Another problem is that a fruitful comparison of two societies involves a
very deep knowledge of their history, culture and languages in order to
understand the data and avoid inappropriate comparisons between institutions
which are only superficially similar. Many university courses are not really
comparative at all, but simply entail the separate study of several foreign
countries. At the opposite pole are some texts and courses which deny entirely
the need for knowledge in depth and involve comparisons of institutions from
all the 190-odd independent nations of the world. Somewhere between these
positions progress has been, and will doubtless continue to be, made. One
trend that shows great promise is to study problems common to all societies of a
particular type, for example environmental pollution in tertiary economies,
and the mechanisms these countries use to solve them. The increasing
international or multi-national nature of problems and responses promises to
make for much sounder and more fruitful comparisons.
Comte
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was the founder of sociology and the originator
of the concept ofpositivismin the social sciences, at least in the sense that he
invented both words and was the first more or less academic writer to construct
a ‘science of society’. Many of his ideas were in fact derived from the early
French socialist thinker Saint-Simon, whose secretary he had been.
Comte divided sociology into two disciplines. One, concerned with the
structure of societies and the relationships between their constituent elements,
he called Social Statics; the other, Social Dynamics, dealt with the develop-
ment and progress of social forms. It was Comte’s Social Dynamics that made
most impact in their time, but their interest today lies in the fact that they are
utterly at variance with the sociological canon that we take for granted. To
Comte the only possible sources of progress or social change were changes in
human thought, whereas not only Marxists but most other modern sociolo-
gists would give economic factors, or environmental determinants of some
kind, an extremely important role. Comte believed he had identified three
stages of social development, along with three corresponding modes of
thought. During the ‘Theological Age’ man was quite unable to understand
his environment, lacked any conception of causality, and saw every event as the
result of divine intervention. In the second, ‘Metaphysical Age’, man did begin
to try to explain the nature of the world, but in a necessarily ‘unscientific’ way,
since the entire intellectual apparatus of modern science (especially the idea of
empirically testing hypotheses) was missing. (Comte’s analysis here ignores the
fact that as early as the 13th century, for example, Roger Bacon was developing
a philosophy of science in which experimental method was crucial.) Finally, in
Comte’s own lifetime, the ‘Positivistic’ or ‘Scientific Age’ had arrived, and
Comte