Chapter1: Introduction: Sociological Theory

Law of the Three Stages

Comte's most famous law is the Law of the Three Stages. Comte identified three basic stages and proceeded to argue that the human mind, people through the maturation process, all branches of knowledge, and the history of the world (and even, as we will see later, his own mental illness) all pass successively through these three stages. Each stage involves the search by human beings for an explanation of the things around them.

1. The Theological Stage Comte saw the theological stage as the first stage and the necessary point of departure for the other two stages. In this stage, the human mind is searching for the essential nature of things, particularly their origin (where do they come from?) and their purpose (why do they exist?). What this comes down to is the search for absolute knowledge, it is assumed that all phenomena are created, regulated, and given their purposes by supernatural forces or beings (gods). Although Comte includes fetishism (the worship of an object such as a tree) and polytheism (the worship of many gods) in the theological stage, the ultimate development in this stage is monotheism, or the worship of a single divinity that explains everything.

2. The Metaphysical Stage To Comte, this stage is the least important of the three stages. It is a transitional stage between the preceding theological stage and the ensuing positivistic stage. It exists because Comte believes that an immediate jump from the the-ological to the positivistic stage is too abrupt for people to handle. In the metaphysical stage, abstract forces replace supernatural beings as the explanation for the original causes and purposes of things in the world. For example, mysterious forces such as "nature" are invoked to explain why things are the way they are ("it was an act of nature").Mill gives as an example of a metaphysical perspective Aristotle's contention that the "rise of water in a pump is attributed to nature's horror of a vacuum'" (1961:11). Or to take a more social example, we could say that an event occurred because it was the "'will of the people." Although numerous entities can be seen as causes in the metaphysical stage, its ultimate point is reached when one great entity (for example, nature) is seen as the cause of everything.

3, The Positivist Stage This, of course, is the final and most important stage in Comte's system. At this point people give up their vain search for original causes or purposes. All we can know are phenomena and the relations among them, not their essential nature or their ultimate causes. People drop such nonscientific ideas as supernatural beings and mysterious forces. Instead, they Iook for the invariable natural laws that govern all phenomena. Examinations of single phenomena are oriented toward linking them to some general fact. The search for these laws involves both doing empirical research and theorizing. Comte differentiated between concrete and abstract laws. Concrete laws must come inductively from empirical research, whereas abstract laws must be derived deductively from theory. Comte was much more interested in creating abstract laws than in creating concrete ones. Although positivism can be characterized by many laws, he sees it ultimately gravitating toward a smaller and smaller number of general abstract laws.

Although Comte recognized an inevitable succession through these three stages, be also acknowledged that at any given point in time all three might be operant. What he envisioned in the future of the world was a time when the positivistic stage would be complete and we would see the elimination of theological or metaphysical thinking.

Comte applied the Law of the Three Stages in a number of arenas. He saw people going through the three stages and viewed the child as a theologian, the adolescent as a metaphysician, and the adult as a positivist. He also saw all the sciences in his hierarchy going through each of these stages. (Because it was a new science in Comte's time, sociology had not yet gone through the positivistic stage. Comte devoted much of his life to the development of positivistic sociology.) And he saw the history of the world in these terms. The early history of the world was the theological stage; the world

next went through tire metaphysical stage; and during Comte's lifetime the world was entering the last, or positivistic, stage. He believed that in the positivistic stage, people would come to better understand the invariant laws that dominate them and would be able to adapt to these laws "with fewer difficulties and with greater speed" (Comte, 185211968:383). These laws would also guide people in making choices that could expedite the emergence, but not alter the course, of inevitable social developments.

Positivism: The Search for Order and Progress

Although Comte used the term positivism in the sense of a science committed to the search for invariant laws, he also used it in another way--as the opposite of the negativism that, in his view, dominated the social world of his day. More specifically, that negativity was the moral and political disorder and chaos that occurred in France, and throughout Western Europe, in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789 (Levy-Bruhl, 1903/1973). Among the symptoms of this malaise were intellectual anarchy, political corruption, and incompetence of political leaders. Comte's positive philosophy was designed to counter the negative philosophy and its symptoms that he found all around him.

But although Comte placed great blame on the French Revolution, he found the major source of the disorder to be intellectual anarchy. "The great political and moral crisis that societies are now undergoing is shown by a rigid analysis to arise out of intellectual anarchy" (Comte, 1830~2/1855:36). Comte traced that intellectual anarchy to the coexistence during his lifetime of all three "'incompatible" philosophies--theological, metaphysical, and positivistic. Not only did all three exist at one time, but none of them at that point was very strong. Theology and metaphysics were in decay, in a "state of imbecility," and positivism as it relates to the social world (sociology) was as yet unformed. The conflict among, and weaknesses of, these three intellectual schemes allowed a wide variety of "subversive schemes" m grow progressively more dangerous. The answer to this intellectual chaos clearly lay in the emergence of any one of them as preeminent, and given Comte's law, the one that was destined to emerge supreme was positivism. Positivism had already become preeminent within the sciences (except sociology) and had brought order to each, where previously there was chaos. All that was needed was for positivism to bring social phenomena within its domain. Furthermore, Comte saw this as the way to end the revolutionary crisis that was tormenting France and the rest of Western Europe.

Comte also put this issue in terms of two of his great concerns---order and progress. From his point of view, theology offered a system of order, but without progress; it was a stagnant system, Metaphysics offered progress without order; he associated it with the anarchy of his day, in which things were changing in a dizzying and disorderly way. because of the coexistence of theology and metaphysics (as well as positivism), Comte's time was marked by disorder and a lack of progress. Positivism was the only system that offered both order and progress. On the one hand, positivism would bring order through the restraint of intellectual and social disorder. On the other hand, it would bring progress through an increase in knowledge and through perfection of the relationship among the parts of the social system so that society would move nearer, although never fully attain, its determinate end (the gradual expansion of human powers). Thus, positivism is the only stage in the history of humankind that offers us both order and progress.

Comte saw order and progress in dialectical terms, and in this sense he offered a perspective close to that of Marx (see Chapter 5). This means that Comte refused to see order and progress as separate entities but viewed them as mutually defining and interpenetrating. "Progress may be regarded simply as the development of Order; for the order of nature necessarily contains within itself the germ of all positive progress Progress then is in its essence identical with Order, and may be looked upon as Order made manifest" (Comte, 1851/1957:116).

It is interesting and important to underscore the fact that in Comte's view the crisis of his time was a crisis of ideas and that this crisis could be resolved only by the emergence of a preeminent idea (positivism). In fact, Comte often described positivism as a "spirit." In this sense, Comte is an idealist: "Ideas govern the world" (183042/1855:36). On this issue, rather than being in accord with Marx, he stands in stark contrast to Marx (a materialist). Marx saw the capitalist crisis as stemming from the material conflict between capitalists and the proletariat, and he believed that its solution lay in a material revolution in which the economic system of capitalism would be overthrown and replaced by a communist system. Marx scoffed at the idea that he was dealing with a crisis of ideas that could be solved in the ideational realm. Marx was distancing himself from the idealism of Hegel; Comte, in contrast, had adopted a viewpoint that resembled, at least in a few respects, Hegelian idealism.

COMTE'S SOCIOLOGY

We turn now more directly to Comte's sociology, or his thoughts about the social world.Here we begin with another of Comte's lasting contributions--his distinction between social statics and social dynamics. Although we do not use those terms today, the basic distinction remains important in the differentiation between social structure and social change. (By the way, Comte believed that all sciences, not just sociology, are divided into statics and dynamics.)

Social Statics

Comte defines the sociological study of social statics as "the investigation of the laws of action and reaction of the different parts of the social system" (1830-42/1855:457). Contrary to what one might think, the laws of the ways in which parts of the social system interact (social statics) are not derived from empirical study. Rather, they are "deduced from the laws of human nature" (Comte, 1852/1968:344-345). Here, again, we see Comte's preference for theory over empirical research.

In his social statics, Comte was anticipating many of the ideas of later structural functionalists (see Chapter 15, on Parsons). Deriving his thoughts from biology (Levine,1995b), Comte developed a perspective on the parts (or structures) of society, the way in which they function, and their (functional) relationship to the larger social system. Comte also saw the parts and the whole of the social system in a state of harmony. The idea of harmony was later transformed by structural functionalists into the concept of equilibrium. Methodologically, Comte recommended that because we know about the whole, we start with it and then proceed to the parts. (Later structural functionalists also came to grant priority to the whole [the "social system"] over the parts [the "subsystems"].) For these and many other reasons, Comte is often seen as a forerunner of structural functionalism.

Comte argues that "in Social Statics we must neglect all questions of time, and conceive the organism of society in its fullness Our ideal" (1852/1968:249). In other words, to use a concept developed by Weber (see Chapter 7), social statics describes an "ideal-typical" society. The system of social statics conceived by Comte never really existed; it was an idealized model of the social world at a given point in time. In order to construct such a model, the sociologist must, at least for the purposes of analysis, hold time still.

At a manifest level, Comte is doing a macrosociology of social statics (and dynamics) because he is looking at the interrelationship among the parts and the whole of the social system. Indeed, Comte explicitly defined sociology as the macro-level study of "collective existence" (1891/1973:172).

The Individual in Comte's Theory However, Comte's isolated thoughts on micro-level individuals are important not only for understanding his social statics but also for comprehending many other aspects of his work. For example, the individual is a major source of energy in his social system. It is the preponderance of affect or emotion in individuals that gives energy and direction to people's intellectual activities. It is the products of those intellectual activities that lead to changes in the larger social system.

More important for understanding his social statics, as well as his overall view of the world, is the fact that Comte sees the individual as imperfect, dominated by "lower" forms of egoism rather than "higher," more social forms of altruism. In fact, Comte sees this dominance of egoism as rooted in the brain, which is viewed as having both egoistic and altruistic regions. Egoism is seen as having higher energy, thereby helping to ensure the "natural feebleness" of altruism (Comte, / 852/1968:139). Putting egoism and altruism in slightly different terms, Comte argues: "Self-love... when left to itself is far stronger than Social Sympathy" (1851/1957:24-25). To Comte (1852/1968:122), the chief problem of human life is the need for altruism to dominate egoism. He sees all the social sciences as being concerned with this problem and with the development of various solutions to it.

Thus, left to themselves, people will, in Comte's view, act in a selfish manner. If we are to hope to be able to create a "better" world, the selfish motives of individuals must be controlled so that the altruistic impulses will emerge. Because egoism cannot be controlled from within the individual, the controls must come from outside the individual, from society. "The higher impulses within us are brought under the influence of a powerful stimulus from without. By its means they are enabled to control our discordant impulses" (Comte, 1851/1957:25-26). Thus Comte, like Durkheim (see Chapter 6), his successor within French sociology, saw people as a problem (egoism was a central concern to both) that could be handled only through external control over people's negative impulses. In terms almost identical to those later used by Durkheim, Comte argues that "true liberty is nothing else than a rational submission to the . . . laws of nature" (183042/1855:435). Without such external controls,

our intellectual faculties, after wasting themselves in wild extravagancies, would sink rapidly into incurable sloth; our nobler feelings would be unable to prevent the ascendancy of the lower instincts; and our active powers would abandon themselves to purposeless agitation. Our propensities are so heterogeneous and so deficient in elevation, that there would be no fixity or consistency in our conduct.., without them [external restrictions] all its [reason's] deliberations would be confused and purposeless.

(Comte, 1851/1957:29-30)

Thus Comte concludes: "This need of conforming our Acts and our Thoughts to a Necessity without us, far from hampering the real development of our nature, forms the first general condition of progress towards perfection in man" (1852/1968:26).

Not only does Comte have a highly negative view of people and their innate propensity to egoism, but he also has a very limited view of the creative capacities of individuals. "We are powerless to create: all that we can do in bettering our condition is to modify an order in which we can produce no radical change" (Comte, 1851/1957:30).Thus, Comte's actors are not only egoistic but also weak and powerless. In a very real sense, people do not create the social world; rather, the social world creates people, at least those animated by the nobler altruistic motives.

Comte addresses this issue in another way, in terms of the relationship between what he calls the "subjective" and "objective" principles. The subjective principle involves "the subordination of the intellect to the heart," whereas the objective principle entails "the immutable Necessity of the external world . . . actually existing without us"(Comte, 1851/1957:26-27). Given the preceding discussion, it should be clear why Comte argues that the subjective principle must be subordinated to the objective principle. The "heart" (especially its egoism), which dominates the intellect, must be subordi-

nated to external societal constraints so that another aspect of the "heart," altruism, can emerge triumphant.

Comte had other, more specific things to say about the individual. For example, he distinguished among four basic categories of instincts--nutrition, sex, destruction and construction, and pride and vanity (Comte, 1854/1968:249-.252). Clearly, all but the constructive instinct are in need of external control. Although Comte does attribute other, more positive instincts to people (attachment to others, veneration of predecessors), it is the instincts in need of external control that define to a great degree his thoughts on the larger society. Larger social structures such as the family and society are needed to restrain individual egoism and to help bring forth individual altruism.

Collective Phenomena In spite of his clear ideas on the individual, Comte's sociology overtly begins at a more macro level, with the family, which Comte labels the "fundamental institution." The family, not the individual, is the building block of Comte's sociology, as he explains: "As every system must be composed of elements of the same nature with itself, the scientific spirit forbids us to regard society as composed of individuals. The true social unit is certainly the family" (1830-42/I 855:502). Comte clearly believes that individuals constitute a different "level" of analysis than families (and society), which are, after all, "nothing but our smallest society" (1852/1968:161). These "smaller societies" form the natural building blocks of the larger society. Methodologically, Comte argues that "a system can only be formed out of units similar to itself and differing only in magnitude" (1852/i968:153). Individuals constitute different (microscopic) units, and (macroscopic) society cannot be formed out of them. Families are similar, albeit smaller, macroscopic units, and therefore they can be the basis of the larger society. In fact, Comte traces a progression whereby out of families tribes emerge and from tribes come nations. The family is the "true germ of the various characteristics of the social organism" (Comte, 1830--42/1855:502). The family not only is the building block of society but also serves to integrate the individual and society, because it is through the family that people learn to be social; the family is the "school" of society.Thus, it is the family that must play a crucial role in the control of egoistic impulses and the emergence of individual altruism. Furthermore, if we are ever to improve society significantly, a change in the Family will be the fundamental basis of any such alteration.Because the family is such a pivotal institution, a change in it will have profound effects both on individuals and the larger society.

Although the family is the most basic and most pivotal institution, the most important institution to Comte is religion, "the universal basis of all society" (1852/1968:7).Doing a kind of structural-functional analysis, Comte identifies two major functions of religion. First, it serves to regulate individual life, once again primarily by subduing egoism and elevating altruism. Second, it has the more macroscopic function of fostering social relationships among people, thereby providing the basis for the emergence of large-scale social structures.

Another important social institution to Comte is language. Language is profoundly social; it is what allows people to interact with one another. Thus, language helps promote unity among people, it connects people not only with their contemporaries but also with their predecessors (we can read their ideas) and their successors (they can read our ideas), Language is also crucial to religion in that it permits the formation, transmission,and application of religious ideas.

Another element of society that serves to hold people together is the division of labor (a view very much like that of Durkheim; see Chapter 6). Social solidarity is enhanced in a system in which individuals are dependent upon others. Society should have a division of labor so that people can occupy the positions for which they qualify on the basis of their abilities and training. Conversely, society should not force people into positions for which they are either underqualified or overqualified (Durkheim calls this the "forced division of labor"). Although Comte argues for the need for a division of labor,he is very concerned here, as he is elsewhere, about the dangers of excessive special-

ization in work in general and in intellectual work in particular. He worries about the tendency in society toward overspecialization and argues that the government should intervene to emphasize the good of the whole.

The government, in Comte's view, is based on force. Force can hold society together;however, if the use of force gets out of hand, the government will be more of a destructive than an integrative factor in society. To prevent this frmn occurring, the government needs to be regulated by a "broader and higher society This is the mission of true Religion" (Comte, 1852/1968:249). Comte clearly did not have a high regard for government, and he felt that religion was needed "to repress or to remedy the evils to which all governments are prone" (1852/1968:252).

Social Dynamics

Comte does have other things to say about social statics, but he devoted more attention to social dynamics. He felt that less was known about social statics than about social dynamics. Furthermore, the topic of social dynamics was, in his opinion, more interesting and of far greater importance than social statics. However, one may question these contentions. How is it that Comte knew more about the history of the world than he did about the nature of his own society? Why is the past (and future) more interesting than the 0resent? In response to these questions, and contrary m Comte, it can be clearly argued that we always know more about the present than the past (or certainly the future) and that the here and now is far more interesting and far more important than the past (or future). Nevertheless, it is on the basis of his beliefs on these issues that Comte abbreviates his discussion of social statics and moves on to the study of social dynamics.

The goal of Comte's social dynamics is to study the laws of succession of social phenomena. Society is always changing, but the change is ordered and subject to social laws. There is an evolutionary process in which society is progressing in a steady fashion to its final harmonious destiny under the laws of positivism: "We are always becoming more intelligent, more active, and more loving" (Comte, 1853/1968:60).Alternatively, Comte labels social dynamics the "theory of the Natural Progress of Human Society" (1830-42/1855:515). Overall, Comte sees us evolving toward our "no-blest dispositions," toward the dominance of altruism over egoism. Comte also offers a somewhat more specific view of this future state toward which we are evolving:

The individual life, ruled by personal instincts; the domestic, by sympathetic instincts; and the social, by the special development of intellectual influences, prepare for the states of human existence which are to follow: and that which ensues is, first, personal morality, which subjects the preservation of the individual to a wise discipline; next, domestic morality, which subordinates selfishness to sympathy; and lastly, social morality, which directs all individual tendencies by enlightened reason, always having the general economy in view, so as to bring into concurrence all the faculties of human nature, according to their appropriate laws.

(Comte, 183042/1855:515)

In his view, society invariably follows this law of progressive development; only its speed from one time period or one society to another may vary.

Because inuvariant laws are controlling this process of change, there is relatively little that people can do to affect the overall direction of the process. Nevertheless, people can make a difference by acting "upon the intensity and secondary operation of phenomena, but without affecting their nature or their filiation" (Comte, 1830-42/1855:470). People can modify (for example, speed up) only what is in accord with existing tendencies; that is, people are able to bring about only things that would have happened in any event. It is the fact that people can affect the development of society, if only marginally, that led Comte to his ideas on changing society and his thoughts on the relationship between theory and practice. We will have much more to say about this issue later in this chapter. However, it should be pointed out here that the idea that people can have only a minimal impact did not prevent Comte from developing grandiose plans for the future, positivistic society.

Comte's theory of the evolution of society is based on his theory of the evolution of the mind through the three stages described previously. He contends that he himself has "tested" this law by means of all the major methods--observation, experiment, comparison, historical research--and found it "as fully demonstrated as any other law admitted into any other department of natural philosophy" (Comte, 1830-42/1855:522).

Having derived this social law theoretically (from the laws of human nature), he turns to a "study" of the history of the world to see whether the "data" support his abstract theory. However, Comte's use of the words study and data is misleading because his methods did not incorporate the criteria that we usually associate with a research study and the data derived from it. For one thing, if Comte's findings contradicted the basic laws of human nature, he would conclude that the research was wrong rather than question the theory (Mill, 1961:85). Comte did no systematic study of the history of the world (how could one systematically study such a vast body of material?), and he did not produce data about that history (he merely provided a series of broad generalizations about vast periods of history). In other words, Comte did not do a research study in the positivistic sense of the term. In fact, Comte acknowledges this by saying that all he is offering is an abstract history; science is not yet ready for a concrete history of the world.

As he had in other areas of his work, Comte offered a dialectical sense of the history of the world. What this meant, in particular, was that he saw the roots of each succeeding stage in history in its prior stage or stages. In addition, each stage prepared the ground for the next stage or stages. In other words, each stage in history is dialectically related to past and future stages. A similar viewpoint is offered by Marx (see Chapter 5), who sees capitalism as being dialectically related to previous economic systems (for example, feudalism) as well as to the future communist society. Although on this point,and on several others, Comte's ideas resemble those of Marx, the reader should bear in mind that the differences between the two thinkers far exceed their similarities. This difference will be clearest when we discuss Comte's conservative views about the future of the world, which are diametrically opposed to Marx's radical communist society.

Never humble, Comte began his analysis of social dynamics by asserting, "My principle of social development.., affords a perfect interpretation of the past of human society at least in its principal phases" (1830-~-2/1855:541 ; italics added). Similarly, at the close of the historical discussion briefly outlined below, Comte concluded, "The laws originally deduced from an abstract examination of human nature have been demonstrated to be real laws, explaining the entire, course of the destinies of the human race" (1853/1968:535; italics added).