Society

In the 18th Century 'atomism' was applied to the physical world, the mental world and the social world. Though Romanticism, through Hegel particularly, develops alternative conceptions, social thought in the 19th Century by no means abandons the atomistic outlook. Foucault says that the 19th Century witness the 'irruption of time', which can be seen most powerfully perhaps in the way in which process displaces structure in the conception of the living world. But there is also a reconceived interest in the change to which human life is thought to be subject. This likewise begins to be thought of in terms of ongoing historical processes.

Some theories of 'social evolution'.

It is often noted that you have in the 19th Century a quickening of interest in the development of human nations or cultures over long spans of time: E.g. Hegel, Compte, Spencer, Marx. This is true, but the distinctive thing is that current structures of society, as well as any developmental change, started to be put down to processes that were going on constantly. (This is the interesting thing, not the simple idea, which was not distinctive, that human natures or cultures undergo development over time.)

HEGEL

I have said that the great dynamo of Romantic thought was the reassertion of agency.

There was a rebellious insistence that human beings were agents, and also that Nature was an agent. Hegel's assertion was that Nations were agents. He treated a people, a society, a Nation as a human being, and a romantic human being at that. A nation, like an individual man or woman had the purpose of giving full expression, as their life developed, of a potential. Here is Isaiah Berlin:

'Hegel transferred the concept of the personal character of the individual, the aims, logic, quality of his thoughts, his choices - his whole activity as it unfolds itself throughout a man's [sic] life - the case of entire cultures and nations...[Part of the immense importance of Hegel consists in the creation of new disciplines which] consist in the history and criticism of human institutions, viewed as great collective quasi-personalities, which possess a life and character of their own, [leading to] the treatment of state, race, history, epoch, for example, as super-persons...'

(Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, First published 1939, 1963 ed. Oxford, OUP, pp 51 and 54.)

The development of such super-persons, as is well known, was put down to a dialectical process. One thing provokes its opposite, and out of that juxtaposition comes a third thing which synthesizes the two originals. Once formed this in turn generates a new opposite, and so the process repeats itself.

COMPTE

First is a period (the theological), he said, in which natural phenomena are ascribed to the actions of supernatural beings.

In the next stage - the metaphysical- 'principle', and 'forces' replace supernatural will, Nature replaces God.

Finally in the ultimate (Positive) stage arrives, when reference to metaphysical entities are abandoned and science speaks only of relations between facts, after the manner of Hume.

The dynamic for Compte is what? Not entirely clear, but it was a matter of Trends which could not be bucked.

(For a readable account of Compte, see Basil Willey's chapter in his 19th Century Studies, London, 1949, Chatto, from which the quotations below are drawn unless otherwise indicated.)

For Compte, progress was the inevitable destiny of humanity. 'Social dynamics' invariably produces improvement. 'The gradual development of humanity favours a growing preponderance of the noblest tendencies of our nature'.

Humanity was to take the place of God in religion, but the rest of religion was pretty much to be retained.

In the second phase of his thought, following the death of Cotilde, with whom he had a brief but intensely romantic (ised?) relationship, Compte gave priority to the affections over the 'head'.

He looks forward to much smaller political groupings (the break up of contemporary Europe).

The blending of 'order' and 'progress' is a preoccupation of 19th C thought, says Willey, and Compte made some success of it. Willey's view is that attempts to combine the structure and aims of the medieval world with the beliefs of the 19th C....

SPENCER

The nineteenth century polymath Herbert Spencer was responsible for proposing perhaps the closest parallel between organic and social evolution, which begins, he proposed, with a number of elementarily simple forms of society, from which arise a wider and ever-widening diversity of forms of ever-ascending orders of complexity.

In other words, just as the diversity and complexity of modern animals and plants are supposed to have evolved from one or a few simple primeval organisms, so Spencer supposed that the varied and sophisticated societies of his day could trace their ancestry back to one or two ancient social systems of elementary organization.

A less ambitious thesis leaves out all talk of a common root for modern societies and insists more simply that all societies pass through one and the same developmental path.

MARX

Marx's influential views were based on a theory of how social change happened, a process which he thought produced a number of distinct phases in European history.

TRIBAL STAGE

Marx first identifies a tribal condition, in which the structure is little more than an extension of that of the family and the necessities of life are met by hunting and fishing, by cattle breeding or by agriculture.

SLAVE-BASED ECONOMY

When several tribal units unite to form a city, a second stage is reached, in which the necessary productive labour is performed by slaves.

FEUDALISM

The third stage is represented by Feudalism: slaves are replaced in the country by an enserfed small peasantry and in the towns by journeymen; their productive activity is limited to small-scale and unsophisticated cultivation of land, and handicraft industry.

CAPITALISM

Out of feudalism comes capitalism, with production being performed largely with the use of machines and society divided into those who own the machines and those who operate them: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

MECHANISM OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Marx thinks that the important thing about a society, is its way of producing life's necessities - how it organizes the production of food, shelter, warmth and so on. It is, thinks Marx, the way a society organizes itself to produce these things which determines its other, less basic characteristics. Consequently, he thinks it is change in this aspect of its life that leads to change in the society as a whole and thus determines its historical course.

But then, how is change in production, in economic organization, initiated? The motivating force, according to Marx, is the human being's ceaseless struggle to meet his or her human needs. In the most primitive stages the human being lives on the brink of disaster: the productive forces at human command are capable of generating only the most basic necessities - and only if life is restricted to almost continuous labour.

With time however ways are found of increasing 'productivity'. In the case of Western Europe at any rate, Marx thinks tribes band together to form groups large enough for a slave based economy to flourish. Eventually the struggle to expand the forces of production results in the development of the machine, and with it the promise for all human beings of emancipation from incessant toil.

What happens in each stage is that a conflict develops between on the one hand the structures through which production is organized and on the other people's pressure to find improved circumstances of life.

It can be argued that what keeps the mechanism in motion is the freely willed striving of individuals. If you take this view you will be able to see Marx as inheriting a belief in human freedom from the Romantic period. (And I would say it is difficult without attributing to him a basic belief in the importance of freedom to understand why he thought it all mattered.)

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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 5

5.4 Society