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The Ideas of the Founding Fathers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

T. B. Bottomore
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Extract

The founders of sociology—Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx—intended to create, each in his own fashion, a universal science of society. Nevertheless, they were above all concerned to explain how the 19th century industrial societies had come into existence, to analyse the ramifying effects of industrialism, to elucidate the connections between economic, political and intellectual changes, and to predict the future development of Western societies. Even in their systematic attempts to classify the types of human society, they inclined towards a simple and radical distinction between the modern Western societies and all others; and gave to the former a privileged position as objects of study. This classification was adopted, with modifications, by many later sociologists, and it plays an important part in the work of Tönnies, Durkheim and others, up to the recent writers who differentiate between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies, or ‘urban’ and ‘folk’ societies.

Type
Industrial Society and Representative Government
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , June 1960 , pp. 33 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1960

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References

(1) Explicitly they held, more or less strongly, that sociology could extinguish political debate by its scientific predictions; but that claim we need hardly consider.

(2) For example Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (London, Oxford U.P., 1954).Google Scholar

(3) CEuvres de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin (Paris, E. Dentu, 1865–1877), t. XX, pp. 81–82 et t. XVIII, pp. 165–168.Google Scholar

(4) Op. cit. t. XX, p. 151.

(5) “Comte was a Saint-Simon who had been through the Ecole Polytechnique”. Brunet, G., Le mysticisme social de Saint-Simon (Paris, Presses françaises, 1925).Google Scholar

(6) Cours de philosophic positive, VI, pp. 58–59.Google Scholar

(7) Ibid., p. 137.

(8) Ibid., p. 88.

(9) Ibid., p. 267.

(10) Spencer, Herbert, Principles of Sociology (London, Williams and Norgate), I (1872), pp. 544–5.Google Scholar

(11) Ibid., p. 545.

(12) Ibid., p. 552.

(13) Ibid., p. 554.

(14) Ibid., p. 555.

(15) Op. cit., II, pp. 603 sq.

(16) There is a similar statement in The Man versus the State when Spencer opposes the régime of status and the régime of contract and says: “[…] these two are definable as the system of compulsory cooperation and the system of voluntary cooperation”.

(17) The German Ideology, translated from the German text, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, sect. I, vol. 5 (Moskva, 1932)Google Scholar. All the following quotations are taken from that edition.

(18) Ibid.

(19) Ibid.

(20) The Poverty of Philosophy, op. cit.

(21) Capital, vol. I.Google Scholar

(22) Op. cit., vol. III.

(23) Simmel in his Philosophie des Geldes and Tönnies in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft interpreted modern society in this way.

(24) Marx's argument here is a moral one; the specialized individual is inferior to the “complete man”. Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society presented a forceful criticism of this idea.