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Introduction: Particularizing Positivism: January 2018
Introduction: Particularizing Positivism: January 2018
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The Worlds
of Positivism
A Global Intellectual History, 1770–1930
Editors
Johannes Feichtinger Jan Surman
Austrian Academy of Sciences University of Erfurt
Vienna, Austria Erfurt, Germany
Franz L. Fillafer
Department of History and Sociology
University of Konstanz
Konstanz, Germany
vii
Contents
Part V Epilogue
Index 357
Editors and Contributors
xiii
xiv Editors and Contributors
Contributors
xix
xx List of Figures
F.L. Fillafer (*)
Department of History and Sociology, Universität Konstanz, Konstanz,
Germany
J. Feichtinger
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
J. Surman
University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany
liaison men, like Gustave D’Eichthal, acted to that effect across Europe
as well as in the Americas. Scholarly and political go-betweens traveled to
the centers of positivism to creatively appropriate the messages enunciated
there. For example, Young Turk intellectuals like Ahmed Rıza flocked to
Paris to study with Comte’s heir Pierre Laffitte while Austrian philologist
Theodor Gomperz’s English sojourn was punctuated by meetings with
John Stuart Mill and George Grote. Spanish adherents of the German phi-
losopher Krause received his adaptation of Comte’s philosophy refracted
through the French renderings of Krause’s works, while Polish promot-
ers of positivism became acquainted with John Stuart Mill’s works at the
imperial hub of St Petersburg and prepared their Polish versions of his
writings on the basis of Russian translations.9 The English disciples of
Richard Congreve, the leader of the Religion of Humanity in the British
Isles, who served as officials in colonial administration, mediated between
Comte’s philosophy and Hindu activists in Bengal.
The context-sensitive study of purposeful appropriations permits us to
reassess the universal validity and scope of positivism. Positivist universal-
ism was conditioned by and geared toward local circumstances. It did
not produce a coherent “global” entity but a multi-pronged, polygonal
structure of scientific-political pursuits. The perspective adopted by the
authors of this book renders the dichotomy between a creative European
center and a receptive, emulative extra-European periphery obsolete.
This decentering of the history of positivism clarifies that there was no
clear-cut, stable “doctrine” that could be “disseminated” from Europe
to the wider world. The European “center” crumbles, revealing a pro-
cess of blending and appropriation that was in no way superior to or dif-
ferent from those taking place elsewhere in the world. “Positivism” was
fabricated at the interstices of Millean and Comtean philosophies in the
1860s, a program whose immediate appeal was not only due to its strong
sociopolitical promise but also to its malleable philosophical content.
The following chapters unveil the sociopolitical aspirations, infrastruc-
tural prerequisites, and daily reality of these adaptations. The book repar-
ticularizes the universalist aims and global structure of positivism. The
laboratories of positivism explored on the following pages are imperial
and regional spaces rather than “nation states,” thereby the book also
restores zones of contact and interaction obliterated by twentieth-cen-
tury national historiographies of science.
6 F.L. FILLAFER ET AL.
Fig. 1.1 The Paris statue of Auguste Comte. This monument was erected to
commemorate Auguste Comte as the founding father of sociology and philos-
ophy of science, on the Paris Place de la Sorbonne in 1902. Designed by the
sculptor Jean-Antonin Injalbert, the monument also features a figure embodying
the working class immersed in intellectual self-perfection and Clotilde de Vaux as
a Virgin Mary-like allegory of Humanity whose worship Comte had pioneered.
She gratefully adorns the pedestal with a palm of glory. John Heseltine/Alamy
Stock Photo.
Comte’s passionate and unrequited love for Clotilde de Vaux which had
begun in 1844 and ended abruptly with de Vaux’s early death two years
later. Clotilde’s example inspired Comte to make the social equilibrium
8 F.L. FILLAFER ET AL.
held that the mass of mankind would forever remain forced to rely on
the authority of experts not only in the technical, but also in the social
and moral domains,36 a view that cut against Mill’s advocacy of indi-
vidual liberty. It was to the establishment of individual liberty through
education, to its preconditions and safeguards in the realm of science,
that Mill devoted much of his work.37 The rule of experts, Comte prom-
ised, would make politics with its piecemeal engineering and inherited
animosities superfluous, whereas Mill maintained that conflict was indis-
pensable for moral and material progress.38
While Mill was a failure as a follower, a wayward and refractory dis-
ciple who diluted Comte’s work before making it percolate in England,
he arrived at his full stride as a founder. With his 1865 Auguste Comte
and Positivism, Mill fashioned a scientific and political agenda. He down-
played Comte’s significance to the “positivism” he elaborated by inte-
grating his philosophy into a sequence of liberating advances in what
seems a pastiche of the French philosopher’s law of inexorable progress.
“The philosophy called positive,” Mill stressed in 1865, “is not a recent
invention of M. Comte, but a simple adherence to the traditions of all
the great scientific minds whose discoveries have made the human race
what it is.”39 “Positive” and “positivism,” Mill continued, have become
“symbols of a recognized mode of thought” which induces “almost all”
who discuss the great problems of the age to take it “into serious consid-
eration, and define their own position, more or less friendly or hostile, in
regard to it.”40 “Positivism,” in Mill’s concise recapitulation, denotes the
inductive examination of observable phenomena and of the regular caus-
ative sequences that connect them, which in turn permits generalization:
Rival Universalisms
The Anglo-French traffic of slogans, templates for social analysis,45 and
prestigious founding figures highlights the glimmering promise and glar-
ing contradictions contained in the universality of positivism. Positivists’
frameworks of universality were themselves dependent on and attuned
to local conditions, and this insight is highly illuminating for positivist
world-building, for its vision of globality. Comte’s universalism was pred-
icated on humanity’s co-productive, shared discovery of laws of develop-
ment as well as on the recruitment of global elites as future guardians of
1 INTRODUCTION: PARTICULARIZING POSITIVISM 13
suspended. For Mill, the universality of method was both epistemic and
sociopolitical. There was only one avenue for humanity’s emancipation:
its enlightenment through European liberalism and education.
Brokerage
The study of “brokered” philosophies and their sociopolitical resonances
breaks much-invoked “transfers” down into their small-scale catalysts
and conduits, it recovers the blockages, suspensions, and feedback loops
that marked these processes. An example from Comte’s early proselyt-
izing for his philosophie positive encapsulates the intricacies of these pro-
cesses. For Comte, the spread of his doctrine was part and parcel of his
universalizing agenda for a world beset by the “great crisis” the French
Revolution had inaugurated. In the 1820s, Auguste Comte’s emissary
and propagandist Gustave D’Eichthal scoured the university towns of the
Germanies, trawling local learned journals for news on recruitable public
intellectuals. D’Eichthal was one of Comte’s intermediaries: his recon-
naissance mission to the Germanies was aimed at finding positivist liaison
men.50 D’Eichthal first picked Friedrich Buchholz in Berlin as mouth-
piece for Comte’s philosophie positive. Buchholz was a late Enlightener,
a longtime adherent of Adam Smith, who had set his stakes on the
study of contemporary history and the editing of liberal periodicals.51
D’Eichthal approached Buchholz since he was a nodal figure in the net-
work of European liberal journals that satisfied the insatiable appetites of
readers across the continent, and because he was an “admirable genius”
who had the whole system of positive philosophy in his head.52 Buchholz
had already acquainted German readers with Saint-Simonianism53 and
Comte was thrilled to learn that Buchholz would translate and publish
extracts from the Système de politique positive in his Neue Monatsschrift
für Deutschland.54
However, Comte’s enthusiasm rapidly cooled in 1824, when
Buchholz committed an unforgivable gaffe: he suggested that the philoso-
phie positive merely repeated ideas he, Buchholz, had already presented
to the public more than twenty years before.55 This insolence was outra-
geous, and indeed Buchholz lost the rank of key promoter of positive
philosophy; now he would act as a “porter” for the German headquar-
ters of Comteanism, whose leadership should be confided to none other
than Georg F. W. Hegel.56 This story about D’Eichthal’s headhunting
foray demonstrates that the mediation of positivism possessed three
1 INTRODUCTION: PARTICULARIZING POSITIVISM 15
Occidental which had begun in 1789, the year of the French Revolution;
and the 61st year of religious positivism. This occasion—a Brazilian
mathematician delivers the opening lecture of the Parisian temple on
the triple dates presented on the title page of the celebratory booklet—
encapsulates two key features of positivism: its diagnosis of permanent
planetary crisis, which only scientific positivism was able to overcome,
and the feeling of a global-universal manifest destiny to elevate all man-
kind. Many European thinkers of the nineteenth century lamented a
post-revolutionary crisis and concocted “universal” remedies. Comte’s
diagnosis was distinctive in that for him the universality of the crisis con-
cerned the planet as a whole, and that its only possible solution would
also have to encompass the globe in its entirety.
agenda in the 1860s. They also chart how the acquisition of “positive
knowledge” was gradually tied to the natural sciences. Jorge Fernández-
Santos Ortiz-Iribas’s and Sara Muniain Ederra’s chapter on eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Spain analyzes how empiricist imperatives in
various forms were melded together in the crucible of Bourbon enlight-
ened reform. They illuminate that Spanish novatores took their cues from
Bacon, Gassendi, and Newton. The chapter discusses how this eight-
eenth-century formulation of the empirical-pragmatic style of inquiry,
which tried to reconcile religious belief and scientific method, prefigured
and preconditioned the nineteenth-century appropriation of positivism,
particularly in the blend of Krausism and positivism. Fernández-Santos
and Muniain Ederra link the fabrication of this “Krausopositivism” with
the anti-utopian thrust of the Bourbon restoration after 1875, locat-
ing its social basis in a newly emerging learned elite of surgeons and
naturalists.
Denise Phillips’s chapter on the scope and subtexts of “positive
knowledge” in the Vormärz German lands also refrains from treating
her protagonists as precursors of positivism proper. In Phillips’s essay the
quest for positive knowledge in the Germanies before 1850s is no mere
set of signposts and premonitions for subsequent Millean and Comtean
programs. Instead, she shows that the association of natural-scientific
inquiries with “positive” knowledge was first voiced as an insult rather
than praise. Neohumanist critics of the natural sciences used this term as
a justification for assigning Naturwissenschaft a lower status in the edu-
cational, civic, and intellectual hierarchies of their time. This, in turn,
prompted natural scientists to defend the epistemic and cultural bene-
fits of positive knowledge as well as its distinctiveness from the humani-
ties. German naturalists thus slowly internalized what had been a hostile
ascription, turning the insult into a competitive advantage toward the
middle of the nineteenth century.
Nathalie Richard’s chapter carries the story of the gradual piecing
together of positivism to France. Richard recovers the philosophical and
political debates of the Second Empire in the 1860s, reconstructing how
the notion of a “positivist school” was, similar to the Germanies, coined
by its detractors who in this case rejected anti-metaphysical science, lai-
cism, and republicanism. These critics targeted Hippolyte Taine, Ernest
Renan, and Comte’s maverick disciple Émile Littré. As Richard clarifies,
this process coincided with Littré’s own refashioning of the positivist leg-
acy. Linking Comte’s Cours with Mill’s System of Logic, Littré highlighted
20 F.L. FILLAFER ET AL.
liberalism whose vision of benign imperial rule, social order, and scien-
tific inquiry it had provided.
Jan Surman’s chapter revisits the different milieus in Habsburg
Galicia, Russian Poland, and the Prussian Duchy of Poznán in which
Polish-speaking intellectuals and writers fabricated their positivism. The
Polish positivists of the 1860s tapped older models of “organic work,”
of economic rationalization, social welfare, and public education which
had been elaborated in the Duchy of Poznán and Habsburg Galicia since
the 1830s. Bearing a strong artistic imprint, Polish positivism was inti-
mately tied to the realist and naturalist repudiation of poetic Romantic
Messianism and Hegelian idealism, which were held responsible for the
crushing defeat of the 1863 Polish uprising. Polish positivism, and its
Warsaw strand in particular, remained intimately connected to realist and
naturalist belles-lettres, its shibboleths and slogans came from the works
of Mill, Buckle, and Spencer, while Comte remained a marginal presence.
Spencerism loomed large here because of its scientistic, anti-imperialist,
and strenuously egalitarian ingredients. Millean positivism was a center-
piece of the widespread liberal Anglophilia among Habsburg and Polish
intellectuals.
Written by Thomas Nemeth, the last chapter of this part gives a fresh
account of the ramifications of positivism in Russia with particular empha-
sis on its predominant Comtean variety. Nemeth shows how calls for a
new science of society that would treat its regularities as parts of the laws
of nature took root in Russia from the 1840s, and continued to prolifer-
ate despite rigorous censorship. As in Poland and the Habsburg lands,
“positivism” undermined Hegelian idealism both culturally and politi-
cally. Positivism should enable its adherents to arrive at the objective anal-
ysis and rational treatment of social ills. Here Russian Comteans faced the
demanding task of reconciling their stated aim, the liberation of individu-
als from the irrationalist restraints imposed by social tradition and insti-
tutions, with the concomitant presupposition of immutable and eternal
sociohistorical laws. Discussing Russian sociology, historiography, legal
theory, psychology, and philosophy, Nemeth follows the ramifications of
this dilemma, showing the conservative and progressive implications of
the positivist conceptions of lawfulness and the ensuing skirmishes over
scientists’ roles as active participants in the reformation of society.
In the fourth and final part of the book, “Positivist Aftermath,” Johan
Strang and Eric S. Nelson offer a revisionist perspective on the transfor-
mation from nineteenth-century positivism to “analytical philosophy.”
22 F.L. FILLAFER ET AL.
Notes
1. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (eds) (2015) Global Intellectual History
(New York: Columbia University Press); c.f. the critical remarks of Sanjay
Subrahmanyam (2015) “Global Intellectual History beyond Hegel and
Marx,” History and Theory 54, 1, 126–137; Martin Mulsow (2015)
“Vor Adam: Ideengeschichte jenseits der Eurozentrik,” Zeitschrift für
Ideengeschichte, 9, 1, 47–66.
2. Bernard Lightman (ed.) (2016) Global Spencerism: The Communication
and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist (Leiden, Boston: Brill);
Thomas F. Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, and Rosaura Ruiz (eds)
(2001) The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World (Dordrecht,
Boston: Kluwer).
3. Quentin Skinner (1969) “Meaning and Understanding in the History
of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, 1, 3–53; revised reprint in id. (2002)
Visions of Politics, I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 57–90, see Franz L. Fillafer (2015) “Auszug aus
Cambridge,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 9, 1, 115–118.
4. See Martin Jay (2011) “Historical Explanation and the Event: Reflections
on the Limits of Contextualisation,” New Literary History 42, 557–571;
Peter E. Gordon (2013) “Contextualism and Criticism in the History of
Ideas,” in Samuel Moyn and Darrin McMahon (eds) Modern Intellectual
History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century
(New York: Oxford University Press), 32–55.
5. Walter M. Simon (1963) European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century:
An Essay in Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
6. Duncan Bell (2009) “Making and Taking Worlds,” in Moyn and Sartori
(eds) Global Intellectual History, 254–279.
24 F.L. FILLAFER ET AL.