Читать книгу The Political Thought of Calvin Coolidge - Thomas J. Tacoma - Страница 18

The positivist philosophy, comprehensively articulated by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century, also influenced key Progressives. Comtean positivism was a broad philosophy with adherents who differed with each other over particulars, but at its center were a few key ideas.^[39] The first is a rigorous empiricism—a rejection of metaphysics and religion as superstition. But positivism was not simply empiricism; Comte taught that society was an organic whole in which families, not individuals, were the basic elements of society.^[40] Second, Comte’s theory provided a philosophy of history. This was Comte’s famous “Law of the Three Stages.” As John Marini explains, “Comte’s positivism was dependent upon a theory of the development of the mind, understood as a historical and rational evolution.” This evolution of the mind worked through stages: first a theological era of the rule by priests, second an era of metaphysical or abstract theories that deconstructed the religious ideas that preceded it, and third, the scientific, constructive, or positive philosophy. In the final stage, the “scientific mind is complete, and man can rationally order society.”^[41] The first is ruled by priests, the second by clergy and lawyers, and the third by industrialists and scientists. In this third stage—which according to Comte began in his own time—the positive theory of human knowledge displaced the older modes of accessing truth through speculative reason or divine revelation. Only an empirical science could discern the truth; only social science could provide guidance in social questions. Indeed, Comte is often recognized as the founder of sociology, the scientific study of society.^[42]

In the United States, positivism was mediated indirectly, especially through British thinkers, but it left an unmistakable stamp on American social thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Gillis Harp explains, Comtean positivism was at or near the heart of Progressive thinking: “[f]or many, it encouraged an interventionist bent, a confidence in the ability to reform; for most, it fostered a faith in technocratic elites; and in general, it nurtured a statist or corporatist bent within American liberalism that continues to play a central role in the nation’s political discourse.”^[43] Comtean ideas held great appeal for American reformers. Initially outside the mainstream of American thought, they brought Comte’s ideas to the fore by the end of the nineteenth century. Lester Frank Ward, for example, discovered Comte in 1875, and his reading of Comte’s philosophy led him to rework his book manuscript. This work, Dynamic Sociology, was published in 1883 to great acclaim. Ward followed Comte in seeing “an interventionist state” as required “by the very laws of social science.”^[44] Ward’s book helped lay the foundation for later Progressive thought. The Comte connection goes even deeper into the Progressive movement. Herbert Croly, a leading Progressive during the movement’s heyday, was literally baptized into Comte’s Religion of Humanity. Harp concludes that Croly and his friends at the New Republic, especially Walter Weyl and Walter Lippmann, “shared an important set of assumptions that were generally consistent with the positivism of Croly and Ward. . . . All were committed to an active, interventionist state and a large public sector in the national economy.”^[45] The philosophy of positivism brought together the social sciences with a vision of where society was going and how it should get there.^[46]