The worlds of positivism were an unintended creation. Positivists imagined one world, but their efforts spawned many. Universalist by ambition and design, positivism was contingent upon local and cultural circumstances. This volume connects and compares the variegated concepts, scientific cultures, and sociopolitical contexts of positivism on a global scale. This inquiry results in an overdue reappraisal of what was, together with Marxism and historicism, one of the three major intellectual formations of the nineteenth century. Today positivism may seem passé, evoking the skirmishes of the 1960s, when the Frankfurt School opened fire on Popperian critical rationalism, or recalling Marxist anti-positivist diatribes. Other than in the realm of international jurisprudence, where the critical legal positivism pioneered by Hans Kelsen retains a formidable presence, positivism appears as defunct and marginalized.
Yet it seems too early to bury positivism. Positivists unraveled the rules nature and society obeyed and they claimed that social progress and moral regeneration across the planet depended on the success of their doctrines. The key epistemic and political problem nineteenth-century positivism raised has lost nothing of its urgency. The universality of knowledge about the world remains a burning issue wherever global theories surreptitiously arbitrate between, adjust to, or repudiate rival knowledge and validity claims, and particularly so when it comes to the sprawling debates on human rights, cultural relativism, and constructivism. The practitioners of positivism aspired to universality, but their sharp disagreement about wherein universality was to be based cut to the very heart of their project: Are there discoverable, general laws of nature and society, or does universality reside in a set of methods whose applicability extends to all cultures and disciplines? Or is there no such universality at all, given the increasingly widespread contention that not only knowledge but also its very claim to universal validity are culturally conditioned? What have scientists since made of this pledge, and how do they deliver on their promise in present-day societies?
It is time for a reappraisal of positivism that situates it in its global intellectual and political frameworks. This permits us to recover the conditions surrounding the emergence and the political objectives of an intellectual program that claimed to be universally valid, free of ideology, and secularist. Positivism was predicated on an all-encompassing science-based and normative vision that should make it applicable to every society. The science positivists envisaged and practiced relied on an epistemic merger between nature and society: the laws of nature and the laws of society were perceived as analogous or identical, requiring related methods of inquiry. The universalism positivists professed was all-embracing in a double sense: it aimed both at the planet in its entirety and at comprehensive knowledge of this world. Many acolytes of positivism believed that the validity of their findings was detached from all cultural connotations as well as immune to disciplinary specificities.
This universalist premise constitutes the point of departure for the present book. Adopting a global and comparative perspective, our volume seeks to dismantle positivist universalism. In what follows, the authors particularize positivism by looking beyond its French and English iterations in order to demonstrate how it evolved from a bricolage-like merger of Comtean and Millean ancestries. At the same time, the book offers a fresh view of the politics of scholarly disciplines. It locates the sites and settings in which positivist doctrines and methods were formulated and propagated, explores how they received their universalist imprint, and analyzes how they became part of the traffic in concepts between distinct branches of scholarship as they emerged. The study of the selective appropriation and reinvention of positivism across and beyond Europe gives us a fine sense of its intersection with pre-existing local traditions. It also alerts us to the struggle over positivist knowledge between imperial elites and those intellectuals who forged the scientific aspirations of nascent nations within these empires . The nineteenth-century transmission of positivist doctrines and practices shows how brittle and fluid the frontiers of Europe were and how the âWestâ was constructed in a process whereby âpositivistâ knowledge was deracinated, tweaked, and readjusted while being transplanted. The global intellectual history of positivism is not a history of local adaptations of a pristine universal body of knowledge, instead it lays bare the local origins of these apparently universally valid conceptual resources and traces how they were reparticularized elsewhere.
This book explains the relevance positivism acquired across the globe and across disciplines from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Its time frame spans the period from the 1770s to the 1930s, while its geographical scope ranges from India to France and from Brazil to Russia. The chapters that follow are not simply case studies of self-contained national movements, nor are they confined to the reception of the ideas of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill , the two pivotal figures of positivist thought. Instead the authors of this book respond to an overarching question: How was a set of ostensibly universal concepts and methods inflected to serve concrete scientific and political purposes on local, national, and imperial levels around the world? By studying positivism in regions outside of the North Atlantic archipelago, the book shows how its Millean and Comtean versions were updated, conceptually refashioned, and amalgamated to fit local needs. Thereby the book contributes to the ongoing debate about the benefits and discontents of global intellectual history.
The Promise and Perils of Global Intellectual History
âGlobal intellectual historyâ is a burgeoning cottage industry within the discipline, but its key premises remain ill-conceptualized. 1 Recent work on matters cognate and adjacent to the theme of the present book, for instance on global Spencerism and Darwinism , 2 amply demonstrates that a transnational perspective is stimulating because it helps dispel ingrained Eurocentric prejudices, while mitigating some of the less salutary effects of the contextualist paradigm in the history of political thought. 3 The claim that a given utterance can only be exhaustively understood by situating it in a specific framework of contemporary concerns, that is, by establishing its context of emergence, has acted as an antidote against perennialist conceptions, some of whose adherents traced the life cycles of coherent and self-sufficient ideas over the centuries. Yet contextualism has also reinforced assumptions about the authenticity of pristine and primordial ideas, suggesting that these ideas, while pure at their sources, were skewed and garbled once appropriated beyond the narrowly defined environments in which they originated. 4 This presumption in favor of the autarky of contextsâoften understood in national termsâhas made it exceedingly difficult to trace larger chains of filiations across time and space.
This volume embraces the stimulating advances promised by the emerging design of global intellectual history. Superficially, positivism may lend itself to a classical diffusionist history of the sort that traces how European thinkers civilized and enlightened the rest of the world. In the diffusionist model, 5 transfers are self-propelling, dispensing the historian from the arduous task of clarifying who acts for what purpose and under what constraints. Here a set of benignly liquid, mellifluous metaphors (âflows,â âinfluencesâ) conceptually sustains lubricant-like, smoothly all-permeating âtransfers.â In contrast to the diffusionist model, the chapters of this volume combine an interest in positivism as an intrinsically universalist program tied to a specific mode of âworld-makingâ 6 with a focus on its agents and on their strategies of appropriation across the globe. 7 What emerges from the following pages are the âbrokered worldsâ 8 of positivism . Comtean positivism can be seen as the first modern organized movement that systematically sought to spread its worldview and techniques of knowledge-acquisition across the globe. Comteâs liaison men, like Gustave DâEichthal , acted to that effect across Europe as well as in the Americas. Scholarly and political go-betweens traveled to the centers of positivism to creatively appropriate the messages enunciated there. For example, Young Turk intellectuals like Ahmed Rıza flocked to Paris to study with Comteâs heir Pierre Laffitte while Austrian philologist Theodor Gomperzâs English sojourn was punctuated by meetings with John Stuart Mill and George Grote . Spanish adherents of the German philosopher Krause received his adaptation of Comteâs philosophy refracted through the French renderings of Krauseâs works, while Polish promoters of positivism became acquainted with John Stuart Millâs works at the imperial hub of St Petersburg and prepared their Polish versions of his writings on the basis of Russian translations. 9 The English disciples of Richard Congreve...