03203. Enlightenment, impact on the social sciences.

John C. Torpey

Graduate Center, City University of New York

Keywords: social sciences, Englightenment, Kant, Foucault, Habermas, post-modernism,

Abstract: This essay examines the relationship between the Enlightenment and the modern social

sciences. It details the different national traditions of “enlightenment” and how these have affected

the trajectory of the social sciences. It explores both the ways in which the social sciences have

sought to carry out an “Enlightenment project” and the doubts that have been raised about that

project along the way.

The modern social sciences are children of the Enlightenment. The signature statement

heralding that movement in European intellectual history was Immanuel Kant’s famous dictum

(1959b: 85-87), “Sapere aude! (Dare to know!) Have the courage to use your own reason! – that

is the motto of enlightenment.” The use of one’s own reason was to be contrasted, of course,

with that dispensed by others, perhaps especially by the hierarchically organized and doctrinally

authoritarian Catholic Church. Hence the Enlightenment was in certain respects a continuation

of the Protestant Reformation’s insistence on the more egalitarian “priesthood of all believers”

and on the ability of each individual to find his or her own path to god. People should use their

own reason publicly, according to Kant, and all that was required for the public use of reason

was political freedom. The idea of enlightenment was thus bound up from its origins with an

emancipatory political outlook that has generally continued to accompany it ever since. The

anti-clerical character of the Enlightenment was perhaps most apparent in the French case, where

the Catholic Church comprised part of the “old regime” and was part and parcel of the

unfreedom that Kant saw as the chief barrier to enlightenment. Not surprisingly, then, Kant was

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a strong supporter of the French Revolution. His stress on the difficulty of achieving truly moral

action – reflected in his distinction between the “is” and the “ought” -- would resonate

throughout much subsequent social science thought.

The establishment of social “science” as an endeavor separate from the wisdom of the

churches would mean that it would be forced to distance itself from theology, philosophy, and

other modes of knowing that lacked a “scientific” foundation. That scientific foundation would

be derived above all from the insistence on the this-worldly, empirical character of the social

sciences. Hence Weber would later say (1949: 72) that social science is an “empirical science of

concrete reality” (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft) and that definition has very much shaped the nature

of the modern social scientific disciplines, even if these fields may in fact be profoundly different

from the natural sciences. The need to distance itself from religious modes of thought has driven

the self-understanding of the social sciences as “objective” and “disinterested,” leading to a

widespread divorce between knowing about the world and doing something in the world. The

link between contemplation and action that had animated classical Greek thought was severed in

the process. There is something ironic in this, given that some of the founding lights of the

social science disciplines, such as Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, were very much

involved in the politics of their day, some of them holding high public office (Tocqueville was

briefly foreign minister of France). The divorce between knowledge and action would later be

intensified by the massive expansion of higher education from the 1960s onward, as a result of

which academics came to constitute an audience for each other and were no longer required to

write for broader “lay” audiences. The extent of the segregation of thought and action, and of

the “is” from the “ought,” has varied, however, in the different national traditions of the social

sciences that emerged from the 18th- and 19th-century background. As compared to European

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and other variants of the social sciences, American social science has been seen as distinctively

“modeled on the natural rather than the historical sciences and imbedded in the classical ideology

of liberal individualism” (Ross 1991: xiii). Indeed, the nature of the American social sciences is

arguably another aspect of “American exceptionalism” (see Lipset 1996).

In addition to strengthening the role of human reason in public life generally, the

Enlightenment “project” had a good deal to do with finding ways to pacify human life and to

overcome the scourge of war. Kant himself, of course, articulated a design for “Perpetual

Peace,” in which he proposed an idea for a sort of “league of nations” that anticipated later

developments along these lines. He also suggested that countries’ predisposition toward

violence beyond their borders was a function of their internal structure, and that republics, in

particular, tend not to go to war. Kant thus laid the groundwork for the theory of the so-called

“democratic peace,” which holds that democracies do not go to war with one another. The

theory generated considerable research and controversy in the 1990s and after. Kant also drew

on a body of thought articulating the theory of “doux commerce” – the idea of the civilizing

function of commercial activity. One version of the thesis, which was advanced by

Montesquieu, Hume, and others, came from the American radical Thomas Paine. In his 1792

tract The Rights of Man, Paine wrote (1992: 172) that “commerce… is a pacific system operating

to cordialize mankind, by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other. If

commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the

system of war….” The idea of commerce as a system for regulating the passions of human

beings would prove a central theme in Enlightenment-era thinking about economics, war, and

modern society (see Hirschman 1977).

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 The Scottish moralists such as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and others were

preoccupied with related themes, examining the conditions under which republican government

and civic humanism could exist under conditions of an advancing division of labor. Smith,

perhaps most frequently associated with his 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations, came to be

regarded chiefly as a thinker concerned with economic activities, but – writing before the

separation of social science and moral philosophy had been completed -- Smith asked about the

causes and consequences of those activities. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the

brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” Smith wrote (1985: 119), “but from their regard

to their own interest.” Along with man’s supposedly innate inclination to “truck and barter,”

Smith developed a rational model of economic motivation that would dominate the social

sciences – whether as touchstone or as bête noire – thereafter. Meanwhile, Ferguson was

concerned with the requirements of citizenship and the promotion of civic virtue, among other

things with regard to the degree to which citizens should be involved in defending the state of

whose acts they would be the authors. In his Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson

advances a conception of the citizen-soldier that would, in its turn, resonate through later social-

scientific thinking about the relationship between citizens and military institutions. The concerns

of Smith and Ferguson would re-surface over and over again in subsequent writing about modern

society, economics, and politics.

Soon thereafter, in the aftermath of the revolutionary levée en masse and the Napoleonic

wars, the German officer Carl von Clausewitz would endeavor to think systematically about the

place of war in modern societies in which ordinary people were increasingly included in political

decision-making. Clausewitz’s dictum (1984: 87) that “war is… a continuation of political

intercourse… with other means” was intended to reflect the nature of war an age in which citizen

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armies were the order of the day. Gradually, however, as the social science disciplines

developed, sociology and political science went their separate ways, and political science – the

study of “high politics” – more or less exclusively held onto the portfolio of war and

international conflict. Meanwhile, sociology – the study of “low politics” – largely abandoned

the study of war, and tended to operate as if Enlightenment dreams of ending war had been

realized and as if war were not an endemic aspect of modern society (see Joas and Knöbl 2013).

From a more systematic perspective, however, the origins of the modern social sciences

are often traced back to the French thinker Auguste Comte, who sought to create a “positive”

science emphasizing the observation of concrete phenomena (see Lenzer 1975). Imbued with the

post-revolutionary aims of order and progress, Comte sought to understand what is in order to

understand what would be – in other words, to predict the future and make of it the orderly

unfolding of human progress. The emphasis on prediction and on general laws of social

development would come to play a pervasive role in social-scientific thinking far into the

twentieth century. Comte developed a scheme for understanding human history, according to

which there were three stages of human development – the theological, the metaphysical, and the

positive or scientific. Comte thus introduced a scheme in which positive or scientific thought

was sharply contrasted with that of religion. The legacy of the French revolution and its anti-

clericalism is straightforwardly apparent. Comte’s contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville did not

share the harsh dismissal of religion that pervaded the Revolution, and indeed regarded religion

as a mode of thinking that was never likely to die out entirely. “Religion,” Tocqueville wrote in

an 1857 letter to Sophie Swetchine, “is only a particular kind of hope, and it is also as natural to

the human heart as hope itself” (quoted in Brogan 2006: 53). Still, the connection between the

Enlightenment, the social sciences, and what would later come to be known as the

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“secularization thesis” – the idea that religiosity would decline as modernity advanced -- was

growing stronger.

The thesis could not have acquired its power from Tocqueville’s analysis of the varying

place of religion in the French Revolution and in the United States, however, as he strove to

point out that religion played a very different role in the two contexts. As an element of the “old

regime” in France, according to Tocqueville (1998), the revolutionaries who wanted to dispense

with the French monarchy were ill-disposed toward the Church not because they were anti-

religious but because they were opposed to the regime of which the Church was a part. In the

United States, by contrast, religion and freedom marched hand-in-hand, the one reinforcing the

other. The result, according to Tocqueville (2000), was that religion flourished in the United

States – despite its constitutionally mandated disestablishment – whereas it withered in France

due to its association with a power rendered illegitimate by the advance of democratic ideas and

forces. As his relatively sympathetic comments on religion may suggest, Tocqueville was not a

great admirer of the Enlightenment, which he regarded as the underlying source of the “abstract

theories of government” (1998: 197) that led to the Revolution and to the extremes of the Terror.

Notwithstanding a guarded sympathy for “democracy,” Tocqueville tended to believe that local

people knew better than central rulers what was best for themselves, and that the abstractions

underlying the French Revolution led to an unfortunate fate for post-Revolutionary France.

The connection between Enlightenment-inspired views of religion and the social sciences

would intensify in the work of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Durkheim distinguished

sharply between religion and magic in terms of their capacity for generating institutions, noting

in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915: 60) that “there is no church of magic.” In

that respect, for Durkheim, “religion” was an advance over magic because it brought people

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together and enhanced human solidarity. Still, traditional religion was in the process of being

supplanted by a form of religion more consistent with modern society. In his contribution to the

Dreyfus affair in 1901, Durkheim wrote (1973: 52) that “man has become a god for man, and…

he can no longer create other gods without lying to himself.” The modern “cult of the

individual” was not about egoism in the negative sense, a celebration of utilitarianism, but rather

a glorification of that dignity that human beings share in common. A member of the Ligue des

droits de l’homme, Durkheim was instead invoking the idea of human rights as a replacement for

traditional religion. Yet even if traditional religion was on its way out, in Durkheim’s view,

every society had and would always have a sort of religious basis. This idea of “civil religion,”

first adumbrated by Rousseau in The Social Contract (1973), was carried forward by one of

Durkheim’s most important heirs, the sociologist Robert Bellah (1991).

Weber’s position on the fate of religion was more ambiguous. He viewed religion as

something of an endangered species as well, but in the sense that it would be shunted into the

realm of the irrational rather than that it would disappear entirely. Weber took this position

against the background of a larger commitment to the idea that human history could be

understood above all in terms of a process of rationalization. This process took many forms and,

in Weber’s view, was fundamental to understanding the diverse routes taken by different

civilizations into the modern world. Weber’s comparative studies of the world religions were

titled in German “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen” (The Economic Ethics of the World

Religions), signaling the degree to which they were – like so much of Weber’s writing – a

response to Marx’s analyses of the modern world. The studies of the world religions proposed to

make sense of the “rise of the West” – that is, why modern “rational” capitalism emerged first in

the West and not somewhere else – and paid less attention to political matters, except insofar as

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these were thought to foster or hamper the emergence of a “rational” acquisitive ethos. Weber

held Protestantism’s stress on the idea of a “calling” and especially Calvinism’s dour view of

frivolous self-enjoyment to be the outlook that harmonized -- felicitously if unintentionally --

with the workings of rational capitalism. Yet, with his typical proclivity for irony and tragedy,

Weber argued that the elective affinity between Protestant ethical doctrines (die protestantische

Ethik) and the spirit of capitalism would lead to the construction of an “iron cage,” one that

would promote bureaucratic rationalization and thus a further strengthening of the bars of the

cage. For all its rationality, Weber was saying, rationalization was a trap.

For his part, Sigmund Freud continued the Enlightenment program of enthroning reason

in human affairs by proposing to replace the chaos of the human instincts with rational self-

control. To use the language of psychoanalysis that he developed, “where id was, there ego shall

be” (Freud 1965: 71). Freud sought to tame the irrational by mapping the human mind and

developing a procedure for understanding unruly, unproductive human impulses. Freud’s

powerful analyses held out the promise that human unreason could be reduced, if not eliminated,

by understanding the past experiences that unconsciously shaped present behavior. The

technique, which made talk the vehicle of mental healing, came to be known as the “talking

cure.” With regard to the prospects of Enlightenment in human affairs, Freud himself lost some

heart as a witness to the catastrophic carnage of World War I in Europe. Having previously

posited a “pleasure principle” as the chief driver of human behavior, in 1920 Freud (1961a)

proposed that human beings also had a “death instinct” that was an ineradicable part of their

instinctual make-up. In his most sustained and expansive reflection on human civilization, Freud

(1961b) argued against socialists and others that this aggressive drive could be lessened

somewhat by greater social equality, but could never be eliminated entirely. Psychoanalysis took

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bourgeois Europe by storm, and – despite questions about its “unscientific” status – profoundly

influenced major 20th-century social scientists such as Talcott Parsons (see Parsons 1982), who

absorbed European intellectual culture as a young man sojourning at the London School of

Economics and the University of Heidelberg in the mid-1920s. Yet in a testament to the variable

forms that “enlightenment” took in different social settings, Freud’s texts had to be translated

into a scientized (Greek) language in order to gain broader favor in American circles (see

Bettelheim 1983). For better or worse, Freud’s oeuvre decisively shaped the “triumph of the

therapeutic” (Rieff 1966).

Weber’s jaundiced view of rationalization would later be taken up by two sophisticated

“Western Marxist” thinkers, themselves deeply influenced by Freud, namely Max Horkheimer

and T. W. Adorno. The two thinkers of the so-called Frankfurt School of “critical theory”

argued in a wartime tract that the Enlightenment had doubled back on itself, so to speak, and

become a sort of curse, ensnaring humanity in a self-made web of unreason. The domination of

“instrumental reason” – the sort of rationality that Weber suggested was paramount in the “iron

cage” of modernity – had deprived humanity of the ability to think in terms of “substantive

reason,” the sort that treats human beings not as means but as ends in themselves (Horkheimer

and Adorno 1972). The irony, of course, is that one of Kant’s central ideas – his “practical

imperative” -- had been precisely that one should “treat humanity, whether in your own person or

in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only” (1959a: 47). For Horkheimer

and Adorno, soured on the Stalinist version of socialism but forced to flee an anti-Semitic

behemoth they regarded as an outgrowth of capitalism, the world had lost the capacity to live up

to Kant’s imperative.

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 Horkheimer and Adorno’s deeply pessimistic treatise from World War II era was

relatively little known in the non-German-speaking world until it was translated into English in

the 1970s. At that point, however, it resonated with a broader disenchantment with Western

political dominance that was then spreading among the intellectual classes that had entered

university life with the 1960s expansion of tertiary education. Consistent with the Frankfurt

theorists’ intuitions, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb fuelled worries that the scientific

advances once seen as advances stemming from the Enlightenment were turning out to be the

means for the extermination of the species. One of the signal contributions was that of Michel

Foucault, a French thinker whose Nietzschean orientation to philosophical questions spurred an

exploration of the connections between power and knowledge. Whereas earlier social scientists

had typically been driven by the belief that knowledge is worth acquiring because “knowledge is

power” and could be used to “speak truth to power,” Foucault identified subterranean

connections between “regimes of truth” and “discourses” that sustained a seamless link between

“power/knowledge.” Foucault’s work was that of a disenchanted member of the French

Communist Party, long known as a “Stalinist” party and hence not particularly interested in (or

actively opposed to) his concerns with madness, sexuality, and the politics of knowledge.

Foucault’s politics would thus drift toward the notion of “biopolitics,” asserting the primacy of

the discourses that governed the growth and regulation of populations in the modern period. His

writings would thus resonate strongly with emerging social and intellectual movements

concerned with sexuality, identity, and the like. His critique of the “universal” intellectual

associated with the Enlightenment and his advocacy of a new “specific” intellectual fit neatly

with a post-modernist critique of “grand narratives” (Lyotard 1984) that coincided with the shift

from class politics to identity politics in the 1970s and after.

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 Relatively little of this philosophical controversy influenced the main body of the

political and social sciences, which emerged from World War II – especially in the United States

– as increasingly empiricist disciplines. The impact on the more theoretical and interpretive

margins of these fields were affected, however, as was anthropology, which proved to be more

open to the “interpretive turn” then sweeping the more “humanistic” social sciences. Behind the

leadership of Clifford Geertz (see esp. 1977), James Marcus and others had drawn the field in the

direction of hermeneutics and the idea that societies could be “read” as texts or discourses.

These trends drew perhaps more on the work of Paul Ricoeur (1981) than on Foucault, but the

shift away from a focus on social and kinship structures was pronounced. Geertz later regretted

what had been done in his name, but the post-modern genie and its skepticism about the

Enlightenment was out of the bottle.

Not everyone was prepared to concede that the “grand narratives” associated with the

Enlightenment destined for the junk heap of history, however. Perhaps the most influential and

thoroughgoing counter-attack was mounted by the German social philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

In a series of lectures on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), Habermas trained his

critical attention on a variety of German and French antagonists of Enlightenment-style critical

reason. One of his principal bêtes noires was Foucault, whom he understood as a crucial figure

in the “counter-Enlightenment” of the last part of the 20th century. Foucault, Habermas wrote

(1987: 282-283), “does not want to refine the language game of modern political theory (with its

basic concepts of autonomy and heteronomy, morality and legality, emancipation and repression)

and turn it against the pathologies of modernity – he wants to undermine modernity and its

language games” tout court. As a dragooned young member of the Hitler Youth and a student of

Horkheimer and Adorno whose thought has been deeply shaped by what he regarded as

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Germany’s catastrophic twentieth-century descent into irrationalism, Habermas had little

sympathy for what he saw as a flirtation with anti-rationalism. That this flirtation came by way

of absorption with the radical anti-democrat Friedrich Nietzsche only made it more suspect.

Criticism of the post-modern turn in the social sciences also came from a somewhat

unlikely source, namely Edward Said. In the 1994 “Afterword” to his widely acclaimed volume

Orientalism, Said (1994: 349) decries the “Eurocentrism” and “the almost decorative

weightlessness of history” in post-modern writing, seeing in post-colonial studies at least a

search for structures of domination and resistance. Post-modernism, by contrast, was marked,

according to Said, by “a preponderance of theoretical and aesthetic emphasis stressing the local

and contingent,” an unpromising point of departure if one is interested in “speaking truth to

power,” as Said himself clearly did in his critique of “orientalist” ways of thinking.

Soon thereafter, the anti-Enlightenment tendencies in the academy came in for a more

visible challenge at the hands of a New York University physicist named Alan Sokal. Perturbed

at the anti-Enlightenment trends in intellectual life and a self-described political progressive,

Sokal set out to see whether he could persuade a major journal of the newly emerging field of

“cultural studies” to publish “an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and

(b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions” (Sokal 1996b). He could; Social Text

accepted the article, apparently without serious evaluation by knowledgeable scholars as would

be standard practice for a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The aftershocks were not to remain

confined to the ivy tower. The ensuing controversy was played out in the pages of academic

journals and on airwaves. The editors of Social Text, among the more prestigious scholars in the

world associated with cultural studies and post-modernism, suffered a rather serious black eye,

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as did the intellectual currents with which they were associated. That is hardly the same as

saying the trends they represented and promoted would disappear, however.

Indeed, the discomfiture with the Enlightenment, with (“Western”) modernity, and with

the supposed failings of “reason” have persisted. One of the most vigorous critics of this cultural

vein in recent years has been the neuroscientist Steven Pinker. Best known for his writings on

cognitive psychology and linguistics, in 2011 Pinker published a massive study arguing – against

considerable evidence to the contrary – that violence had declined in the modern world as

compared to the earlier societies in which no state held a “monopoly on the legitimate use of

violence” (Max Weber’s famous definition of the state). According to Pinker (2011: xxii), “a

large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about

civilization, modernity, and Western society.” Pinker’s book was perhaps as much directed at

this audience as it was at students of violence in the modern world. Whether he is correct about

the decline of violence on a world scale remains a matter of considerable debate; the judgment

depends significantly on the reliability and generalizability of evidence of intrinsically recondite

character (see Lawler 2012).

But the effort to establish whether, against all appearances and our intellectual prejudices,

violence has actually declined with the shift to state-dominated societies constitutes one of those

quintessentially social-scientific questions bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. We cannot

presume to know the answer without investigation and thoughtful weighing of the difficult

evidence. We must dare to use our reason. That is surely what the modern social sciences

understand themselves to be doing, even if there have been doubts along the way about whether

that reason is as disinterested as it imagines or as helpful to the human species as its practitioners

believe.

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