Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Cheryl B. Welch
If early claims for a social science privileging political economy were
rejected both by the liberals of the juste milieu and by Catholic social reform-
ers largely because of divisive associations with revolutionary individualism,
it was precisely those dangerous associations that first drew disaffected mem-
bers of the post-revolutionary generation into a study of ‘individualist’
social science. Many of these younger French thinkers, initially meeting in
inchoate reading circles to study the works of Tracy, Say, Cabanis, Kant and
Bentham, followed tortured personal odysseys that eventually led to revolu-
tionary conspiracy or utopian withdrawal. Like members of the Utilitarian
Society in England who followed the lead of Bentham and James Mill, these
young radicals sought at first to weed out the irrationalities and prejudices
allegedly strangling the French polity by applying the sharp logic of utility
(Welch 1984,pp.135–53). For the French, however, this perspective often
proved a way station rather than a destination. Responding sympathetically
to the utopian refrain of universal happiness in a new industrial society in
the works of Say, Tracy or Bentham, most soon abandoned the associated
political programme, i.e. non-revolutionary democratic politics and non-
intervention in the economy. Some thought of these political strictures as
the faint-hearted timorousness of an older generation, and turned to ver-
sions of neo-Jacobin insurrectionism. Others faulted the Id
´
eologues for a
flawed understanding of physiology or history, or for their facile acceptance
of individualist economic dogmas. Increasingly, this latter group drifted
into utopian socialism, and in particular into the orbit of Saint-Simon and
Auguste Comte.
9
We are now in a position to assess the continental divide in debates
over social science in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In
England, political economy had emerged as the most highly developed and
prestigious of the social sciences. Yet it still served as handmaiden to tradi-
tional elites who borrowed neither from economics nor social science for
their political legitimacy. More pervasive in France was a morally charged
condemnation of political economy, the denial of the sufficiency of its con-
clusions if it remained self-contained within its own sphere, and the attempt
9 It was among these groups of younger radicals that the term ‘individualism’ was first coined as a
general description of methodologies – like those of the Id
´
eologues and English utilitarians – that
began from individual wants, needs and purposes. The increasing tendency to criticise individualism
from the points of view of biology or history (or both) can be followed in the contributions to the
Saint-Simonian journal Le Producteur (1826) by the then Saint-Simonian Louis-August Blanqui, 1:
139;byP.M.Laurent3: 325–38, 4: 19–37; by Philippe Buchez 3: 462–72; and by Rouen 2: 159–64.
See also the eighth session of the Doctrine de Saint-Simon by Amand Bazard (l958).
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Social science from the Revolution to positivism
to subsume it within a more inclusive social science that would provide the
context for the generation of new moral norms.
10
Not least among those
claiming to have privileged scientific access to the social world was Auguste
Comte, whose ‘positivist’ renovation of the rambling intellectual structures
he inherited profoundly marked intellectual life in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. A comparison of Comte’s picture of the field of
social science with that of John Stuart Mill illuminates the distinct patterns
of political assumptions and cultural intuitions that underlay French and
English notions of social science as the master science by mid-century.
It also sets the stage for a contrast of the different cultural spaces that
‘positivism’ would occupy in nineteenth-century England and France.
When Comte lectured on the structure of the sciences in the 1820s, lec-
tures later published as the Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830–42), he tellingly
omitted both the ‘pseudo science’ of psychology (which he associated above
all with sensationalism and eclecticism) and political economy (Comte 1998,
pp. 229–32). In his view, individualist metaphysical methodologies viti-
ated the scientific pretensions of these disciplines. Moreover, their claims
to independence contradicted Comte’s desire to discover the positive –
that is irreducible – laws of society itself (Brown 1984,p.191). Indeed
Comte shared with his mentor Saint-Simon and with the Saint-Simonians
a critical attitude towards both economic liberalism and its associated ‘sci-
ence’ that was close to that of Sismondi and the social economists (Mauduit
1929;Pickering1993,pp.110–12, 405–6). Comte used Destutt de Tracy’s
inadvertent exposure of the gap between political economy’s metaphysical
presuppositions and the actual facts of social experience as incontrovertible
evidence that the introspective method could not be the method of social
science. For example, Tracy’s analyses of property, wealth and poverty were,
according to Comte, patently contradictory. Though Tracy had intended to
be positive, this noble intention was belied by the persistence of individualist
metaphysics in his approach (Comte 1968, iii,pp.604–30 passim).
Comte thought more highly of Cabanis, who had argued that one must
approach an understanding of the facts of social experience by presupposing
10 Not until the 1880s would political economy face a serious intellectual challenge from the combined
front of economic historians and sociological positivists in Britain. In an echo of earlier French debates
about the place of political economy within a larger social scientific project, the English positivist
followers of Comte, most notably Frederic Harrison, joined the historical school in attacking the
individualist and ahistorical assumptions of political economy (Harrison 1908,pp.271–306). These
attacks by no means vanquished economics, but did occasion a theoretical self-examination that
pushed economics to clarify both its methods and its relationship to public purposes.
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Cheryl B. Welch
and building on the laws of human physiology. Yet Comte denied that
sociological laws were derived from human physiology. Rather, they were
to be sought either in the laws governing the social organism as a whole
(which functions as an ensemble of interrelated parts) or from the laws
governing the process by which one social organism succeeds another in
history. According to Comte, the law of the three developmental stages – the
theological, or fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientific, or
positive – was the most important law of historical change. In social physics,
or sociology, the initial observations that form the basis of hypothetical laws
are not original sense impressions, as followers of the sensationalist theory
of mind believed, but rather observations of the most general aspects of
society: mores, customs and historical transformations. The initial data of
social science, in short, come from the sharp eye of the social and historical
observer on the alert for social patterns. These phenomena become the bases
of hypotheses that are then checked against further observations. Comte’s
insistence that one must begin with an observation of the ‘social’, bracket
all speculation about first causes, and be ready to re-evaluate hypotheses,
has earned him canonical status as a founder not only of positivism, but of
scientific sociology.
11
John Stuart Mill explicitly reformulated his notion of the inductive/
deductive method in light of Comte’s methodological discussions. More-
over, he was influenced by Comte’s law of historical development, in
particular the view that historical f actors, as opposed to biological ones,
increasingly dominate human social life. Finally, he, too, wished to subor-
dinate more limited human sciences to a larger integrative social science.
Yet, despite Mill’s claims for an overarching science that would take into
account the wide variety of motives and goals that characterises actual
human behaviour, he largely understood ‘social science’ as a synthesis or
summation of discrete branch disciplines (psychology, economics and others
unnamed). These branches – and here political economy provided the most
highly developed model – were to provide partial laws of human nature as
they operated in different fields of human society (Mill 1844,pp.135–6).
It is indeed unclear in Mill’s various accounts whether he thought social
science had distinctive subject matter of its own or was merely a method-
ological procedure for synthesising the insights generated by its constituent
parts (Brown, 1984,pp.136–47).
11 This accolade is usually then severely qualified, and Comte is charged with having disastrously
departed from his own methodological principles. See Charlton 1959,pp.34–50.
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Social science from the Revolution to positivism
4 Comtism in England and France
Let me now turn more explicitly to Comte and the place of positivism in
the intellectual terrain of nineteenth-century England and France. Comte
developed the outlines of his positive philosophy as a young man during
a period of close collaboration with Saint-Simon. The debate regarding
intellectual influence between the two men – each the founder of a new
rationalist religion – has always been contentious.
12
They certainly shared
much: abandonment of the revolutionary ideal of civil and political equality
in favour of an organic conception of society in which harmony would result
from functional differentiation; division of human capacities into rational,
industrial and spiritual; and a recasting of earlier views of historical progress
into a tripartite scheme of conflict, crisis and reorganisation at a higher
level. Most important, they shared the view that the physical sciences and
the ‘science of society’ were not methodologically distinct, that the primary
model for social science was biology, and that social science itself was not
composed of discrete disciplines but was a master science that in some sense
integrated human physiology, history and politics into one set of overarching
general laws. If the germs of positivism were present in the disorganised and
sometimes incoherent writings of Saint-Simon, his disciple supplied the gifts
of organisation and coherence, along with a much greater acquaintance with
the sciences, that would turn positivism into a full-blown system. In the
Cours de Philosophie Positive,andintheSyst
`
eme de Politique Positive (1851–4),
Comte produced a body of work that – despite his repetitive, graceless and
pedantic prose – was capable of moving some of the very best minds of
the nineteenth century. Like Hegel and Marx, Comte offered a particular
fusion of history and prophecy that supplied a compelling narrative of what
had been and what was to come.
Key terms that reappear incessantly in Comte’s formulations of posi-
tivism are ‘unify’, ‘connect’ or ‘make whole’. Again like Hegel, he exhib-
ited a compulsive need to resolve contradictions and restore coherence to
every realm of human experience. He stimulated a response above all in
those individuals troubled by the sense that something fundamental had
come ‘undone’ in Western European civilisation, individuals who experi-
enced quasi-romantic longings to inhabit a culture in which conflicts were
12 Comte’s latest biographer, Mary Pickering, suggests that their shared perspective brought them
together rather than resulted from the influence of Saint-Simon on the younger man (Pickering
1993,p.101). In this she follows the classic work by Gouhier (1933–41), III, pp. 168–70.
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Cheryl B. Welch
reconciled, or at least reconcilable. Part of the story of his differential recep-
tion in Britain and France, then, has to do with differing perceptions of
which conflicts had become most problematical in European culture.
Perhaps the most characteristic nineteenth-century answer to the ques-
tion of what had come unhinged in European culture was the assumed link
between religious faith and right action. Belief in divine purposes had long
anchored moral precepts, but what God’s prescience had joined together,
man’s science was rapidly putting asunder, at least for many in the elite
classes. Yet, there were distinct national variations on this common cultural
theme.
In England the phrase ‘loss of faith’ often can be parsed as meaning one
of two things: a faltering of the conviction that one’s personal selection by
God would inspire the performance of social duties, or a crumbling of the
underlying assurance that motives to moral action would be forthcoming
because a benevolent Fir st Cause had inevitably, if invisibly, designed human
motivations in this fashion. Both varieties of ‘loss of faith’ undermined the
belief that people could be counted on to perform their duties towards
others. This loss of confidence in the sources of benevolence, combined
with a strong and vital empirical tradition that privileged the egoistic drives
as explanatory postulates in the human sciences, contributed to an obsessive
worry about the motivations to virtuous action. Educated Victorians very
often conversed in what has been tellingly reconstructed as ‘the nineteenth-
century idiom of egoism vs. altruism’ (Collini 1993,pp.67, 60–90 passim).
Coined by Comte, the word ‘altruism’ passed rapidly into English usage.
The Victorians were to be peculiarly receptive not only to Comte’s new
term, but also to his assurances that social evolution would not destroy the
individual motivation to do one’s duty.
Comte argued that the power of living for others did not wither but
rather swelled with the progress of intelligence and an increasing division
of labour. Indeed the nutritive and sexual instincts would steadily decrease
in the face of the growth of sympathy for ever-widening circles of others.
Domestic relationships and the particular affective gifts of women were not
in competition with this growing altruism, but were entangled with its
deepest psychological – Comte would have said physiological – roots in
individual and social memory (Comte 1853, i,pp.463–4; ii,pp.89, 106–7,
130–1, 552, 1877,pp.18–29). Though he thought the progress of altruism
was in some ways spontaneous, he became progressively more convinced
that it would need the ministrations of a new religion of humanity to
strengthen its hold over those born into the positivist era. Comte’s, however,
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Social science from the Revolution to positivism
was a godless religion that focused on the fragile nexus between moral and
intellectual beliefs, and on the particular role of aesthetic and imaginative
stimulation both in creating convictions and in moving people to act on
those convictions.
13
It was in this aesthetic and ethical context that Comte was to speak most
persuasively to an English audience. John Stuart Mill had been influenced
by Comte in the formulation of his logic of the social sciences; he was
also undeniably drawn to Comte’s notion of a religion of humanity (Mill
1874b). Alexander Bain, John Morley, George Henry Lewes, George Eliot
and Harriet Martineau were partial adherents to Comte’s positivist system;
others (e.g. Matthew Arnold, Henry Sidgwick and Leslie Stephen) read
Comte – often surprisingly sympathetically – because, given their particular
moral concerns, he was a force to be reckoned with. From the mid-1850s
there was an official positivist movement, led by Richard Congreve, and
including E. S. Beesly, J. H. Bridges and the prolific Frederic Harrison.
What Harrison found most compelling in positivism was the attempt
to reground the ‘eternal truths of the human heart and conscience
[that is]...resignation, self-forgetfulness, devoutness, adoration, patience,
courage, charity, gentleness, [and] honour’ in a theory based on scientific
and historical evidence, rather than in an ‘exploded mythology’ (Harrison
1911, i,pp.210, 276). He never doubted the virtues themselves; the diffi-
culty lay in reawakening the springs of moral action and harmonising them
with the requirements of modern life. Harrison’s cast of mind would be
particularly open to Comte’s claim that ‘heart’ – the qualities of sympathy
and energy together – would be developed by positivism and would supply
a ‘habitual spring of action’ (Comte 1877,p.16).
English sympathisers, John Stuart Mill among them, often greeted the
later Comte’s detailed relig ious prescriptions with distaste as authoritar-
ian aberrations. Yet the general promise of a religion of humanity had
widespread appeal. It was not through ritual, although Congreve and the
English positivists held some pallid services at Newton Hall, but rather
through cultural education in the widest sense that English positivists hoped
to respiritualise individuals (Harrison 1911, i,p.282). They had great hopes
that George Eliot, a fellow traveller if not a communicant, would more
13 PeterDale(1989,pp.33–128) focuses on a coincidence of interest to be found between Comte
(in his later works) and Lewes and Eliot. All played with the role of imagination in creating moral
‘hypotheses’, and in the motivating power of those hypotheses, even in the absence of the scientific
validation that would turn them into ‘laws’. On Comte and women see also Pickering (1993),
‘Angels and Demons in the Moral Vision of Auguste Comte’.
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Cheryl B. Welch
wholeheartedly devote herself to this didactic purpose. Though she disap-
pointed these hopes, it is perhaps in her novels that one can best appreciate
the primarily ethical cluster of concerns into which Comte’s social science
was drawn and domesticated.
Eliot’s characters – Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Dorothea
Brooke in Middlemarch, Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda – inhabit
societies where their deepest moral aspirations are not ‘at home’. In these
contexts Eliot explores the concept of moral duty: its tangled interconnec-
tions with ‘exploded religious mythologies’, its emotional roots in familial
memories, its uneasy relationship to necessary historical laws. In his later
writings, Comte had increasingly turned to the redemptive notion that
subordinating the self to social feeling, an ideal that he thought came
closest to incarnation in certain exalted womanly natures, formed the
highest type of moral experience (Comte 1877,p.5). Eliot’s novels, as
well as George Lewes’ works on psychology, also explore the ‘madonna
type’ and the remarkable power of deeply human images, thought to have
the elemental force of nature itself, to evoke unselfishness and the larger
feelings.
14
Historians and literary critics have focused on Comte’s version of posi-
tivism as a particularly fruitful conduit into the nature of the religious crisis
and the transformation of theology in Victorian England (Cashdollar 1989;
Wright 1986) and also into the ways that the attraction to positivism illumi-
nates the English appropriation of literature to moral purposes (Dale 1989).
Indeed it is perhaps the particular nature of the Victorian moral crisis that
best illuminates the surprisingly deep appeal of Comte’s promise to restore
moral coherence through science (Collini 1993,p.89).
The other locus at which positivism had a major impact in England was
the labour movement. If Comte had looked to the cultivation of altruism
as a force of moral regeneration, it was among the working classes that he
hoped positivist intellectuals would find their most important allies in the
project of industrial reorganisation. Not only did he believe that the welfare
of la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre should be the criterion of public
actions, but he was among the first to argue that an alliance of intellectuals
14 The influence of Comtean positivism on George Eliot has been explored most fully in Wright 1981
and 1986. Eliot is particularly attractive to contemporary critics because her narratives can be read
as both asserting and subverting the ‘truth’ that science will provide a new moral cosmology. For
readings that highlight this double vision in her novels, see Beer 1986 and Dale 1989,pp.85–101,
129–63. For a reading that explores her ambiguous relationship to social science through the prism
of a confrontation with Herbert Spencer, see Paxton 1991.
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Social science from the Revolution to positivism
and working-class leaders in a social (rather than political) movement would
be able to surmount the growing antagonism between the capitalist class and
the proletariat (Comte 1877,p.136). Comte believed that the conditions
of working-class life led to a greater prevalence of altruism among workers,
and that their minds were less corrupted by intellectual error. Though he
never attacked the individual appropriation of wealth, and indeed hoped
that moralised bankers and evolved capitalists would eventually provide
public leadership, he believed that wealth was social in origin and needed
to be redirected to more socially beneficial ends. Above all workers needed
secure employment, education and a tolerable standard of life. He urged
positivist intellectuals to promote trade unionism, as opposed to involvement
in corrupt parliamentary politics, and to educate public opinion through
public lectures and classes.
In England, these teachings fell on fertile ground. Among the many
intellectuals who influenced labour politics in the 1860sand1870s, ‘it
was the English Positivists who established the closest ties with the Trade
Union leaders and working-class politicians and who exercised the most
decisive influence on men and events’ (R. Harrison 1965,p.251). Frederic
Harrison and Beesly in particular were important in the fight to establish
a legal basis for trade unionism and to change public attitudes towards this
issue (Adelman 1971,p.183;F.Harrison1908,pp.307–73;R.Harrison
1965,p.277). Beesly established a working relationship with Marx and was
instrumental in the founding of the International. English positivists were
also tireless in their attempts to turn British workers against imperialism
(Wright 1986,p.110).
In 1908 Frederic Harrison could honestly write that he had ‘taken the
keenest interest in the political and social problems of the last fifty years’
(Harrison 1908, p. xv). This interest, however, as well as the concerns of
other official positivists, was in many ways removed from politics as under-
stood by most of his contemporaries. The conservative Robert Lowe was
not very far from common opinion when he pronounced the English posi-
tivists ‘free from those complicated, embarrassing, and troublesome consid-
erations of the collateral and future effects of measures that perplex ordinary
mortals’ (quoted in Wright 1986,p.110). Indeed, if Comte’s cultural dif-
fusion in England points to the centrality of concerns about the bases of
ethical action in a disintegrating Protestant culture, and to the deep anxi-
eties produced by social unrest in a country that more and more saw itself
as a pioneer of industrialism, the failure of ‘Comtism’ to affect specifically
political modes of theorising suggests the resilience of traditional political
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vocabularies in Britain and their relative impermeability to the language of
social science.
If one again considers the case of Mill, it is striking that his stated aspiration
to absorb politics into a larger project of a historically grounded ‘social
science’ figures so slightly in his explicitly political writings. Given his
apparent openness to the positivist sociological project, one might expect
that his political theory would centre not just on the scientific character of
politics as a field of study, but also on the relationship between social and
political science. On the contrary, ‘the terms of the questions which held his
attention, and even the categories under which he arranged the evidence
relevant to their solution, remained...obstinately political’ (Collini et al.
1983,p.134;pp.129–59 passim). Mill in fact never embraced the central
notion of Comte’s social physics, which was to interrogate society in order
to find in its overmastering demands a modern calling for politics. For
Mill that calling always focused above all on the human judgements and
conciliations that would be necessary to create progress, and on enlarging
a notion of liberty that was in important ways the product of a peculiarly
English, rather than a generically European history.
The impact of Comtean social science in England, then, was broadly
ethical, more narrowly social (in the sense that it was bound up with a
specific phase of the labour movement), and scarcely at all political. At the
risk of drawing much too tidy a contrast, one might say that the reverse was
true in France. To his fellow citizens, Comte spoke no more persuasively
than many others about the ethical, religious and industrial fragmentation
of the French nation, but his contribution – or rather that of key disciples –
to the binding up of its political wounds was significant.
In France, Comte was at first slower to gain adherents than in England.
It has been suggested that this had something to do with the nature of
periodical journalism in England, or with the long predominance of eclectic
philosophy in France (Mill 1865,p.2; Simon 1963,p.12). By the 1860s,
however, there was a definite shift among French intellectuals to religious
scepticism and an appreciation of the methods of natural science. Indeed,
the Second Empire and the early years of the Third Republic have often
been termed the age of positivism. Much subsequent sifting of evidence
has gone into assessing the role of Comte in this diffusion of the positivist
spirit. While his role was certainly not negligible, the notion of a ‘positivist
generation’ captures a much broader cultural wave, in which many expressed
an anguishing loss of faith and a turn to science to restitch the fabric of
their intellectual lives (Simon 1963,pp.94–171). Sainte-Beuve tells us that
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expressions of loss of faith were practically mandatory to establish one’s
intellectual bona fides during the period. Renan’s work on religion and
Taine’s studies of psychology, literature and history elevate the scientific
method to a vocation and explicitly see it as replacing religion, at least for a
Parnassian elite (Burrow 2000,pp.54–5).Yet the works of these writers, so
central to French intellectual life from the 1860stothe1880s, run parallel
to Comte rather than in any way responding to his particular formulation
of the spiritual crisis of the age (Charlton 1959,pp.86–157).
Comte’s diffusion in France is less useful as a gauge of the larger cultural
and religious crisis than was his reception in England in part because of
the different spiritual sensibilities that often accompanied the experience of
loss of faith in the two societies. What was felt most acutely in France was
not anxiety about the soundness of what might be called Protestant moral
psychology, but rather the frightening intimation of an aesthetic, moral
and intellectual void, given the disappearance of the mediating functions of
the Catholic Church and the fragility of French national identity. Among
those who broke with the Church, there was a deeper anger at a God
who abandoned His flock and a darker premonition of the dangers of
true normlessness. Even among those writers most marked by the positive
spirit – the conviction that knowledge comes only from observation of
phenomena, and that much will remain unknowable – one is struck by a
hard-bitten realism (for example in Taine), a deep cynicism (as in Louise
Ackermann), or an anguished stoicism (palpable in the poems of Sully
Prudhomme) that are foreign both to Comte and to the English Victorians.
Though Comtean positivism has often been called Catholicism without the
Church, its particular brand of substitute religion, with its emphasis on the
historicity and psychology of altruism, paradoxically resonated more in a
Protestant culture than in a Catholic one.
Neither did positivism make much of an impact on the French labour
movement. Although Comte, following Saint-Simon, signalled the impor-
tance of industrial organisation and the concentration of industry, the par-
ticular British conjunction of a struggling trade union movement and an
elite positivist group with strong affinities towards ameliorist social reform
was lacking. It was not until the 1890s that French trade unions sought
or achieved status as independent organisations. In the preceding years,
the questions of trade union organisation and ‘social’ versus ‘political’
tactics to improve the position of the working classes, were inevitably
caught up in a highly polarised political climate and structure. Under the
Empire, for example, Comte’s strictures against political organising had
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