The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought by Werner Stark

Author:Werner Stark [Stark, Werner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reference, General, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781135035099
Google: YngVcT29iUcC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-04-15T05:47:03+00:00

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MECHANICISM

Secondary Forms

IT HAS been our endeavour to show that organicism has produced, not only some primary, but also some secondary manifestations, that is to say, theories which, without being—like organicism proper—elaborations of the body-metaphor, yet belong within the same ambit of thought. We must now attempt to do the same for mechanicism, and we shall again begin by looking at a rather peripheral phenomenon, utilitarianism. Bentham’s relation to the mechanistic tradition is perhaps no more obvious than Marx’s to the organical; yet it is at the same time no less real.

In his Essay on Political Tactics, Bentham appears to condemn all metaphorical language in the social sciences. His words are so striking that they would almost deserve to stand as a motto to this book: ‘The imaginations of writers have been stretched to give to political bodies the properties of different kinds of bodies. Sometimes they are mechanical bodies; and then it is a question of levers and springs, of wheelwork, of shocks, of friction, of balancing, of preponderance. Sometimes they are animated bodies; and then they have borrowed all the language of physiology: they speak of health, of sickness, of vigour, of imbecility, of corruption, of dissolution, of sleep, of death and resurrection’. Such ‘figurative language … is mischievous’, Bentham writes. ‘It accustoms us to reason upon the most false analogies and gathers round the truth a mist which the most enlightened minds are scarcely able to penetrate.’1

These are golden words. But Bentham, unfortunately, does not keep the scales even. He condemns organicism, but he is far from condemning mechanicism, though he appears to avoid its metaphors. He defines, in the very same context, a body politic as ‘an assembly or collection of individuals, inasmuch as they are found united together in order to perform a common act,’ and this definition is pure nominalism. Indeed, in the next lines, he approaches very closely to the concept of contrat social: ‘That which constitutes a political body, is the concurrence of many members in the same act. It is therefore clear that the act of an assembly can only be a declarative act—an act announcing an opinion or a will. Every act of an assembly must begin by being that of a single individual: but every declarative act, the expression of an opinion or of a will … may finish by being that of a body. “This”, says Titius, “is what passes in my mind.” “This is precisely what has passed in mine”, may Sempronius equally say. It is, therefore, the power of agreeing in the same intellectual act which constitutes the principle of unity in a body’1

In view of this attitude, it is hardly surprising that Bentham at times forgets his own warnings and slips into the language of mechanicism after all. ‘Whatsoever … be the aggregate mass of the matter of good existing in the community in question,’ he writes on June 9, 1816, ‘it is the interest … of each member of the community … to have the whole of it.

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