455 1 English for Psychologists and Sociologists

The Enlighteners' theory of progress, which played the role of the ideological foundation of the new epoch, largely paved the way for the evolutionist schemes of the nineteenth century. But the linear conception of social development often took on a frankly teleological character: the goal postulated by the philosopher in fact played the role of the Providence.

In its application to historical material the idea of «eternal» laws was very shaky. Attempts to explain both the general structure of society, and its concrete state at a certain moment of time, by one and the same formula, failed, while the identification of the concepts of social change, development, and progress created an illusion of the movement of history along a predetermined route.

Parallel with the speculative philosophy of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, empirical social studies began to develop, above all social statistics. These investigations, arising from the practical needs of government, were originally local, imperfect in methods, and different in various countries. But they gradually gathered scope and force. In France the technique of mass statistical surveys and economic censuses was developed. The English «political arithmeticians» of the seventeenth century, William Petty, John Graunt, Gregory King, and Edmund Halley, laid the foundations of modern demography and worked out methods of quantitative investigation of social patterns.

Looked at separately, the empirical studies of the seven­teenth and eighteenth centuries seem only descriptive, without a general theoretical basis. But in default of a sociological theory these investigations were based on the conceptions of natural science and general philosophy. It is characteristic that there were many outstanding natural scientists among the founders of empirical sociology (for example, Halley, Laplace, Buffon, and Lavoisier), whose study of social processes was organically linked with their scientific activity

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These scientists did not simply «apply» the ready-made methods developed in the natural sciences to the study of social problems; many general scientific methods and theories were developed in fact on social material. A desire to get a rigorous mathematical formula of population growth explains the popularity of Malthus' Essay on Population (1798).

In addition to social statistics the development of ethno­graphic studies at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries had great significance for sociology. The «savage world» discovered by the first historians, travellers, and settlers was not so much just an object of study as an object of influence. But the Enlighteners' theories about «natural man» stimulated a more and more active comparison of «civilised morals» and «savage»; the savage was now primitive man in whom Europeans could recognise features of their own history.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the word «anthropology» still belonged to the lexicon of anatomy and meant «study of the human body». But Buffon was already defining it as the general science of human kind.

The first attempts at a systematic description and com­parison of the ways of life of various nations were made in the eighteenth century (Joseph Lafitau, Francois de Volney).

The comparative historical method was being applied not only to study of «primitive» peoples but also to jurisprudence, folklore, and linguistics.

In the early nineteenth century speculative social philosophy was everywhere being counterposed by the idea of scientific «positive» investigation. The differentiating of scientific disciplines itself was also accelerated. Jurisprudence and history, political economy, ethnography, statistics, and linguistics were separated off from philosophy. That was a model for the rise of new disciplines, and at the same time increased the need

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for some new intellectual synthesis and non-philosophical (in the sense of non-speculative) science of man and society.

IV. Translate the text in writing:

THE SOCIAL AND CLASS PREMISSES OF SOCIOLOGY

The birth of sociology was also linked with certain social needs. Just as the social philosophy of the Enlighteners reflected the breaking-up of the feudal order and the rise of a new, capitalist society, sociology arose as a reflection of the inner antagonisms of capitalist society and the social and political struggles generated by it.

The early nineteenth century was a period not only of stormy growth of capitalism, but also of the first clear display of its contradictions. The growth of industry and of towns was accompanied with mass ruin of the peasantry, handicraftsmen and artisans, and of small property owners. The extremely hard conditions of factory work and of the workers' life contrasted sharply with the growth of the bourgeoisie's wealth, provoking a sharpening of class struggle. The uprising of the Lyon weavers in France, the Luddite movement in England, and later Chartism, were evidence of the entry into the arena of a new social class, the proletariat. Disillusionment with the results of the bourgeois revolution and the «Kingdom of Reason» proclaimed by it swept broad strata of the intellectuals. The lost illusions were succeeded by bitter scepticism; the need for a realistic analysis and evaluation of existing society, and of its past, present, and future,was intensified.

The mode of that analysis depended on the thinker's class position. In the first third of the nineteenth century, three main orientations, and correspondingly three groups

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of thinkers, became clearly outlined in the socio-political thought of Western Europe: conservative traditionalists, bourgeois liberal utilitarians, and Utopian socialists, who not only embodied different intellectual traditions but also expressed the interests of different social classes.

The conservative traditionalists, like Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Louis de Bonald (1754-1840), and Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821), held a frankly negative position in regard to the French Revolution of 1789 and its results. They associated the post-revolutionary development with chaos and destruction, which they counterposed to an idealised harmony and order of the feudal Middle Ages and prerevolutionary times. Hence their polemic against the ideas of the Enlightenment and the specific theory of society.

In opposition to the individualism and social nomi­nalism of the Enlightenment, which treated society as the result of interactions between individuals, the traditionalists regarded society as an organic whole with its own internal laws rooted in its remote past. Society not only preceded the individual historically, but also stood above him morally. Man's existence was impossible in principle without society, which moulded him, in the direct sense of the term, only for its own ends. Society did not consist of individuals but of relations and institutions in which each person was allotted a certain function or role. Since all parts of this whole were organically interconnected and interdependent, a change in any of them inevitably disturbed the stability of the whole social system.

Satisfaction of fundamental, immutable human needs underlay the functions of social institutions. Disruption or weakening of the activity of any social institution therefore inevitably caused a disordering and disorganisation of the corresponding functions. It proved nothing that the social function of any institution or