The Working Class and the Socialist Thesis

So far, however, we have only dealt with the start of the age of sociology. Sociology is still with us, and in spite of the increasing frequency with which the word ‘crisis’ has been attached to it, no end is in sight. Nevertheless, there is a limited set of problems with which sociology has been pre-eminently concerned, and which give us the possibility of delimiting an ‘age of sociology’ . To discern it we must define what sociology strove towards from the outset.

Central to jts preoccupations were problems of politics and political reconstruction ; but there was also ‘the social question’, or as it was often put in the USA, ‘social problems’. The social question was part of the sociological tradition from the beginning, and it was of paramount importance in its establishment as an institutionalized discipline.

A characteristic concern of sociology throughout its development has been the condition of the lower classes of society : their poverty, their work or lack of work, their leisure, their housing, their health, their morality, their delinquency, and so on. This was no less the case in the establishment of American sociology, in spite of the

44 Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, IV, p. 14 (English éd., II, p. 145O : Système de politique positive, p. 6 i4 f (English ed . III, p. 52 7 ^ . Saint-Simon had more appreciation of de Bonald (‘ Introduction to the Scientific Studies of the 19th Century’, in F. Markham, ed , Henri de Saint-Simon, Social Organization, the Science o f Man and other Writings, New York, 1964, pp. 1 4 - 1 8 ; Oeuvres, VI, pp. 167Q. In the reference above, Manuel’s way of quoting Saint-Simon’s enthusiastic admiration for the theoretical powers of de Bonald (Manuel, op. cit., p. 389) does not adequately convey to the reader that Saint-Simon’s objective in the chapter in question is to refute de Bonald’s view of the role of religion (Oeuvres, VI, p. 158).

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laissez-faire influence of Spencer.

‘The only early department of sociology that did not originate in connection with charities, philanthropy and reform, was at Yale because of Sumner’s negative views on these matters’, writes Anthony Oberschall in a penetrating essay on the early history of American sociology. Oberschall also makes it clear that philan­

thropic sociology was not absent at Yale either. ‘Philanthropy, social economics, and social reform were offered in the Yale Divinity School’s Department of Christian Sociology.’45

The investigation of the situation of the proletariat and of other impoverished social strata has always been a major subject of empirical social research and of sociology, although its lengthy history was generally forgotten until recently. There were im­

portant early works in this tradition apart from Charles Booth’s survey of the London poor at the turn of the last century, and Le Play’s studies of European workers of about half century before.

There existed, for example, the work of the British statistical societies of the 1830’s, along with Parent-Duchatelet’s study of prostitution in Paris and Villermé’s study of workers during the French July Monarchy, and even Sir Frederick Morton Eden’s The State o f the Poor of 1797.46

Only later did this tradition of empirical investigation effect a juncture with the development of sociological theory. However, they shared from the beginning a common interest and concern.

The social question became the main problem for Saint-Simon in his later years. He announced that his aim was ‘to ameliorate the lot of this class [the working-class] not only in France, but in England . . . in the rest of Europe and the whole world’.47 He wrote an open letter to ‘Messieurs les Ouvriers’,48 and in his last work, Le Nouveau Christianisme, he asserted : ‘The whole of society should work to

45 A. Oberschall, ‘The institutionalization of American sociology’, in Ober­

schall, op. cit., p. 212. The general American intellectual background is portrayed by R. Hofstadter, Theyige o f Reform, New York, i960.

46 An overview of this tradition of empirical social research is given in the article ‘Sociology: Early History of Social Research’, by B. Lécuyer and A.

Oberschall, in International Encyclopedia o f the Social Sciences, New York, 1968, Cf. P. Lazarsfeld, ‘Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology’, I S I S 52, 2, June 1961. Lazarsfeld is directing a large-scale research project on the history and development of empirical sociology.

47 H. Saint-Simon, ‘Du système industriel II’ , p. 81, Oeuvres, vol. III.

48 In Oeuvres, vol. VI.

ameliorate the moral and physical existence of the poorest class;

society should be organized in a manner most suited to attaining this great end.’49 In the Communist Manifesto he is included, with respect, among the critical-utopian socialists, and much later Engels was even to write that ‘nearly all the ideas of later socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo’ .50

Comte, for his part, also came to notice that ‘the growth of industry . . . naturally brought to the front the great question of modern times, the incorporation of the proletariat into society, which had been ignored so long as the anomalous interval of warfare

[anomalieguerrière] had lasted’ .51 He professed sympathy with some of the aims of socialism and communism and stated that his positivism adhered to ‘the spontaneous principle of communism ; namely that property is in its nature social, and that it needs control’. He criticized the economists for their interdiction of the regulation of property.52

Spencer, of course, as a laissez-faire ultra was an odd man out in the company of such social reformers, though in his writings on state and society he had to deal with the actual existence of the social question, if only to develop a more and more extreme reaction against the solutions suggested to it.53 The Marquis de Tocqueville, a large number of whose relatives had been guillotined during the French Revolution, was for all his perspicacity too obsessed with the anti-aristocratic revolution to be able to devote any systematic attention to what Comte called ‘the modern question’.54

49 Saint-Simon, ‘Le Nouveau Christianisme’, p. 173, Oeuvres, vol. III.

50 F. Engels, ‘ Socialism; Utopian and Scientific’, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Moscow n .d , p. 400; M E W 19, p. 196. The context, where Engels talks of the limitations imposed upon Saint-Simon, strongly qualifies this well-known statement.

51 Comte, Système de politique positive, III, p. 610 (English ed. III, p. 523).

52 Ibid, I, p. i54f.

53 In certain late writings there is however, even in Spencer, a clear and sad awareness of the social problems of capitalism, absent from the simple models of competitive commodity production. See below ch. 5.

54 In his introduction to Democracy in America (pp. 6-7), Tocqueville says à propos this revolution : ‘The whole book that is here offered to the public has been written under the influence of a kind of religious awe produced in the author’s mind by the view of that irresistible revolution which has advanced for centuries in spite of every obstacle and which is still advancing in the midst of the ruins it has caused.’ During the 1848 revolution Tocqueville witnessed the new class struggle, as his vivid Recollections (London, 1970) show. But its effect on his

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Durkheim, on the other hand, the key figure in the later French institutionalization of sociology, was acutely aware of the social problems involved in the ‘abnormal forms’ of the contemporary capitalist division of labour. The last part of his first major work,

The Division o f Labour in Society, was to be devoted to a critical exposure of these aberrant forms, whose negative effects on the situation of workers endangered and undermined social solidarity.

In his preface to the second edition, Durkheim - for all his avowed scientism - went so far as to advocate a concrete (albeit utopian) solution to the social problem, in the form of a corporatist arrange­

ment of occupational groups.

In Germany the focal organization of the period in which sociology was established was the Verein fiir Sozialpolitik (Social Policy Association), founded in 1873. I* sponsored a large number of studies on economic and social matters and acted as an intellectual, later an overwhelmingly academic, forum of social reform. The German Society for Sociology developed out of it in 1909 as an exclusively scientific society, but not as a hostile or competing organization. Leading German sociologists such as Ferdinand Tonnies and Max Weber were members of both.55