But if the social sciences, as a new way of thinking, a new theory of human order, emerged first in France, it was rapid industrialisation, in particular the wholesale migration from the countryside to the towns in England, that threw up the obvious practical need for this new approach. Between 1801 and 1851 the population of England and Wales more or less doubled, from 10.5 million to 20.8 million, but in the cities the increase was out of all proportion. Birmingham went from 71,000 to 233,000, up by 328 per cent, Glasgow jumped from 84,000 to 329,000 (392 per cent), and Manchester/Salford from 95,000 to 401,000, a staggering rise of 422 per cent.12 Such massive increases could not but have enormous consequences, the worst of which were the bad housing, the overcrowded factories, the vicious cruelty of child labour, primitive and inadequate sanitation and its associated diseases. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers lived in cramped and crowded homes, in buildings that were disfigured by soot and smoke from blast furnaces and lacked even the most basic amenities. Conditions were so bad that an entire region, between Birmingham and Stoke, became known as ‘the Black Country’.13
John Marks has collected several accounts of the horrors of child labour and disease. ‘Large numbers of poor children were handed over to employers from the age of seven, to work for over twelve hours a day, Saturdays included, under the control of overseers who often used the whip on them. Sometimes children worked for fourteen or fifteen hours a day for six days a week, with meal times being given up to clean machinery . . . Here is part of the evidence given to the government Committee on Factory Children’s Labour in 1831–32: “At what time in the morning, in the brisk time, did those girls go to the mills?” “In the brisk time, for about six weeks, they have gone at 3 o’clock in the morning, and ended at ten, or nearly half past, at night.” “What intervals were allowed for rest or refreshment during those nineteen hours of labour?” “Breakfast, a quarter of an hour, and dinner, half an hour, and drinking, a quarter of an hour.” “Was any of that time taken up in cleaning the machinery?” “They generally had to do what they call dry down; sometimes this took the whole of the time at breakfast or drinking, and they were to get their dinner or breakfast as best they could; if not, it was brought home.” ’14 Beginning in 1819, Acts of Parliament were passed to limit such excesses but they didn’t go anywhere near far enough and conditions remained pitiable.
Under this system, children became so washed out that they often needed to be shaken awake in the mornings, and had to be dressed by the adult overseers. ‘In some of the mines conditions were even harsher – children might be taken as early as age four, to perform the function of opening and closing the ventilation traps. They had to sit for hours in small niches cut into the coal where, in the words of one Commissioner, their work “was solitary confinement of the worst order”.’15 Not surprisingly, the death rates arising from these arrangements were alarming, not least from children falling asleep on the job and sliding into machinery. That at least had the merit of being a quick death. But there were many diseases that thrived amid the squalid sanitation, most especially the unholy trinity of tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid.16
Dickens and other writers produced their ‘industrial novels’, Robert Owen and others campaigned for a change in the law, but the first person who thought industrialisation was a problem that could be studied systematically was the Frenchman Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte, notable physically for his unusually short legs, had an exceptional upbringing in that he was raised in a family made up entirely of women, and this seems to have had a permanent effect: he always had a problem with women and was always interested in those less well-off than himself. The son of a civil servant, he entered the École Polytechnique in Paris, then well-known for its courses in science and engineering, and concentrated on the study of the French and industrial revolutions. It was at the Polytechnique that Comte discovered his lifetime aim, to ‘apply the methods of the physical sciences to society’.17 Comte understood that society around him was changing in a fundamental sense: what he called ‘theological’ and ‘military’ values were giving way to ‘scientific’ and ‘industrial’ ones. In such a world, he said, industrialists replaced warriors, and scientists replaced priests. The social scientists, ‘because they managed human harmony, essentially fulfilled the role of high priest in the new social order’.18
Between 1817 and 1824, after his time at the École Polytechnique, Comte became Saint-Simon’s secretary. After they fell out (because Comte felt that Saint-Simon had not given him enough credit on a paper he published), the secretary set off on his own. He was a great believer in phases and it was in his book Cours de Philosophie Positive (Course of Positive Philosophy) that he argued that both humanity and science had passed through three stages.19 There was first the theological stage in which people attribute phenomena to a deity; in the second, metaphysical stage, humans attribute causes to abstract forces or forms; in the third, what he called the positive stage, science ‘abandons the search for ultimate causes’ and looks instead for regularities and predictable sequences in ‘observable phenomena’. He believed that humanity had made systematic progress in the main sciences: the physical sciences in the seventeenth century, and the life sciences in the eighteenth century and his own time, the early nineteenth century. From now on, he said, science – and in particular life science – would be at the centre of progressive civilisation.20 In his own mind the life sciences were called ‘organic physics’ and were divided into physiology and social physics, what he later came to call sociology, a neologism he coined. Social physics, he said, is essentially divided from physiology, ‘it has its own subject matter, the regularities of the social world, which cannot be translated into the laws of another science’.21 Comte was specifically and deliberately seeking to replace political philosophy with sociology – he said it was ‘inevitable’ – as a less partisan basis for social harmony and, indeed, morality. Social phenomena, he said, are like all other phenomena in that they have their own invariable natural laws. But he did distinguish two forms of sociology. One, the ‘static’ form, governed the organisation of society, producing order and morality, whereas the ‘dynamic’ form governed the laws of change.22
Comte then rather lost his way. His obsession with social order, combined with his scornful view of organised religion (not to mention a passionate love affair), led him to attempt his own form of social order, in a new religion, the aim of which was ‘to live in love on the basis of positive knowledge’. Comte loved religious ritual – he thought it helped bring about social harmony – but there was little that was ‘positive’ about these institutions that were founded in his name. In fact, more than anything else, they paralleled the Catholic Church, except that the love of humanity was the object of worship.23 Comte’s considerable creative energies were thus deflected and dissipated. This hindered the maturation of his system of social physics, which ultimately fell down on two accounts. There was no allowance in his system for psychology, for individual motivation. And he was so obsessed with order, and how to achieve it, that he neglected the role of conflict in society, the crude reality of power. This left a gap for Marx to fill.24