A bit more on sociology

I must admit I have never heard of the Nisbet thesis, and for once Wikipedia doesn’t help much. But surely the issue here is that old standard, individualism versus society (or ‘society’ depending on your point of view). And here of course we can look at the relationship between Hegel and Marx, because the key thing about Hegel (and, implicitly, about Marx) was their ‘organicism’: i.e. the idea that society really exists, that it is best seen as a kind of quasi-biological ‘organism’ and that therefore to really look at Man properly we have to see him as fundamentally a social and sociated being, and that, therefore, approaches to psychology, cognition, consciousness etc. etc. that don’t look FIRST at society (as opposed to the individual) will be hopelessly simplistic (‘reductionist’). Now: Hegel inferred ‘right wing’ ideas from this. But Marx, with equal logic, inferred ‘left wing’ concepts from the same set of ideas.
But, as I never tire of saying, this simply brings home a point that must be repeated again and again and again:

The modern left is not a creature of the Enlightenment. In fact that’s so important I will state it again.

The modern left is not a creature of the Enlightenment*

For a start, the dates are all wrong. The modern left is a 19th century phenomenon, and it really came into its own in the late 19th century. The Enlightenment, on the other hand, was a late 17th century, 18th century phenomenon. The Left’s real precursors are either social movements that don’t fit easily into the ‘enlightenment-romanticism’ debate (the Spartacus slave revolt, the peasant’s revolt), or else religious movements that really have little in common with the enlightenment (The Diggers and others in the Civil war).
The French revolution as it started and continued wasn’t really a left wing movement, although the seeds of what was to become, later the ‘left’ were planted. Instead it was, as Nisbet doubtless claimed, an Enlightenment, ‘Rationalist’, ‘middle class’ revolution par excellence, with more in common with the concurrent American revolution than the Russian, a century later.

The key problems of the ‘Enlightenment’ in terms of sociology (I’ve argued elsewhere on CT that the word ‘enlightenment’ really has no meaning in this context but let’s ignore that for the moment) is that Enlightenment thinkers (most of ’em anyway) had little concept of human beings as social (which pretty much ruled out a science of sociology from the beginning) as they tended to be over-impressed by Newtonian reductionism (humans being conceptualised as social atoms in this viewpoint) and they had little theory of history (Enlightenment thinkers like Hume of course did write history but with the exception of Gibbon, their words are generally not considered to be all that impressive).

You’re right, though. Economics is an Enlightenment science par excellence. That’s what’s wrong with it.

*I have to stress this point, as in recent years ‘The Enlightenment Project’ (there was no such project but let’s let that pass) has often been taken to be a synonym for ‘left wing’, and in recent debates over Iraq, ‘intellectuals’ fell over themselves to identify themselves as being more enlightenment than thou. But the whole debate was fundamentally misplaced. Look at the Francis Wheen autobiography: Marx was a Romantic (friend of Heine, poet and novelist). The modern left owes more to Blake and (the early) Wordsworth and Coleridge than Hume or Adam Smith.

‘The reason here IMO is the founding tragedy of economics – that just when Cantillon, Petty, Quesnay and the rest were beginning to get going with the makings of a sensible social science of the management of an economic system (as a primitive branch of control engineering and feedback loops)….Up until the Wealth of Nations, economics was a very different project, much more related to the creation of statistics (etymologically “information about a state”) which was going hand in hand with the invention of states themselves’.

Isn’t this also related to mercantilism? (oft maligned by people who don’t know much about it). (Note: I know that Quesnay et al were not mercantilists, but they grew up in that intellectual milieu and in my understanding, were not as vehement about opposing in the same way that Smith was).

To quote the Wikipedia:

‘Adam Smith rejected the mercantilist focus on production, arguing that consumption was the only way to grow an economy. Keynes (also) argued that encouraging production was just as important as consumption. Keynes also noted that in the early modern period the focus on the bullion supplies was reasonable. In an era before paper money, an increase for bullion was one of the few ways to increase the money supply. Keynes and other economists of the period also realized the balance of payments is an important concern. Since the 1930s, all nations have closely monitored the inflow and outflow of capital, and most economists agree that a favorable balance of trade is desirable. Keynes also adopted the essential idea of mercantilism that government intervention in the economy is a necessity. While Keynes’ economic theories have had a major impact, few have accepted his effort to rehabilitate the word mercantilism’. (or the concept, one might add).

Also: ‘One area Smith was reversed on well before Keynes was in the use of data. Mercantilists, who were generally merchants or government officials, gathered vast amounts of trade data and used it considerably in their research and writing. William Petty, a strong mercantilist, is generally credited with being the first to use empirical analysis to study the economy. Smith rejected this, arguing that deductive reasoning from base principles was the proper method to discover economic truths. ‘

Assuming one accepts this it leads to interesting links between mercantilism and instutionalism and the Historical School.

Two more points:

Quesnay was a genius but behind Quesnay lay China (he was, after all, the ‘French Confucius’). Indeed, it has been argued that ‘laissez faire’ is simply a translation of ‘Wu-Wei’ the Taoist idea of ‘letting things be’ or ‘do not interfere in the Way of the Tao’ which obviously has political connotations in a n economic context. Again reading the Wikipedia one gets the idea that like Burke and Hegel (and Marx), Quesnay was inspired by biological metaphors (and tried to see the economy as a dynamic system, based on biology, not, like the neo-classicists, a model based on theoretical physics).

Which brings us to the final point: Stafford Beer. Like Hegel, Marx, the physiocrats, and (implicitly) Keynes and the Historical School, all these thinkers see economies as cybernetic complex systems, with feedback and feedforward loops (i.e. organic), not the absurd little ’cause and effect’ models of the neo-classicists. Surely it’s this that links them with Burke and the sociological school in general.

‘

Yes, although the physiocrats, mercantilists and other groups that belonged to what might be called the “Engineering School” of economics did miss Smith’s big insight – that the purpose of an economic system is to produce things people want, rather than to maximise some measurable quantity of interest. The concentration on subjective preferences and welfare was the big insight in Wealth of Nations and accounts for the fact that it basically wiped out its predecessors.

‘cybernetic’ does not equal organic. or, otherwise put, it is also not necessarily ‘organicist’ to believe that society has an objective existence that is not reducible to that of the individuals that make it up.

i also haven’t heard of the Nisbet thesis. but i should say that Saint-Simon is not exactly counter-revolutionary. Comte, who is a more plausible ‘founder’ of French sociology, is also not really counter-revolutionary. At least in the French context, sociology in the 19th century is associated strongly with the positivists and therefore also the republicans (who, before the 3rd republic) certainly qualify as revolutionary.

If sociology takes “the social” as its object, then its legacy is traced back to Montesquieu and Smith of Theory of the Moral Sentiments fame. Any further back and you cannot distinguish “sociology” from “economics” as autonomous spheres of inquiry.