THERE ARE SEVERAL ATTEMPTS at the history of the social sciences, none really satisfactory. The writing of that history has been marred by false perspectives, especially by the notion that all preceding work leads up to and somehow culminates in the present. Against this, J. W. Burrow’s impressive Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (1966)—which, despite its title, has much to say on eighteenth-century social inquiry—has issued a timely warning; the book eminently repays close reading. I found a certain amount of useful material in Harry Elmer Barnes, ed.: An Introduction to the History of Sociology (1948), and in the relevant chapters of A. Wolf (see above, 611). Raymond Aron: Main Currents in Sociological Thought, I, Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, The Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848 (1960; tr. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver, 1965), is a rewarding analysis, full of ideas. So is Robert A. Nisbet: The Sociological Tradition (1966), an intelligent, systematic investigation into what sociology in fact is. Robert K. Merton: Social Theory and Social Structure (1957) offers a brilliant collection of essays on theory, functionalism, and various major sociologists; Merton has revised part of that book and written a suggestive essay, “On the History and Systematics of Sociological Theory,” in On Theoretical Sociology (1967), 1–37; but, as Merton observes, much historical work needs to be done. Some of it is being done now by the students of Paul F. Lazarsfeld.
Lazarsfeld himself has made a significant beginning on the history of quantification; see “Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology—Trends, Sources and Problems,” in Quantification: A History of the Meaning of Measurement in the Natural and Social Sciences, ed. Harry Woolf (1961), 147–203. For a tendentious, hostile, but not complete perverse view of the rage for numbers in the Enlightenment, see Louis I. Bredvold: “The Invention of the Ethical Calculus,” in R. F. Jones et al.: The Seventeenth Century (1951), 165–80; and The Brave New World of the Enlightenment (1961), passim, especially chap. ii, “The New Promise of Science,” [I, 429]. Gilles-Gaston Granger: La mathématique sociale du marquis de Condorcet (1956) is a fascinating monograph; it recounts the attempts of a remarkable philosophe-mathematician to introduce quantitative analysis into social and political questions.
In the eighteenth century, social science and cultural relativism were inextricably intertwined, and travelers’ reports formed the raw material for cultural relativism. Here much work is being done. Claude Lévy-Strauss, an eloquent defender of Rousseau as a social scientist, has movingly portrayed Christian man’s discovery of other cultures as a “terrible ordeal,” unprecedented and never to be repeated, “unless there should one day be revealed to us another earth, many millions of miles distant, with thinking beings upon it.” Tristes Tropiques (1955; tr. John Russell, 1961, edn. 1964), 78–9. He is right, but only partly: for many, this discovery was a thrilling event. On Rousseau as a founding father of the social sciences, see Lévy-Strauss: “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fondateur des sciences de l’homme,” in Samuel Baud-Bovy, et al.: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1962), 239–48.
For accounts of the impact of non-European cultures on the European consciousness, see the entries above (chap. ii, section 2), and add Geoffroy Atkinson: Les Relations de voyages du XVIIe siècle et l’évolution des idées: Contribution à l’étude de la formation de l’esprit du XVIIIe siècle (1924); and Pierre Martino: L’Orient dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (1906) for France; and William W. Appleton: A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the 17th and 18th Centuries (1951), which has much material, for England. Among the Germans, Leibniz has been studied most carefully; see the now old Louis Davillé: Leibnitz historien (1909) and the more recent article by Donald Lach, “Leibniz and China,” JHI, VI, 4 (October 1945), 436–55. In general, I found Percy G. Adams: Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (1962), a treatment of imaginary voyages served up as realistic reports, highly amusing and highly instructive.
On the possibility of sociology becoming not merely intellectually retrograde but politically reactionary, see Albert Salomon’s impassioned attack on Comte, Saint-Simon, and others, prophets of progress who became theocrats, in The Tyranny of Progress: Reflections on the Origins of Sociology (1955). Compare the similar indictment of positivism in Herbert Marcuse: Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941), from a totally different intellectual orientation (Hegel and Marx, who are the villains of Salomon’s book, are the heroes of Marcuse’s). Clearly, Salomon and Marcuse cannot both be wholly right; both, I think, overestimate the impact of ideas on events, but their warning that the “science of society” is not always an automatically progressive force is obviously of real value. The problem of the sociologist whose work is used for reactionary purposes that he himself disclaims is summarized in the Introduction by Charles P. Loomis and John C. McKinney to Ferdinand Tönnies: Community and Society, the classic of 1887 translated by Loomis in 1957.
For Montesquieu, the true father of sociology, see, in addition to Shackleton’s standard biography, cited several times (note especially his chaps. ii, v, x, xii, xiv and xv), Muriel Dodds: Les Recits de voyages, sources de l’Esprit des lois (1929) and Arnold H. Rowbotham: “China in the Esprit des lois: Montesquieu and Msgr. Foucquet,” Comparative Literature, II (1950), 354–9. Raymond Aron’s chapter on Montesquieu in his Main Currents in Sociological Thought (just cited) is excellent; I have depended on it. Franz Neumann’s “Introduction” to Spirit of the Laws (see above, 629) is incisive and comprehensive; it taught me a great deal. Neumann tends to see Montesquieu—as do I—interested in classical questions concerning the good government; against this must be put Émile Durkheim’s important, suggestive, but not persuasive “La contribution de Montesquieu à la constitution de la science sociale,” Durkheim’s Latin thesis of 1892, translated into French by M. F. Alengry and reprinted in Durkheim: Montesquieu et Rousseau, Précurseurs de la sociologie (1953), which treats him as an early modern positivist. For Montesquieu’s relativism, see the article by Charles Jacques Beyer: “Montesquieu et le relativisme esthétique” (cited above, 657), which moves into aesthetics from sociology. Montesquieu’s significant intellectual ancestor, the abbé Dubos, has been well treated as a proto-sociologist in A. Lombard: L’Abbé Du Bos (cited above, 657), 239–68.
For the Scottish sociologists, though deeply in debt to Montesquieu still an original and significant group, see above all the general, intelligent survey by Gladys Bryson: Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (see above, 597), which reports on the transition from moral philosophy to social science. Louis Schneider’s anthology, The Scottish Moralists on Human Nature and Society (1967), which offers selected passages from eight Scottish writers including Ferguson, Hume, and Adam Smith, is only mildly helpful. Bryson should be supplemented by William C. Lehmann: Adam Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Sociology (1930); Herta Helena Jogland: Ursprünge und Grundlagen der Soziologie bei Adam Ferguson (1959), [both I, 431]; and above all by David Kettler: The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (1965), a thoughtful essay. Duncan Forbes’s edition of Ferguson’s great work of 1767, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1966), has a comprehensive introduction on which I have relied. The question of why Hume did not like Ferguson’s Essay is discussed in Kettler: Adam Ferguson, 57–60; but lack of evidence makes it impossible to be conclusive. R. B. Oake: “Montesquieu and Hume,” Modern Language Quarterly, II, 1 (March 1941), 25–41 and II, 2 (June 1941), 225–48, traces the influence of one sociologist on another. On another sociologist, John Millar, see William C. Lehmann: John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and His Contributions to Sociological Analysis (1960), a sober survey with long selections from Millar’s writings thoughtfully appended. There is an important article on him by Duncan Forbes, “ ‘Scientific Whiggism’: Adam Smith and John Millar,” The Cambridge Journal, VII, 11 (August 1954), 643–70, which shows both philosophers as writing manifestos quite as much as treatises, and concerned (especially Millar, as a “militant Whig”) quite as much to change as to explain the world (651).
The prehistory of the science of political economy—that is, the history of the discipline before Adam Smith—appears prominently, in the context of economic realities, in T. S. Ashton: An Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century, Phyllis Deane: The First Industrial Revolution, and Charles Wilson: England’s Apprenticeship, all very valuable books (all cited above, 573–9). Douglas Vickers: Studies in the Theory of Money, 1690–1776 (1959) moves from John Locke to Adam Smith, across the eighteenth century. See also E. A. J. Johnson: Predecessors of Adam Smith (1937), and “The Place of Learning, Science, Vocational Training, and ‘Art’ in Pre-Smithian Economic Thought,” The Journal of Political Economy, XXIV, 2 (June 1964), 129–44. Among studies of early economists, that by E. Strauss on Sir William Petty (1954) is particularly illuminating. The most important source for these pages, however, was William Letwin’s informative and well-considered The Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought 1660–1776 (1963), from which I have learned much. Letwin’s thesis that the thought of Adam Smith rests mainly on his late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century predecessors has been challenged by Raymond de Roover: “Scholastic Economics: Survival and Lasting Influence from the 16th Century to Adam Smith,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXIX, 2 (May 1955), 161–90, which usefully stresses survivals, but, I think, overstates its case.
The classic study of mercantilism is still Eli F. Heckscher: Mercantilism, 2 vols., first published in Swedish in 1931, translated into English by Mendel Shapiro in 1935, and now available in a second edition, revised by E. F. Söderlund. It replaces the earlier, though still interesting, volume by Gustav von Schmoller: The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance (1884; tr. W. J. Ashley, 1896). The thesis common to both books, that mercantilism is an economic policy devoted to political ends, and that it determines the shape of foreign and military policy, has been eloquently challenged by Sir George Clark: War and Society in the 17th Century (1958), 68 ff.; and their thesis that mercantilism is almost exclusively a system of power has been challenged, just as eloquently, by Jacob Viner: “Power versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” World Politics, I, 1 (October 1948), 1–29 (now conveniently in Viner: The Long View and the Short: Studies in Economic Theory and Policy [1958], 277–305). I have taken full account of these objections in the text, but the brute fact of seventeenth-century power politics, with power first and welfare second, remains. Charles W. Cole: French Mercantilist Doctrines before Colbert (1931) and his comprehensive Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. (1939), concentrate on one—perhaps the crucial—country.
The book by Albion Small: The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Polity (1909), though now old, can still be consulted with profit. George Rosen: “Cameralism and the Concept of Medical Police,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, XXVII, 1 (January-February 1953), 21–42, is a fascinating account of the authoritarian German (and Hapsburg) theory of Polizey as applied to medicine; see also Rosen: A History of Public Health (1958). For the Austrian Cameralists, see L. Sommer: Die österreichischen Kameralisten in dogmengeschichtlicher Darstellung, 2 vols. (1920, 1925).
The most significant work in rehabilitating the Physiocrats has been done by Ronald L. Meek: The Economics of Physiocracy (1962), which contains a brilliant long Introduction by the editor, an equally brilliant set of apologetic essays, and lengthy excerpts from relatively inaccessible writings of the Physiocrats—an altogether splendid book. It is dedicated to the memory of the great French specialist on physiocracy, Georges Weulersse, whose writings on the subject remain of great value: see his Le mouvement physiocratique en France (de 1756 à 1770), 2 vols. (1910); the posthumous La Physiocratie sous les ministères de Turgot et de Necker (1774–1781) (1950); and the brief, popular, authoritative survey Les Physiocrates (1930). François Quesnay et la physiocratie, 2 vols., published by the Institut national d’études démographiques (1958), is an interesting collection of essays on physiocracy in general, with a fine long Introduction by Mario Einaudi. In the United States there have been several good articles defending Quesnay and his group, notably Norman J. Ware: “The Physiocrats: A Study in Economic Rationalization,” American Economic Review, XXI, 4 (December 1931), 607–19; and the recent essay by Thomas P. Neill: “Quesnay and Physiocracy,” JHI, IX, 2 (April 1948), 153–73. Much light is shed on French economic theories and realities by Marc Bloch’s brilliant articles “La lutte pour l’individualisme agraire dans la France du XVIIIe siècle,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, II, 7 (July 15, 1930), 329–81, and 8 (October 15, 1930), 511–56. One much-neglected early economic thinker was Montesquieu, who has been ably rescued by Nicos E. Devletoglou, in Montesquieu and the Wealth of Nations (1963). On the influence of China on the Physiocrats, see Virgile Pinot: “Les Physiocrates et la Chine au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, VIII (1906), 200–14; and the recent notes by Lewis A. Maverick, “Chinese Influence on the Physiocrats,” Economic History, III (February 1938), 13, and “Supplement,” ibid., IV (February 1940), 15.1
For British economic thinking before Adam Smith, see the volumes cited above, especially Letwin. Add to these Rotwein’s edition of Hume’s economic writings, cited above, 592. Adam Smith, though the subject of some first-rate monographic work, still awaits his modern biographer; John Rae: Life of Adam Smith (1895), though useful, is dated, and W. R. Scott: Adam Smith as Student and Professor (1937), [both I, 431], which has new documentation, does not pretend to be complete. Until we have the complete works, now promised, Edwin Cannan’s edition of The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library edn., 1937) will remain standard; the Introduction is helpful. The problem of reconciling this masterpiece with the earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments has long occupied the scholars; the German theory of a deep split, inevitably called “Das Adam Smith-Problem,” has been shrewdly and definitively disposed of by Glenn R. Morrow: The Ethical and Economic Theories of Adam Smith: A Study in the Social Philosophy of the Eighteenth Century (1923), [I, 431]. At the same time, a certain tension remains, beautifully captured and summarized in an important article by Jacob Viner: “Adam Smith and Laissez Faire,” first published in 1927, now in The Long View and the Short, 213–45. In addition, I found useful John Maurice Clark et al: Adam Smith, 1776–1926 (1928) and C. R. Fay: Adam Smith and the Scotland of his Day (1956), [both I, 431]. G. S. L. Tucker: Progress and Profit in British Economic Thought, 1650–1850 (1960) places Adam Smith into the context of a long debate on economic progress, profits, and the rate of interest (see especially chaps. iii and iv). I have learned from the stimulating essay by Lord Robbins: The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy (1952), which moves beyond Adam Smith to his successors. The earliest of these successors, especially Jeremy Bentham, remain relevant to this book. Here I found T. W. Hutchison: “Bentham as an Economist,” The Economic Journal, LXVI, 262 (June 1956), 288–306, a long review of W. Stark’s three-volume edition of Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings (1952–4), enormously helpful and stimulating; it details Bentham’s gradual disenchantment with laissez faire. It should be read in company with J. Bartlet Brebner’s important article, “Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Economic History, supplement VIII (1948), 59–73, which has been reprinted with minor changes in Robert L. Schuyler and Herman Ausubel, eds: The Making of English History (1952), 501–10. See also Mark Blaug: “The Classical Economists and the Factory Acts: A Re-Examination,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXXII, 2 (May 1958), 211–26.
The Italian political economists deserve further attention. Domenico Grimaldi, Francesco Longano, and before them, Antonio Genovesi, are little more than names; much of their work has been deservedly rescued from oblivion by the collections of Franco Venturi: Illuministi Italiani (cited above, 576). For the most interesting economist in the group, the philosophe Ferdinando Galiani, see now Harold Acton: “Ferdinando Galiani,” in Art and Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Italy (cited above, 648), 45–63, a pleasant but hardly analytical essay. [See I, 442.]
In my bibliographical essay to The Rise of Modern Paganism, I had occasion to deal at length with the secondary literature that has grown up around the historical writings and theories of the philosophes. Since my treatment there is very detailed, I can only refer the reader to my pages there [I, 433, 451–5], and add a few titles. My own essay on seventeenth-century historiography in America, A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America, deals with the prehistory of Enlightenment historiography; I concentrate on the American colonies there, but in the opening I sort out Renaissance historiography, seventeenth-century erudition, and seventeenth-century piety (see also the bibliographical essay, especially the part devoted to chap. i [123–31]). A formidable, but to my mind unconvincing, case against the historical spirit of the eighteenth century is made in R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History (1946), especially 61–85. Arnaldo Momigliano’s article on “Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method” [I, 453] is now conveniently accessible in Momigliano: Studies in Historiography (1966), 40–55. He has also reprinted “Ancient History and the Antiquarian” [I, 452] in the same volume, 1–39. Frank E. Manuel: Shapes of Philosophical History (1965) lucidly traces two modes of philosophical history—the cyclical and the progressive—through the ages, and includes material on the eighteenth-century historians. Trygve R. Tholfsen: Historical Thinking: An Introduction (1967) is an unpretentious history of historical modes of thought, and includes a chapter (iv) on Voltaire and the historiography of the Enlightenment. René Wellek’s Rise of English Literary History (cited above, 630) contains much that is relevant to this section. George H. Nadel traces the rise and fall of what he calls “the exemplar theory of history,” which ended with historicism, in “Philosophy of History before Historicism,” (1964), now in Studies in the Philosophy of History: Selected Essays from “History and Theory,” ed. George H. Nadel (1965), 49–73. See also the judicious monograph by Thomas P. Peardon: The Transition in English Historical Writing, 1760–1830 (1933). The evidence for a burgeoning historical spirit in the age of the Enlightenment is everywhere. See, for instance, Shackleton’s Montesquieu, 44–5, 153, 160 ff., 133, 337 ff., for examples of secularism and historical scholarship; Reynolds: Portraits, 18–21, 29, for examples of the historical mentality in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s circle—notably Boswell; and Rosenblum: Transformations in Late 18th-Century Art (cited above, 638), for the historical spirit in art. There was historicism before historicism.
On Hume’s historical work, the substantial anthology by David Fate Norton and Richard H. Popkin: David Hume: Philosophical Historian (1965), with two introductory essays by the editors, one on “Skepticism and the Study of History,” the other on “History and Philosophy in Hume’s Thought,” is worth consulting. Laurence L. Bongie has written a short study on the reception of Hume in France—David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution (1965). See also two sympathetic, accurate articles by Hume’s biographer, Ernest Campbell Mossner: “An Apology for David Hume, Historian,” PMLA, LVI, 3 (September 1941), 657–90; and “Was Hume a Tory Historian? Facts and Reconsiderations,” JHI, II, 2 (April 1941), 225–36.
There is a new biography of Gibbon—Joseph Ward Swain: Edward Gibbon the Historian (1966); it concentrates on the man more than on the historian. H. R. Trevor-Roper (whose devastating review of Swain’s biography in The New York Review of Books, IX, 11 [December 21, 1967] 31–4, is perhaps rather harsh), has an interesting essay on Gibbon [in addition to those cited in I, 454], “The Idea of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” The Age of the Enlightenment (cited above, 615), 413–30. In the same volume (1–14) O. R. Taylor analyzes “Voltaire’s Apprenticeship as a Historian: La Henriade, 1–14.
For Dubos as historian, see A. Lombard: Du Bos (already cited), 257–68. Hans Wolpe: Raynal et sa machine de guerre: ‘L’Histoire des deux Indes’ et ses perfectionnements (1957), [I, 437], is an excellent analysis.
1 For the political thought of the Physiocrats, see below, chap. ix, section 3.