Condorcet’s antireligious passion prevents his valuing the achievements of the European Middle Ages.
During this disastrous stage we shall witness the rapid decline of the human mind from the heights that it had attained, and we shall see ignorance following in its wake. . . . Nothing could penetrate that profound darkness save a few shafts of talent, a few rays of kindness and magnanimity. Man’s only achievements were theological day-dreaming and superstitious imposture, his only morality religious intolerance. In blood and tears, crushed between priestly tyranny and military despotism, Europe awaited the moment when a new enlightenment would allow her to be reborn free, heiress to humanity and virtue.
He sees printing as the agent of knowledge, and knowledge as the agent of freedom. Progress, then, is a coherent, inevitable process. Religion, the enemy of progress, was a system of hypocrisy in which priests “frighten their dupes by means of mysteries.”
Has not printing freed the education of the people from all political and religious shackles? It would be vain for any despotism to invade all the schools. . . . The instruction that every man is free to receive from books in silence and solitude can never be completely corrupted. It is enough for there to exist one corner of free earth from which the press can scatter its leaves. How with the multitude of different books, with the innumerable copies of each book, of reprints that can be made available at a moment’s notice, how could it be possible to bolt every door, to seal every crevice through which truth aspires to enter?
So printed books opened paths for political freedom.
And Condorcet foresaw the rise of a new power. “The public opinion that was formed in this way was powerful by virtue of its size, and effective because the forces that created it operated with equal strength on all men at the same time, no matter what distances separated them. In a word, we have now a tribunal, independent of all human coercion, which favours reason and justice, a tribunal whose scrutiny it is difficult to evade, and whose verdict it is impossible to evade.”
Progress actually transformed, and enlarged, the very subject matter of history. “Up till now, the history of politics, like that of philosophy or of science, has been the history of only a few individuals: that which really constitutes the human race, the vast mass of families living for the most part on the fruits of their labour, has been forgotten. . . .” So the historian himself was now to be transformed from biographer into social scientist. Formerly he needed only to “collect facts; but the history of a group of men must be supported by observations.” Only Enlightenment could guide the historian to the observation of groups.
Condorcet had thus sketched an enticing scheme of history past and future, with a momentum not apt to be deflected by individuals. This was an ideology. But he never made of it a religion, a dogma to be enforced by institutions. Whether he might have made his theory into an enforced orthodoxy we will never know. His arrest was ordered in July 1793, but he remained hidden in Paris in the house of a Madame Vernet until the end of March of the following year. During these few months he wrote his influential Sketch. Then when he left the house he was identified as an aristocrat, arrested for being without papers, and confined in the prison of Bourg la Reine. He was found dead in his cell the following day. Perhaps he had committed suicide by taking poison.
While Condorcet was fortunate in not having seen his theory become an enforced ideology, he did have some prophetic notions of the future of the social sciences. In his scheme of universal education he included a new science that he called Social Mathematics. His “art social” was the “application of mathematics to the moral sciences,” believing as he did that “the truths of the moral and political sciences can be as certain as those that make up the system of the physical sciences.” With a flair for mathematics, Condorcet proposed the statistical description of societies and applying the calculus of probability to human phenomena. He applied the technique himself to a theory of voting that sought ways of structuring voting to produce the maximum probability of collective choice of a “true” solution.
Condorcet’s Sketch, brief and unpolished, has survived as a monument in the liberal tradition. His view of modern Western civilization, though overly optimistic, was uncannily prophetic. Except for his dogma of human equality, his view of society remained open-ended, aiming at human “perfection,” whatever that might be.
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While Condorcet did not live long enough to make a religion of his ideology, his more influential disciple, Auguste Comte, would do just that. In fact, Comte did everything with the idea that Condorcet had not done. What his predecessor had made into a suggestive Sketch, Comte would elaborate into a massive system. While Condorcet had casually touched on some sources and results of progress, Comte would document and define the “laws” of progress. Comte would play the role of a learned Aquinas to his predecessor’s inspired Saint Paul.
A precocious, independent boy in a royal and passionately Catholic family in Montepellier, the young Comte early rebelled against the conventions of his community. His erratic and troubled personal life was in dramatic contrast to the rigor of his philosophic system. He offended his family by abjuring Catholicism at the age of fourteen. When his brief career at the École Polytechnique was cut short by his refusal to follow the school rules, he stayed in Paris occasionally teaching and writing for magazines, educating himself by wide reading and conversation with the lively intellectual community. The most influential of his young acquaintances was Henri de Saint-Simon, whose ideas he would adapt and develop. Comte’s abnormally short legs made people call him ugly, and troubled his relations with women. One of his first amorous adventures was with a prostitute, Caroline Massin, whom he married in a civil ceremony—in order to have her removed from the police register.
By 1826, when Comte was only twenty-eight, he was presenting his “system of positive philosophy” in a series of lectures to a private audience of leading Paris intellectuals. But after only two lectures he could not continue, and was so disturbed that he was taken to an asylum. To satisfy his mother, his marriage to Caroline was solemnized in a Catholic ceremony, but he was unable to sign the register. In deep depression, he attempted suicide by jumping off the Pont des Arts into the Seine, but was rescued by a passing soldier. He gradually recovered his faculties and successfully resumed the lecture series in 1829. Over the next twelve years the lectures were published in six volumes—the Cours de philosophie positive.
Here Comte proposed his “law of human development,” which became famous with its appealingly simple three stages. Human progress (and each branch of our knowledge), he observed, had passed through three stages—“the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.” In the first stage, explanations depended on supernatural beings, gods or spirits; in the second stage explanations were by abstract forces, essences, and final causes. “In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destiny of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws. . . . Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge . . . the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts, the number of which continually diminishes with the progress of science.” The second, or “abstract,” stage was necessary because “The human understanding, slow in its advance, could not step at once from the theological into the positive philosophy. . . . an intermediated system of conceptions has been necessary to render the transition possible.”
Each of the sciences in turn had also gone through these stages, and Comte arranged his “hierarchy” of the sciences—beginning with the simplest or most general, the inorganic, and proceeding to the most complex, the organic. Each science depended on the science below it in the hierarchy. “Thus we have before us Five fundamental Sciences in successive dependence—Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and finally Social Physics.” And this Social Physics
—for which unifying science, the highest of the hierarchy of sciences, Comte invented the name Sociology—“is what men have now most need of; and this it is the principal aim of the present work to establish.”
Comte’s own life would dramatize the weaknesses of the rigid rationalism that he had preached. His wife, Caroline, left him and he taught erratically at the Polytechnique. He then fell in love with Clotilde de Vaux, the married sister of one of his pupils, who had been abandoned by her husband. But she died in 1846, after only a year of their passionate association, and he never recovered from his loss. He made a ritual of her memory, regularly visited her tomb, and wrote her a letter each year. His life became a ritual, in which he ended his evening dinner with a crust of dry bread, “meditating on the numerous poor who were unable to procure even that means of nourishment in return for their work.”
By the time Comte finished the final volume of his System of Positive Philosophy in 1854 his works had been translated and exerted a strong influence in England. Positivist societies were growing around the world. When Harriet Martineau condensed Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive into two volumes and translated it into English, the pious Martineau explained that “The supreme dread of every one who cares for the good of nation or race is that men should be adrift for want of an anchorage for their convictions. . . . a very large proportion of our people are now so adrift. . . . The work of M. Comte is unquestionably the greatest single effort that has been made to obviate this kind of danger.” Comte too was well aware that the progress of science and industry had created a crisis of belief.
Comte did not see science as a cure-all for the loss of moral convictions in a science-obsessed society. “Monotheism in Western Europe,” he observed in his General View of Positivism (1848), “is now as obsolete and as injurious as polytheism was fifteen centuries ago. The discipline in which its moral value principally consisted has long since decayed. . . . The noblest of all practical pursuits, that of social regeneration, is at the present time in direct opposition to it. For by its vague notion of Providence, it prevents men from forming a true conception of Law. . . . Sincere believers in Christianity will soon cease to interfere with the management of a world, where they profess themselves to be pilgrims and strangers.”
Comte is ready with his answer to this need for meaning. “We tire of thinking and even of acting,” he made his motto for The General View of Positivism. “We never tire of loving.” “The new general doctrine aims at something more than satisfying the Intellect. . . . it is in reality quite as favourable to Feeling and even to Imagination.” So Comte rounds out his system by elaborating “the Religion of Humanity.” “Love . . . is our principle; Order our basis; and Progress our end.” “Positivism becomes, in the true sense of the word, a Religion; the only religion which is real and complete; destined therefore to replace all imperfect and provisional systems resting on the primitive basis of theology.” The successor to Christianity, his religion surpasses it.
And the Religion of Humanity will have its own festivals. “In every week of the year some new aspect of Order or Progress will be held up to public veneration; and in each the link connecting public and private worship will be found in the adoration of Woman. . . . All the points in which the morality of Positive Science excels the morality of revealed religion are summed up in the substitution of Love of Humanity for Love of God.” A new kind of Worship of the Dead will be the services commemorating those eminent persons in the past who have served morality and progress. The most important object of the regenerated polity will be “the substitution of Duties for Rights; thus subordinating personal to social considerations. The word Right should be excluded from Political language, as the word Cause from the language of philosophy.”
Since Catholicism, according to Comte, is now no more than “an imposing historical ruin,” he offers us what T. H. Huxley called “Catholicism minus Christianity.” Comte’s world, governed by the iron laws of sociology, has no need for the liberty of mere opinions. Progress, for Comte, unlike Condorcet, is not indefinite, but continuous. And there is no room for surprise or the whims of personal liberty. It was no wonder, then, that the doctrines of Enlightenment and social science, touted to liberate man from the tyranny of the priesthood, would soon establish their own tyranny. Comte and his successors could not imagine that their gospel of progress might prove as ephemeral as the fictions of theologians or the abstractions of metaphysicians.
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Karl Marx’s Pursuit of Destiny
The most influential of the new “scientific” historians was also the prophet of worldwide revolution. “As Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature,” Friedrich Engels declared at the graveside of his hero, “so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” But while Darwin shook faith in the prevailing religion of Western Europe, Karl Marx (1818-1883) created a new religion of Revolution. His new historicism charted the destiny of Western civilization in an ideology that revealed the shaping forces of which men were part but which gave little freedom for mankind to deflect the material forces. Marx might have said, as Bertrand Russell has observed, that he did not advocate socialism but only prophesied it. The movement for which Marx supplied the sacred text would command a life-risking passion no less than the faith of the Christian saints and martyrs of the Middle Ages.
Marx’s personal background was marked by conflicting loyalties. Trier, the town where he was born, had some of the most important Roman remains of northern Europe as well as an elegant Gothic cathedral, and prospered from factories making iron and leather goods. It had been a French department under Napoleon, but passed to Prussia after his fall. Marx’s father was a lawyer, a devotee of Voltaire and the Enlightenment philosophers. Marx was one of seven children. His grandfather was a rabbi in Trier who was succeeded in the synagogue by his uncle. Marx’s mother, who came from Holland, was also descended from a line of rabbis. She spoke only broken German. About a year before Karl was born, his father, Heinrich, was baptized in the Evangelical Established Church of Prussia, and Karl himself was baptized when he was six. The conversion was convenient, and probably necessary for Heinrich’s position as a practicing lawyer. Karl happily married Jenny von Westphalen, a beautiful and spirited girl four years his senior, who came from a non-Jewish Prussian aristocratic family.
After the Trier high school, Marx attended the University of Bonn in 1835. The high school at Trier had been under police surveillance for suspected liberal teachers, and student life at Bonn was disrupted by the arrest of students for disturbing the Federal Diet at Frankfurt. Marx joined in the student life, fought a duel, and was once jailed for being drunk and disorderly. Then he went on to the University of Berlin to study law and philosophy. There he became one of the Young Hegelians. In 1841 he offered his doctoral dissertation for a degree at Jena, known to have lower academic standards. He used the Hegelian dialectic to expound the differences between the materialist philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. He idolized Prometheus, and in his foreword he already revealed his aggressive spirit. “As long as one drop of blood still pulses through the world-conquering and untrammelled heart of philosophy it will always defy its enemies with the words of Epicurus: not he is Godless who scorns the Gods of the multitude, but he who accepts the opinions of the multitude concerning the Gods.”
Another influence toward a materialist philosophy entered Marx’s life with the publications of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), who argued (1839) “that Christianity has in fact long vanished not only from the reason but from the life of mankind.” In his own philosophy Marx managed to combine Hegel’s dialectic with Feuerbach’s materialism in what became his materialist interpretation of history (“Dialectical Materialism”). When Marx left the university he became a journalist, reporting and editorializing on the miseries of the Berlin poor as well as on other issues. His liberal alarms were so effective that the paper he wrote for, the Rheinische Zeitung, was soon suspended by the Prussian authorities.
After a jury in Cologne in 1849 acquitted him of press offenses and inciting to armed insurrection, he went to Paris to study communism. But within the year he was expelled from Paris, and emigrated to London, where he remained in exile till his death in 1883. After 1851 he was European correspondent for The New York Tribune, for whom he wrote some five hundred articles and editorials.
Marx lived in conflict between his two vocations—as the scholarly social scientist and as the passionate prophet of social justice. He was equally committed and equally vigorous in both. His restless exploring mind helped him assimilate and review the elusive abstractions of Hegel, Feuerbach, and others into explanations of the facts of life that he observed and reported around him. The everyday horrors of the newly flourishing industrial system that he observed in England and learned about through his close friend the Manchester industrialist Friedrich Engels documented the findings of English Royal Commissions, fueled his moral indignation, and inspired his hopes for a better society. In both roles he had the advantage of a restless pen, equally fluent of wit and vitriol.
Karl Marx proved to be the perfect transitional figure between the Age of the Religious Why, which sought to explain the world by the end (To what purpose?), and the Age of the Science Why (From what cause?). From Salvation to Evolution. He somehow preserved a sense of meaning and purpose in history while revealing the laws of social change. So for his followers Marx was able to avoid the emptiness of a valueless world ruled by impersonal forces by assuring them of the triumph of justice in the long run. His moral prophecies were all encapsulated in the security of science. The Marxian history would offer salvation without Christianity.
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