Comte had an English counterpart in Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who, like the Frenchman, was much influenced by hard science and engineering. In Spencer’s case this had much to do with the fact that he was brought up in Derby, a railway town in the British midlands, where Spencer’s first employment was for a railway company. But he differed from Comte in one fundamental way: whereas the Frenchman’s aim, ultimately, was for sociology to influence government policy, Spencer was always anxious to have sociology show that government ‘should interfere as little as possible in human affairs’. He was an admirer of both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin and he adapted their ideas to produce a picture of society that he viewed as increasingly complex and therefore needing, as in a factory, both structural differentiation and the specialisation of functions. This was necessary, he said, because such a structure made societies more adaptable in a Darwinian sense. He insisted that evolution occurs among societies at every level, resulting in ‘the survival of the fittest’ (the phrase is his, though he only partially assimilated the theory of natural selection). This process, he said, would ‘weed out’ less adaptable peoples, an approach that became known as social Darwinism.25
Spencer was more popular than Comte, certainly in Britain and America, where his most famous book, The Study of Sociology (1873), was published both between hard covers and as a series in the press. One reason for his popularity was that he told the Victorian middle classes what they wanted to hear: that individual moral effort is the motor of change, and that therefore sociology supported ideas of laissez-faire economics and minimum government intervention in industry, health and welfare.
During the course of the nineteenth century, German sociology caught up with and then overtook its French and English counterparts. Following the horrors of Stalinism and the grim conditions in many Eastern European countries during the Cold War (not to mention China), the name of Karl Marx (1818–1883) carries much baggage. His political theories were discussed earlier, in Chapter 27. For many people, however, he has always been regarded as much as a sociologist as a political theorist. His sociological ideas revolve around his concepts of alienation and ideology – these too were discussed earlier, but a brief recapitulation will help.26 Alienation refers to the extent to which people’s lives and self-image are determined and often damaged by their material working conditions. ‘People working in factories,’ Marx said, ‘become factory workers,’ by which he meant that they come to feel they have no control over their lives and frequently are made to operate far below their capabilities. By ‘ideology’ he meant prevailing world views, unconsciously represented in a society, which make people think that, for example, nothing can be done about their state of affairs, nothing can be improved because the way things are is ‘natural’. Marx’s other sociological idea was that of the ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in society. For him, the conditions of production comprise the base, the fundamental reality of society, whereas social institutions – the law, say, the civil service, or the church – make up the superstructure. For Marx, economics is the fundamental human science, not psychology, and in saying this he created a new way of looking at human affairs – the relation between belief or knowledge, or social institutions, and the operation of power. ‘Whereas Enlightenment writers or nineteenth-century liberals started their thinking from claims about human nature, Marx reversed the equation and sought to explain human nature via historical and economic factors.’27
It may seem surprising now but, to begin with, Marx’s ideas were not really assimilated in western Europe till the end of the century (Harold Perkins says Marxism was ‘hardly known’ in England before the 1880s). To begin with, there was far more interest in him in Russia, which was then a very retarded country, politically and socially, and where people had begun to wonder whether such a backward state could ‘leap-frog’ forward or whether it needed to go through the different reforms, revolutions and renaissances that the West had already experienced. Marx came to the attention of the West only later, as events in Russia turned violent and appeared to ratify his arguments.
The other German sociologists who helped shape both the discipline of sociology and the twentieth century were Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel. Like Marx, Weber’s theories were predominantly economic but he also owed something to Comte and was probably the first German to call himself a sociologist. (Reference to society, as ‘society’, was not common before the end of the nineteenth century. People referred to ‘political society’, ‘savage society’, etc. but not to anything more abstract.28)
The main concern among German sociologists was ‘modernity’, how modern life differed in a social, political, psychological, economic and moral sense from what had gone before. This idea was particularly prominent in Germany because of the country’s formal unification on 1 January 1871. All of Max Weber’s work was aimed at identifying what made modern, Western civilisation distinctive but, as Roger Smith has characterised it, all the early sociologists were interested in how modernity came about. Here is Smith’s table:
Herbert Spencer: modernity involved a change from a predominantly militant [military] society to an industrial one;
Karl Marx: the change was from feudalism to capitalism;
Henry Maine (the British sociologist/anthropologist, whose most famous work was Ancient Law, which took an evolutionary approach): status → contract;
Max Weber: traditional authority → rational-legal authority;
Ferdinand Tönnies: Gemeinschaft (community) → Gesellschaft (association).29
Weber thought that social science should be developed to help the newly unified German state by analysing and clarifying just what, exactly, were the ‘inescapable modern social and economic conditions’. He was part of a group of scholars – predominantly economic historians – who in 1872 founded the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Society for Social Policy) whose aim was just this, to research the links between social conditions and industrialisation.30 As they saw it, members of the Verein thought that Germany was faced with a dilemma. They agreed that the Second Reich, in which they lived and worked, had no option but to accept industrialisation, but at the same time did not believe that the economy satisfied everyone equally. They therefore recommended that the government develop policies which reflected this reality, such as a system of national insurance, to alleviate working-class poverty.31
Within sociology, Weber was a polymath. To begin with he wrote economic history, then made a survey of the agricultural depression in Prussia in the 1880s, before turning to a different aspect of history, the ancient religions of Israel, India and China, which provided him with a comparative perspective for (modern) Western economic development.32 This gave an added authority to his best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which appeared in 1904. In this work he sought to explain that ‘the crucial economic development in the modern world, capitalism, was first and foremost an exercise carried out by Protestants – even in Catholic countries’.33 Moreover, these Protestants were not necessarily concerned with wealth creation, as such, for the luxuries money could buy, but far more by work as a form of moral obligation, a calling (Beruf), as the best way to fulfil one’s duty to God. In effect, whereas for Catholics the highest ideal was purification of one’s own soul by withdrawal from the world and by contemplation (as with monks in a retreat), for Protestants the virtual opposite was true: fulfilment arises from helping others.34