454 1 English for Psychologists and Sociologists

science became methodologically a part of natural science. While the stellar world was depicted in these theories as a mechanical interaction of celestial bodies, society was regarded as a kind of astronomical system of individuals connected by social attraction and repulsion.

The thinkers of the seventeenth century, having taken mathematics (geometric method), astronomy, and mechanics, as the model of science, endeavoured to treat not only history but also social statistics (which was making its first significant advances at that time),

The social philosophy of the eighteenth century, which was orientated to Newtonian physics rather than to astronomy and geometry, was already not so mechanistic and was more careful about its generalisations.

Mediaeval philosophy and its ideological heirs (Romantic traditionalists) represented society as an organic whole, as a community in which socio-economic ties were inseparable from moral ones and were personified by traditions and religion. The Enlighteners counterposed to that idealised image a «mechanistic» model of society based on division of labour and rational exchange between individuals. The likening of society to a machine was naive, but it opened up a possibility of analytical clarifica­tion of the real functions of separate social institutions and subsystems (the state, law, economy, culture).

The difference between society and the state was first of all clarified. The first step toward that had already been made by the theorists of «natural law» and of the contract origin of the state.

The English materialists of the seventeenth century (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke), the Scottish moralists (David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson), and the French materialists of the eighteenth century (Holbach, Helvetius) were in accord in considering human behaviour as egoistic in principle, directed to attaining some .personal advantage. But it was only a step from

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reducing the motives of the social behaviour of the indivi­dual or group to the interests of the latter to establishing the dependence of those interests on the individual's or group's real socio-economic position. The thesis of the clash of social interests led logically to a conclusion about incompatibility of the conscious motives of individual actions and their social results. The Scottish moralists stressed that people's social behaviour was governed by irrational, instinctive forces and inclina­tions, and that people's deeds generated results unexpected for all the parties of this interaction. From that it followed that the structure and dynamics of the social whole could be explained without their being correlated with the consciousness of the individuals comprising this whole.

Clarification of the significance of economic property relations led social thought, beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau, to the problem of class differences and the functional role of social inequality. The English classical economists deduced the social division of society from the social division of labour. This led, at the end of the eighteenth century, to the concept «class» coming into use.

The «real» world of spontaneously shaped social relations came to be called civil society in contrast to the world of political and legal relations. That was linked terminologically with the traditional difference between civil (private) law and public law. But Hegel had already examined this matter more deeply, seeing civil society as simultaneously united (since no individual could get along

in such a society without others), and divided, torn by contradictory selfish interests.

The attempt made by Vico at a conceptual delimitation

of society culture, and the Enlighteners' development of

the idea of progress were very important achievements

b>f eighteenth-century philosophy