Comte, sociology and the critique of political economy

After 1814 Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) - he later signed himself Henri Saint-Simon - was seduced by political economy, in which he saw a new political science. However, he soon changed his mind, deciding that industrial society could not be based on egoism alone.

An enduring society cannot exist without common moral ideas; this is as nec­essary on a spiritual level as a community of interests is on a temporal level. These ideas cannot be common if they do not have as their base a philosophi­cal doctrine universally adopted in society. This doctrine is fundamental: it is the link that unites and consolidates all parties.

(Saint-Simon and Comte, 1821, in Saint-Simon 2012, 51)

Consequently, the core message of the Saint-Simonian school, as stated by Saint- Amand Bazard and Barthelemy-Prosper Enfantin (1829), can be summarised as follows. Contemporary political and social instability was thought to be rooted in the duality of human agency:

In two words, calculation or reasoning, science, applied to material interests, is not the sole factor motivating human action; we also act on the sympathy

which fine arts arouse and favour; we are men of reason, but we are also impassioned, we are self-interested, but nonetheless we know how to devote ourselves to the highest generosity.

(Bazard and Enfantin 1829, 27)

A commitment to the well-being of other people and to other-oriented action was inscribed in a new religion, and the historical method finally emerged as a powerful way of explaining how religion could once more take its place in industrial society. Later Comte followed a similar path, stressing the methodological importance of history - that is, Comte’s law according to which any form of knowledge passes through three successive steps (theological, metaphysical and positive) - to build a new science, creating a hierarchical procession of the sciences culminating with sociology.

The methodological critique

Comte devoted the 47th lesson of his lengthy Cours de philosophie positive - “Some philosophical reflections on the nature and the topic of political economy” (Comte 1830-42, II, 92-8) - to a critique of some thinkers who had taken some steps in the same direction: notably Montesquieu’s politics, Condorcet’s social mathematics and, finally, economists.

His criticisms were mainly methodological. Firstly, economists were thought to be wrong to isolate their science from political science; secondly, since they had been educated as men of letters and lawyers, economists did not have the scientific training necessary to build a new science - an exception was made for Adam Smith, particularly because Comte had studied Smith’s History of Astron­omy very closely. Thirdly, political economy was said to be highly metaphysical, since it supposed that economic actors were perfect calculators of their own inter­est. The language of science (mathematics) used by some economists - Comte had in mind Destutt de Tracy’s long introduction to his Traite d’economiepolitique - appeared meaningless to him because it was tainted by metaphysical conceptions of psychology. At this point, his critique of political economy and his comments on Franz Joseph Gall’s phrenology (or “science of the brain”) converged. Both approaches attributed a superiority of reason over the passions, a position deemed erroneous by Comte. In fact, according to Comte, men followed a unique passion: “egoism commanded by the intellect”. This emphasis upon reason was at the root of a misconception of human beings: “Hence man has been portrayed, against all evidence, as an intellectual being, processing continuously, unconsciously, a large number of imperceptible calculations, without any form of spontaneity, from his most tender childhood” (Comte 1830-42, I, 856). A few pages later, targeting Helvetius’s utilitarian views on ethics, he rejected the idea of “egoism treated as the necessarily unique principle of ethics, it being not necessary to stress here the considerable danger of this view” (Comte 1830-42, I, 862).

This very negative assessment of political economy did include one enduring favourable comment: political economy paved the way for positive philosophy, since it rightly emphasised and explained the role of the division of labour. Econo­mists were therefore praised for their explanation of the solidarity between various interests within society (Comte 1830-42, II, 95-6). French economists did not react publicly to these criticisms, and it is possible to suppose that, had the Journal des economistes been founded earlier than December 1841, they would have swiftly answered and rebutted Comte’s strictures on the method of political economy.

Altruism and the Comtean economic sociology

Later, in his Systeme de politique positive, Comte came back to economic issues. The previous methodological criticisms were not repeated, since now Comte’s aim was to provide an idea of what an altruistic society would look like. The economic dimension of social life is dealt with in Chapter 2 (“Sociological assessment of the human problem, or positive theory of material property”) and this provides what can be thought of as a Comtean economic sociology.

The material strength of society follows two “economic laws”: (i) man can pro­duce more than he needs for his own consumption; and (ii) products can be stored.

He had a broad and unusual view of the transmission process, dividing it into four different forms - gift, (market) exchange, inheritance and conquest - distin­guishing between forcible and voluntary transmission on the one hand, and disin­terested and interested transmission on the other (Comte 1852, II, 155). Inheritance and exchange were said to be common within industrial society, while conquest and gifts were matters of the past. Positive philosophy claimed that war had no real place in industrial society, and so Comte thought there was no reason to attribute any importance to conquest as a mode of transmission. The provision of a gift was a completely different thing since, as a disinterested and voluntary form of transmission, this “oldest and noblest form of material transmission will be more helpful to industrial reorganisation than anything related to the useless metaphysics of our crude economists” (Comte 1852, II, 156).

At this point, Comte came back to his positive remarks on the division of labour, which he identified in his Cours de philosophie positive as the great discovery of modern economists. He explained that voluntary transmission was instrumental in the accumulation of capital, and therefore important to the division of labour that brought “each active citizen to function essentially for others” (Comte 1852, II, 159). This collective dimension of economic activity, exemplified by the division of labour, became the central tenet of Comte’s approach to altruism in industrial society.

According to Comte’s sociology, society is not composed of individuals but of families. Therefore, the chapter on material wealth is followed by a chapter dealing with the functioning of the family and, more specifically, with the way in which altruism is realised within a family. The three dimensions of altruism - veneration, attachment and kindness - are successively relevant to any living person: a child develops veneration for the parents who take care of her, and particularly for the mother; wife and husband develop attachment when they marry; and finally, par­ents experience kindness when they care for their children. Having successive positions within the family creates a system in which there is reciprocity between the veneration of the children and the kindness of the parents, a reciprocity which overlaps from generation to generation, and which is at the root of the feelings linked to the transmission of wealth through the law of inheritance.

A second institution is necessary to solve the “great human problem, the sub­ordination of egoism to altruism” (Comte 1852, II, 204): spiritual power, which is a combination of the intellectual power that “wise men and priests”, with their knowledge of Comte’s positive philosophy, have in the political domain, and the moral power of women within the family (Comte 1851-54, II, 311). Here Comte made clear the importance he attached to Charles Dunoyer’s distinction between industries that apply their art to things, and industries that apply their art to human beings (Dunoyer 1845). The former are the usual industries that one can find in Say’s Traite d’economie politique - manufacture, commerce, agriculture - while the latter are divided into industries acting on the body of men (physical educa­tion) and those operating on affective faculties, intellectual faculties, moral habits and religion. Apart from that point of agreement, Comte disagreed with Dunoyer’s praise of competition, and rejected this “state of anarchy”. Instead, in the subse­quent chapter, Comte explained how a sociocratic clergy can “aspire to the modi­fication of human will” thanks to the scientific and moral knowledge systematised in his own positive philosophy. The impulse at the root of the education provided by this clergy is to “prepare everybody to live for others in order to live in others” (Comte 1852, II, 371); these are according to Comte the two faces of altruism - objective and subjective. The objective face is nothing other than the division of labour, whereas the subjective face relates to the cult of Humanity, according to which the salient elements of the life of the dead are remembered by the living. The major issue with which the clergy has to deal is the anarchy that reigns in the material dimension of contemporary society: in other words, the economy required a regulatory power founded upon new principles. Two of these principles can be considered here.

Firstly, still in line with Dunoyer, Comte endorsed an unrestricted freedom to make bequests. As noted above, this freedom of bequest is necessary to weaken the “domestic egoism” that appears within the family; it is also useful in order to achieve the efficient transmission of wealth from one generation to the next, since this freedom of bequest makes it possible to go beyond the family circle when transmitting accumulated capital. Secondly, Comte developed his “reli­gious theory of wages”. Labour, he argued, understood as a service to humanity, cannot be properly compensated by a wage; the only proper remuneration for this service is to be found in the work itself, that is, the reward deriving from altruistic action. However, there must be a wage to buy the goods consumed during the performance of the service and, quite probably, for the training of the person performing the service. This payment applies only to workers or prole­tarians, who should receive from the capitalists a minimum living wage - plus an additional sum related to their actual performance so that they might be able to own a minimum amount of property: accommodation, furniture, and the like. The other social classes do not receive any wage: the clergy is paid through gifts offered to them as evidence of veneration; women are cared by their husbands; and finally, capitalists are prevented from expanding their share because of the “healthy competition” existing between them, and because they wish to gain the approval of the remainder of society. If this were not enough, Comte relies on the unspecified possibility of discharging inefficient and greedy capitalists (Comte 1852, II, 417, 419).

This leads to an industrial world in which altruism prevails over egoism. The latter instinct is still present, since the alimentary instinct must be satisfied; this is the task of men entering the market so that they can provide their wife and children with food, clothing and housing. Egoism is still present among the capitalist class, but is moderated by the “healthy competition” that Comte noted, without actually explaining what it really means. Beyond that, altruism rules: in the family, thanks to the affective power of women; in society, thanks to the clergy spreading the gospel of the Religion of Humanity, and receiving gifts in remuneration; in industrial relations, since the wage relation shrinks; finally, altruism also rules in intergenerational rela­tionships, since the law of inheritance and policy favouring adoption bypass “domes­tic egoism” and permits greater efficiency in the transmission of accumulated capital.

These “altruistic economic ideas” were, to say the least, at odds with the con­temporary development of political economy. One might expect that political economists would not be very interested in Comte’s idiosyncratic views. But while Mill criticised Comte’s views on altruism in harsh tones, some economists and sociologists took an interest in them. Beyond Herbert Spencer, prominent contem­porary economists - such as Francis Ysidro Edgeworth in England and Paul Leroy- Beaulieu in France - did indeed do so. In this sense, Comte’s sociology played a role in the development of the European political economy (Steiner 2017).

2.