The Long Peace of the Nineteenth Century and the Birth of Sociology

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Research Programs ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Liberal Thought

This chapter examines how the progressive optimism nourished by liberal doctrines gradually began to take hold and how sociology as a discipline took a particularly wide variety of institutional forms and featured very different theoretical and research programs. Toward the end of the eighteenth and during the first third of the nineteenth centuries, utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and later James and John Stuart Mill were already singing the praises of free trade and its peace-promoting effects. This laid the foundations for at least one strand of liberal thought in the nineteenth century, on which early “sociologists” such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer could then build. Despite the hegemonic status of liberal doctrines, other views were always present beneath the surface. This includes Marxism, which in many respects embraced the legacy of liberalism.

A ‘LESS THAN ENTHUSIASTIC’ FRIENDSHIP: JOHN MORLEY, GEORGE ELIOT, AND GEORGE HENRY LEWES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin A Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Middle Age ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Liberal Philosophy ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

Abstract For roughly a decade, John Morley enjoyed a warm and deferential sociality with George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. The basis for their friendship was the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, which initially held great appeal to Morley, who had lost his religious faith while studying as an undergraduate at Balliol, Oxford. While Lewes and Eliot’s views on Comte were largely fixed by middle age, Morley, still in his twenties, was searching for a substitute belief system. As Morley began to embrace the liberal philosophy of (and form a friendship with) John Stuart Mill, who had declared himself to be an antagonist of Comte’s, Morley, Lewes, and Eliot increasingly held less in common. This lack of commonality gave Morley the critical distance to reassess the couple both personally and intellectually. Embracing a new philosophy and divergent aesthetic preferences, Morley developed an equivocal view of his friends, roughly two decades his senior. Utilizing letters, diary entries, published writings, and a previously untranslated document in French, this essay provides a complex portrait of an intergenerational friendship among three nineteenth-century intellectuals.

The Great Classical Tradition, 3

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Living Standard ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Pronounced Difference ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Low Wages

This chapter examines the ideas elaborated specifically in the refinement and defense of the classical tradition in economics. There were points of vulnerability and fault that required a defense of the classical tradition, including the pronounced difference between the wages and resulting living standard of the workers and those of the employers or capitalists, the unequal distribution of power inherent in the system, and the phenomenon referred to as a panic, crisis, depression or recession, with its associated unemployment and general despair. The chapter considers how the classical tradition dealt with inequality and oppressive power, focusing on the initial defense advanced for the low wages of the laborer in comparison with the revenues of the employer and landlord. It also discusses the defense from Utilitarianism, led by Jeremy Bentham, and the views of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Nassau Senior, and William Stanley Jevons.

“The Church of Humanity”: New York's Worshipping Positivists

1991 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 508-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Church

The philosophy of Auguste Comte changed irrevocably the intellectual contours of nineteenth-century Europe. In the Anglo-American world, John Stuart Mill was profoundly influenced by Comte's magisterial Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842) and Mill's work became an important conduit through which Americans such as John Fiske, Lester F. Ward and Henry Adams encountered positivism. Comte's controversial later work (especially the Systéme de politique positive [1851–1854]) was also significant, although Mill and others became harsh critics of the so-called ‘second system.’ English admirers of Comte's bizarre social and religious blueprint did include notables, however, such as Frederic Harrison, Harriet Martineau and novelist George Eliot1.

scholarly journals JOHN STUART MILL, VICTORIAN LIBERALISM, AND THE FAILURE OF CO-OPERATIVE PRODUCTION

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOCELYN PAUL BETTS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Profit Sharing ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
Construction Of Knowledge ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Valid Form

ABSTRACTJohn Stuart Mill's support for, and predictions of, co-operative production have been taken as a coherent wedding of liberal and socialist concerns, and as drawing together later nineteenth-century political economy and working-class radicalism. Despite its evident significance, the alliance of political economy and co-operative production was, however, highly conflicted, contested, and short-lived, in ways that help to shed light on the construction of knowledge of society in nineteenth-century Britain. Mill's vision should be seen as developed in contrast to the sociological and historical perspectives of Auguste Comte and Thomas Carlyle, as an attempt to hold together political economy as a valid form of knowledge with the hope of a new social stage in which commerce would be imbued with public spirit. This ideal thus involved debate about competing social futures and the tools of prediction, as well as entering debates within political economy where it was equally embattled. Even Mill's own economic logic tended more towards support of profit-sharing than co-operative production, and hopes for the latter became significantly less persuasive with the introduction of the concept of the entrepreneur into mainstream British economics during the 1870s and 1880s.

Autobiography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stuart Mill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Substantial Contribution ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Ways Of Life

It may be useful that there should be some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable John Stuart Mill (1806-73), philosopher, economist, and political thinker, was the most prominent figure of nineteenth century English intellectual life and his work has continuing significance for contemporary debates about ethics, politics and economics. His father, James Mill, a close associate of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, assumed responsibility for his eldest son's education, teaching him ancient Greek at the age of three and equipping him with a broad knowledge of the physical and moral sciences of the day. Mill’s Autobiography was written to give an account of the extraordinary education he received at the hands of his father and to express his gratitude to those he saw as influencing his thought, but it is also an exercise in self-analysis and an attempt to vindicate himself against claims that he was the product of hothousing. The Autobiography also acknowledges the substantial contribution made to Mill’s thinking and writings by Harriet Taylor, whom he met when he was twenty-four, and married twenty-one years later, after the death of her husband. The Autobiography helps us understand more fully some of the principal commitments that Mill’s political philosophy has become famous for, in particular his appreciation of the diversity, plurality, and complexity of ways of life and their possibilities. This edition of the Autobiography includes additional manuscript materials from earlier drafts which demonstrate the conflicting imperatives that influenced Mill’schoice of exactly what to say about some of the most significant episodes and relationships in his life. Mark Philps introduction explores the forces that led Mill to write the ‘life’ and points to the tensions in the text and in Mill's life.

Environmental Desire in: The Mill on the Floss

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-222
Author(s):  
Jayne Hildebrand
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Biological Medium ◽  
Ecological Role ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Biological Concept ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Relationship Of

Jayne Hildebrand, “Environmental Desire in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss” (pp. 192–222) This essay argues that George Eliot’s expansive use of landscape description in The Mill on the Floss (1860) represents an engagement with the emerging concept of a biological “medium” or “environment” in the nineteenth-century sciences. In the 1850s, scientific writers including Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes redefined biological life as dependent on an abstraction called a “medium” or “environment”—a term that united all the objects, substances, and forces in an organism’s physical surroundings into a singular entity. Eliot in The Mill on the Floss draws out the ecological potential of this new biological concept by imbuing the described backgrounds of her novel with a lyrical affect I call “environmental desire,” a diffuse longing for ambient contact with one’s formative medium that offers an ethical alternative to the possessive and object-driven forms of desire that drive the plot of a traditional Bildungsroman. Maggie Tulliver’s marriage plot is structured by a tension between environmental desire and possessive desire, in which her erotic desire for Stephen Guest competes with a more diffuse environmental desire that attaches to the novel’s described backgrounds. Ultimately, the new environment concept enables Eliot to reconceive the Bildungsroman’s usual opposition between self and world as a relationship of nourishment and dependency rather than struggle, and invites a reconsideration of the ecological role of description in the Bildungsroman genre.

Herbert Spencer and the Spectre of Comte

1967 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney Eisen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
To Come ◽  
Century Science ◽  
George Sarton

“It is very interesting to compare Spencer and Comte,” wrote George Sarton in an essay lauding their efforts to embrace all knowledge in a grand synthesis. The comparison, indeed, was tempting for contemporaries, as it has been for students of ideas. Both Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer were authors of new philosophic systems which, they believed, had been built on the firm foundations of science, and both were convinced that society should be reconstructed in accordance with the truths of their philosophies. The insistence of Positivists and some who were not Positivists that Spencer, consciously or not, had been influenced by Comte, and Spencer's repeated and fervent denials, made for a series of controversies that extended over half a century and ranged from the minutiae of priority to the more important issues of the classification of the sciences and the nature of religion.The eclipse of both the Positive Philosophy of Comte and the Synthetic Philosophy of Spencer in the twentieth century hardly suggests the interest they aroused in the nineteenth. The unification of knowledge and the discovery of the laws of man and society were dreams which nineteenth-century science and philosophy hoped to realize. Comte and Spencer made their contribution in this area; and while both were attacked for erecting systems on questionable assumptions, and for their weakness in details, their extraordinary ability to amass quantities of information and to come up with penetrating generalizations attracted admirers and disciples. Few of their critics thought that what they had set out to do was not worth doing, or could not be done.

scholarly journals Elements of positivism in the Ukrainian philosophy and culture of the second half of the 19th century

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 269-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vyacheslav Artyukh ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
The 19Th Century

This article addresses the appropriation of positivist thought by Ukrainian intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular in the field of philosophy of history. By discussing elements of positivist thought in the works of Mykhailo Drahomanov, Ivan Franko and Pantaleimon Kulish, the author argues that all three were under direct influence of positivist thought, but none of them was a blind adherent of positivism. Positivism particularly influenced their thinking about history and the issue of determinism. Importantly, it was not the French positivism of Auguste Comte whose ideas were adopted, but rather the English positivism of Henry Thomas Buckle and John Stuart Mill.

Comte, Mill, and the Thought of Nishi Amane in Meiji Japan

1968 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas R. H. Havens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Abstract Reasoning ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Meiji Restoration ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Modes Of Thought

One aspect of the intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was the phenomenon of bummei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment.” Although it may be useful to think of the early Meiji years as a Japanese siècle de lumières, it is significant that the country's most progressive scholars derived their main inspiration from such contemporaneous Western social philosophies as positivism and utilitarianism, not the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is natural that the proponents of bummei kaika turned for guidance to John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte rather than Diderot or Rousseau, because their goal was to expose Japan to those urbane modes of thought from abroad which would bring her to the “civilized” stage of development envisaged by European social philosophy. The means to be employed consisted of empiricism, not abstract reasoning: “what we should call the truly enlightened world,” wrote Tsuda Mamichi in 1874, “is when practical studies become popular in our country and each person attains an understanding of truth.” Similarly, Fukuzawa Yukichi took nineteenth century England, not eighteenth century France, as the model for Japan's efforts to achieve “enlightenment.”

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