Pels D. - Property and Power in Social Theory[c] A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (1998)(en)

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in French positivist social philosophy. Even where such philosophers did not immediately aspire to be kings, however, and allowed for some division of labour between politicians and intellectuals, the sociological project of ‘knowledgeable organization’ introduced a pronounced claim to social and political power of the savants.

SAINT-SIMON AND COMTE REVISITED

In this perspective, the focus of our historical interest is naturally attracted by the axial figure of Saint-Simon, who was the auctor intellectualis of the organizational project of sociology and has been recruited with equal fervour by both left-wing and right-wing social theorists as a founding father. SaintSimon’s first public profession of the necessity of a new kind of political science might well be his unsuccessful entry into a discussion held in 1802 at the Lycée républicain, where he proposed the gathering should collaborate in the creation of a new ‘science of sciences’ (Dautry 1951). In his Lettre d’un habitant de Genève of the following year, his Introduction aux travaux scientifiques of 1807, and his scattered sketches for a ‘New Encyclopedia’, this projected résumé of the human sciences was laid out in the form of a positively grounded politics. The Reorganization of the European Community

(1814), written in collaboration with Augustin Thierry, enquired in the Aristotelian manner after the best possible constitution, pleading a reconstitution of the body politic in conformity with the present state of enlightenment, since ‘the troubles of the social order arise from obscurities in political theory’ (Saint-Simon 1964:66, 40).

Paradoxically, however, while exalting positive politics as the queen of sciences, Saint-Simon seemed to contemplate a similar elevation of political economy. His l’Industrie of 1818 approvingly quoted Say’s influential declaration of (economic) independence:

For a long time politics in the proper sense of this term, i.e. the science of the organization of societies, has been confounded with political economy, which teaches how the riches which satisfy the needs of society are formed, distributed, and consumed…riches are essentially independent of political organization.

(Saint-Simon 1966 I:185)

Saint-Simon, for his part, rightly suspected that this demarcative claim concealed a much more imperious gesture: the author, he suggested, ‘vaguely and as it were involuntarily sensed that political economy is the veritable and unique foundation of politics’. Politics should indeed become the ‘science of production’, and by that very fact would finally turn into a positive science (Saint-Simon 1966 I:188–9; Ionescu 1976:106–8). However, this contradiction

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was more apparent than real. Durkheim, for one, clearly saw that SaintSimon precisely distinguished himself here from the classical economists, for whom economic life remained entirely outside of politics, while for Saint-Simon it was the very substance of politics itself (1958:179). SaintSimon himself specified this contrast in the following manner. After Smith had explained the principles which guided the development of industry, the problem remained of ‘discovering legal means for transferring “le grand pouvoir politique” into the hands of industry’ (1966 II:159; Ionescu 1976:124). The main problem thus was organizational (the expression l’organisation du travail is not yet encountered in Saint-Simon, but was first employed by his pupil Bazard, before being spread by Louis Blanc’s 1839 book of the same title), and therefore of a political nature.19 The rather ill-defined class of industriels or producteurs, as whose mouthpiece Saint-Simon presented himself, though formally embracing all those who laboured with the head or the hand, turned out to be primarily staffed with organizers, managers, and politically minded savants.20

A major contrast between Saint-Simon and Smith, therefore, was a more radical application of the standard of social utility, which implied the precedence of the organizational project over that of ‘laissez faire le propriétaire’. Saint-Simon’s opposition between producers and idlers was a far more powerful one than Smith’s more tranquil distinction between productive and unproductive labourers. Unlike Smith, Saint-Simon did not halt before the sanctified principles of possessive individualism, pioneering both the functional theory of property and the critique of the right of inheritance which would be continued by Bazard, Comte, Durkheim, Duguit, and numerous others. The very first proposition of Saint-Simon’s ‘science of production’ already contained the germs of this conflict between the principle of production and that of property; it asserted

that the production of useful things is the sole reasonable and positive aim which political societies can propose to set themselves; and consequently, that the principle of respect towards production and producers is infinitely more fruitful than this one: respect towards property and proprietors.

(1966 I:186)21

The ‘superior law’ which overruled the right of individual property was that of the progress of the human spirit, which presently dictated that the claims of private property were subordinate to those of merit and talent.22 In a somewhat peculiar defence of the property-owners, Saint-Simon alleged that the haves should govern the have-nots, but not because they owned property; they owned property and governed because, collectively, they were superior in enlightenment than the have-nots, and the general interest dictated that ‘domination should be proportionate to enlightenment’. Science was useful because it possessed the means of prediction, which made scientists

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superior to all other people. The opening lines of Saint-Simon’s famous ‘Parabole’ accordingly listed scientists, artists, writers, and engineers before bankers, businessmen, and farmers as most eminently useful to the nation (1964:4–8, 72).

In his pupil Comte, the focus upon social reorganization directed by positive science (most clearly announced in the title of his programmatic

Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société from 1822)23 was likewise combined with a functionalist conception of property. Comte’s ‘positive theory of property’, however, acquired a stronger elitist and etatist coloration. True philosophers, he taught, would not hesitate to underwrite the instinctive reclamations of proletarians against the ‘vicious definition’ adopted by the majority of modern jurists, who attributed to property an ‘absolute individuality’ and defined it as a right to use and abuse. This ‘anti-social theory’ was equally devoid of justice as of reality. Since no species of property could be created or even transmitted by its sole possessor without the indispensable contribution of public cooperation, its exercise could never be a purely individual act. At all times and places, the community intervened to a greater or lesser degree in order to subordinate it to social needs. In every normal state of humanity, each citizen was in fact a public functionary, whose attributions determined both the citizen’s rights and obligations. This universal principle, Comte held, had to be extended to the institution of property, ‘which positivism considers above all to be an indispensable social function’, designated to create and administer the capital by means of which each generation prepared the labour of the next.24

In his essay ‘Considerations on the Spiritual Power’, Comte outlined the tensionful relationship between political economy and social science in the following terms:

The essential vice of political economy, regarded as a social theory, consists in this. Having proved, as to certain matters, far from being the most important, the spontaneous and permanent tendency of human societies towards a certain necessary order, it infers that this tendency does not require to be regulated by positive institutions. On the contrary this great political truth, apprehended in its ensemble, only proves the possibility of an organisation, and leads us to a correct appreciation of its vast importance.

(1974:240; italics mine)

Comtean positivism was accordingly not adverse to state intervention of an entrepreneurial or welfare nature, and remained largely indifferent to the distinction between private and public ownership. Comte denied that the substitution of one regime of ownership for another would materially change the structure of the social order, since the main cleavage in the stratificational pyramid was not found in the opposition between proprietors and

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propertyless, but in the inevitable distinction between those who had power and those who lacked it.

Comte’s sociology, in addition, was straightforwardly elitist, advocating a sociocracy in which the able were to be the powerful, and the powerful the wealthy—in this order of accretion (Comte 1974:129ff., 209ff.; Aron 1965 I: 76, 96). Whereas the general public could only indicate the ends of government, the consideration of measures for effecting it exclusively belonged to ‘scientific politicians’ (savants en politique). The business of the public was to form aspirations, that of ‘publicists’ to propose measures, and that of rulers to realize them. Spiritual power would accordingly be confided to the savants, while the temporal power would befall to the heads of industrial enterprises, but the spiritual function ought to be treated first and the temporal one was to follow. The savants possessed the two fundamental elements of spiritual government, capacity and authority in matters of theory, to the exclusion of all other classes; hence the necessity ‘for confiding to the cultivators of Positive Science the theoretical labour of reorganizing society’. A new class of savants should be formed, that of social physicists or sociologists, that would synthesize the ensemble of specialist knowledges in a positive philosophy and establish its spiritual power (1974:131–3, 210–13).

DURKHEIM’S THIRD PROJECT

It is almost inevitable, given the drift of the present argument, to delve somewhat deeper into the intriguing case of Durkheim, and review some recent reappraisals of his work. At first sight Durkheim’s writings present the most formidable obstacle to the interpretation which I am developing, since conventional ‘territorial’ conceptions of the sociological object lean heavily upon his epoch-making formula about the sui generis character of social facts, and because his work has long been interpreted as a theory of consensual order (or ‘community’ or ‘solidarity’) which has laid the groundwork of much of modern functionalist sociology and anthropology. In the disputes which ravaged ‘crisis-ridden’ sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, the ancestral figure of Durkheim was thus very much at stake: both partisans and detractors of mainstream functionalism sought to articulate and legitimize their different programmatic statements through an interested appropriation of his work. In the course of these polemics, the long-standing ‘conservative’ (mis)interpretation by theorists such as Parsons, Nisbet, Coser, and Zeitlin (which was fully shared by Marxists such as Nizan, Hahn, and Therborn) progressively evaporated. According to this view, Durkheim was centrally concerned with the problem of order as logically prior to the problem of change, and neglected to analyse issues of power, violence, and social class. In addition, he subordinated the individual to the claims of society, and strongly repudiated socialism. As a result, his work expressed an abiding conservatism which inserted it into the broader context of the

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revolt against Enlightenment thought (cf. Parsons 1968; Coser 1960; Nisbet 1966; Zeitlin 1974).

Giddens, among others, has countered that, far from having been his central problem from an early stage, the problem of order was not a problem for Durkheim at all, since his central issue was how to conceptualize the change from traditional society to the emergent modern or industrial type, and to theorize the forms of authority appropriate to the latter—a problematic which stood rather close to that of Weber (Giddens 1977:250, 238; 1982). The Parsonian view was untrue to the intellectual influences which Durkheim sought to process, because it exclusively concentrated on his polemic with utilitarianism and neglected his (largely sympathetic) discussion of Kathedersozialismus, solidarism, and neo-Kantianism. It also misconceived the political grounding of Durkheim’s sociology, which was not derived from a call to order tout court, but from the problem of how to order a liberal and democratic republic by means of far-reaching reorganizations in the political system and class structure. But if theorists such as Giddens, Lukes (1973), and Gouldner (1958) successfully reversed the systematic neglect in which Durkheim’s political sociology had fallen, French commentators such as Filloux (1977) and Lacroix (1981) appeared to go one step further. Misled by Durkheim’s own demarcation of sociology from political philosophy, Lacroix contended, mainstream sociology missed the evident fact that his social science represented a critical continuation or improvement of ‘les sciences politiques’. Durkheim’s early object was ‘nothing other than the political object’ and his so-called sociology, in its own time, was only a different way of practising the moral and political sciences (Lacroix 1981:20, 304).

It is essential not to overdraw this radical Foucaldian interpretation, in order to appreciate the true scope and direction of this ‘political’ object-and- project. It is intriguing, in this context, to watch Durkheim enter, in his early articles and reviews, upon simultaneous negotiations on the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ (or on the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ perimeters) of the intellectual field, and carefully edge forward in order to clear a third intellectual position intermediary between individualism and etatism. His long review of the ‘positive science of morality in Germany’ (1887), as its title notified, significantly (mis)interpreted Wagner’s and Schmoller’s state-oriented, political economy as a moral science,25 and defended it as such against the orthodox Smithian school (represented in France by Levasseur, Leroy-Beaulieu, and others grouped around the Journal des économistes) which, from its laissezfaire point of view, could only dismiss it for its ‘superstitious respect for the authority of the State’. Its prime focus and major inspiration, to Durkheim, was rather the idea of social realism, i.e. of the existence of a sui generis order of social facts which followed autonomous laws of development and preceded both the intentions of legislators and the acts of the individuals which were so dear to the economic utilitarians. Clearly implying that political economy, in its classical guise, had to subordinate itself to a more

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encompassing science des mœurs, Durkheim also objected to the exaggerated confidence which the Kathedersozialisten placed in authoritarian legislative action. This betrayed a similar (and unsound) view of society as a Kunstprodukt, which was freely malleable by conscious (statal) intervention, whereas the laws of morality were natural laws, products of a long evolution, whose course could not be arbitrarily changed (1975:268, 281–2, 369).

It was Schäffle, Durkheim claimed, who uniquely escaped this grave error in refusing to admit the ‘excessive plasticity’ that Wagner and other Kathedersozialisten attributed to moral facts. Whereas the latter tended to describe society as a machine steered from the outside, Schäffle instead considered it a living being which steered itself from the inside (Durkheim 1975: 283–4). Moral force was not a result of exterior and mechanic pressure; not the state exercised it but society as a whole; it was not concentrated in a few hands, but was disseminated across the entire nation. An earlier review of Schäffle (1885) —Durkheim’s first printed publication—had already indicated that the study of moral facts was coextensive both with the study of social organization and that of moral authority:

Every social mass gravitates around a central point, and submits to the action of a directive force, which regulates and combines the elementary movements and which Schäffle calls ‘authority’. The various authorities, in their turn, subordinate themselves to one another and this is how a new life results out of the individual activities, which is simultaneously unified and complex. Authority might be represented by one man, or by a class, or by a formula. But in one or another form, it is indispensable.

(Durkheim 1975:366)26

The true import of this view about the ubiquity and the balanced articulation of authority is appreciated only if it is interpreted as anti-collectivist and anti-centralist. Durkheim, at least, repeatedly defended Schäffle against such charges, which were variously raised by economists such as Leroy-Beaulieu, socialists such as Benoit-Malon, and solidarists such as Fouillée. In this particular sense, Durkheim explained, Schäffle’s ‘authoritarian socialism’ manifestly opposed itself to the centralizing tendencies of ‘social democracy’ as advocated by Rodbertus or Marx. ‘Authoritarian socialism’ was simply organized socialism, in which the industrial forces were grouped around centres of action which regulated their course; each of these mutually coordinating and subordinate centres constituted an ‘authority’. Egalitarian democracy à la Marx failed to admit the existence of such a plurality of ‘nervous centres’ in the social organism (1975:378–9).

In this fashion, Durkheim’s double demarcation, by locating the organizational impulse in the middle regions of society, repeated the ‘centring’ movement of the French positivist school as a whole, which spiralled from Saint-Simon’s ‘productionist’ organizational project through Comte’s more

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etatist one towards the ‘third-way’, corporatist variant which Durkheim initially derived from Schäffle and Montesquieu. The true weight of the political was similarly placed in the intermediate zone, defining both the continuity and the rupture from traditional political philosophy. Durkheim’s Latin thesis on Montesquieu (1892) once again bore witness to this dual concern.27 Montesquieu was the first to have established the fundamental principles of social science, even though he had erred in assuming that social forms resulted from types of sovereignty and were exhaustively defined by them (Durkheim 1966:110–11). Despite its ‘political’ phrasing, Montesquieu’s classification of types of regime actually referred to underlying types of society. Radicalizing Montesquieu’s criticism of the ‘Legislator myth’ and his incipient sensitivity to autonomously functioning laws of morality, Durkheim pleaded a more serious recognition of the fact that (political) laws were actually derivative of mœurs, not the other way around, and constituted nothing other than ‘des mœurs mieux définis’. Social life was best organized through a corporatist division of public functions and powers, which would balance each other through competition and hold each other in check. This arrangement was set in clear contrast to the despotic state, which abolished all ‘orders’ and all division of labour; this was a ‘monstrous being in which only the head lived’, because it had drawn towards itself all the forces of the social organism (1966:85, 64, 67).

Notwithstanding his explicit demarcations from traditional political philosophy (cf. 1975:225; 1958:187), Durkheim’s ‘moral science’ therefore admitted close continuities between the political and the social, including an ‘organizational’ and ‘knowledgeable’ conception of the state which identified it as the intelligent command centre of a complex hierarchy of social institutions. Once again, this conception of the state was carefully designed to mediate between individualistic and economistic ‘nightwatchman’ conceptions, as advanced by, for example, Kant, Spencer, and the classical economists, and what Durkheim referred to as the ‘mystical’ or transcendent view, which was attributed to the Hegelians (and in an important degree also to Comte) (1992:51–4, 72; 1975:198–9). While being continuous with other societal organs (as the ‘institution of institutions’ or the ‘organization of organizations’, as solidarists phrased it), the state also fulfilled a specific function as the reflective ‘social brain’. Although it enjoyed relative autonomy as ‘the embodiment of the collectivity’, it was still merely a derivation from the power immanent in the collective consciousness.28 Arguing directly against Comte, who had claimed that the dispersive effects of the division of labour could only be checked by government regulation, Durkheim countered that, normally, the unity of organized societies resulted from the spontaneous consensus of the parts, and that therefore ‘it was not the brain that creates the unity of the organism, but it expresses it, setting its seal upon it’ (1984:42– 3, 295–7; cf. Gouldner 1958:18). Although the state was above all ‘an organ of reflection’, whose principal function was to think, it did not itself create the psychic life of society, but concentrated and organized it (Durkheim

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1986:46–7; 1992: 50–1). Since collective representations were spontaneous, unstructured, and obscure, state consciousness had to acquire a higher degree of reflective clarity, in order to ensure the vital interplay between diffuse sentiments, ideas, and beliefs and the clear-headed decisions made by the state. Statal reflection was essentially organized thought (Durkheim 1992:79– 80). Even though Durkheim explicitly remarked that the work of the sociologist was not that of the statesman (1984:1), this intellectualist view of the state minimally suggested that sociological enlightenment was indispensable to it. His view of the calling of intellectuals was never very distant from that of Saint-Simon’s industriels théoriques or Comte’s savants en politique (cf. Hearn 1985:163–4).

By characterizing it as the supreme organ of social reflection and moral discipline, Durkheim still seemed dangerously attracted to the Hegelian view of the ethical-reasonable state. This impression is enhanced by his further claim that the field which opened itself to the state’s moral activity was ‘immeasurable’, and its advance was bound to go on indefinitely in the future (1992:68). However, Durkheim’s view of the state remained consistently opposed to radical (neo-)Hegelian views about the ‘total state’ and the prodigious identity of state and individual as advocated by state socialists or nationalists such as Treitschke—who in all respects anticipated the subsequent fascist and ‘conservative revolutionary’ etatism of, for example, Gentile, Rocco, Freyer, and Schmitt. Treitschke, we should recall, had written a scathing critique of sociology from the imperialistic perspective of the Staatswissenschaften, decrying its ‘chimerical’ distinction between state and society, and defending the contrary claim that the state ‘represented society in its true organization’ (cf. Freyer 1930:159–60). The more interesting was Durkheim’s wartime criticism of Treitschke, which focused upon the latter’s Politik as representative of German etatist thinking in its entirety (Durkheim 1986:224ff.). The ‘German’ idea of the state, by celebrating its unlimited sovereignty and proud self-sufficiency, was essentially warlike, because it was propelled by a morbid inflation of the will-to-power. Wishing to organize all individuals into a concentrated whole, it acted as a collective ‘superman’ that was superior to all private wills. This ‘morbid enormity’ represented a clear-cut case of social pathology, confirming France and her allies in their legitimate confidence, ‘for there is no greater strength than to have on one’s side what is the very nature of things’ (ibid.: 231–2).

Durkheim’s conception of state and individual remained diametrically opposed to this postulate of identity and ‘total mobilization’. Rather than being in essential conflict, moral individualism and state intervention were mutually constitutive and progressed together. Far from tyrannizing over the individual, it was precisely the state that redeemed the individual from society. Moral individuality was not antagonistic to the state, but was instead set free by it; its tendency was to ensure the most complete individuation that the state of society would allow (Durkheim 1992:57, 68–9). This ‘social’ (as opposed to ‘egocentric’) individualism (cf. Durkheim 1970:262ff.; 1986:

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262ff.) was crucially dependent upon the institutionalized checks and balances installed by the corporatist reorganization of civil society. The formation of secondary groups as politically recognized organs of public life, especially associations of a functional or professional nature, established a cluster of collective forces intercalated between individual and state, which simultaneously connected and separated them. In contrast to the state, these secondary groups stood close enough to the individuals to be able to adapt to individual diversity and morally act upon them. However, in order to prevent such secondary authorities from swallowing up their members and exerting a repressive monopoly over them, they had to be capped by a higher authority that would neutralize their tendency to ‘collective particularism’ and represent the whole against the parts. By thus holding its constituent societies in check, the state would liberate individual personalities, while the despotic tendencies of the state itself would in turn be neutralized by the counterforce of the secondary groups. It was out of this conflict of social forces that individual liberties were born (1992:62–3; 1986:144–5).

It has been insufficiently appreciated how intimately and constitutively sociology’s classical demarcation of its object (‘society’, ‘the social’) was linked to its project of a ‘societal’ (as opposed to a ‘state’) corporatism.29 Its ‘third object’ simultaneously represented a ‘third project’, because the resolution of the scientific problem of solidarity and moral order was in all respects the same as that of the political problem of balancing and mediating between individualism and collectivism. Taking his initial cue from Montesquieu and Schäffle, but also ‘centring’ between Saint-Simon’s technocratic-industrial corporatism and Comte’s more etatist version, Durkheim once again placed his knowledge-political cards on the secondary groups. Corporatism, by requiring a double transfer of political jurisdictions and economic competences towards the intermediate zone, installed both a ‘mixed’ or socialized economy and a ‘mixed’ or decentralized state which were simultaneously connected and separated through the buffer zone of the secondary associations.30 The organizational or organic view of the state was accordingly supplemented by an equally organizational and organic view of the economy. Adopting Schäffle’s outline of a liberal socialism (cf. Schäffle 1894:20, 55ff., 61),31 Durkheim also supported the latter’s diagnosis that, at present, the economy constituted an ensemble of reflexes, which had to be reconnected to the conscious centres of the social organism. His own defence of socialism likewise focused upon the ‘absence of organization’ of the economic functions as defining the true morbidity and abnormalcy of the present crisis-ridden social (dis)order (Durkheim 1958:379–84; 1984:xxxi– xxxiii).

Socialism, to Durkheim as well as to Schäffle and Saint-Simon, was ‘essentially a movement to organize…a process of economic concentration and centralization’. It had to bring economic functions from the diffuse or dispersed state to the organized or moral state, where they would be

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connected to the ‘knowing and managing organs of society’ (1958:58, 89). In his lectures on Saint-Simon, Durkheim clearly defined as socialist every doctrine ‘demanding the connection of all economic functions, or of certain among them, to the directing and conscious centres of society’, stipulating at once that ‘connection’ was not equal to centralist subordination: ‘socialists do not demand that the economic life be put into the hands of the state, but into contact with it’. While the corporations were to take over important political functions from the central state, they would simultaneously become the focus of important economic competences and rights. In his earliest writings, Durkheim had already sympathized with Wagner’s and Ihering’s social conception of ownership, and had defended Fouillée’s solidarist view of personal ownership against varieties of state collectivism. His mature socialism likewise defined ownership as a social function and service, and criticized the principles of absolute property and inheritance as archaic survivals contrary to the spirit of individualism, and as generative of a ‘negative solidarity’ (1984: lvi–lvii, 72–5; 1992:174–5, 214–17). The true problem of reform was not where things were located or who enjoyed ownership of them, but that the activity which they occasioned remained unregulated (1984:lvi). The assertion of the eminent right of the collectivity, however, did not imply state inheritance but inheritance by the professional groups which, different from the state, satisfied all the conditions for becoming the heirs of the family in the economic sphere (ibid.: xlv–lvi; 1992:218).

SOCIOLOGICAL DIALECTICS

Durkheimian socialism, like that of Saint-Simon, hence practically exhausted itself in the project of ‘knowledgeable organization’, as specifically narrowed down to the blueprint of a ‘societal’ corporatism. Both the theme of organization and that of corporatism also extended ‘sideways’ (or ‘Eastward’), linking up with the strong organizational impulses of the neo-Hegelian tradition and its more statal version of the corporatist project. However, if the sociological enterprise thus bordered on and shaded into types of etatist ideology, it still demonstrated larger elective affinities with the ‘third’ project of mediating between polity and economy and of mixing etatism with individualism. My argument in the following will be that the classical positivistic delineation of the sociological object (‘society’, ‘the social’, ‘social facts’) served to conceal, but in this concealment simultaneously to legitimize, the ideological or political project of sociology as previously outlined.32 The objectivistic demarcation of the sociological object, to be more precise, was loaded with projective intentions on at least two levels, aiming to justify both the immediately political project of a societal corporatism, and the mediate, knowledge-political project of establishing sociology as a new master science in a doubly contested field. Squeezed in between the old imperialisms

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