Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim: Pioneers of Social Science
Auguste Comte: The Founder of Sociology
French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) greatly advanced the field of social science, giving it the name “sociology” and influencing many 19th-century social intellectuals.
Major Contributions
- The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1830-42)
- Appeal to Conservatives (1889)
- The Catechism of Positive Religion (1891)
Positivism
In the six-volume Course of Positive Philosophy, Comte argued that, like the physical world, society operated under its own set of laws.
Positivism is the term used to describe an approach to the study of society that relies specifically on scientific evidence, such as experiments and statistics, to reveal the true nature of how society operates.
Positivism, as a philosophy of science, relies on the approach that the principles and procedures of the natural sciences are applicable to the study of social phenomena.
Comte was interested in establishing theories that could be tested with the ultimate goal of improving our world once these theories were clearly laid out. He was eager to discover natural laws that applied to society.
He viewed the natural sciences, such as biology and physics, as a necessary step in the development of a social science. Just as gravity is a universal truth we all experience in the physical world, Comte believed sociologists could uncover similar laws operating on the social level of people’s lives.
Comte’s uniqueness lay, therefore, not in originating positivism but in placing it within a theory of history that claims human culture developed (and always must develop) in three stages:
- Theological: In this stage, human beings rely on supernatural agencies to explain what they can’t explain otherwise.
- Metaphysical: In this stage, human beings attribute effects to abstract but poorly understood causes.
- Positive: Human beings now understand the scientific laws that control the world.
The characteristics of positivism are:
- Science is the only valid knowledge.
- Fact is the object of knowledge.
- Philosophy does not possess a method different from science.
- The task of philosophy is to find the general principles common to all sciences and to use these principles as guides to human conduct and as the basis of social organization.
Criticisms of Comte’s Positivism
- Though Comte claimed to be the father of positivism or the scientific approach, he himself was not committed to it.
- Timasheff opines that Comte’s sociological theories represent a premature jump from the level of observation and inferences to the level of theory.
- According to John Stuart Mill, Comte’s religion does not stand the test of rationalism because it can never be put into practice.
- Comte’s religion was born out of his “moral intoxication”. Auguste Comte gave maximum importance to the scientific method.
In spite of criticisms, his insistence on a positive approach, objectivity, and scientific attitude contributed to the progress of social sciences in general.
Law of Three Stages
The “Law of Three Stages” is an idea developed by Auguste Comte. It constitutes one of the main contributions of Comte to the field of sociological thought.
Comte’s famed “law of the three stages” is an example of his search for invariant laws governing the social world. Comte argued that the human mind, individual human beings, all knowledge, and world history develop through three successive stages.
According to Comte, each branch of our knowledge passes successively through different theoretical conditions. This is known as the law of three stages. The main aim of this principle is to provide the basis of sociological thinking.
According to Comte, the evolution of the human mind has paralleled the evolution of the individual mind. Just as an individual tends to be a staunch believer in childhood, a critical metaphysician in adolescence, and a natural philosopher in manhood, so mankind in its growth has followed three major stages. Comte believed that each field of knowledge passes through three periods of growth.
Comte felt that one of the most basic laws of human organization is the “law of the three stages,”. He termed these stages the theological–military, metaphysical–judicial, and scientific–industrial or “positivistic”.
1. Theological or Fictitious Stage
In this stage, human beings rely on supernatural agencies to explain what they can’t explain otherwise. The theological stage is dominated by a search for the essential nature of things, and people come to believe that all phenomena are created and influenced by gods and supernatural forces.
According to Comte, in this stage, “all theoretical conceptions, whether general or special, bear a supernatural impress”. Unable to discover the natural causes of the various happenings, primitive men attributed them to imaginary or divine forces.
This stage is also divided into three sub-stages:
(a) Fetishism – Primitive persons tend to think in supernatural terms. They believe that all phenomena are “produced by the immediate action of supernatural beings.” They believe in all kinds of fetishes in which spirits or supernatural beings live.
(b) Polytheism – When the mind of primitive man became better organized, fetishism became cumbersome. Too many fetishes created confusion. Hence, they started believing in several gods. During this sub-stage, man begins to believe in magic and allied activities.
(c) Monotheism – Finally, they developed the idea of one god, or of monotheism. They started believing in the superhuman power of only one god.
2. The Metaphysical/Abstract Stage
Comte said that this stage started around the Middle Ages in Europe, or somewhere around the 1300s. In the metaphysical stage of society, people viewed the world and events as natural reflections of human tendencies. People in this stage still believed in divine powers or gods, but they believed that these beings are more abstract and less directly involved in what happens on a daily basis. Instead, problems in the world are due to defects in humanity.
3. The Positive/Scientific Stage
The positivist stage is the last and highest stage in Comte’s work. In this stage, people search for invariant laws that govern all of the phenomena of the world. Comte’s final stage for society is called the positive stage. Just as the name implies, here people view the world and events as explained by scientific principles.
In short, these stages represent different and opposed types of human conception. The most primitive type is theological thinking, which rests on the “empathetic fallacy” of reading subjective experience into the operations of nature. As civilization progresses, the metaphysical stage begins as a criticism of these conceptions in the name of a new order. In the final stage of positive science, the search for absolute knowledge is abandoned in favor of a modest but precise inquiry into the relative laws of nature.
Social Statics and Dynamics
“Just as in biology it is useful to separate anatomy from physiology, so it is desirable to make a distinction in sociology between statics and dynamics. It corresponds with the double conception of order and progress: order consists in a permanent harmony among the conditions of social existence, and progress consists in social development.” Order and Progress, statics and dynamics, are hence always correlative to each other.
Social Statics
“The statical study of sociology consists in the investigation of the laws of action and reaction of the different parts of the social system apart, for the occasion, from the fundamental movement which is always gradually modifying them.” It studies the balance of mutual relations of elements within a social whole. There must always be a “spontaneous harmony between the whole and the parts of the social system.” When such harmony is lacking, we are confronted by a pathological case.
According to his thought of collective organism, he places families at the level of an element, classes and caste of a tissue, and cities and towns of an organ. Aware of the limitations of such analogy, Comte concluded them by stating language, religion, and division of labor as the unifying or binding forces of society.
Language is the “easiest and common way of communication”, making it an essential tool for binding people closely to each other in a community.
Religion compensates for the weaknesses of language by binding the society on the basis of a few common beliefs, acting as a “positive guide”. It ties the society by morality, not letting it fall apart because of the disparities among people.
Finally, division of labor binds the society together on the basis of “similarity of classes” but is feared of distancing men from a larger mass as they are more driven towards their personal interests over the societies.
Social Dynamics
Social dynamics is a branch of social physics that deals with the laws, forces, and phenomena of change in society. It is an approach to sociology focusing on the empirical studies of societies and social systems in the processes of change in years gone by. The processes and forces of change at work in any social group. Social dynamics is a mathematically inspired approach to analyzing societies, building upon systems theory and sociology.
Social dynamics looks at all of the things that can change a social group. It is the study of the ability of a society to react to inner and outer changes and deal with its regulation mechanisms. It deals with the forces in society that provide for change and or conflict and with those aspects of social life that pattern institutional development and have to do with social change.
Comte placed greater emphasis on the study of social dynamics, or social change. “For the dynamical view is not only the more interesting, but the more marked in its philosophical character, from its being more distinguished from biology by the master-thought of continuous progress, or rather of the gradual development of humanity.”
Hierarchy of the Sciences
Comte’s second best-known theory, that of the hierarchy of the sciences or classification of sciences, is intimately connected with the law of three stages. Just as mankind progresses only through determinant stages, each successive stage building on the accomplishments of its predecessors, so scientific knowledge passes through similar stages of development. But different sciences progress at different rates. “Any kind of knowledge reaches the positive stage early in proportion to its generality, simplicity, and independence of other departments.”
Comte classified knowledge on the basis of observation of the scientific or positive level of human thinking. The main aim of the classification of science by Comte is to prepare the background and basis for the study of society, Sociology, a science invented by him. On this also he determined the methodology of sociology. Comte thought that each science came into being not arbitrarily. It has come to seek the “Laws” of a particular kind or level of facts which man had encountered in his experience of the world. Each science is concerned with some definite event or subject matter, and these constitute the subject of its study.
Comte spoke of sociology as the “crowning edifice” of the hierarchy of sciences. He did not mean that it is in any sense superior to any other science, but only that it serves to bring all other sciences into relationship with each other, in the overall intellectual history of man. Comte says, Astronomy, the most general and simple of all natural sciences, develops first. It is followed by physics, chemistry, biology, and finally, sociology. Each science in this series depends for its emergence on the prior developments of its predecessors in a hierarchy marked by the law of increasing complexity and decreasing generality.
According to Comte, behind and before all these sciences, however, lies the great science of mathematics—the most powerful instrument the mind can employ in the investigation of natural law. The science of mathematics must be divided into abstract mathematics or the calculus, and concrete mathematics embracing general geometry and rational mathematics. So we have thus really six great sciences.
The classification of sciences follows the order of development of the sciences. It indicates their social relation and relative perfection. In order to reach effective knowledge, the sciences must be studied in the order named. Sociology cannot be understood without knowledge of the anterior sciences.
Comte arranged the sciences so that each category may be grounded on the principal laws of the preceding category and serve as a basis for the next ensuing category. The order, hence, is one of increasing complexity and decreasing generality.
The simplest phenomena must be the most general – general in the sense of being everywhere present. In the hierarchy, Comte places mathematics on the lowest rung and the topmost rung is occupied by Sociology.
David Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim (1858 to 1917) was a French sociologist, social psychologist, and philosopher. He formally established the academic discipline and is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and the father of sociology.
Major Contributions
- The Division of Labor in Society (1893)
- The Rules of Sociological Method (1895)
- Suicide (1897)
- The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912)
Social Facts
Social facts are one of Emile Durkheim’s most significant contributions to sociology. Social facts are things such as institutions, norms, and values which exist external to the individual and constrain the individual.
As far as Durkheim was concerned, this was no different to the concept that human life is greater than the sum of the individual cells which make it up – society has a reality above that of the individuals who constitute it.
A key idea of Durkheim – that we should never reduce the study of society to the level of the individual, we should remain at the level of social facts and aim to explain social action in relation to social facts.
In this way, sociology should aim to be scientific, it should not study individuals, but scientific trends at the level above the individual. This is basically the Positivist approach to studying society.
Characteristics of Social Facts
Social facts have three properties:
- General – They are general throughout society. They are diffused throughout the group.
- External – Social facts exist outside the individual, are prior to him, and exist independently of their will.
- Constraining – They often have some sort of sanction, manifested in coercion or ostracism, against any individual who resists them.
Observing Social Facts
Social facts, for Durkheim, are things, not ideas. Things have reality and can be observed. As things, they can be studied in the same way that natural science can study molecules. Social facts are not produced by individual will, but by external social coercion.
Theory of Suicide
Suicide is any death which is the immediate or eventual result of a positive (e.g., shooting oneself) or negative (e.g., refusing to eat) act accomplished by the victim himself.
Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels which result in high suicide rates.
Durkheim argues that the suicide rate is a social fact – something that is external to any individual. It is a product of the social structure of any given society. Durkheim figured that by examining the different types of suicide, he could identify key elements of social organization.
- Integration is the extent of social relations binding a person or a group to others, such that they are exposed to the moral demands of the group.
- Regulation is defined as the normative or moral demands placed on the individual that come with membership in a group.
Types of Suicide
Egoistic suicide. This type of suicide occurs when the degree of social integration is low. When a person commits this type of suicide they are not well supported in a social group. They feel like they are an outsider or loner and the only people they have in this world are themselves. They often feel very isolated and helpless during times in their lives when they are under stress.
Altruistic suicide. This type of suicide occurs when the degree of social integration is too high. When a person commits this type of suicide they are greatly involved in a group. All that they care about are that group’s norms and goals and they completely neglect their own needs and goals. They take their lives for a cause. A good example of this would be a suicide bomber.
Anomic Suicide. This kind of suicide is related to too low of a degree of regulation. This type of suicide is committed during times of great stress or change. Without regulation, a person cannot set reachable goals and in turn, people get extremely frustrated. Life is too much for them to handle and it becomes meaningless to them. An example of this is when the market crashes or spikes.
Fatalistic suicide. People commit this suicide when their lives are kept under tight regulation. They often live their lives under extreme rules and high expectations.
These types of people are left feeling like they’ve lost their sense of self.
Division of Labor
Durkheim’s concept of the division of labor focused on the shift in societies from a simple society to one that is more complex. He argued that traditional societies were made up of homogenous people that were more or less the same in terms of values, religious beliefs, and backgrounds. Modern societies, in contrast, are made up of a complex division of labor, beliefs, and backgrounds.
In traditional societies, the collective consciousness ruled, social norms were strong, and social behavior was well regulated. In modern societies, common consciousness was less obvious, and the regulation of social behavior was less punitive and more restitutive, aiming to restore normal activity to society. He has classified the solidarity into two headings.
- Mechanical solidarity occurs when individuals within structural units are alike and self-sufficient. For example, in traditional societies, people grew their own food, made their own clothes, and had little need for extensive social contact with others because they did not have to rely on others for daily needs.
- Organic solidarity is when a large population is stratified into smaller structural units. There’s a high level of interdependence among individuals and structures, but there’s still a division of people along the lines of labor or type.
Durkheim recognized that things like increased communication, transportation, and interaction with others resulted in the social change from mechanical solidarity to organic. If societies evolve too quickly from traditional to modern, a breakdown of norms and collective consciousness occurs. The concept of community and social constraints becomes weakened, and this leads to disorder, crisis, and anomie.
Religion and Totem
“A unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden”.
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) is a book that analyzes religion as a social phenomenon. Durkheim attributes the development of religion to the emotional security attained through communal living. His study of Totemic societies in Australia led to a conclusion that the animal or plant that each clan worshipped as a sacred power was in fact that society itself.
According to Durkheim, religion is a division of the world into two kinds of phenomena.