804 Ch. 20 • Responses to a Changing World

His paintings of the town reflect

a balance between leisure and

industry (seen, for example, in a

painting of sailboats on the

Seine River with factory smoke­

stacks in the background).

Monet eventually tired of the

hustle and bustle of urban life

and moved down the Seine to the

village of Giverny. There his gar­

den and its pond and lily pads

provided an ideal rural setting for

his work. He never painted the

railway tracks that ran through

his property.

Social Theorists’Analyses of Indus­

trial Society

Edgar Degas’s L’Absinthe (1876-1877)

shows a woman and her companion with a

glass of absinthe. Note how the lack of a

table support helps draw the viewer’s atten­

tion to the glass of absinthe.

Scientific advances contributed

to the diffusion of the belief that

human progress was inevitable

and that it moved in a linear man­

ner. This optimistic view became

known as positivism. Auguste

Comte (1798-1857) had already spread faith in the promise of science.

Believing that scientific discovery had passed through three stages of

development—the theological, the metaphysical, and the “positive” (or

scientific)—Comte concluded that what he called “the science of society”

could do the same. Society itself, he reasoned, like nature could be studied

in a scientific manner and its development charted. Comte’s positivism

called for the accumulation of useful knowledge that would help students of

society to understand the laws of social development.

Positivists challenged some of the central tenets of the established

churches, particularly those of the Catholic Church, whose theologians held

fast to a view of humanity as essentially unchanging. Darwinism (see Chap­

ter 18) denied the literal biblical description of God creating the world in

seven days. Clergy of many denominations, and many other people as well,

were aghast to think that humanity could have descended from apes.

Now, in the face of rapid social change, intellectuals attempted to

understand the structure of the society they saw changing around them.

They did so by adopting the model of natural science and undertaking

objective systematic analysis of observable social data. They gradually

developed sociology, the science of society, which asked: How do societies

hold together when confronted by economic and social forces that tend to