Before 1870
Adams Smith’s work is of relevance to the broad view of the subject when both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are taken into account. The Smithian approach to wealth and social behaviour demonstrates that he did not consider economic activity without inquiring into many other dimensions of the social fabric.
His famous analysis of the political, social and economic development of Europe in book III of the Wealth of Nations is a case in point. A few decades later, Jean-Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi followed the same path when he added to his works on political economy a collection of studies of the social sciences (Etudes sur les sciences sociales, 1836), two volumes being specially devoted to political economy (published as Etudes sur l’economiepolitique, 1837-38), because he was dissatisfied with the “scholasticism” of political economists who persisted in treating wealth at a very high level of abstraction. This is still true of Karl Marx’s Capital, in which capital is not simply a set of material goods and services necessary for the production of commodities but also a social relation thanks to which the accumulation of wealth is made possible and profitable to capitalists. Furthermore, Marx’s study of the development of the capitalist order, from manufacturing to major industrial enterprises, can still be considered a major achievement in which social issues (political struggles between landlords and capitalists, enactment of legal regulations, changes to the production process and the like) are connected to the economic development in England.However, none of these major political economists claimed to be economic sociologists. The reason is plain: in order to create such a label, sociology had first to come to existence, and this did not happen before Auguste Comte’s lectures on positive philosophy at the end of the 1830s (Comte 1830-42 [1975]).
Sociology, or the study of complex social facts was the final layer in his classification of the sciences. According to Comte’s views on the progress of scientific knowledge, sociology could not appear before existing domains of knowledge (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology) had reached the status of positive sciences. Consequently Comte dismissed eighteenth-century political economy purely as a premature endeavour to create a socialscience capable of dealing with the issues raised by an industrial society emerging from the political, scientific and cultural changes brought by the American and the French revolutions. While Comte was himself a competent mathematician, he thought, contrary to Condorcet’s essay in social mathematics, that mathematics would be of no use to the social sciences. He believed mathematical thinking to be at the root of the abstract reasoning of political economists, conceiving men as rational calculating machines - what would soon be known as homo wconomicus.
Given Comte’s views on the role of the government and his strong argument that egoism had to be contained by altruism, which was the principal challenge that industrial society confronted (Comte 1851-53 [1895], II: ch. 2), he initially placed sociology in opposition to political economy as a more comprehensive and balanced view of the functioning of societies, permitting adequate moral ideas (altruism) to be fostered. This had immediate consequences: Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and French liberal economists all agreed on rejecting Comte’s philosophy of sciences and sociology.
English thinkers were more receptive to Comte’s views. The first to play a positive role was John Stuart Mill, who was greatly impressed by Comte’s broad views on sciences and societies, even if his defence of an abstract science of wealth based on the behaviour of a homo wconomicus set a limit to his enthusiasm. Nevertheless, Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) opened the road to a form of cooperation between the sociological approach and political economy, even if sociology is never mentioned within that book.
First, in the first pages of book II (Distribution) Mill explained that “the distribution of wealth is a matter of institutions solely” (1848 [1900], I: 197) and thus gave a leading role to “the opinions and feelings of mankind... consequences of the fundamental laws of human nature, combined with the existing state of knowledge and experience, and the existing condition of social institution and intellectual and moral culture” (1848 [1900], II: 210). Secondly, he endorsed the Comtean distinction between the static and the dynamic in book IV (The influence of the progress of society on production and distribution), pointing out the role of collective action as the major source of progress.Finally, Herbert Spencer was instrumental in legitimizing the sociological approach in nineteenth-century social science. He explicitly admitted his debt to Comte in the very essay in which he explained his disagreement with several general principles related to the classification of the sciences. Among the points of agreement that he considered as “sundry minor views” were the distinction between statics and dynamics, the concept of social consensus (that is, interdependency between the various parts of the society), and the necessity of a class of scientists devoted to synthesizing the local achievements of the specialists. Finally, he adopted the word sociology, and wrote a series of volumes (Descriptive Sociology, 1873; the multivolume Principles of Sociology that appeared from 1876 to 1896) that were widely read among the educated classes by the end of the nineteenth century. Among his differences with Comte, Spencer firmly rejected the idea that the government may have a larger and positive role in the future, and he claimed that in the future a minimal state would afford the largest freedom to citizens contracting with each other. This view of sociology made it much more palatable to economists.
Finally, sociology was made a part of political economy by William Stanley Jevons.
In 1876, celebrating the publication of Smith’s landmark book, he proposed dividing the domain of political economy into several branches so that economists could specialize and keep in touch with developments in that part of the science with which they were concerned. One aspect of this was directly connected to Spencer’s views on sociology, understood as a dynamic approach to societies, political economy being found wanting in this domain: “We must take into account the long past out of which we are constantly emerging. Whether we call it sociology or not, we must have some scientific treatment of the principles of evolution as manifested in every branch of social existence” (Jevons 1876: 195). This was more than lip service paid to the crisis in the political economy of his time. Three years later, in the preface to the second edition of his Theory of Political Economy, he proposed a division of political economy into five branches: commercial statistics, the mathematical theory of economics, systematic and descriptive economics, economic sociology and fiscal science (Jevons 1879 [1965]: xvii). He was therefore the first political economist to suggest that economic sociology should play a part in the development of economics. The lesson was not lost with the tragic death of Jevons: given the continuing intellectual crisis within political economy, three great social scientists of the next period pushed the idea further.