Along with related ‘social sciences’, sociology emerged as a separate academic discipline in the nineteenth century. However, sociological thought (the capacity to reflect upon and to think critically about a specifically ‘social’ dimension to human affairs) has its roots in much earlier periods. In this chapter, we look specifically at the highly influential thought of the European Enlightenment and at its development into the early 19th century.
New ways of thinking about societies began to emerge during the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. A new, critical approach to intellectual inquiry developed which provided the foundations for the development of specifically social scientific approaches to the understanding of social processes. Hereafter, we look at some of the key ideas and intellectual developments that occurred during this period.
What was the Enlightenment?
The Enlightenment refers to a period of European intellectual history that has its beginnings in the early years of the eighteenth century. Many of the most important thinkers, movements and projects associated with the Enlightenment were based in France. However, Enlightenment thinkers were also active in most of the major European states of the day.
During this period a new framework of ideas about human beings and their societies was developed in the work of a wide variety of thinkers. In particular, a new preoccupation with the social world emerged. This began to be seen as a specific and important realm of human activity. This focus on the social world generated new questions about human history, political and economic activity, and forms of social interaction. This questioning of the social world was based in a new spirit of inquiry that no longer looked to tradition, to ‘classical’ authors or to religious texts for certain knowledge. Instead, rational methods of inquiry sought to explain how and why the specific conditions of the present had arisen and, importantly, what might be done to change these conditions for the better. Enlightenment thinking took place within a broad paradigm in which certain basic tenets were accepted. A paradigm is a set of interconnected ideas, values, principles and facts within which coherent theories (attempts to describe and to explain phenomena) are developed.
Hamilton (1992: 21−22) argues that key aspects of the Enlightenment paradigm included:
• Reason: the fundamental importance of reason and rationality as ways of organising knowledge were stressed.
• Empiricism: this is the idea that all thought and knowledge about the natural and social worlds is based on what we can apprehend through our senses. Much Enlightenment thought relied upon using both rational and empirical methods.
• Science: this is the idea that the only way to expand human knowledge is through those methods (experimental, etc.) devised during the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century.
• Universalism: the idea that reason and science are applicable in all circumstances and that they can provide explanations for all phenomena in all circumstances. Science in particular was thought to uncover universal laws.
• Progress: this is a key idea of the Enlightenment. Here, it was believed that human beings could improve their natural and social conditions through the application of reason and of science. The result would be an ever-increasing level of happiness and well-being.
• Individualism: the idea that the individual is paramount and that his or her individual reason cannot be subject to a higher (possibly irrational) authority (such as the Church) or traditional knowledge.
• Toleration: the idea that all human beings are essentially the same and that the beliefs of other cultures or ‘races’ are not necessarily inferior to those of European Christianity.
• Freedom: opposition to the traditional constraints on belief, expression, trade, social interaction and so forth.
• Secularism: another key aspect of Enlightenment thought, this is opposition to traditional religious knowledge and to metaphysical speculation.
• Anti-clericalism: opposition to the Church, organised religion, superstition and religious persecution.
• Enthusiasm for technological and medical progress: an enormous enthusiasm for scientific discovery and its practical application in the fields of technology and medicine.
• A desire for political change and reform: Enlightenment thinkers were not democrats, but they wished to see constitutional and legal reforms in the states in which they lived.
• A belief in the pre-eminence of empirical, materialist knowledge: a desire to uncover the real reasons for the ways that societies operate; the model used was derived from the natural sciences.
The Enlightenment was largely the ‘work of three overlapping and closely linked generations’ of thinkers (Hamilton, 1992:25). The first of these included the French thinkers Voltaire (1694–1778) and Montesquieu (1689–1755) and was strongly influenced by the work of the English political philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) and scientist Isaac Newton (1642–1727). For this generation of thinkers, rational inquiry based on the natural sciences and a critique of the social and political institutions of ‘absolutist’ monarchy was important. The second generation included the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) and French philosophers Rousseau (1712–78) and Diderot (1713–84). It was more explicitly ‘anticlerical’ and continued and developed the interest in the application of scientific method to ‘moral’ (or social) issues developed by members of the first generation. The third generation included the German philosopher Kant (1724–1804) and Scottish moral philosophers Adam Smith (1723–90) and Adam Ferguson (1723–1816).
From this point Enlightenment thinking ceased to be quite so general and a series of more specialised ‘proto-disciplines’ began to emerge: these included epistemology, economics, sociology and political economy. Although Enlightenment thought was not in any precise sense consistent, it is usual to refer to the entire period as the ‘Age of Enlightenment’. This clearly carries the connotation that it was a period that saw itself as emerging into the light from a ‘dark age’ of superstition and ignorance.
There had been speculation about human beings and their social, political and historical circumstances. However, it was also the case that such speculation tended to assume that societies and civilisations passed through (inevitable) cyclical stages of growth and decline and that nothing essentially new was ever likely to appear. By the eighteenth century, however, many educated Europeans began to sense that the societies they lived in were undergoing unprecedented changes.
The development of social theory
It was during the eighteenth century that a number of different thinkers began to investigate the social world more systematically. Social, cultural and political arrangements began to be thought of as the result of complex processes that were not immediately obvious from casual observation. Neither could they be explained through the study of what ancient authors had to say. This was partly as a consequence of the profound changes that were at work in the European societies of the eighteenth century. The sociologist Karl Polanyi described these changes as ‘the great transformation’ and argued that they were part of a fundamental transformation of social, economic and political life which gave birth to the ‘modern’ world. Polanyi argued that this transformation was well underway by the middle of the eighteenth century. The period of the Enlightenment can therefore be seen as one of transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ forms of society. The new preoccupation with developing forms of explanation (‘theories’) for how and why societies work in the ways that they do can be seen as a response to these unprecedented changes.
Awareness of these changes led to a desire to understand and to account for them. We have already seen that older forms of explanation began to be considered inadequate to this task. One of the consequences of this was that the study of societies and their development became more closely related to the scientific study of the natural world and to draw on similar methodologies. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century had, in the work of Isaac Newton, for example, revolutionized the understanding of the natural world and science was held in very high esteem. It is unsurprising therefore that the methods that natural scientists had developed should be put to use to explore aspects of the social world. The natural sciences were thought to provide a model for disinterested inquiry. They pointed to the possibility of a rational and empirically based method for creating a form of knowledge that was not conditioned by religious dogma or tradition (Hamilton, 1992: 43).
The use of methods and ideas derived from the natural sciences is extremely important but it also raises problems that continue within social scientific work. As we have seen, the Enlightenment was to a large extent based on humanitarian principles and a desire to change and to improve social institutions. Social institutions were felt to have been dominated by attitudes based on religious dogma and unthinking forms of tradition. Change and improvement were to be achieved firstly by applying critical and rational methods of inquiry to these institutions, thereby exposing their foundational basis in oppressive or irrational modes of thought.
This is an important point as it opens up a very interesting problem. The use of methods of inquiry based on the natural sciences was intended to produce objective forms of knowledge. However, the Enlightenment itself was based in a moral imperative to improve society. In other words this moral dimension of Enlightenment thought was rooted in a particular set of values. In this sense, the Enlightenment can be seen as a normative1 project. Scientific inquiry on the other hand regarded itself as a disinterested and value-free pursuit that was interested solely in the discovery of facts in the form of objective ‘laws’. One of the blind spots of Enlightenment thought was its inability to recognise that the type of scientific inquiry that it espoused was incapable of providing an objective basis for its moral and ethical values.
The emergent social sciences (they were called ‘moral sciences’ during this period) that developed across the eighteenth century in the work of Enlightenment thinkers needed two basic conditions in order to develop coherent areas of study. Both of these conditions were derived from the natural sciences. The first precondition is naturalism, which is the notion that cause and effect sequences fully explain social phenomena (as opposed to metaphysical or spiritual influences). Secondly, the control of prejudice was felt to be necessary if inquiry was to be value-free.
Enlightenment and the question of ‘society’?
As we have seen, Enlightenment thinkers initially tended to make use of scientific method in an attempt to uncover the basis of social life in an underlying and unchanging ‘human nature’. So, although the Enlightenment represented a considerable break with earlier forms of inquiry, it continued to assume that social formations and processes were essentially derived from ‘human nature’.
This idea was present, for example, in the work of the seventeenth century English philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704). Both wrote extensively about social and political issues from a secular and an historical perspective. That is, they conceived of human affairs (human social and political arrangements) strictly in their own terms in much the same ways that later Enlightenment thinkers would. Both saw them as produced by human beings and as having definite historical conditions and as such they were thought to be susceptible to positive change. In other words, these positive changes would follow from human beings reflecting critically on their societies and the ways that they functioned.
Both Hobbes and Locke based their ideas on the notion that social and political arrangements are determined by a fixed and unchanging human nature. They both argued that in an original, pre-social ‘state of nature’, human beings would have had specific characteristics. Famously, Hobbes deduced that in a ‘state of nature’ human beings would be war-like and violent (as a direct and inescapable consequence of their ‘nature’). According to Hobbes, this unchanging nature means that if left to themselves, human beings will always revert to violence in order to get what they want and that the social order will be threatened with collapse. As a consequence of this, Hobbes advocated the imposition of a strong state. We can see therefore that Hobbes’ theory about human beings and their societies is based on the idea that it is human ‘nature’ that determines the way that societies operate.
This view of human beings was challenged during the (generally much more optimistic) period of Enlightenment by one its major thinkers, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau argued that the ‘state of nature’ as imagined by Hobbes was in fact based on faulty reasoning. Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’, Rousseau argued, was based on the values and tendencies evident in human beings living in contemporary societies. Rousseau saw the greed and violence of mankind as being the products of society rather than ‘nature’. Writing of Hobbes and other thinkers who had attempted to describe the ‘state of nature’ Rousseau argued that: Every one of them, in short, constantly dwelling on wants, avidity, oppression, desires and pride, has transferred to the state of nature ideas which were acquired in society; so that, in speaking of the savage, they described the social man. (Rousseau, 1999:9] This is an important point, as it highlights one of the recurring themes within Enlightenment thought about the relationship between ‘nature’, ‘human nature’ and the social world. In The Discourse, Rousseau engaged in a ‘thought experiment’ of his own and attempted to deduce what human beings in a ‘natural’ state might have been like. However, he was aware of the great difficulty of attempting to discover what a ‘natural’ (that is a presocial state might look like): The investigations we may enter into, in treating this subject, must not be considered as historical truths, but only as mere conditional and hypothetical reasonings…For it is by no means a light undertaking to distinguish properly between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man, or to form a true idea of a state which no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist…(Rousseau, 1999:10) In other words, Rousseau claims that it is enormously difficult to decide what is social (‘artificial’) and what is natural (‘original’) in human beings.
In the writings of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues that the selfinterested
economic transactions of individuals are responsible for the creation of a large-scale self-regulating market economy. This emerges as an unintended consequence of the activities of human beings engaged in trade with one another. The interactions of people in their daily activities of trading and exchanging goods have consequences which go far beyond the level of the individuals involved. Thus, Smith’s analysis of the commercial society of the eighteenth century proposes that it has emerged as a consequence of activities that, taken together, make up something that is more than the sum of these individual parts.
However, as Callinicos argues, Smith’s analysis (and the similar analyses of some other Enlightenment thinkers) accorded a ‘privileged status’ to human nature. Remember, Smith argued that human beings have a ‘natural’ disposition to trade and the widespread division of labour and the development of commercial society are an ‘unintended consequence’ of this. Rather like Hobbes, therefore, Smith has attempted to ‘base concrete accounts of social institutions and behaviour on generalisations about human nature’.
Rationalist optimism
We have seen that in the work of several important Enlightenment thinkers ideas about the relationship between political, economic and social arrangements began to be thought of in significantly new ways. Generally, the Enlightenment period is thought of as one of ‘rationalist optimism’ in which it was assumed that ‘progress’ would follow from the discovery of new or more rational ways of organising societies. This optimism was based on the assumption that progress was genuinely possible through the use of reason. A classic statement of this was to be found in Kant’s text: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and it is worth looking at this in detail to see how Enlightenment thinkers envisaged the use of reason benefiting ‘humanity’ in general.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, which began in 1789 and was initially greeted with much optimism, had proved a powerfully disillusioning experience for thinkers who wished to see ‘progress’ and enlightened reform of existing social institutions. At first, the Revolution was seen as ‘an opportunity for enlightened men to bring about a more rational, just and humane organisation of the affairs of mankind’ (Hamilton, 1992:49). It appeared that many of the ideas that enlightened thinkers had discussed throughout the century were being realised as rights and liberties (freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc.) and were enshrined in a new constitution. However, after 1792 the first phase of revolutionary government in France passed well beyond the stage of enlightened reform and culminated in the period of the Terror in 1793–4. The king and large numbers of the aristocracy were executed along with anyone considered to be an enemy of the Revolution, including many who had been its strong and active supporters. Following the Terror a new form of ‘absolutism’ was established as Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor. Enlightened reforms were suspended. The course of events in the Revolution, from hopeful reform through the period of the Terror to the establishment of a new form of absolutism under Napoleon also marked the end of the Enlightenment ‘as a force for progress and intellectual change’ (Hamilton, 1992:51). However, although some of its ideas about progress and its faith in reason had been shattered by events, the new ways of thinking about human beings and their societies were not abandoned. Indeed, the emergence of new forms of government, a powerful new class of capitalist entrepreneurs, the arrival of the industrial revolution and the rapid growth of cities and towns, demanded new social theories that could account for and explain the direction in which ‘modern’ societies were heading.
Comte and sociological positivism
August Comte (1798–1857) criticised what he called the ‘negative’ philosophy developed by eighteenth century individualistic philosophers such as Kant. In his view, they had destroyed rather than provided the foundations for social order and social consensus. Comte was the first person to use the term ‘sociology’. His aim was to create a ‘naturalistic science of society capable of both explaining the past and predicting the future’ (Hamilton, 1992:53). Like Smith and Millar (see Callinicos 1.4 and the discussion above) Comte argues that societies developed in stages. However, Comte argued that development from stage to stage occurred as a result of the development of the human mind. All human thought, he argued, has passed through three separate stages: the theological, the metaphysical and the positive.
According to Comte, in the theological state, the human mind analyses all phenomena as the result of supernatural forces; feelings and imagination predominate. In the metaphysical stage, abstract ideas such as essences or causes predominate. In the positive stage, the human mind gives up the search for absolute truth and the origin of hidden causes. Instead it attempts, through a combination of reason and observation, to discover ‘the actual laws of phenomena…their invariable relations of succession and likeness’ (Comte in Callinicos: 65). The emphasis in this final stage shifts to the study of facts. Comte took the view that every science develops in exactly the same way, passing through the separate stages of the theological, the metaphysical and the positive. In the evolution of science, astronomy develops first, followed by physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. Each science develops only on the basis of its predecessors; there is an hierarchical framework dominated by the law of increasing complexity and decreasing generality.
Sociology is particularly dependent on its immediate predecessor in the hierarchy, biology. The science of biology is basically holistic in character, beginning not from isolated elements, as in chemistry and physics, but from organic wholes and systems. In Comte’s view, sociology should study society as a whole: namely, society defined as a social system. Sociology should investigate the action and reaction of the various parts of the social system. Individual elements must be analysed in their relation to the whole. As with biological organisms, society forms a complex unit irreducible to its component parts: Comte makes the important point that society cannot be simply reduced to the individuals of which it is comprised. Thus, to gain knowledge of the parts, it is essential to examine the whole. Thus Comte is already considerably different to thinkers of the Enlightenment. Society was defined by Comte, therefore, as a collective organism characterised by a harmony between its individual parts and its whole.
Comte’s contribution to sociological theory was to emphasise that all social phenomena are subject to invariable laws and that the task of social science lay in establishing their reality. Does this mean that there is no room in Comte’s positivism for human beings to take action to change their social situation? Is all action determined by invariable laws? It would seem so: the individual might ‘modify’ the course of social development and assert a freedom of action over ‘blind fatality’, but ultimately the natural laws of society dominate. Social evolution, which for Comte was the progressive development of the human mind as it finds its expression in the three stages, is thus a universal history of humanity that claims the importance of knowledge for the ends of social reorganisation, but subordinates the individual to the inevitable ‘realities’ of social life: the needs of order and progress.
Conclusion
As we have seen, Enlightenment thought laid the groundwork for the development of social scientific thought in a number of important ways. By asking questions about how and why societies had come to be as they were and about the social and historical conditions that prevailed, Enlightenment thinkers opened up new and very significant areas of inquiry. However, much Enlightenment thought, despite some advances, was unable to escape from its reliance on an idea of an unchanging ‘human nature’ as the foundation for its theoretical consideration of social conditions. The closest it came to a more proper sociological consideration of the social and economic determinants on human action and organisation was in the Scottish Enlightenment’s notion of stages of human social development. But this was based in the precepts of moral philosophy and was ultimately concerned with the discovery of a universal human nature.
The problem for the new social sciences which began to emerge in the early to mid-nineteenth century was therefore to propose a proper object of study (society itself) and a means of studying this which was not based on ideas about ‘human nature’. As we have seen, various developments within Enlightenment thought pointed in this direction without, however, escaping its inherent methodological individualism.
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