p By the end of the 19th century the data accumulated by the social sciences had grown and was seen to be in crying contradiction with the 323 dogmas of flat evolutionism and the organic theory of society. Historians had shown that the history of mankind abounded in revolutions, periods of fierce struggle between the new and the old, and the collapse of the obsolete. The scene in the early 20th century showed the smooth and conflict-free development of society predicted by the positivists to be an illusion. The reduction of all social phenomena to superficial analogies with biological processes was being resolutely refuted. The question arose about the specific character of social phenomena. The neo-Kantians claimed that it was due to the domination of the spiritual element in social life, but this clashed with the data obtained by social science by that time, notably, information about economic development. It was clear to one and all that the old positivist schemes were irrelevant.

p It was the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who made the most resolute statement in bourgeois science about the disintegration and deep crisis of “classical” positivist schemes. He considered the question of “social fact" and social phenomenon and declared in his Method of Sociology (1895) that these could not be reduced either to biology or psychology. He held that “social fact" was a blend of notion and action, thereby dealing a heavy blow at the schemes put forward by Spencer and Comte. It was not the individual but the group, the collective that was the basic unit of sociological research. Social ties and relations between men were, consequently, what the sociologists should consider in the first place. That was the right way to attack, but the critical importance of Durkheim’s writings is much greater than his attempts to find a way out of the positivist dead end.

p However, he did try to find a way out in his work entitled On the Division of Labour in the History of Society (1893). Let us recall that Comte had drawn attention to the division of labour under the impact of the ideas which had been characteristic of Saint-Simon and other Utopians. Durkheim saw the division of labour as the basis of society’s progressive development, which explained intellectual, moral and legal evolution. The growth of population required a rising labour productivity, and this was achieved by ever stricter specialisation in work, through a division of labour. That is Durkheim’s starting point in his efforts to switch the attention of sociology to “social action" and the system of social relations. However, he ignored classes and class struggle, which is why the problem of social relations, including the importance of the division of labour for their development, were problems he could not solve.

p Durkheim attacked the empty abstractions of the old positivist schools, insisting that social phenomena had to be seen as real and material. But he reduced the effort to a study of the origin and development of individual phenomena in social life, abandoning the general idea of advance in the historical process. At the same time, Durkheim favoured 324 a study of sociological laws and strict determinism in analysing social phenomena, insisting that these should be explained through an analysis of social life, instead of biology or psychology.

p Durkheim tried to use this method in his work entitled The Suicide (1897). This was a challenge to the sociologists who reduced social phenomena to biological and psychological factors, as they easily did, for instance, in analysing phenomena like suicide. Durkheim sought to prove that suicide was a social fact caused primarily by social factors. He had statistical data to prove that only a small number of suicides occurred at a time of great political crises and consolidation of social forces in the epoch of revolution and wars. From this he drew the conclusion that the causes of suicide were to be found in the individuals’ unsatisfactory participation in social life or inadequate integration of collectives to which the individual belonged. These conclusions were clearly aimed against the harmful biological and purely psychological theories, but they were still fairly abstract.

p In a work entitled Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) written mainly on the basis of his study of religion among the Australian tribes, Durkheim sought to tackle the question of the origins of religion as a social phenomenon. That was an achievement. He connected the origination of religious beliefs with the emergence in the primitive commune of notions about the “sacred” and the “profane”. Here he has many valuable observations, but his conclusion was wrong and harmful: he held that religion was a bond between the individual and society, and so had a positive role to play in social development.  [324•16  There again, the researcher was fettered by an idealistic view of social bonds.

p It became even harder to present the ideas of Comte and Spencer as incontestable achievements in social science following the publication of Durkheim’s works, which were very widely read. But the systems of Comte and Spencer were defeated by forces that were more powerful than their critics in bourgeois sociology. The old liberal positivist systems of the bourgeoisie collapsed because of the fundamental changes in the world’s social and political situation.

p A historian of English political doctrines has this to say about the atmosphere at the turn of the century: “The morning sun of January 1, 1901, illumined a happy and hopeful world. ...Men hoped and believed that the new century, while bringing perhaps even greater material progress, would also bring a greater measure of order and stability, of peace and prosperity.

p “Looking backward, it is easy to see that this sanguine state of mind 325 was scarcely warranted by the facts."   [325•17  The old certainty about the solidity of capitalism was a thing of the past.

p Elton Mayo, an American sociologist, wrote: “The Victorians were very sure of their progress—of its reality and beneficence for humanity."   [325•18  What he meant, of course, was capitalist progress and certainty in the prospects before capitalism. The prominent English philosopher Arnold Toynbee, says something similar: “The writer’s mind runs back 50 years, to an afternoon in London in the year 1897. He is sitting with his father at a window in Fleet Street, watching a procession of Canadian and Australian mounted troops who have come to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee."  [325•19  The pomp ceremonies were eloquent evidence of the political and economic might of British imperialism, but Toynbee feels that only a philosopher might have reflected that “where there is growth, there is likely also to be decay".  [325•20 

p However, at the turn of the century bourgeois sociologists still gave little thought to the decay of capitalism. British bourgeois publicists sang praises of “business expansion" and prophesied everlasting prosperity for the empire. Herbert Spencer, pretentiously called the Aristotle of Victorian Britain, ruled the minds of men, and his evolutionism and “organic theory of society" were accepted as the summit of social thought.

Spencer patronisingly recommended to science that it should share its authority with fideism, declaring in his Social Statics that the world was on its way to harmony and equilibrium, including the harmony of classes, that everything in the world tended gradually to adapt itself to the existing conditions, which is why the working people’s struggle would cease. The decade that followed showed that these optimistic expectations clashed with the harsh truth of historical reality. “Spencer’s idea of evolution as a process of adaptation progressively tending in the direction of an ultimate condition of complete adjustment is contrary to all the facts we have."  [325•21  Spencer himself has now been declared by his critics to be no more than an amateur scientist and a pseudophilosopher, for life has completely exploded his synthetic theory and demolished his political postulates.