Positivism: A Global Account

Positivism:

An Old Name for Some Global Ways of Thinking

Positivism is standardly taken, nowadays, to be a philosophical position or school committed to the authority of science, the primacy of observation over theory, and empiricism. Those exposed to technical philosophy will probably also mention positivism's alleged commitments to the fact-value dichotomy, value-neutrality, and the view that science aims to find regularities so as to predict, not to find the fundamental causes of things. Those familiar with the cultural history of the 19th century will probably mention Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity that he founded. Those familiar with the cultural and educational history of Catholic countries will probably mention positivism's famous battles against the cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church. And those who know the history of Latin America will mention the period 1870-1910, when positivism was the semi-official philosophy of most Ibero-American countries, encouraging a gradualist, scientifically-grounded, elite-driven, and reform-minded approach to achieving liberal democracy and a market society. In fact, all of these views capture an important aspect of the truth about positivism. Positivism is all of these things, and more. It is an intellectual tradition that has a philosophy, an attitude, a political program, an educational program, and a religion. It has been used as a foundation for several different political doctrines, and it has been used as a foundation for criticizing several different political ideologies and their presuppositions.

At present, the multi-faceted reality of positivism is being lost from view. Discussions of positivism nowadays usually occur within narrow frames of reference. It is discussed by philosophers of science as one of the rival theories of science, by sociologists as one of the rival theories of social change, by philosophers of religion as one of the deflationary theories of religious language, by political theorists as one of the positions hostile to normative political theory, by historians of the Catholic Church as one of its great opposing movements, by scholars of literature as the source of Zola's and Strindberg's naturalism, and by historians of Latin American political thought as one of the great sources of Latin American political ideas and political institutions. But these discussions, as they are nowadays conducted, rarely take note of developments in the others. Who now, with the academic division of labor, can keep abreast of the technical terms and ideas in all these fields? But this hyper-specialization has a great danger, a danger which the 19th-century positivists--who opposed hyper-specialization and disciplinary policing--would have warned against. We are in danger of losing the global view of positivism, an account of what it amounts to, and of how it has influenced our thought and culture. For positivism has indelibly influenced the thought and culture of the contemporary world. The way anyone educated in a university now thinks and talks has been powerfully shaped by positivism and its leading doctrines. But to see this, we need to take a global view of positivism. We must discover what are its main doctrines, and how they have been understood and interpreted in those different parts of the world where positivism has been a dominant philosophy. We must try to grasp what positivism has had to say about science and politics, metaphysics and art, religion and economics, morals and law, intellect and emotion. We must look at how positivists have applied the core doctrines of the philosophy to all domains of thought and action. We must examine what people have done in its name, and why so many gave their lives for what they thought it entailed. For positivism has not just been a doctrine suggested by timid, bookish types who never venture into real politics. It has also been a doctrine defended by people of action; indeed, in the name of positivism, seemingly timid and bookish types have sacrificed their lives and even their reputations. So clearly, when we examine positivism, we are not just dealing with a dry and arid philosophy, nor with a mere ideological prop for vested self-interest. This is why it is worthwhile to pursue a global understanding of positivism.

To further this understanding, this webpage gives a two-fold account of positivism. It first lays out what it takes to be the core doctrines of positivism. It then gives an international history of positivism, tracing the philosophy to its sources in the empiricist philosophy of Newton, the political and social theory of Hume, and the Enlightenment philosophy of Helvetius. It traces positivism's rise through Saint-Simon and Bentham, to its founding in Comte and Mill, to the first generation in Europe of Herbert Spencer and others, to the anti-rationalistic reaction against it by European high culture in the 1890s. It describes positivism's influence and political uses in Latin America, the re-founding of positivism on modernist principles in Vienna in the 1920s, and the rise of modernist neo-positivism to worldwide predominance by 1950. It then discusses positivism's decline in the 1960s and some of the consequences of that decline. This historical account seeks to give equal attention to philosophy of language and philosophy of politics, to philosophy of science and to ethics, to philosophy of education and to economics, to theories of social change and theories of mathematics. Always, it keeps an eye on the practical social consequences that have been drawn from, or suggested by, positivism's technical doctrines in theoretical philosophy. Equally, the account seeks to give prominence to developments in positivism, and to the uses to which it was put, in countries and cultures outside the core economies of the modern world. It examines how positivism was understood in 19th century Italy and Ibero-America, as well as in France, Britain, Germany, and the United States. For it is only by examining the diverse applications and interpretations of positivism in different social, political, and cultural circumstances that we can understand all of its implications.

We begin, then, by examining the core doctrines of positivism. We therefore first interpret positivism as a philosophical position or school comprised of several doctrines. In the historical account that follows, we see how these doctrines were applied to diverse domains of thought and action: politics, ethics, religion, science, economics, art, psychology, and more. By going through the account of positivism's historical development, we can examine whether or not the statement of its core doctrines holds up to historical scrutiny, or whether it might rule out or rule in doctrines which are, or are not, genuine core doctrines of positivism. (Readers unused to discussions of abstract philosophical doctrines might skim this section and then skip ahead to the historical account that follows; once they have read that, they will have a better sense of what these abstractly-stated doctrines mean, and of why getting them right matters.)

The Core Doctrines

Let us then turn to examining positivism's core doctrines. Here we are interpreting positivism as a philosophical position or school, a restriction we shall relax in the historical account that follows. Taken as a philosophical position or school, positivism was one of the dominant schools of philosophy from about 1850 until about 1965. Arguably, the following seventeen doctrines are central to positivism and shared by all positivists, from Comte and Mill in the 1840s to the last of the logical positivists in the 1970s. These doctrines, I claim, are shared by all people who call themselves "positivists" and understand it as a theory bearing centrally on science. (The distinction between positivism tout court and legal positivism will be developed later, when we come to discuss Bentham's philosophy.)

First, and most famously: phenomenalism or the phenomenal relativity of factual knowledge, the view that all we can know about the world and matters of fact must always be a matter of the phenomena of which we could have possible experience: all truths of fact must always be objects of possible experience, and we are entitled to say that a thing exists only when we have had relevant experience of it. It makes sense to say that a cold is caused by a currently invisible virus, for the latter is an object of possible experience; but it does not make sense to say that that house is composed of matter, or of spirit, for matter or spirit could never be the objects of experiences.

Second, empiricism, the view that all truths of fact are justified by experience: we can only be justified in a belief about a question of fact if we have a relevant experience which justifies that belief. No factual propositions are justified a priori: as necessary truths justified independent of experience.

Third, inductivism, the view that the only method of reasoning we have by which we come to know new truths of fact is induction: generalizing from experience, observation, and experiment.

Fourth, theory subjected to observation and experiment: the view that (i) a theory should be accepted only after it has been shown to fit with observations and experiments relevant to the entities with which it deals; until careful observation and experiment on the question have been done, we should be neutral among theories that try to answer it; that (ii) a theory should not be considered a serious contender for acceptance if it relies on hypotheses or suppositions that have not been tested by careful observation; and (iii) and a theory may be held only so long as it is not incompatible with observation and experiment: once it is shown to be so, it should be rejected in favor of a better theory.

Fifth, action guided by observation and experiment, not by fictions: the view that when people's interests are at stake in an action or decision, we should ensure that the theories driving that decision are subjected to observation and experiment. We should ensure that those theories are not fictions or obvious falsehoods.

Sixth, nominalism, the view that all things that exist are concrete particulars: there are no abstract universals with independent existence, like "chairness" or "the triangle." There are just particular chairs and particular triangles: the only thing that links them all as tokens of the same type is the fact that we choose to refer to them with the same general name or word. Hence there are no abstract universals, neither platonic ideas of a chair, nor general concepts of a chair to which the general name "chair" refers. And all such general names are created by us in order to sort and order experience.

Seventh, as a consequence of the above, the dichotomy of truths: the view that there are fundamentally two types of truths: relations of ideas or analytic truths, and factual truths. All truths either concern matters of necessary conceptual or logical connections--mathematical truths, conceptual truths, logical truths, and so are known a priori; or concern matters of phenomenal fact, and so are known a posteriori and are contingent--they are not necessarily true, but only contingently so.

Eighth, as a consequence of those doctrines: anti-metaphysics: the view that all metaphysical doctrines--theories that try to discover the ultimate truth about what lies beyond the realm of phenomenal experience--are things about which we can have no knowledge. Metaphysics holds that there is something behind the appearances--some constant that we can discover if we look hard enough. Positivism does not deny this claim: rather, it says that we cannot know whether the claim is true or false. We can never know whether some constant lies behind the appearances, and so metaphysics is not a matter of knowledge. Metaphysical theories may be useful fictions, they may satisfy deep emotional needs, but they are not matters of knowledge. We cannot even in principle know whether they are true. (The favorite targets of this doctrine, historically, have been Thomist metaphysics and natural theology, on the one hand, and Hegelian absolute idealism, on the other. But it equally challenges Descartes's project of discovering the ultimate reality of things.)

Ninth, nomism: the view that we do best to assume that the universe and human beings are ordered by natural laws: we do best to make it a working hypothesis that all phenomena are associated in lawlike regularities, and these laws in turn can be subsumed under more general laws. One of the main tasks of science is to find and establish these laws, and to subsume them under ever more general laws. Science does not, cannot, and should not look for the causes of things: science's subject is regularities.

Tenth, predictionism: the view that science chiefly aims to predict the course of future events, so as to enable intelligent and rational human action in accordance with the above doctrines.

Eleventh, as a consequence of those ten doctrines: instrumentalism: the view that scientific theories do not try to explain the world by making claims about the absolute truth about it, nor by finding the deep causes of events; rather, scientific theories try to identify ever more robust generalizations about experienced data, and to deliver ever more accurate predictions of future events. Theories are tools for prediction and manipulation via generalizations; they are a not reading glass through which we can descry the ultimate truths written in the Book of Nature.

Twelfth, the unity of science: the view that science is a common enterprise with shared aims and purposes, that there can and should be a harmony of scientific methods, and that the differences among the several sciences are and should be less important than the differences between science and other forms of human activity.

Thirteenth, the theory-observation dichotomy: the view that our reliable observations are not filtered by any ambitious theories we have about the objects of those observations, but are more or less the pure deliverances of sensory perception; and that we can and do make such reliable observations.

Fourteenth, fact-reductionism about values: the view that all true statements of values or morals are ultimately reducible to true statements of phenomenal fact.

Fifteenth, scientism: the view that scientific procedures conceived in accordance with unity of science are the uniquely valid ones for producing genuine and robust knowledge about matters of fact.

Sixteenth, rational progressivism: the view that if societies would arrange their affairs so as give sufficient support and authority to science, and would respect the doctrines mentioned above, they would make general and inevitable progress toward general human happiness.

Seventeenth, scientific politics: the view that a politics grounded on, respecting, and using the findings and methods of science and all the doctrines mentioned above will produce better social and political orders than any other kind of political program.

What does all this imply for ethics and politics? Plenty. Many--perhaps all--positivists have been suspicious of attempts to ultimately ground values or principles in unobservable entities like natural rights or a hypothetical social contract, a la Aquinas, Suarez, Grotius, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft, or Rawls. Appealing to phenomenalism and fact-reductionism about values, positivists ask: How could we ever have experience of a fundamental and irreducible natural right? Or of a fundamental and irreducible social contract among hypothetical rational agents? Whereas, they maintain, we undoubtedly do have experience of happiness, well-being, or emotions. So it is in things like those that positivists have usually attempted to ground morality. Hence the historic partnership between positivism and utilitarianism.

Positivism has historically found an ally in the pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey, with which it has many affinities. It has also mutually influenced metaphysical materialism and Kantian philosophy, which have historically been its two great rivals and competitors for adherents among scientifically-minded philosophers. Its great nemeses have been non-materialist metaphysical philosophies--above all, Thomism, natural law theory, and Hegelianism--and dialectical materialism a la Engels and Lenin. It has shaped the philosophy and outlook of practicing scientists, and has massively influenced the practice of social scientists.

The above doctrines define positivism as I shall use that term. As they define it, it is a philosophical and social theory. However, there is another sense of the term "positivism," which we must attend to since it was used by the chief founder of positivism in my sense, Auguste Comte. As we shall see below, Comte first invented positivism in my sense, but he later added to it. The additions were his famous "Religion of Humanity," which Thomas Huxley famously described as "Catholicism minus Christianity," and his authoritarian socialist politics. Comte in later life thought that the term "positivism" should be reserved for the combination of all three elements: the theory, the religion, and the politics. Many have followed him in this, and his Religion and his politics did acquire followers. But many people have rejected the religion and the politics while accepting the theory. Indeed, of the three, it is the theory that is of world-historical importance, and has profoundly shaped the thought and culture of our world today. So by "positivism" I shall mean only the theory. In my description of positivism's history, I attend almost solely to the development of the theory, mentioning Comte's religion, Comte's politics, and their followers only in passing.

The Development of Positivism

Precursors

Isaac Newton, 1642-1727 (Wikimedia Commons)

One of the most famous sources of positivism is the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton, and especially its theory of the methods to be used and the methods to be eschewed in successful inquiries in natural philosophy. Newton famously declared that his Principia Mathematica made no hypotheses, by which he meant untested and unobserved premises used in a deductive explanation. He claimed that the Principia's explanations proceeded purely inductively, generalizing from observation and experiment. In the following, famous, quote from the Opticks (1704), Newton asserts inductivism and instrumentalism, tacitly drawing them from the phenomenalism and empiricism that he also accepted.

"As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy. And although the arguing from Experiments and Observations by Induction be no Demonstration of general Conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of, and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the Induction is more general. And if no exception occur from Phenomena, the Conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if at any time afterwards any exception shall occur from Experiments, it may then begin to be pronounced with such exceptions as occur. By this way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from Motions to the Forces producing them; and, in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general. This is the Method of Analysis: And the Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discover'd, and establish'd as Principles, and by them explaining the Phenomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations."

--Isaac Newton, Opticks, Book III, Part 1, Query 31

David Hume, 1711-1776 (Wikimedia Commons)

-A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1739-40)

-An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748)

"Of the Original Contract" (1748)

-An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)

-"The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth" (1754)

-The History of England (1754-61)*

-Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)

In the Treatise, Hume sought to do for morality, psychology, and the human sciences what Newton had done for astronomy and physics. He there attempted to ground morals on a theory of human nature that was derived solely from observation and experiment, not from untested hypotheses. The reasoning by which he derived this theory he presented as wholly inductive or experimental. This theory, which worked both from and towards an underlying picture of human beings as perfectly natural beings living according to the laws of a perfectly natural universe, argues from observation for several striking doctrines that influenced positivism. Among these we may mention seven. The first is that our passions have supremacy over our reason: reason serves our emotions and desires; it can never liberate us from them. These emotions are naturally social, so government should be organized so as to properly channel those emotions; not to mortify or extirpate them. Another doctrine is that there is no such thing as causation: what we call causes are either spurious connections or just regularities: "constant conjunctions." Hume thus did much to foster the rise of nomism and instrumentalism. A third doctrine is skepticism about the unobservable: since we cannot really know the answer to questions about unobservable phenomena, it is better, Hume says, to withhold commitment to any such answer, and just to appear to accept whatever conventional answer society currently goes with. In any case, he continues, our passional natures will often lead us to accept certain such answers anyway, especially if they are backed by the authority of convention. A fourth doctrine is Hume's famous dichotomy of truths, also called "Hume's fork." According to this, truths fall into two classes. There are truths of mathematics and the formal sciences, and there are truths derived from observation and experiment. Any proposition, holds the doctrine of the fork, that cannot be classed as falling under the one or the other category, is not a truth. So, for Hume, a substantive proposition of theology, like "An all-loving God watches over the universe" is not a truth; for it does not fall under either category. It is not a formal-mathematical truth, and it is not a truth derived from observation and experiment.

In the fifth doctrine, Hume famously draws a sharp distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value. Judgments of value do not concern truths and falsehoods about the external world, but rather the emotional states of the judge. In making a value judgment, I am making both a factual claim about the tendency, character, and consequences of certain events I am judging--say, someone's giving me a gift--and also expressing an emotion about the things described in that factual claim. And, if the value judgment is to be correct, that emotion is the one someone taking the general point of view on the question would feel. So correct value judgment is a matter of the sentiments someone would have if she had both true factual beliefs and felt an emotion in the way that someone taking the general point of view would do. This moral theory, with its stress on the difference between factual judgments and value judgments, and its locating morality in the sentiments of an observer, would have an immense impact on positivism.

The sixth doctrine concerns the choice of political institutions and the reasons for choosing them. Hume preferred the established political institutions of his day to experiments in republican revolution. However, his reasons for supporting the established institutions lacked reverence. He thought they were justified given people's interests, prejudices, and habits. He did not ground his defense of them in nobler motives. He held that government should be responsible and responsive to the educated and the rich, because he thought that their interests tracked the real interests of the whole polity. He acknowledged that all people pursued their self-interest. He believed, however, that in the aristocratic law-abiding market society that was the Britain of his day, if the educated and the rich pursued their self-interest in politics, they would thereby be pursuing the real interests of the polity.

In the seventh doctrine, Hume held that political change should, except in the most dire circumstances, be made gradually, not suddenly. Even in desperate circumstances, he thought, where quick change might conceivably be the least bad option, such change must be tailored to what actually already exists. For people are attached to the familiar and the traditional. Yet Hume is not against reform, improvement, and innovation. He does not reject as inherently harmful grand schemes of social change or even social engineering. What is crucial, he suggests, is that such innovation be undertaken slowly and gradually, with a view to achieving the goal over generations, rather than a few years. So long as social engineering proceeds gradually, and so long as it sufficiently accepts and understands what actually exists, it need not be harmful. If it meets those gradualist, positive criteria, then it can be for the good--the question then becomes one of the value of the ideals such engineering seeks to approach. Hume is not, then, in principle against large-scale innovation aimed at bringing society closer to political ideals. He thought the English Revolution and its creation of the Commonwealth a mistake, but because of its hasty, brutal, and unempirical methods, not because of its republican ideals.

"I found that the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, labor'd under the same Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical, & depending more upon Invention than Experience. Every one consulted his Fancy [i.e., imagination] in erecting Schemes of Virtue & of Happiness, without regarding human Nature, upon which every moral Conclusion must depend."

--Letter to Dr. Cheyne (1734)

"When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

--The consequences of Hume's fork, as stated in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, final sentence.

For an illuminating brief overview of the main doctrines and ambitions of Hume's system, watch this video of a conversation with John Passmore.

The French Ideologues: "Scientists of Ideas"

They can be called the great-grandfathers of positivism, for they emphasized the power and possibility of science as the key to achieving the good society; stressed nomism; took a generally empiricist stance toward knowledge; and, in their studies of the powers of the mind, broadly followed inductivist canons. But they lacked the hostility to metaphysics that is characteristic of true positivism. They were open to metaphysical reductions of entities to material objects. The Ideologues took a naturalistic approach to morality, arguing that it was grounded in the physical laws of nature and physical facts about human beings and human needs. In politics, they favored liberal-republican-civic-nationalism committed to popular sovereignty. By this I mean that they favored, first, the standard set of liberal civic and economic rights: legal equality, the rule of law, religious freedom, a religiously tolerant state, free speech, freedom of assembly, free movement, free contract, free markets, and free labor. Second, they also favored the republican ideals of self-government, political liberty, civic virtue, and distrust of corrupt elites. Finally, following their political patron, the Abbe Sieyes, author of the famous What Is the Third Estate?, they argued that society should be reconfigured as a civic nation--society should not be primarily a community of communities or a union of corporations, but one nation in which all who shared the liberal-republican civic ideals, had agreed social-contract style to accept them, and resided in the territory were incorporated as equal members of the polity. Moreover, they held that this civic-centered nation was the source of all sovereignty and political authority, and such authority could not be legitimately exercised without the express approval of the nation.

These views the Ideologues maintained throughout their careers. But after the Reign of Terror of 1794, and after it became clear that Bonaparte meant to create a lasting dictatorship, they came to interpret and justify them differently. After the Reign of Terror, they came to mistrust the idea of natural and imprescriptible rights, which they thought had helped motivate the bloody excesses of the Terror and the state's massacres of women and children in the Vendee uprising. Moreover, the Ideologues opposed violent revolution as a means of achieving their goals, at least in the circumstances of Napoleon's dictatorship, which had such a powerful memory of the civil strife and horrors committed in the revolutionary fervor of the Terror. So, although they were critics of that dictatorship, they did not try to organize a violent overthrow of it. They hated despotism, but after 1794, they feared the bloody and arbitrary consequences of revolutionary disorder, remembering how their own Condorcet, a loyal Revolutionary, was arrested as a traitor by the Revolutionary government, which would have put him to death had he not first taken his own life. Above all, they came to think that there was great danger in the interpretation of popular sovereignty advocated by their patron Sieyes. Sieyes had held that popular sovereignty meant that the people--understood as a civic nation founded on a social contract--had the supreme authority in politics and morals. Whatever the people willed, was both politically authoritative and just. And if the people had delegated authority to a certain office or a certain body, then whatever that office or body did also could claim to be politically authoritative and just. This interpretation of civic nationalism and popular sovereignty the Ideologues came to reject after their experiences of the Terror and Bonaparte's grab of absolute power. Seeing the massive bloodshed that the Committee of Public Safety committed in the name of the people's will, and then how Napoleon used the appeal to the people's will to acquire absolute power, convinced them that this interpretation was extraordinarily dangerous. For it meant that whoever claimed to represent the people's will could then use it to claim total power, authority, and justice, and then press for radical immediate changes which tore society apart, or set up an absolute despotism. So they rejected the notion that popular sovereignty granted absolute power, authority, and justice to the people and whoever they could be said to have delegated political authority to. They remained committed to civic nationalism and popular sovereignty. But they rejected the idea that the people's absolute authority could be delegated. Moreover, they denied that such authority was founded on a social contract, which they thought encouraged the view that absolute authority could be delegated to particular political bodies. They came to think that society was not best viewed as only a collection of individuals who had contracted to set up a polity and nation. Society is not, they held, simply a machine invented by us; a machine all of whose workings and principles we understand because we intentionally create it. Rather, they held that society also had some of the features of an organism. It is delicate and complex, just like an organism, and we do not in our present knowledge understand all of its workings. Thus we must take a scientific attitude toward social reform: we do not know everything about what consequences reforms will have on society, and hence we should not be rash or hasty--we should proceed with an open mind, ready to change our theories of social reform in light of the weight of the evidence. On the other hand, as liberals, they distinguished sharply between society and the state. The state, they held, is definitely not an organism. It is a human contrivance, created to carry out human purposes. But this does not mean that it is created in a social contract, real or imagined. Nor does this mean that a particular state is justified if it would be chosen by its citizens in a hypothetical social contract. The state exists to benefit its citizens and to carry our their will. Hence the Ideologues remained throughout their lives admirers of the American Revolution, its consequences, and its liberal-republican-civic-nationalist political principles. They were friends and correspondents of Thomas Jefferson. But they rejected the natural-rights and social-contract foundations upon which Jefferson had justified that Revolution.

Thus did the Ideologues--who at first supported Bonaparte and Sieyes in their coup against the Directory, on the grounds that it was replacing a corrupt government that had disastrously mismanaged both the economy and the nation's wars with a government more attuned to the interests of the people and honest dealing--come to oppose Bonapartism, democratic caesarism, and the natural rights theories and social contract theory of popular sovereignty that they thought supported it. Hence after Bonaparte had secured total power by 1801 or so, they opposed his despotic methods. But they did not think his regime was evil enough to warrant advocating violent revolution against it. Their experience of the Terror and the civil disorders that followed it convinced them that while Bonaparte's despotism and arbitrary government were despicable, they at least had the virtue of not ordering radical social change by means of violence. Bonaparte had, after all, brought civil peace and a growing economy. Given that France, as they thought, still remained just above an abyss of civil war and mass violence, they thought it better to adopt the position of internal social critics aiming at gradual and careful social reform. The delicate internal balance of society, they held, was still in grave danger from violent revolution. Hence they would, from posts within the establishment, quietly criticize Bonaparte's unjust government while urging gradual reform of society toward a liberal-republican-civic-nation, guided by the findings of social science. If directing such reform meant getting their hands dirty and accepting official posts in the dictatorial regime, then so be it. It was better to preserve social peace and gradually heal society than to risk destroying it by quick and hasty methods.

The Ideologues thus occupied an intellectual position in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France analogous to that held in Britain between 1810 and 1840 by Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and the philosophic radicals. They were reformers and social critics, defenders of representative and rational government, and of liberal-republican institutions. But they were not revolutionaries.

In Britain at the same time, 1795-1820, the leading school of philosophy was the Scottish common-sense realism that had been invented by Thomas Reid and was now being articulated and extended by Dugald Stewart. In Germany, the leading philosophies of the time were the subjective idealism of Fichte and the Jena Romantics, the objective idealism of the young Schelling, and the empirical version of Kantianism worked out by Karl Friedrich Fries. The Ideologues' chief antagonists in French philosophy were, first, Henri Maine de Biran (1766-1824), and then Victor Cousin (1792-1867). Maine de Biran defended against them, and Condillac, a voluntarist spiritualism that stressed the independent power and influence of the conceptual mind in perception. Cousin defended broadly the same position, arguing against the Ideologues and Condillac that they did not, as they claimed, avoid the tendency of 17^th-century systematic philosophers to imagine and invent, to rely on abstract principles and unsubstantiated hypotheses. They did not, he argued, hold themselves to simple observation and experiment and inductions from it. Instead, they made unobservable hypotheses that conflicted with the observable facts and the data of consciousness. That the will could be reduced to sensations, and that mental operations were combinations of sensations, as Condillac and the Ideologues claimed, were, Cousin argued, relations that were unobservable even in principle.

Constantin-Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, 1757-1820

-The Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (1791)

-The Law of Nature; or, Physical Principles of Morality; or, Catechism of the French Citizen (1793)

Secretly translated and published in English by Thomas Jefferson as The Law of Nature; or, Principles of Morality, Deduced from the Physical Constitution of Mankind and the Universe (1796)

In this work, which could be said to present the Ideologues' theory of morality, Volney rejected the view that morality is derived from either religious revelation or a social contract, arguing instead that it comes from the physical laws of nature and the physical facts about human beings, their needs and desires and motives. Suggested that ethics is best conceived as a physical science.

Grandparents of Positivism: Two Philosophic Radicals

These are Saint-Simon and, to a lesser but important extent, Bentham. Saint-Simon has often been included among the Ideologues, and it is true that he was regarded by many contemporaries as their disciple. He took their doctrines and used them as a foundation for a novel theory of history, a history of the sciences, and a proposal for a socialist polity. As mentioned above, there are interesting parallels between the social roles played by Bentham's disciples, the Philosophic Radicals, between 1810-1840 in Britain; and by the Ideologues and later by Saint-Simon's disciples in the 1820s and 1830s in France, when Saint-Simon's reputation and influence as a social visionary were at their peak. In that same period of 1820-1840, the leading philosophies in France were the voluntaristic spiritualism of Maine de Biran, the hybrid of Scottish realism and Kant's transcendental idealism that Victor Cousin was then working out, the sociologically-grounded liberalism of the French Doctrinaires: Royet-Collard and Guizot. In Germany, the leading philosophies were Hegelianisms of the left and right; Schelling's later philosophy, and a reformed empirical Kantianism influenced by the findings of psychology, worked out by Karl Friedrich Fries and Johann Herbart. In Britain, the leading philosophies were the Scottish realism of William Hamilton and his associates, the intuitionism of William Whewell, and the empiricist-associationism of Bentham's bulldog, James Mill.

The Two Founders of Positivism: Comte and Mill

Auguste Comte is the great founder of positivism as a philosophy and philosophical tradition, with J. S. Mill playing the role of a junior partner. Their great books, A Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-42) and A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843), are the two founding works of positivism. Some of their most notable positivist doctrines are described below, along with the uses to which they put them. But it is worth mentioning here a position on questions of methods, social science, revolution, and social reform on which Comte, Mill, and all their positivist followers would have agreed. The positivists rejected a doctrine on these questions held by Jefferson and the French Revolutionaries. The latter tended to see the answers to social and political questions in terms of deductions from a few axioms about the principles of morality and human nature. They saw human nature as basically the same everywhere, and describable in a few axioms. Whatever additional features of a society and its people there might be were, the Revolutionaries thought, easily stripped away in order to get down to what really mattered and what really did the causal work--universal human nature, influenced by different political and social arrangements. Get human nature, the institutions, and your moral principles right, thought the Revolutionaries, and a well-ordered society would result. The one obstacle to such a society, so they thought, was wicked political institutions.

This reasoning the positivists rejected. They argued that the axiomatic or geometrical approach, with its tendency to reduce human nature and social science to some quickly described properties, monstrously over-simplified the most complex matter there is. Social science proper, they held, was a partly inductive enterprise dealing with extremely complicated phenomena. Human nature cannot be described in a few axioms, at least if we want to use that description to generate wise policies for politics and social reform. Human beings and their cultures and societies are complex and varied, their societies are shaped by massive numbers of causes, and humans themselves are fundamentally shaped by history: human nature changes through history; it is not fixed and immutable. It is therefore a historically- and comparatively-minded social science, not an axiomatic philosophy of human nature, which will eventually produce the proper understanding of the facts about social life from which we can then build a true theory of how to reach the well-ordered society. Nor did the positivists think that only natural-rights and social-contract theorists were guilty of this. Mill, in particular, argued that the faults in the proposals for social reform made by Bentham and Mill's own father James Mill derived in great part from their sympathy for this axiomatic approach to human nature and social theory. In so doing, John Mill argued, they had missed the important fact that in social life, there are conflicting forces. To base policy proposals on axioms that capture one or just a few of these forces is to invite perverse consequences of the policies. Moreover, Mill argued, "It is unphilosophical to construct a science out of a few of the agencies by which the phenomena are determined, and leave the rest to the routine of practice or the sagacity of conjecture...[We] ought to study all the determining agencies equally, and endeavour, so far as it can be done, to include of all of them within the pale of the science; else we shall inevitably bestow a disproportionate attention upon those which our theory takes into account, while we misestimate the rest, and probably underrate their importance."** To this doctrine, Comte would have vehemently assented.

In the period 1830-1845, when Comte and Mill were working out the epistemological, logical, and scientific foundations of positivism, the dominant philosophies were as follows. Cousin's philosophy was in effect the official theoretical philosophy in France, which was then under the liberal July Monarchy; the sociological liberalism of the Doctrinaires was predominant in French social and political theory, with Guizot serving as Prime Minister and his disciple Tocqueville achieving world fame; and socialism became a real intellectual movement in France around 1840, led by the Christian socialism of Lammenais, by the followers of Saint-Simon and Fourier, by Etienne Cabet, and by Louis Blanc. In Britain, the leading philosophies continued to be the Scottish realism of Hamilton and his associates, and the intuitionism represented by William Whewell and Henry Mansel, both of which Mill made it his business to challenge and refute. In Germany, Left Hegelianism was causing a great stir, while Schelling and Herbart were perhaps the leading technical philosophers.

The First Developers and Propagators of Positivism, 1840s-1860s

In France and Britain, these people began to develop and spread the ideas of positivism. Their most serious competitors in British and French philosophy were Scottish common-sense realism and the hybrid of Scottish realism and Kant's transcendental idealism worked out by Victor Cousin and his followers in France, the latter of which was the semi-official philosophy of France's liberal, market-oriented July Monarchy (1830-1848). Once that monarchy fell, to be replaced first by a semi-socialist republic and then a populist dictatorship led by Napoleon III, the major opponents of positivism in French philosophy in this period were Charles Renouvier, who moved from positivism to a Neo-Kantian philosophy; and Felix Ravaisson, who advocated a will-based spiritualism that found an inner harmony between man and nature, but refused to see humans as purely natural beings. After Comte's death, the Religion of Humanity that he had founded was taken over by Pierre Laffitte, who also worked as a historian of science. In Germany, Rudolf Lotze and Gustav Fechner were developing systems that tried to reconcile scientific developments with metaphysical idealism. Alexander von Humboldt was publishing the volumes of Cosmos, making him the world's leading theorist and synthesizer of science. Throughout Europe, socialism was making itself known: Louis Blanc became famous in the socialist experiment of the French Republic in 1848, and Proudhon and Marx had begun making names for themselves. Civic and linguistic nationalism by subject European peoples were on the rise, fostered by the civic-nationalist theories of Giuseppe Mazzini and Vincenzo Gioberti. After the failures of 1848, pessimism became fashionable, and thus the works of Schopenhauer were finally discovered, vaulting him to world fame.

The Positivist Theorists of History of 1860-1890

In this period, the positivist approach to history was at its height in Europe. Practicing historians, inspired by the intellectual program of Comte, Mill, and Spencer, worked out positivist theories of history and the methods needed to properly understand it. The positivist historians accepted the methods of critical historical science worked out by Leopold von Ranke and his followers: rigorous checking and skeptical scrutiny of sources; provision of references to all sources in the final work; a strong desire to avoid presenting fictions as facts; respect and privileging of verifiable facts; and presenting the past as it actually was, not falsely fabricating it so as to illustrate some point to one's contemporaries. So far, the positivists were critical historical scientists. But they had their own theory of what to do with the facts when they were gathered and recounted: a theory that many of Ranke's followers, then and now, reject. The positivists held, following Comte, that the historian should try to move by induction from the critically-gathered facts to more general laws that shape and determine the course of societies: they claimed that the historian's ultimate aim should be to discover and establish those laws: what we could call "laws of societal dynamics." The positivist historians thus defended Comte and Spencer's doctrine of the lawful development of societies: that all societies in all ages are governed by the same set of laws determining their development, actions, and decay. (This doctrine bore great similarity to, and yet differed from, Marx's theory of capitalist development: that all capitalist economies had gone through roughly the same process of economic development, and would ultimately throw off capitalism to establish communism and then socialism.)

Yet since they were historians, the positivist historians tended to reject Comte's and then Durkheim's view that the historian should focus on positivistically gathering the facts, and then hand them over to sociologists, who would then use them to discover the laws. They tended to argue, instead, that historians themselves should try to discover and establish the laws, since almost everything we can know about society is in the past. History, then, should become the most general and comprehensive social science, discovering the most general laws of the life of societies--societal dynamics (i.e., all societies go through these stages x, y, z); while the other social sciences could focus on discovering laws of societal statics (i.e, if a society has this feature, then it will also have that feature) or more limited laws of dynamics or statics holding true for objects smaller than societies (e.g., legal systems, governments, markets, churches, associations, individuals...).

This aspiration--to turn history into the fundamental social science dealing with the development of societies--won many adherents who admired it in principle. Some historians of the period did formulate and test proposals for the laws governing the development of societies: three notable examples are the works of Louis Bourdeau, mentioned below; Brooks Adams's The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895); and Karl Lamprecht's German History (1891-1908), although Lamprecht only applies his proposed stages of societal growth to German history. Moreover, many practicing historians began positivistically gathering the facts that would later be needed to discover the laws. But in practice, the aspiration to discover the laws of societal development fell afoul of most practicing historians' discomfort with themselves discovering and establishing universal laws of the lives of societies. Many historians were happy to exhibit particular batches of facts as illustrating a supposed law (e.g., later Marxist histories), and some were happy to discover and examine enduring relationships holding across large swathes of time and space (e.g., histories of empires, or Fernand Braudel's "total history" of The Mediterranean); but they were not so happy with the task of establishing precise laws of societal development valid for all societies in all ages. This discomfort, at first expressed only in practice during the heyday of positivist history-writing, gradually led some to explicitly reject the lawful development doctrine. As the century turned and skepticism about historical progress grew, more and more academic historians also rejected the doctrine. The First World War then dealt a death blow to Spencer's organic conception of societies, which had been a chief support of the doctrine. Thus it was that a later historian's attempt to discover and establish the laws governing the development and decline of all societies, Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History (1934-61), was first ferociously criticized and then ignored by almost all academic historians.*** The lawful-development doctrine was expelled from academic history by the 1940s or so; but it continued to flourish in the social sciences, where it exercised great influence over modernization theory. A prime example of the doctrine's influence in that field is Walt W. Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960).

Many--not all--of the positivist historians also held another doctrine which was not essential to Ranke's critical historical science: a doctrine which has been vehemently rejected by many Rankeans from that time to this. These positivists held that the historian, when writing history, should make no moral judgments or criticisms of past actions or past social institutions. Moral judgments, this doctrine held, should not appear in histories strictly speaking. The serious historian could pass moral judgments on history when off duty: in discourses not presented as objective history. But in writing a strictly historical work, the historian should eschew moral evaluation. Objective, serious history-writing, these positivists held, had to be value-neutral.

This doctrine of value-neutrality posed a serious problem for all positivists of this era who held it. For all the positivist historians of this era firmly agreed with Thomas Hobbes that "the principall and proper worke of History, [is] to instruct, and enable men, by the knowledge of Actions past, to beare themselves prudently in the present, and providently towards the Future." They thought this was implied by the positivist doctrine of predictionism. They would therefore have rejected the anti-positivist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski's claim that "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are,"**** or the claim made by a critic of Toynbee, Pieter Geyl: "[Jakob] Burckhardt [was right to think] that there is wisdom to be gained from the study of the past, but no definite lessons for the actual problems of the present."***** For the positivists, history was a tool for creating flourishing societies, and definite lessons could be gained from it. But how to enable their readers to create such societies without ever making a value judgment?

The value-neutrality doctrine was much criticized by practicing historians and philosophers, such as Charles A. Beard and Isaiah Berlin. Two philosopher-historians who dedicated themselves to challenging every element of the positivist theory of history are Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood.

The Positivist Theorists of History, 1860-1890

Louis Bourdeau, 1824-1900

-Theory of the Sciences: Plan for an Integrated Science (1882)

-History and Historians: A Critical Essay on History Considered as a Positive Science (1888)

In this work, a programmatic manifesto, Bourdeau called for history to become a science of the laws of societal development, using the techniques of statistics. From the 1870s through 1890s, he produced a series of books which sought out and tried to confirm such laws, which he thought of as laws of social progress. Thus, he wrote books seeking out, specifying, and confirming laws of how agricultural improvements led to social improvements, engineering improvements led to better living standards, better eating habits led to better quality of life, etc.

The Second Generation of Positivist Theorists, 1863-1880s

Positivism can be said to have entered its phase of world expansion between 1863 and 1865. In those years, Gabino Barreda in Mexico and Pasquale Villari in Italy gave the stirring professions of it mentioned above, while Rafael Villavicencio introduced it to Venezuela's intellectuals and included it in the curriculum of Venezuela's Central University. In Poland, intellectuals urged adoption of positivism after the failure of the Romanticism-inspired 1863 Uprising against the Russian occupier. In France, positivism became almost the official philosophy of the Third Republic, which was founded in 1871 after the downfall of the Second Empire. Positivism began in this period to catch on throughout Latin America and Italy, where it seemed to many an excellent tool to use to change a social order dominated by the Catholic Church, and to transform a feudal system of economic production, of guilds, and of traditional hierarchies. (Its influence in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking America was so profound that we give that a separate section below.)

In Europe, positivism had at this time tremendous prestige and authority, particularly outside of academic philosophy. But within academic philosophy in Europe, there was at this time serious resistance to positivism. In France, Felix Ravaisson defended a spiritualistic personalism, which based consciousness in the will and found an inner harmony of man and nature, but refused to see humans as purely natural beings; this philosophy's defense of free will inspired William James. On the other hand, Charles Renouvier and Jules Lachelier defended a neo-Kantian critical philosophy. In Germany, the "back to Kant!" movement in academic philosophy was in full swing, and this entailed a reaction against positivism. Hermann von Helmholtz defended a hybrid of positivism and Kantian critical philosophy.

In this period, Comte's Religion of Humanity was led by his successor Pierre Laffitte, who also wrote on philosophy and history of science for the general public. There was also a strong group of intellectually distinguished followers of the Religion in England, with strong ties to Oxford University. Its leaders were Richard Congreve and Fredric Harrison, and its ideas made a great impression on the then-young Fabian Socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb. New York City also had a Comtean Church of Humanity during this period.

Latin American Positivism, 1860s-1930s

In this period, positivism had an immense influence in Latin America. Indeed, the very concept of Latin America was invented by two men, Francisco Bilbao of Chile and Michel Chevalier of France, the latter of whom was a disciple of Saint-Simon who went on to occupy high places in the Second Empire; he grounded the concept Latin America in very Saint-Simonian reasons. Here we shall focus on positivism in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries of Latin America, which I will collectively call "Ibero-America." In this region, positivism's impact was enormous. (It was also influential in the French-speaking Americas, but we shall leave those regions aside.)

Positivism came to Ibero-America in the early 1860s, where it began to draw serious attention in Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, and Argentina. It then spread to the rest of the region by 1880. In its Comtean version, it became the official philosophy of the First Brazilian Republic (1889-1930), and in a more Spencerian version, the semi-official philosophy of Mexico under Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911) and of Argentina from 1868 until 1916. It also had wide and organized support among political and social elites in Chile and Uruguay during these years. Moreover, Comte's Religion of Humanity developed strong outposts in Brazil and Chile. Although positivism suffered a region-wide decline in the 1910s, it had a late flourishing in Venezuela, where a circle of powerful social and political theorists gave positivist arguments in support of the regime of 1905-1936.

Its Appeal

Why did positivism appeal so powerfully to so many Ibero-Americans for so long? In great part, it was because it offered what seemed a promising solution to a political problem that had long tormented Ibero-America. After the Spanish-American colonies gained independence from Spain in the 1820s, they quickly fell into a period of civil wars which lasted until 1880 or so. The struggle in just about every Spanish-American society was among three broad groups. The first were the traditionalists who wanted to preserve traditional hierarchies and a society conceived as a set of corporations, rather than a set of individual contractors. The traditionalists wanted to conserve what is often called "the colonial order": a society focused around the Church, the military, guilds, and feudal agriculture with serfs; all of this presided over by a confessional Catholic state. The second group were the liberal-republican-civic-nationalists who desired a society of bourgeois male citizens joined in a civically-conceived nation, founded on a social contract, with this nation's economy based on free movement, freedom of work, and the market system. They tended to base their political program on such principles as natural rights, and they had come to think by the 1850s that the only way to bring about such a society in their countries was to sever the state from the Church and create a laicist state that was opposed to the Church's hegemony over society and could thus break the linchpin of the colonial order. This, of course, ensured the enmity of the traditionalists. The third were indigenous groups and communities of ex-slaves who tried to resist total assimilation by the Iberian culture. They wanted to break free of feudal servitude to the traditionalists, and of being forced by the liberal-republicans to become good citizens--and, in practice, wage-slaves--of the civic nation. These groups disagreed too strongly to have civil peace, and their relative numbers were too large, their members too committed, and their moral compunctions too strong to successfully exterminate, expel, or forcibly assimilate any of them. (Most Anglophone Americans of the period had no such compunctions about their indigenous peoples, and duly slaughtered, expelled, or forcibly assimilated them.) So in the 1860s and 1870s, the Spanish-American societies seemed locked in a trap of civil strife. Mexico and Colombia, in particular, underwent terrible civil wars. This was the political problem to which the Spanish-American positivists proposed a new solution.

In the 1860s and 1870s, some young thinkers who shared the political ideals and commitments of the liberal-republican-civic-nationalists came to think that the trap was partly the fault of their liberal-republican forebears. Part of the blame for the endless strife, argued these young liberal-republicans, should be assigned to their elders' methods and presuppositions about social philosophy. The elder liberal-republicans had been too doctrinaire in their liberal-republican-nationalism. In particular, their metaphysics of natural rights, their commitment to the unverifiable fiction of a social contract, their axiomatic and geometrical approach to human nature and social theory, and their zeal for quickly transforming society into a liberal-republican market society founded on a contractual civic nation, had led them to overlook palpable social facts. They had refused to see that institutions and social attitudes that are as deep rooted as those of the colonial order can only be quickly changed at the cost of horrific violence and civil strife. The resistance of the traditionalists was not simply because they were willfully evil opponents of liberal republican individualism, but because human beings are attached to the familiar and the authoritative. The old generation, in their zeal for destroying a society consisting principally of illiberal corporations in collusion with the state, had not seen that society is as much like a delicate organism as it is like an association of contracting reasonable individuals. Moreover, the old generation had--unlike the French Revolutionaries--not swept the social slate clean. The traditional, colonial order was still a significant force in Spanish American society. As recent history had shown, to destroy it immediately would require paying a price too terrible to contemplate. And old guard of liberal-republicans had been led by their social-contract commitments to expect too much of the modern state, thinking it the perfect expression of the enlightened general will. They had not seen the state for what it it observably is--a useful but inevitably imperfect device for benefiting society and providing publicly scrutinizable rules of public life.

Thus the new generation of liberal republicans in Spanish America in the late 1860s and the 1870s--with a few exceptions, like Jose Maria Vigil of Mexico-- argued that the previous generation had been unempirical, metaphysical, unscientific doctrinaires about politics and social philosophy. Though the new generation did not put it in these terms, their message was that the previous generation had not learned the lesson that the French Ideologues had learned, as described above. The new generation therefore advocated founding liberal-republican-civic nationalism on a new philosophy: a philosophy that put the empirical attitude front and center, that used science as the test of truth, that repudiated unverifiable fictions and imaginings, that stressed the relative and incomplete over the absolute and theoretically complete, that advocated peaceful social reform guided by the findings of science, and that saw society as a delicate organism that could all too easily be maimed by misguided governments or over-hasty radical reforms. The new generation, who proudly styled themselves "positivists," claimed that it was better to have a peaceful, gradually reforming society that made compromises with the traditionalists, with the traditional corporations, and with the need to avoid civil war; better that than to have the inevitable and interminable civil strife occasioned by a government committed to immediately achieving liberal-republican-nationalist political ideals and quickly reconfiguring society and the state into an agreement among bourgeois individual citizens. Moreover, especially among those in Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile where the influence of Mill and Spencer was strong, these new positivists also held that more good and social happiness was produced by people's pursuing their enlightened self-interest through free institutions and free markets, than by high-minded charitable and self-sacrificial deeds, or by sudden social transformation directed by the state. Gradual improvement and development toward and by means of a market society were two of their watchwords. For these market-society positivists, such economic arrangements were part of the key to achieving a flourishing society with good liberal institutions, good republican institutions, and a strong civically-conceived nation. The other keys were universal education, the rule of law, and an end to arbitrary government founded on popular sovereignty.

In Brazil, positivism was seen as the solution to a similar political problem, but in this one, the fear was of future civil strife's destroying a largely peaceful society, not of recurrent bouts of civil war. Before positivists sprang up like dragon's teeth, the Empire of Brazil (1822-1889) had a stable society and growing economy, relatively accepted liberal institutions, and a representative government. But it was founded on chattel slavery, the power of slave-owning plantations, a narrow franchise, and education for the few; and it still gave a strong place to Catholic education and Catholic corporations. These the young generation of republicans of the 1870s and 1880s came to see as insuperable obstacles to progress. In particular, they thought that a positivist republic was the best means of overcoming the resistance of traditionalist slave-owning elites to emancipation. The Brazilian liberals, they thought, did not have an ideology and a social and educational program strong enough to withstand the inevitable reaction and disorders that a general emancipation would bring. If the older liberals went through with emancipating the slaves--as they in fact did in 1888--then the traditional elites would stop at nothing to shore up the resulting loss of their social power. This challenge the liberal order would be too weak to meet: the liberal order's foundations were too shaky--without slavery, its appeal was unclear. But republicanism and positivism, these young men thought, could supply just the solid political and social foundations that would be needed after such a fundamental change. So the young republicans accepted positivism in largely the same form as the Spanish-American positivists, and proposed it as a solution to the Empire's coming crisis over what was to follow emancipation. Brazil's problems, they argued, stemmed from its commitment to an unscientific, liberal, slaveholding, narrowly educated social order. Replace that with a positivist, republican, emancipated order, and the path to social peace, continued growth, and widening enlightenment would be clear.

Its Distinctive Views

The Ibero-American positivists thus saw themselves as diagnosticians of social disease--a disease that afflicted them as well as their opponents, and certainly the previous generation of their party. Given their commitment to Spencer's organismic model of society, they set a high value on the medical model of social analysis, and wrote many famous books with titles like Manual of Political Pathology, A Sick People, and The Sickness of Central America. For the Hippocratic Oath's "First, Do No Harm," they substituted "First, Do Not Make Hasty Revolutionary Reforms that Will Bring Civil War." For them, a society with a stable representative government, economic growth, and institutions aiming to provide universal education was a necessary step to achieving a liberal republican civic nation. If that meant sacrificing genuine democracy in the short run, it was a price most Ibero-American positivists were willing to pay. They therefore made compromises with dictatorial regimes like that of Porfirio Diaz, which were willing to carry out their educational, scientific, technological, and market reforms in exchange for their agreeing not to directly challenge the despotism, which took to heart Saint-Simon's doctrine that politics should be replaced by administration. Though most Ibero-American positivists did not believe that politics should be got rid of, many became complicit with regimes that did.

One of the positivists' main ideas was that education was the best tool for achieving peaceful reform toward a liberal-republican industrial society. Accordingly, they founded secular schools and universities, like Mexico's National Preparatory School (1868), Argentina's Normal School at Parana (1870), Argentina's National University of La Plata (1905), and Mexico's National Autonomous University (1910). Here arose one of the great debates among the positivists. They were implacably opposed in principle to the doctrines and practices of Catholic education, and they were vociferous critics of Catholic hegemony over society and its institutions. But their political theory of social change and their model of the delicate nature of the social organism warned them against attempts to quickly extirpate Catholic control over education and morals, and the Catholic corporations. This was a major problem of political judgment for the positivists: if they made too many compromises with Catholic hegemony over society, social reform would be blocked. If they were too uncompromising, then civil strife would start again, since Catholic hegemony was the key commitment of the traditionalists. The positivists came down on different sides of this question. All agreed that secular education must be part of the remedy, but whether that meant that such education must be compulsory, and whether Catholic education should be suppressed, were subjects of dispute. Some positivists, like Jose Pedro Varela in Uruguay, advocated laicism, according to which the state must oppose Catholic hegemony over society in all its forms. In this they were the heirs of the great Mexican anti-clerical Reforma of the 1850s-1860s. Other positivists were more compromising and advocated liberal toleration of all religions, and so a secular state, though it would be tempered by advocacy and support for secular education. In the end, the positivists did not suppress Catholic education, even when they managed to achieve control of the state. That fell to later radical national-socialist governments who were enemies of positivism, such as the Mexican Revolutionary government of Plutarco Elias Calles (1924-1934).

The Ibero-American positivists were united by their refusal to accept Sieyes's interpretation of popular sovereignty, which held that the people's will is always political authoritative and just, and that therefore whoever is the duly appointed representative of the people makes decisions that are necessarily authoritative, legitimate, and just. They thought this a dangerous doctrine when put into practice in the Ibero-America of their day, where many people were uneducated and disadvantaged--ripe for manipulation by unscrupulous elites using populist methods. They feared that Sieyesian popular sovereignty would be used to support attempts to create populist dictatorships, which indeed it often was in those years. The Ibero-American positivists therefore frequently decided that it was better to oppose Sieyesian popular sovereignty, and indeed even popular sovereignty itself, than to risk populism and the possibility that a strongman could use it to cement a dictatorship. They therefore were willing to entertain proposals for restrictions on the franchise, and did not necessarily think that universal manhood suffrage of all loyal nationals was absolutely morally required. Some called for universal male suffrage, some did not. But all agreed in preferring that the ruling elite in society be educated.

Its Decline: 1910s-1930s

The authority of positivism in Ibero-America began to crumble in the 1910s. Both fairly and unfairly, it came to be seen as an ideological support for the authoritarian racial rule of a governing class composed of landed oligarchs, the bigger capitalists, and those professionals willing to join them. Though the positivists had indeed made genuine reforms, and brought peace, civil order, and economic growth, the price in terms of social justice and lack of democracy seemed to mount with every year. The positivists' lack of commitment to universal equal suffrage, even for all men; the tendency many of them had to look down on the "less civilized races," deploring the dead-weight effects they took them to have on social progress; all of this told heavily against positivism in the 1910s and 1920s, especially in racially-mixed societies like Mexico and Brazil. The racism and racially un-democratic nature of the positivist regimes became more palpable as worldwide calls for democracy and racial equality grew ever stronger. What Jose Ortega y Gasset later called "the Revolt of the Masses" was brewing, and it was clear that the Ibero-American positivists were not prepared for it. For they were committed to Mill's doctrine that "the aim of practical politics is to surround any given society with the greatest possible number of circumstances of which the tendencies are beneficial, and to remove or counteract, as far as practicable, those of which the tendencies are injurious." Although most of the positivists were genuine civic republicans, and although many would have said that they valued democracy as an ideal for society to strive towards, they would have said that when there was a conflict between a policy that respected democracy and a policy that realized Mill's doctrine, there would often be a good reason to prefer the realization of Mill's doctrine, given the difficulties faced by Ibero-American societies. Such reasonings the newly uprising democrats regarded as sophisms that functioned as ideological supports for rule by elites who, they thought, would never willingly transition to democracy.

Moreover, in matters of political economy, the positivists seemed to serve as justifiers of a new racial exploitation, with racially-inferior workers laboring as near-serfs or barely subsisting wage-slaves. True, such positivists as Justo Sierra had declared themselves opposed to the plutocracy they claimed was the ruling order in the United States; but with every year that positivist policies were in effect, it seemed that Spanish-America was converging on just such a plutocracy. The rich and comfortably-off got richer, but to many people, it was not clear that the lot of the peasants and the indigenous peoples was improving. It was undeniable that the influence of Spencer had led to economic policies derived from crude versions of Spencerian Darwinism, which seemed to aim merely at keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. Whether this was in fact what Spencer and the Ibero-American positivists had intended was regarded by ordinary people as a purely academic question. And their willingness to deal with regimes that advocated replacing politics with adminsitration came back to haunt them. Many of these discontents with positivism could be summed up as follows: "Economic growth, stability, administration, and scientific education are all very well, but how long must we wait for democracy and a just distribution of social status and wealth?" The malcontents would have sympathized with John Maynard Keynes's later comment: "In the long run, we are all dead."

Take, as an example of these discontents at work, the Mexican Revolution. By revolting against such a racially exploitative, Spencerian Darwinist social order, the Mexican Revolutionaries also revolted against the positivism which was seen to support it. For example, in 1910, the year the Revolution began, a leader of the anti-positivist movement among the young Mexican philosophers, Jose Vasconcelos, published a book challenging the positivist philosophy and its political implications--Gabino Barreda and Contemporary Ideas. When the violence ended, in 1920, the new Revolutionary government of Mexico officially repudiated positivism. It immediately installed as Rector of the National University Vasconcelos, who had by then turned from criticizing positivism to building an alternative and radically different philosophical system: a kind of evolutionary race-mixing spiritualism, as seen in his famous 1925 book, The Cosmic Race: The Mission of the Ibero-American Race. Indeed, such non-positivist themes as spiritualism, vitalism, the fundamental contribution made by our concepts to perception, autonomy as the ground of theoretical philosophy, and anti-rationalism were the basic commitments of the most avant-garde Ibero-American philosophers of the 1910s and 1920s, who included Vasconcelos, Carlos Vaz Ferreira of Uruguay, Alejandro Korn of Argentina, and Antonio Caso of Mexico.

The themes of the new politics and culture that replaced positivism in the 1920s and 1930s were social democracy, guild socialism, market socialism, workplace democracy, economic corporatism, indigenism and spiritualism in culture, anti-imperialist nationalism, and, in racially-mixed societies like Mexico and Brazil, racial democracy and pride in mixed-race culture.

Positivism lost its authority at different rates throughout the region. While it collapsed with spectacular swiftness in Mexico in the 1910s, and was dethroned in Argentina by 1920, in Brazil, it remained the dominant philosophy until a few years after Einstein's famous 1925 lecture to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences; Einstein's theory of relativity, of course, was thought to challenge traditional positivism, since it seemed to rely so heavily on unobservable entities. In Venezuela, a circle of distinguished intellectuals used positivist arguments to defend the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gomez until well into the 1930s. By the outbreak of World War II, 19th-century positivism was no longer extant in the region.

Empirio-criticism, 1880s-1916

The empirio-critics represent something of a departure from the high positivism of Comte, Mill, and Spencer. Those three had taken the results of the empirical sciences as largely unproblematic and sought to build a philosophy that would synthesize them and guide future scientific--and especially social--inquiry. They do not fear skepticism about science. The empirio-critics are more worried about the meaning and validity of scientific results. For them, greatly influenced as they are by Kant, skepticism is a worry; so they seek a foundation that would justify the results of science and explain their meaning. This foundation they found in the notion of pure experience--experience stripped of all preconceived notions and doctrines. In other words, they radicalize the positivist notion of theory-free observations: they seek experiences that are absolutely pure of all theory or concepts. These will be the touchstone of truth and knowledge.

What would be this touchstone? Richard Avenarius argued that it was to be found by radicalizing phenomenalism and empiricism. Empirio-criticism focuses on a category of pure experiences, which it argues are prior to the division of subject and object. It uses this category of pure experience to present a neutral monism, the view that what there is is neither physical nor mental, but rather a substance that is neither: it is simply given in pure experience, and depending on the framework in which we put it, we can see it as either mental or physical. Pure experience is prior to the notion of an inner mental life, with mental events: every pure experience is not yet an object, nor a mental event occurring in a subject. Yet this is not, according to Avenarius--and Mach, who also accepted the doctrine--a metaphysical thesis, in the sense that it makes a claim about the ultimate truth of things. Instead, it is presented as a purely positive doctrine arrived at by careful observation. This neutral monism would later be accepted by William James and Bertrand Russell, among many others. Indeed, James was famously to write several essays defending and developing the doctrine, which were posthumously published as Essays in Radical Empiricism.

Empirio-criticism was attacked by Lenin in his Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908), on the grounds that its positivism, theory of pure experience, and neutral monism undermined metaphysical materialism and Marxism, and mystified social relations in such a way as to prevent people from attaining an appropriately critical and revolutionary attitude toward them.

Positivistic Thinkers of the Belle Epoque in Europe, 1890-1914

During this period, strict positivism was falling out of fashion among philosophers and philosophically-minded scholars in Europe and the English-speaking world. Philosophy in Europe began to undergo a period of profound doubt about the plausibility and justification of intellectualism, the view that the intellect is or can be a sure guide to successful action and social policy. On the one hand, philosophers began to wonder whether the foundations of such concepts as intelligibility, explanation, and truth were as obviously strong and stable as they had seemed, and many argued that the foundations amounted to little more than quicksand. Of course, those concepts were all of them central to the positivist outlook. On the other hand, secular, non-theological philosophers began to give great importance to the claims of the spiritual, the mystical, and the irrational. And in this period, the power and importance of unconscious emotions and motives was becoming appreciated by philosophers and psychologists: many theories of the unconscious were then being developed, of which Freud's was to prove the most powerful and profound. Among Anglophone philosophers, Hegelianism and then pragmatism and a new, semi-Kantian scientific realism were the most fashionable philosophies; in France, Neo-Kantianism and a kind of evolutionary spiritualism competed for predominance: Bergson and Emile Boutroux were the great philosophers of the day; in Germany, Neo-Kantianism was supreme; in Italy and Spain, Hegelianism, Neo-Kantianism, and an existential spiritualist religious philosophy were becoming dominant. In Latin America, by contrast, positivism was predominant. The philosophers mentioned below are thus not so much strict positivists as defenders of philosophical theories highly sympathetic to positivism.

This shift in positivism's influence was also mirrored in high culture in general: by 1890, there were many declarations that positivism and its intellectualism were dead or moribund in Europe. In theoretical discourse, among other themes, intuition, spiritualism, the power of the irrational, and pragmatism were coming into vogue. Reflective people were beginning to discover the recently-published works of a then little-known thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche. In political discourse, doubts were being expressed about the two political programs that positivists had urged: either liberal-republican-civic-nationalism or authoritarian socialism led by scientific elites. On the one hand, the social question was becoming urgent, as European cities were filled with desperately poor working people living in squalor. Neither of positivism's two political recipes seemed likely to solve the social question. On the other hand--partly as a result of the rise of the social question--democracy was becoming a watchword, and positivism did not seem to the younger generation to value it sufficiently.****** This shift in the culture is described and regretted in this 1893 address by Emile Zola, who attempted to create the positivist novel as a genre. Zola stubbornly clung to his positivism, which he would have said dictated his liberal-republican-civic-nationalist politics, and later moved him to his famous denunciation of the anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus Affair.

It was at about this period that positivistic thinkers in wide numbers began to sympathize with socialism--even those who vehemently disagreed with Saint-Simon and Comte's authoritarian socialisms. This tendency gave empirical support to F. A. Hayek's attempt to show in The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952) that all positivism--not just Comte's positivist politics--is a powerful prop for socialism.

Enrico Ferri, 1856-1929 (Wikimedia Commons)

A leading criminologist and then socialist politician, a leader of the Socialist Party of Italy. He was a disciple of Cesare Lombroso who explained criminality in terms of unjust social and political pressures operating on people. He united positivism with Marxism, socialism, and Darwinism. He became a leading reformer of the Italian criminal code, and the code he wrote greatly influenced the code adopted by Argentina in 1921. At the end of his life, he went from opposing Mussolini and the Fascists in the name of republican socialism to not opposing them. He argued that Fascism was the only feasible way of overcoming the harms done by liberal individualism in Italy's contemporary circumstances.

-Socialism and Crime (1883)

-Criminal Sociology (1884)

-Socialism and Positive Science (1894)

-The National Socialists and the Fascist Government (1923)

-Fascism in Italy and the Work of Benito Mussolini (1928)

The Ernst Mach Circle of Pre-war Vienna, ca. 1905-1914

It was formed by three young students of the University of Vienna: Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, and Philipp Frank, who were admirers of Mach. They came together to discuss issues in the theory of science and the theory of society from an empirio-critical perspective. Hahn and Neurath later founded, with Moritz Schlick, the Vienna Circle and thus logical positivism. (On which, see below.)

Neo-positivism (logical positivism and logical empiricism)

By 1925 or so, positivism's fortunes were at a low ebb among philosophers. In Germany, Poland, and the former Austrian Empire, Neo-Kantianism had thoroughly displaced positivism; and phenomenology and realism were gathering in strength. In France, the leading secular philosophies were a Kant-influenced constructive humanist idealism, a scientific realism, and Bergsonian evolutionary spiritualism: the great figures were Leon Brunschvicg, Emile Meyerson, and of course Bergson. Positivism in France was kept alive by the social scientist-philosophers Celestin Bougle and Marcel Mauss. In Italy, Hegelianism, vitalism, and pragmatism called the tune: Croce and Gentile were the leading philosophers. In Spain, an existential spiritualism and a contextualist perspectivism were the most noted philosophies, defended by Unamuno and Ortega, respectively. In North America, pragmatism and Neo-Kantianism of a scientific flavor were in the lead. In Britain, realism and empiricism had acquired a severe new logic, which they wielded against the idealism and pragmatism which had been dominant: but no fashionable philosopher had much time for positivism. Even in Latin America, positivism was being displaced by evolutionary spiritualism, racial vitalism, historicist perspectivism, Neo-Kantianism, and Marxism.

Positivism seemed out of tune with the times, for at least five reasons. First, it clashed with the modernist temper. For that emphasized, on the one hand, obsession over purity of technique, and on the other, stress on the power of irrational emotions. On both counts, positivism seemed ruled out. On the one hand, positivism conceived of philosophy as a kind of total integration of all sciences, willing to use whatever scientific techniques seemed most apt for tackling any problem. The old positivism never cared much for disciplinary boundaries, which became quite important for modernism. On the other hand, positivism had stressed the power of disciplined and benevolent reason. So positivism seemed to conflict with modernism's theme of the power of unreason. The second way positivism seemed against the spirit of the age was that the First World War had dealt a death blow to its doctrine of rational progressivism. Thirdly, positivism seemed outmoded in its doctrine of scientific control, interpreted as it had been to admire paternal rule by enlightened elites. The First World War seemed to many to show that such rule was illegitimate and doomed. For those people, positivism's scientific-control doctrine seemed suspiciously anti-democratic, at least as it had been widely interpreted. The fourth way positivism clashed with the temper of the times was in the new physics. Most positivists opposed the new relativity theory championed by Einstein, as well as the non-Euclidean geometries it used. Just as Mach had opposed the atomic theory on the grounds that atoms--or at any rate their internal components--were then unobservable, so the positivists of the 1910s--including Mach himself--challenged relativity on the grounds that it too was unobservable. But in 1919, Einstein's theory was found by Arthur Eddington to successfully predict an observed event, while Newton's rival theory failed to do so. After that, it was almost universally concluded that it was irrational to continue opposing relativity. Now, both positivists and anti-positivists had thought that positivism implied just such opposition. So after Eddington's test, many concluded that positivism had to be rejected, because it had an unacceptable implication. Thus when Einstein came to give a lecture at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in May 1925, Brazilian pure scientists used the occasion to debate and denounce the positivists, who tended to be applied scientists, and still predominated in Brazil's scientific institutions. A fierce controversy raged in Brazil for a couple of years, ending with positivism generally discredited among the younger generation. Hence by 1928 or so, positivism had died even in the country that had made it the official philosophy. (Interestingly, the First Brazilian Republic was toppled in 1930.) Fifth, the old positivism clashed with the flourishing axiomatization movement, which was sweeping through the sciences in the wake of Frege and Russell's new logic, David Hilbert's axiomatization of geometry, Giuseppe Peano's axiomatization of arithmetic, and Einstein's reliance on non-Euclidean geometry. This movement, which flourished from 1900 until about 1960, called for the axiomatization of all the accepted and successful theories in all the sciences: they should be reconstructed in the form of rigorous proofs consisting of axioms and definitions leading to lemmas, and those in turn to theorems. All of these, the movement claimed, were better presented in formal notation than in natural language. Some results of this enterprise can be seen in J. H. Woodger's 1937 axiomatization of biological theory, or Gerard Debreu's 1950s axiomatization of general equilibrium theory in economics. This highly deductive and formal enterprise seemed fundamentally at odds with the spirit and approach of the old positivism. Comte, Mill, and Spencer had seen themselves as engaged in a search for a unifying account of our knowledge that proceeded from the ground up. The task of the philosophic systematizer, they thought, was the same as that of the scientist. It was to move up the pyramid of knowledge--which was growing both at the base and toward the top--from particular observations to ever more general unifying laws. Philosophy to them was merely the most abstract and general science, and its conclusions had to be as faithful to the facts as those of any particular science. As such, the conclusions of philosophy were only as reliable as the facts from which they generalized. The axiomatizers, on the other hand, held that the task of abstract theorizing was to proceed from the top down. The systematizer's task, they held, was quite different from that of the empirical scientist. It was to identify axioms and definitions from which scientific theories could be derived, and then give mathematical proofs deriving those theories. System came not from ever-greater generalization moving up the pyramid, but from deductive derivation moving down from absolute first principles to facts. These first principles, the axiomatizers held, must be truths of the ideal logical and conceptual system. As such, one should regard with suspicion any facts which did not fit neatly with such truths' proven logical consequences. The axiomatizers' picture of well-organized knowledge was like that of a classical façade: a triangular pediment (the first principles and definitions leading to lemmas) at the top, under which lie the columns (the lemmas and definitions leading to the theorems: all of these being the correctly-ordered theories of science and everyday life). The pyramid model, they held, worked well enough for understanding the accumulation of scientific knowledge. But it was a bad model of how to systematize and order scientific theories. Unsurprisingly, disciples of axiomatization did not think highly of the philosophy of 19th-century positivism. They thought its picture of science respectable; but its philosophy they despised, on the ground that it failed to distinguish between first-order scientific inquiry and second-order deductive systematization of theories. Moreover, axiomatization encouraged the idea that the unity of science required a reduction of all the sciences to one basic science, which was usually thought to be mathematical physics. For the axiomatizers took unity to mean system, and system for them meant axiomatics, the axioms of which were truths of the most basic kind. So the old materialist dream of the reduction of all the sciences to physics was inadvertently revived, ironically enough, by a Platonist movement in mathematical theory!

Given all this, it is extraordinary that, by the 1930s, positivism had again become a powerful force in philosophy. It was reborn as neo-positivism. Its success owed largely to the fact that it reformulated positivism so that it escaped each of the five difficulties just mentioned. It turned positivism, that is, into a modernist, axiomatizing philosophy that incorporated and indeed worshipped the new physics, and was cautious about enthusiastically advocating progressivism and scientific control. This new positivism differed from the old in at least thirteen main ways. (1) It wielded the new logic of Frege and Russell; (2) it respected modernism's stress on purity of discipline: it argued that philosophy should be seen as fundamentally concerned with the analysis of our language and our concepts, on the one hand, and with the critical reconstruction of scientific theories and scientific inference, on the other; (3) as a consequence of (1) and (2), it joined the other modernist philosophes in spurning what it called "psychologism," and of which it thought Mill and Bain especially guilty--see below for more; (4) it respected modernism's stress on the power of irrational emotions, whereas the old positivism had not much thought about specifically irrational emotions; (5) it heavily qualified and restricted the doctrine of rational progressivism; (6) it added the famous verifiability theory of meaning, about which see the next paragraph; (7) it added the value-neutrality criterion for objectivity--see below; (8) its mainstream interpreted the unity of science to mean that all sciences should be ultimately reducible to mathematical physics, and elevated such physics to the rank of the master science on which all the others should model themselves; this reductive view of the sciences would have been vehemently rejected by Comte, Mill, and Spencer, who took an egalitarian view of all scientific endeavors, and rejected attempts to reduce sciences to others; (9) it demonstrated that the theory of relativity was consistent with positivism's chief doctrines, properly construed; (10) its mainstream argued that the chief philosophical problems were meaning, the structure of scientific theories and scientific inference, and the nature of perception; (11) it believed that evolutionary models, if applied to anything besides species and organisms, should not be taken as anything more than metaphors; (12) it made two radical divisions central to its philosophizing: that between cognitive expression and emotive expression, and that between factual claims and confessions of values; in both of these, the first term was seen as far more authoritative and important than the second; (13) it drew heavily on the spirit and the concepts of Kant's philosophy: like Kant, it made dualisms central to its philosophizing--fact/value, subjective/objective, mental/physical, theory/observation, analytic/synthetic, meaningful/meaningless--; Mill, Comte, Spencer, and Avenarius would have deemed this obsessive dualizing wildly exaggerated, and smacking of insufficient commitment to phenomenalism. Indeed, neo-positivism could fairly be called an unholy alliance of Hume's epistemology, Comte's theory of science, the radical separation of cognitive and emotive expression, and Kant's philosophical methods. Moritz Schlick, the founding father of neo-positivism, is reported to have said that "the whole of [neo-positivism] could be summed up in one statement: There are no synthetic a priori truths."*******

Four of these doctrines, anti-psychologism, verifiability, value-neutrality, and the dualism of cognitive and emotive and fact and value, need discussion.

The rejection of psychologism was common to the philosophies of the modernist period. It was a common goal of the analytic philosophy founded by Frege and Russell; of the phenomenology of Husserl; of Cassirer's neo-Kantianism; of the realism of Nicolai Hartmann; of Heidegger's existential phenomenology; of the perspectivism of Ortega; and even of the idealism of Croce and Gentile. All these philosophies denied that any concepts or categories of philosophical interest could be reduced without remainder to psychological facts about human beings, such that the science of psychology could eventually give a full account of the nature and content of these concepts. The anti-psychologism movement held that what these concepts referred to might be so reducible--e.g., the neo-positivists held that morality was reducible to psychological facts, which as such were most appropriately studied by psychologists. But all the opponents of psychologism agreed that the concepts and categories themselves were not so reducible. They all agreed that a complete psychological science could never give a complete account of the concepts and categories of interest to philosophy. The idea that psychology could in principle do this, they all took to be the fundamental error of 19th-century philosophy, of which Mill and Spencer were especially guilty. One result of this rejection of psychologism was the idea, first adopted by Frege and Russell, that philosophy should concern itself with the analysis of concepts and categories; and not with what those concepts referred to; nor with people's thoughts, feelings, and doings about either the concepts or their referents. Thus was born analytical philosophy, a purified philosophy aiming solely at the analysis of concepts and categories. Neo-positivism proclaimed itself one school of this new analytical philosophy.

The verifiability theory of meaning offered a criterion for deciding when a statement was meaningful. It held, following Kant, that there were two basic kinds of statements: analytic and synthetic. Analytic statements were true or false purely by virtue of the terms they used: they were true or false by definition, as in "A bachelor is an unmarried man," "1 + 1 = 2," "2 +2 =5," or "That bachelor is married." Analytic statements thus made conceptual claims, and conveyed no new knowledge of the world. Synthetic statements, by contrast, made claims that were not simply implied by the concepts used, as in "That bachelor is entering that house over there," "That fish weighs two kilos," or "5 states signed the treaty." To this, the verifiability theory as wielded by the neo-positivists added that true analytic statements resulted solely from conventions about how we use our concepts. A bachelor is an unmarried man, they held, simply because we have agreed to use the concept bachelor in that way. These axioms in hand, the verifiability theory then made its core claim: to have cognitive significance, any synthetic statement had to be in principle verifiable by empirical observations. It followed that all metaphysical statements, such as "God is all-good," or "The world is ultimately composed of matter," were either analyses of our concepts, or unverifiable synthetic statements without cognitive significance. Hence "God is all-good" either made claims about what people have agreed to mean by "God" and by "good" or it conveyed nothing of cognitive significance, because everyone agreed it was not even in principle empirically verifiable. This theory the neo-positivists used to challenge the whole enterprises of theology and metaphysics.

Value-neutrality the neo-positivists proposed as a necessary condition for a proposition's being objective. If, they said, a proposition implied a value judgment that some reasonable person might challenge, then that proposition was not objective. For example, if I say that "Happiness is good for all people," then the logical positivist would ask whether that statement means "Happiness is something all people consider good," or "Happiness is something all people desire," or "Happiness is something all people should desire." If either of the first two, then the neo-positivist would admit that the statement could be objective, and could be true. If the third, then the neo-positivist would say that it could not be objective, because it implied a value judgment that some reasonable person might challenge.

Finally, we come to neo-positivism's radical separation between cognitive and emotive expression, and between facts and values. Neo-positivism held that there are two fundamental kinds of expression: cognitive and emotive. Cognitive expressions are statements: either of an empirically verifiable, a logical/mathematical, or a conceptual character. All expressions that do not clearly fall under one of those three headings are then held by neo-positivism to be emotive. They express emotions or attitudes, and have no cognitive content in the strict sense. For example, take an expression like, "What a lovely person he is!" Of this the neo-positivist will say that it certainly does not count as conceptual or logical/mathematical. It may have, as Hume and then Schlick suggested, a partly empirical character, in that it might imply that the person satisfies empirically verifiable criteria for lovely personhood. But principally, says the neo-positivist, the expression is emotive. It expresses an emotional attitude toward the person, and perhaps also invites listeners to share that attitude. With this doctrine in hand, the neo-positivists drew a sharp distinction between statements of fact and statements of value. They held that no set of claims about what we ought to do followed solely from claims about observable empirical fact: to reach claims about what we ought to do, there needs to be a tacit linking premise saying that if the facts are such-and-such, then we ought to do such-and-such. The neo-positivists, or at least their mainstream, also held that statements of fact could be got at uncolored by the observer's value commitments: their commitment to value-neutrality was one pressure pushing them to draw the fact-value dichotomy. For the mainstream of neo-positivism, then, fact and value did not have to be entangled. The two can, they held, in principle be kept separate.

Like the old positivism, neo-positivism took metaphysics and theology as its chief antagonists; unlike the old positivism, the tool it used most in challenging their doctrines was the verifiability criterion of meaning. This philosophy was fathered by the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, and it soon came to be called "logical positivism."

At the same time as the Vienna Circle were giving birth to logical positivism, a sibling philosophy had been born in Berlin--logical empiricism. This philosophy accepted all the doctrines of neo-positivism, except for the verifiability criterion of meaning. But logical empiricism had no interest in tackling social or ethical questions, nor did it care to engage in controversies with metaphysicians or theologians. Its sole interest was in philosophizing about science and scientific knowledge, and hence into the intellectual tools used by those: language, mathematics, probability, statistics, and logic. So we might say that logical empiricism is a positivist philosophy in doctrine, but not a form of logical positivism. And unlike the logical positivists or the old positivists, the logical empiricists had no desire to engage in inquiries or controversies in all the realms of traditional philosophy. The combination of logical positivism and logical empiricism we may call "neo-positivism."

Another aspect of neo-positivism should be mentioned: its view of the history of philosophy. It is often said that neo-positivism had no interest in the history of philosophy, but this is misleading. It is true that few neo-positivists conducted much research on the history of philosophy. But the neo-positivists did read and think about the theories of great philosophers of the past. What is distinctive is which philosophers they thought worth reading. For them the great names worth reading were Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Helmholtz, Peirce, Mach, Frege, Henri Poincare, Pierre Duhem, Russell, Einstein, and early Wittgenstein. Hume they credited with carrying out a Copernican Revolution within philosophy. Lesser figures deserving some attention were Jakob Friedrich Fries (who presented in 1807 a psychological and empirical version of Kant), Marx for his economic and social theories, James, Dewey, and Freud. Mill they regarded as well-intentioned, but fundamentally confused and contradictory, especially for his psychologism and his failure to rigorously distinguish analytic from synthetic. For Saint-Simon and Comte, they had no time whatever, despite the fact that the neo-positivist picture of science was rooted almost entirely in them. And Hegel, Schopenhauer, Engels, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, and Bergson they regarded as bogus charlatans. In short, they were extraordinarily uninterested in the philosophy of the 19th century. For them, the only worthwhile philosophy done between Fries's psychological version of Kant in 1807 and the American pragmatists after 1878 was theory of science produced by practicing scientists like Helmholtz, Darwin, and Mach. (Note, however, that this is not true of Neurath, Schlick, and Carnap, but rather of their followers and of the logical empiricists; all three were learned in the philosophy of the 19th century.)

In politics, the neo-positivists tended to favor social democracy carried out on the principles of scientific politics. Neurath and Carnap were the strongest believers in socialist methods, but almost all the positivists were committed to social democracy. All were opposed to Fascism and national socialism, and some took great risks to oppose it, ultimately paying with their lives. But it is a remarkable feature of neo-positivism that, with Neurath and Felix Oppenheim the distinguished exceptions, they wrote very little in the way of systematic theories of politics. Especially among those younger than Neurath, the modernist idea of the purity of the disciplines took hold, and they thought it was not the province of theorists of science to explore political morality or the empirical realities of politics.

By the 1930s, neo-positivism had swept from its birthplaces in Vienna and Berlin through Central Europe, Poland, and Germany, and caused great controversy in Britain and France. It would by 1940 have strong outposts in North America, where it had a ready audience among the pragmatists, the scientific Neo-Kantians, practitioners of the new behaviorism in psychology, and social scientists generally. And in the late 1940s and 1950s, it acquired strength in Latin America and Italy. Around 1950, logical positivism and logical empiricism combined were perhaps the dominant philosophy in the world, their victorious trajectory charted by their own Hans Reichenbach's exultant The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951). Natural scientists were gratified to hear their endeavors exalted by neo-positivism, and among the burgeoning numbers of social scientists worldwide, there was a host of eager disciples. The impact of neo-positivism on world culture was tremendous: from the 1930s through the 1970s, intellectuals, artists, people associated with big science and big organizations, and others debated, denounced, proclaimed, and worried over the doctrines and outlook of neo-positivism.******* Even to this day, the neo-positivists' dichotomy between fact and value and their value-neutral criterion for objectivity have wide influence in economics, political science, and psychology. In particular, most economists today still accept the fact-value dichotomy, which was famously formulated for them in Chapter VI of the programmatic manifesto of modernist neoclassical economics, Lionel Robbins's Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932).

Wittgenstein the Inspirer of Logical Positivism

Portrait

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889-1951

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

This work might well be called the magnum opus of modernism in philosophy. For it gave to philosophy a distinctive task, purified of any of the concerns or methods of other disciplines: the analysis of language and concepts. This conception of philosophy, and the book's main doctrine--the picture theory of meaning--both massively influenced the Vienna Circle.

After publishing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein held discussions with the Vienna Circle, who had read and been inspired by the book. In those meetings, he proposed the notorious verification criterion of meaning, which held that a synthetic statement--a statement that is not a conceptual, definitional, or logical/mathematical claim--is meaningful only if it can be verified by a possible experience. In so doing, Wittgenstein transformed Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatic maxim for clarifying our ideas and made it into a criterion for meaning. Peirce had argued that we attain a fully clear grasp of a concept only we when we have a clear conception of all the effects the concept would have if active in the world. Wittgenstein took this maxim, refocused it on test by possible experiences, and made it a criterion for a synthetic statement's having genuine meaning. In combination with phenomenalism, this verification principle was used by the logical positivists to argue that all synthetic statements of metaphysics or theology are nonsense, or meaningless.

For a good, short, overview of the main doctrines and ambitions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, as well as of his later, radically different philosophy, watch this video of a conversation with Anthony Quinton, "The Two Philosophies of Wittgenstein."

The Vienna Circle, 1922-1936: The Birth and Flourishing of Logical Positivism

In 1929, Hahn, Neurath, and Carnap published the manifesto of the Circle, The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle, dedicating it to Schlick.

For an illuminating brief overview of the main ambitions and chief doctrines of logical positivism, watch this video of a conversation with A. J. Ayer.

The Berlin Circle of Logical Empiricism, 1920s-1933

As noted, the logical empiricists accepted all the doctrines of positivism, and all the doctrines of logical positivism except for verifiability. But their interests in philosophy were limited to the scrutiny of science and scientific knowledge, logic, and mathematics. Moreover, logical empiricism produced in Carl Hempel one of the main critics of the logical positivists' verifiability criterion of meaning.

It was the logical empiricists Hempel and Oppenheim who produced the famous deductive-nomological model of explanation.

Most of the Circle's members were Jews, so the Circle broke up when the Nazis won the national government in 1933.

Positivism in the U. S. and Scandinavia: Science, Social Science, and Law

These people are not all positivists in the strict sense outlined above: but they defended theories and views quite sympathetic to positivism, and were themselves quite sympathetic toward it.

The Death of Positivism, early 1970s

Among philosophers, positivism died about 1970. The list of philosophers who had challenged it since the 1930s is a who's who of Anglophone and German-speaking philosophy in those years, including: John Dewey, Karl Popper, R. G. Collingwood, the later Wittgenstein, Max Horkheimer, Brand Blanshard, F. A. Hayek, Susanne Langer, Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, Leo Strauss, W. V. O. Quine, Isaiah Berlin, Wilfrid Sellars, Elizabeth Anscombe, Stephen Toulmin, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, Rom Harre, Leszek Kolakowski. Even Ayer, who had steadfastly defended and extended logical positivism into the 1960s, ultimately repudiated it and indeed positivism in general. In the 1940s and '50s, Oxford and Cambridge, in particular, were worldwide centers of resistance to neo-positivism, and indeed of positivism in general. The ordinary language philosophy practiced at Oxford by Ryle and Austin might almost be said to have been created to oppose neo-positivism. Even the legal positivism famously defended by H.L.A. Hart at Oxford in the 1950s and '60s was profoundly opposed to logical positivism. And the philosophy taught by the later Wittgenstein at Cambridge was bitterly hostile to all forms of neo-positivism. Thus many of Wittgenstein's students came away from Cambridge armed with arguments against neo-positivism, and the desire to deploy them.

Positivism's death was celebrated by philosophers and social scientists throughout the 1970s and 1980s. They saw it as a liberation from an intellectual straitjacket. And indeed, logical positivism did exercise a stifling hegemony over the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s. But not all positivisms are logical positivism, with its unholy alliance of Hume's epistemology, Comte's theory of science and scientific control, Kant's philosophical methods, and the verification theory of meaning. In particular, Mill's positivism is not that of the logical positivists. True, Mill's positivism is ferociously polemical and intolerant about the foundational questions in the theory of knowledge, in metaphysics, in the philosophy of mind, and in moral philosophy. But it is broad-minded, pluralistic, fallibilist, and widely sympathetic about how to draw implications from the answers to those questions. But with the death of positivism, few people even to this day appreciate this. And Comte, Mill, and Neurath's theory of the unity of science is not the reduction-to-physics theory called for by the logical empiricists and those logical positivists bewitched by the axiomatization movement. For those three, all sciences are equally fundamental in their own way. No science is the model of any other, all have an equally valuable contribution to make, and all must work together for the benefit of humanity. In our age of hyper-specialism, this view is as dead as the dinosaurs.

Something else was lost when positivism died. Or rather, it is being lost now, 40 years later, with positivism still dead and unresurrected.

Today, the last of the philosophers and social scientists who had battled for or against logical positivism are retiring or dying. With them goes an almost universal knowledge among philosophers and social scientists of a single philosophical system. For almost every social scientist or philosopher who was active in the days of the battles for and against logical positivism was familiar with its chief doctrines. This gave philosophers and social scientists a set of common reference points which they now lack. Today, there is no one philosophical system with which you can expect any reputable social scientist or philosopher to be professionally familiar, if only in a rough and ready way.********* This is a loss, for it means that there is little philosophical common ground which you can fairly expect all such scholars to share. This is one reason why quick communication and interchange among all such scholars is much harder than during positivism's life.

* = This latter Thomas Jefferson banned from the library of the University of Virginia, saying to W. Duane that it had "spread universal Toryism over the land" and to John Adams, "This single book has done more to sap the free principles of the English Constitution than the largest standing army." Jefferson presumably had in mind Hume's challenges to the natural-rights and social-contract commitments of the English Revolutionists, as well as his dislike of their hasty and brutal methods.

**= Mill, A System of Logic, Book VI, ch. viii, S. 3.

***=Pieter Geyl, in debating with Toynbee his theory, said, "To detach, for the purposes of comparison [and trans-historical generalization], a historical fact from its own particular and never to be repeated circumstances only too easily leads to violence being done to history." This nicely expresses a central doctrine of most post-positivist historians. "Can We Know the Pattern of the Past?--A Debate," in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (1959), p. 309.

****=Leszek Kolakowski, "The Idolatry of Politics," Jefferson Memorial Lecture, 1986.

*****="Can We Know the Pattern of the Past?," in Theories of History, p. 319.

******= For a famous examination of the influences of these themes on contemporary social thought and psychology in France, Germany, and Italy, see H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (1958).

*******=William Barrett, "Introduction," Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Volume Three, ed. William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken (1962), p. 7.

********= For a helpful survey of its impact on US and British writers, see Michel LeMahieu, "Introduction," in his Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945-1975 (2013).

*********=Pragmatism comes closest, but it is less a philosophical system than a method and an attitude toward theoretical questions. And in any case, the percentage of philosophers and social scientists who can describe more than one pragmatist doctrine is quite small. Can you?