Fortunes of History by Donald R. Kelley

Author:Donald R. Kelley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2003-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Scientific History

In France the revolutionary and postrevolutionary search for a science of society turned to history as an auxiliary and empirical—a “positive, ” and “positivist”—base. From Condorcet to Comte the study of history again allied itself with philosophy and took a conjectural form, seeking large patterns and periods, like the “epochs” of Condorcet’s Esquisse, and the emphasis was on social and economic forces rather than political and legislative control— on collective rather than individual behavior. Saint Simon’s view of history took the form of a modern trinity (industry, science, and art) and on the four stages of fetishism, polytheism, deism, and “physicism”; and in this he was followed by Fourier and others. The thought of these socialists was systematic and encyclopedic as well as utopian; its religious tendency suggested that the quest for the “Heavenly City” (in the phrase of Carl Becker) was still in progress; and as Saint-Simonian social science became a sort of theology, so history became a sort of theodicy leading to a New Christianity based on the principle not of struggle or competition but of cooperation and love. Saint-Simon’s vision moved many young historians of the postrevolutionary generation, including Guizot, Thierry, Michelet, and Lerminier, as well as theorists like P. J. B. Buchez and Auguste Comte.54

In 1833, Buchez published an introduction to the “science of history, ” which was devoted to the determination of “causes, ” but final and not efficient causes, according to a sort of Catholic socialism.55 What he preached was a doctrine of progress and a teleology envisaging a future of utopian socialism. Buchez was also keen on “method” and the inference of a “law of variations” which would make it possible to predict this future, but behind these high “scientific” ideals Buchez’s view of history remained with the framework of the Adamic story and seems closer to Bossuet than to Condorcet. With Le Roux, Buchez also published in 1834 a standard source collection of the French Revolution, to which was prefixed a survey of French history, representing the Revolution as the necessary culmination of modern civilization, or at least its next-to-last stage.

Auguste Comte’s “sociology” was “positive” because it was based on history, or at least a theory thereof. With the “new history” of Thierry, Comte agreed that the Middle Ages had been undervalued and needed to be taken seriously to understand the organic growth of society. For Comte “positive” was the opposite of “conjectural, ” and yet his idea of history was little more than a rehearsal of the ancient (and medieval) ages-of-man idea—the famous law of three stages, theological, metaphysical, and positive, corresponding to childhood, youth, and manhood. In its theological phase (drawing here on Creuze’s Symbolik) history began with fetishism—and ended there, too, as some critics would say with respect to Comte’s own worship of natural science. In a global as well as European perspective humanity progressed from polytheism to monotheism, and like Bossuet, Comte celebrated the contributions of Catholicism to progress.56 Metaphysics, “the ghost of dead theologies, ” arose

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