by Peter Watson
Under this system, children became so washed out that they often needed to be shaken awake in the mornings, and had to be dressed by the adult overseers. ‘In some of the mines conditions were even harsher–children might be taken as early as age four, to perform the function of opening and closing the ventilation traps. They had to sit for hours in small niches cut into the coal where, in the words of one Commissioner, their work “was solitary confinement of the worst order”.’15 Not surprisingly, the death rates arising from these arrangements were alarming, not least from children falling asleep on the job and sliding into machinery. That at least had the merit of being a quick death. But there were many diseases that thrived amid the squalid sanitation, most especially the unholy trinity of tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid.
Dickens and other writers produced their ‘industrial novels’, Robert Owen and others campaigned for a change in the law, but the first person who thought industrialisation was a problem that could be studied systematically was the Frenchman Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte, notable physically for his unusually short legs, had an exceptional upbringing in that he was raised in a family made up entirely of women, and this seems to have had a permanent effect: he always had a problem with women and was always interested in those less well-off than himself. The son of a civil servant, he entered the École Polytechnique in Paris, then well-known for its courses in science and engineering, and concentrated on the study of the French and industrial revolutions. It was at the Polytechnique that Comte discovered his lifetime aim, to ‘apply the methods of the physical sciences to society’.17 Comte understood that society around him was changing in a fundamental sense: what he called ‘theological’ and ‘military’ values were giving way to ‘scientific’ and ‘industrial’ ones. In such a world, he said, industrialists replaced warriors, and scientists replaced priests. The social scientists, ‘because they managed human harmony, essentially fulfilled the role of high priest in the new social order’.18
Between 1817 and 1824, after his time at the École Polytechnique, Comte became Saint-Simon’s secretary. After they fell out (because Comte felt that Saint-Simon had not given him enough credit on a paper he published), the secretary set off on his own. He was a great believer in phases and it was in his book Cours de Philosophie Positive (Course of Positive Philosophy) that he argued that both humanity and science had passed through three stages.19 There was first the theological stage in which people attribute phenomena to a deity; in the second, metaphysical stage, humans attribute causes to abstract forces or forms; in the third, what he called the positive stage, science ‘abandons the search for ultimate causes’ and looks instead for regularities and predictable sequences in ‘observable phenomena’. He believed that humanity had made systematic progress in the main sciences: the physical sciences in the seventeenth century, and the life sciences in the eighteenth century and his own time, the early nineteenth century. From now on, he said, science–and in particular life science–would be at the centre of progressive civilisation.20 In his own mind the life sciences were called ‘organic physics’ and were divided into physiology and social physics, what he later came to call sociology, a neologism he coined. Social physics, he said, is essentially divided from physiology, ‘it has its own subject matter, the regularities of the social world, which cannot be translated into the laws of another science’.21 Comte was specifically and deliberately seeking to replace political philosophy with sociology–he said it was ‘inevitable’–as a less partisan basis for social harmony and, indeed, morality. Social phenomena, he said, are like all other phenomena in that they have their own invariable natural laws. But he did distinguish two forms of sociology. One, the ‘static’ form, governed the organisation of society, producing order and morality, whereas the ‘dynamic’ form governed the laws of change.22
Comte then rather lost his way. His obsession with social order, combined with his scornful view of organised religion (not to mention a passionate love affair), led him to attempt his own form of social order, in a new religion, the aim of which was ‘to live in love on the basis of positive knowledge’. Comte loved religious ritual–he thought it helped bring about social harmony–but there was little that was ‘positive’ about these institutions that were founded in his name. In fact, more than anything else, they paralleled the Catholic church, except that the love of humanity was the object of worship.23 Comte’s considerable creative energies were thus deflected and dissipated. This hindered the maturation of his system of social physics, which ultimately fell down on two accounts. There was no allowance in his system for psychology, for individual motivation. And he was so obsessed with order, and how to achieve it, that he neglected the role of conflict in society, the crude reality of power. This left a gap for Marx to fill.24
Comte had an English counterpart in Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who, like the Frenchman, was much influenced by hard science and engineering. In Spencer’s case this had much to do with the fact that he was brought up in Derby, a railway town in the British midlands, where Spencer’s first employment was for a railway company. But he differed from Comte in one fundamental way: whereas the Frenchman’s aim, ultimately, was for sociology to influence government policy, Spencer was always anxious to have sociology show that government ‘should interfere as little as possible in human affairs’. He was an admirer of both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin and he adapted their ideas to produce a picture of society that he viewed as increasingly complex and therefore needing, as in a factory, both structural differentiation and the specialisation of functions. This was necessary, he said, because such a structure made societies more adaptable in a Darwinian sense. He insisted that evolution occurs among societies at every level, resulting in ‘the survival of the fittest’ (the phrase is his, though he only partially assimilated the theory of natural selection). This process, he said, would ‘weed out’ less adaptable peoples, an approach that became known as social Darwinism.25
Spencer was more popular than Comte, certainly in Britain and America, where his most famous book, The Study of Sociology (1873), was published both between hard covers and as a series in the press. One reason for his popularity was that he told the Victorian middle classes what they wanted to hear: that individual moral effort is the motor of change, and that therefore sociology supported ideas of laissez-faire economics and minimum government intervention in industry, health and welfare.
During the course of the nineteenth century, German sociology caught up with and then overtook its French and English counterparts. Following the horrors of Stalinism and the grim conditions in many Eastern European countries during the Cold War (not to mention China), the name of Karl Marx (1818–1883) carries much baggage. His political theories were discussed earlier, in Chapter 27. For many people, however, he has always been regarded as much as a sociologist as a political theorist. His sociological ideas revolve around his concepts of alienation and ideology–these too were discussed earlier, but a brief recapitulation will help.26 Alienation refers to the extent to which people’s lives and self-image are determined and often damaged by their material working conditions. ‘People working in factories,’ Marx said, ‘become factory workers,’ by which he meant that they come to feel they have no control over their lives and frequently are made to operate far below their capabilities. By ‘ideology’ he meant prevailing world views, unconsciously represented in a society, which make people think that, for example, nothing can be done about their state of affairs, nothing can be improved because the way things are is ‘natural’. Marx’s other sociological idea was that of the ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in society. For him, the conditions of production comprise the base, the fundamental reality of society, whereas social institutions–the law, say, the civil service, or the church–make up the superstructure. For Marx, economics is the fundamental human science, not psychology, and in saying this he created a new way of looking at human affairs–the relation between belief or knowledge, or social institu
tions, and the operation of power. ‘Whereas Enlightenment writers or nineteenth-century liberals started their thinking from claims about human nature, Marx reversed the equation and sought to explain human nature via historical and economic factors.’27
It may seem surprising now but, to begin with, Marx’s ideas were not really assimilated in western Europe till the end of the century (Harold Perkins says Marxism was ‘hardly known’ in England before the 1880s). To begin with, there was far more interest in him in Russia, which was then a very retarded country, politically and socially, and where people had begun to wonder whether such a backward state could ‘leap-frog’ forward or whether it needed to go through the different reforms, revolutions and renaissances that the West had already experienced. Marx came to the attention of the West only later, as events in Russia turned violent and appeared to ratify his arguments.
The other German sociologists who helped shape both the discipline of sociology and the twentieth century were Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel. Like Marx, Weber’s theories were predominantly economic but he also owed something to Comte and was probably the first German to call himself a sociologist. (Reference to society, as ‘society’, was not common before the end of the nineteenth century. People referred to ‘political society’, ‘savage society’, etc. but not to anything more abstract.28)
The main concern among German sociologists was ‘modernity’, how modern life differed in a social, political, psychological, economic and moral sense from what had gone before. This idea was particularly prominent in Germany because of the country’s formal unification on 1 January 1871. All of Max Weber’s work was aimed at identifying what made modern, Western civilisation distinctive but, as Roger Smith has characterised it, all the early sociologists were interested in how modernity came about. Here is Smith’s table:
Herbert Spencer: modernity involved a change from a predominantly militant [military] society to an industrial one;
Karl Marx: the change was from feudalism to capitalism;
Henry Maine (the British sociologist/anthropologist, whose most famous work was Ancient Law, which took an evolutionary approach): status → contract;
Max Weber: traditional authority → rational-legal authority;
Ferdinand Tönnies: Gemeinschaft (community) → Gesellschaft (association).29
Weber thought that social science should be developed to help the newly unified German state by analysing and clarifying just what, exactly, were the ‘inescapable modern social and economic conditions’. He was part of a group of scholars–predominantly economic historians–who in 1872 founded the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Society for Social Policy) whose aim was just this, to research the links between social conditions and industrialisation.30 As they saw it, members of the Verein thought that Germany was faced with a dilemma. They agreed that the Second Reich, in which they lived and worked, had no option but to accept industrialisation, but at the same time did not believe that the economy satisfied everyone equally. They therefore recommended that the government develop policies which reflected this reality, such as a system of national insurance, to alleviate working-class poverty.31
Within sociology, Weber was a polymath. To begin with he wrote economic history, then made a survey of the agricultural depression in Prussia in the 1880s, before turning to a different aspect of history, the ancient religions of Israel, India and China, which provided him with a comparative perspective for (modern) Western economic development.32 This gave an added authority to his best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which appeared in 1904. In this work he sought to explain that ‘the crucial economic development in the modern world, capitalism, was first and foremost an exercise carried out by Protestants–even in Catholic countries’.33 Moreover, these Protestants were not necessarily concerned with wealth creation, as such, for the luxuries money could buy, but far more by work as a form of moral obligation, a calling (Beruf), as the best way to fulfil one’s duty to God. In effect, whereas for Catholics the highest ideal was purification of one’s own soul by withdrawal from the world and by contemplation (as with monks in a retreat), for Protestants the virtual opposite was true: fulfilment arises from helping others.34
Though a passionately political man, Weber was just as eager as Comte was for sociology to produce ‘value-free facts’ about society–that is, facts free from the personal or collective values of the scientists carrying out the research. At the same time, Weber was at pains to point out that science could not provide values or tell us how to live; it could only provide new facts which might help us in our decisions about how to live. He thought that the most salient fact about the modern world is that it brings disenchantment. It is a world in which, he said, ‘the gods neither have nor can have a home’.35 Modernity, for Weber, meant rationality, the organisation of affairs based on the trinity of efficiency, order and material satisfaction. This for him was achieved by means of legal, commercial and bureaucratic institutions that increasingly govern our relations with one another. The problem, as he saw it, was that commercial and industrial society, whatever freedoms and other benefits it has, brings disenchantment into our lives, eliminates any ‘spiritual purpose’ for mankind.36 He didn’t think there was anything to be done about this; disenchantment was here to stay and had to be lived with.
A final point of Weber’s was that the new human sciences, of which sociology was one, were fundamentally different from the natural sciences. While we can ‘explain’ natural occurrences in terms of the application of causal laws, human conduct is ‘intrinsically meaningful’, and has to be ‘interpreted’ or ‘understood’ in a way which has no counterpart in nature.37 This Weberian dichotomy has remained vivid and pertinent down to our own day.
Hardly less influential than this dichotomy, at the time anyway, was the distinction made by Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936). In 1887 he characterised pre-modern societies as based on Gemeinschaft (community), whereas modern societies he said were based on Gesellschaft (association). Communities in the traditional sense grow organically and have ‘sacred’ values which are shared by everyone, most of which are unquestioned. Societies in the modern world, on the other hand, are planned along rational, scientific lines and are maintained by bureaucracies. It follows, Tönnies said, that there is inevitably something artificial and arbitrary about modern societies, with no guarantee that the people we associate with will share our own values. This view was often expressed by the arts of modernism (Chapter 36).
The fourth of the great nineteenth-century German sociologists was Georg Simmel, who in 1903 published an essay, ‘The metropolis and mental life’. He explained there that ‘The psychological foundation, upon which metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.’38 For Simmel, who taught both Karl Mannheim and Georg Lukács, the vast new cities of the nineteenth century (metropolises, not medieval university towns) were a new type of space, with important implications for human interaction, ‘a space that both excites and alienates…a place that leads to the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture…’39 If the first phrase sounds like the city the impressionists were trying to portray, that explains why Simmel was known as ‘the Manet of philosophy’ in Berlin. His other influential point was his distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ culture. Objective culture for Simmel was what we would call ‘high culture’, what Matthew Arnold described as the best that has been thought, written, composed, and painted. This culture was objective in that it was ‘out there’, in concrete form, for everyone to see, hear, or read, and Simmel thought that how people related to this ‘canon’ of works was the best way in which to define a society or culture. On the other hand, in ‘subjective culture’, said Simmel, an individual seeks ‘self-fulfilment and self-realisation’ not in relation to any culture ‘out there’ but through his or her own resources. Nothing–or
very little–is shared in subjective culture. Simmel thought that the classic example of subjective culture was the business culture; everyone was turned in on his or her own particular project. In such a world everyone could be more or less satisfied with their lot yet be unaware of the collective dissatisfaction, manifested as alienation. In 1894 Simmel became the first person to teach a course specifically called sociology.40
Simmel leads us back to France again, for his opposite number there was Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). The son of a rabbi from Lorraine, a Jew and a provincial, Durkheim was doubly marginal, which perhaps gave an edge to his observations. France had been through some regular periods of turbulence since 1789–the revolution of 1848, the Franco-Prussian War and siege of Paris, 1870–1871–and this gave Durkheim an abiding interest in the conditions of social stability, what determines and what destroys it, and which factors give individuals a sense of purpose, keep them honest and optimistic.41
