the System of Logic was published in 1872 Mill had removed most of his favourable references to Comte (W. M. Simon, 1963).

Another reason why Comte’s abstract philosophical ideas are generally considered more important than his substantive sociological ideas is that his speculative pronouncements about progress and the moral reconstruction of society were soon overtaken in popularity by the evolutionary sociology of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), which was widely understood to offer a scientific corrective to Comte’s later pseudo-religious excesses. Spencer’s evolutionism, when first expounded in the 1850s, dovetailed with the laissez-faire ethos of the day. His ideas formed part of the general movement now known as social Darwinism (Hofstadter, 1955), after the famous account of evolution by Charles Darwin (1809–92) in On the Origin of Species published in 1859 – though Spencer’s first statement of evolution antedated Darwin’s book by several years (Peel, 1971). Spencer disagreed with many of Comte’s ideas, and claimed to be little influenced by him (Spencer, 1864). In particular, being committed to individual responsibility, he abhorred the moral authoritarianism of Comte’s sociology. The earlier progressivists, including Comte, had claimed that progress relied upon increasing social harmony – avoiding conflict and competition – by subjugating individuals to the moral order, by imposing science over individuality. Spencer rejected this sociologism, and instead proposed an individualistic theory of historical development in which competition between individuals was the motor of progress. (Marx and Engels were developing a theory of progress that depended on conflict between classes rather than individuals at about the same time.) The very competition which Comte took to be the result of either ignorance of the harmonising laws of society or failure to conform to them was for Spencer the manifestation of real incompatibilities between individuals’ interests (or for Marx, classes’ interests), and the struggle of one against another provided the internal dynamic for the advance of society.

Despite his differences from Comte, Spencer is commonly considered to have reinforced the ‘positivist spirit’ of the second half of the nineteenth century and is often identified as one of the important sources of twentieth-century sociological positivism (Timasheff, 1955; Martindale, 1961; Kolakowski, 1966). Consequently, his work is taken to provide a fifth conception of positivism: positivism, is a theory of history in which the motor of progress that guarantees the emergence of superior forms of society is competition between increasingly differentiated individuals.

Spencer’s evolutionary theory of history (positivism₅) is opposed to Comte’s theory of history (positivism₁), but what links the two authors is their naturalism (positivism₁), for just as Comte unifies all knowledge in his hierarchy of sciences, so Spencer unifies all knowledge under his principle of evolution. Although evolutionary theories can form the basis of anti-naturalism (and therefore anti-positivism₃) if interpreted teleologically in terms of the wilful pursuit of human goals, Spencer’s universal evolutionary principle is a naturalistic one: he maintains that because every active force or cause produces more than one effect, progress in all areas – physical, biological and human – consists in increasing differentiation, passing from homogeneity to heterogeneity. Accordingly, social development is a purely natural process, and not the product of individual will or human goal-seeking (Spencer, 1857).

Spencer was also sympathetic to the scientistic notio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Comte and the Early Period
• 2 Statistics
• 3 Logical Positivism
• 4 Laws and Explanation
• 5 Theory and Evidence
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index