idea of an equilibrium between the two principles of order and progress, where Comte defends the principle of progress precisely insofar as he speaks for the bourgeois society that has become emancipated from the structures of feudal and absolutist authority but also on behalf of order, insofar as, just like Hegel, he not only sees the horrors of the French Revolution but also sees that the ruthless realization of bourgeois equality, i.e. of the exchange principle as the sole criterion of society, tends to deform and unhinge the structure of society itself; in other words, he sees that this naked exchange relation is ultimately all that remains, and that this deformation of society threatens to expose it to what might typically be described today as ‘atomization’ or ‘massification’ – to use popular expressions which in Comte’s time were just as superficial and inadequate for capturing the real historical dynamics involved as they are today.
So I shall now read you a passage which will reveal this connection between the philosophy that is criticized by Comte, namely metaphysics, and the politically restorationist tendencies of his own thought. And here I simply want to bring out one Comtean thought which will show you precisely how the bourgeois principles of progress and rationality are combined with the principle of order in Comte. For here you will discover a very ancient Platonic theme, although the good Comte himself would doubtless be turning in his grave if he could hear me, over a hundred years after his death, ultimately describing him as a Platonist. And this is the thought that the task of ruling society essentially falls to a kind of science, indeed specifically to sociology.9 For Comte envisages sociology as a scientific discipline, as a neutral and entirely objective authority that stands above the play of social forces and is capable both of directing human progress – where this is understood in Saint-Simon’s sense as the progressive unfolding of the technical forces of production10 – and also of somehow containing and neutralizing the disorganizing, destructive and anarchic forces that arise and develop within society itself, and this idea, once again, strongly recalls the role of the state in Hegel.11 On this Comtean conception, therefore, sociology represents a kind of classless authority hovering above the play of social forces. And this anticipates a notion that we also encounter in the history of sociology in more recent times – in other words, something like the idea of the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’ in the work of my former colleague Mannheim.12 This idea is already present in Comte’s doctrine, and ultimately in Saint-Simon’s doctrine as well.
What Comte says is basically as follows. He criticizes the principle regarding the freedom of conscience – namely the principle expressed with particular force by Fichte13 but already affirmed by Kant – which claims that every single human being is responsible only to his own conscience, a principle which, as Comte quite rightly sees, embodies one of the most fundamental impulses of the bourgeois metaphysics of freedom. And it is typical of the way Comte already links philosophical concepts to specific social developments when you find him coupling this concept of the freedom of conscience with the concept of national sovereignty. Thus he goes on to say, in a passage you can find on page 49 of Blaschke’s edition: ‘It is also quite easy to estimate the value of the principle of the sovereignty of the people. It is the second conclusion drawn from the principle of the freedom of conscience, one which has been transferred from the intellectual domain to the political domain. This new stage of metaphysical politics’ – in other words, a politics which is supposed to spring from pure principles rather than merely conforming to the given facts: the kind of politics espoused by Fichte in a rather extreme way14 – ‘was required in order to proclaim the downfall of the old regime and prepare the way for a new constitution.’ As you can see, you already have a kind of sociology of knowledge here. Comte continues: ‘The peoples had to award themselves the right to change the already existing arrangements at will; otherwise all restrictions could only proceed from the old regime itself, the existing authorities would have to be maintained, and the social revolution’ – in other words, the French Revolution – ‘would have failed. It was the dogmatic canonization of the sovereignty of the people alone that made new political experiments possible.’ And then you can see the trajectory of Comte’s thought when he immediately goes on to say:
Under any other procedure the political transformation, the element of utopian participation, would have required the very powers that it was supposed to destroy. Yet, despite the temporary assistance provided by this dogma, we cannot fail to recognize the tendency to anarchy it involves; for it generally opposes any kind of institution, condemns those higher up to a dependence on the mass of people below, and transfers the much censored divine right of kings to the peoples themselves. This metaphysical spirit finally manifests itself in a similar way as far as the relations between peoples are concerned.
And so on and so forth. He then goes on to speak, rather perceptively, about the anarchy which increasingly afflicts the relations between peoples and countries with the emergence of the modern nation state. This anarchy only encourages the possibility of utterly devastating wars, and that to greater extent than was the case under the Ancien Régime, where in the eighteenth century monarchs could sometimes wage war with one another for decades without these wars necessarily impinging that much on their respective populations, apart from the people involved in the armies themselves or connected with the regions immediately affected by such conflicts.
You can see that Comte here accuses philosophy, critical thinking itself, because it would tend, through its abstract reasoning as Hegel would say,15 to dissolve actually existing institutions. And from this he concludes without further ado, without providing any real justification for this view, that this critical effect would be synonymous with anarchy – in other words, that it would prove entirely destructive and ultimately undermine the self-preservation of society itself. The notion that a society of self-responsible individuals enjoying civic equality might lead to a more meaningful arrangement of things by virtue of its own internal dynamics and its own objective character, namely because all individuals share an interest in their own self-preservation – as Kant could still suggest in his Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent16 – this notion is something that has really already fallen away in Comte; instead we find him bestowing a right to exist on institutions as such, an idea that can be traced back to the older tradition of the French Enlightenment, and particularly to Montesquieu.17 The process of critique and the resulting dissolution of institutions is basically identified with anarchy. The deeper reason for this, of course, is that in the time of Comte and Hegel independent civil society had reached a critical point – in other words, a point where it had already begun to produce pauperization from within itself, where it was no longer possible to see how society could be preserved within civil society and the formal equality that came with it. The idea of the self-preservation of society in spite of these antagonisms or through these increasingly evident antagonisms was first really developed by the early socialists in opposition to the great bourgeois philosophers of the same period whose thought already betrayed a certain apologetic character; and insofar as Comte came to speak for a bourgeois class that already felt threatened by the emerging power of ‘third estate’, we find in his work that the concept of social institutions retrospectively assumes the very lustre that it had forfeited in the French Revolution. This lustre is no longer guaranteed simply by tradition, however, but now has to be renovated, or, to put it more exactly, has to be restored precisely by means of the science of sociology whose mission this is. I would like to supplement the passage I just read out to you with another one which you will not find in the little edition but only in the very large one I mentioned earlier. The passage runs as follows:
There is certainly no need for us to examine all the other central dogmas of revolutionary metaphysics in the same detail, which the attentive reader can now easily subject to an analogous assessment through a similar procedure; for in all other cases, as I have already shown with regard to the most important principle, the reader will soon easily recognize the following: the unconditional affirmation of a temporary manifestation of modern society, by appeal to a formula that is extraordinarily fruitful and indeed indispensable when applied in its proper historical context to the mere destruction of the old political system, ends up, when applied and transferred at an inappropriate time to the conception of a new social order, only by fundamentally obstructing the latter precisely because it leads
