Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 16:35:35 -0700 (MST) From: Martha Gimenez <gimenez@csf.colorado.edu> To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu> Subject: Marx and Sociology

Dear PSNers,

Did Marx ever used the word sociology? If so, what did he say about it and where?

Pitirim Sorokin, somewhere, said something like this about American Sociology: "it is the painful elaboration of the obvious" and Marx, had he read some of it, might have said something similar :) But I think he never made a reference to sociology in his work.

Does anyone know?

Just wondering.....

Martha

Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:17:17 -0500
From: rlarkin <rlarkin@nyc.rr.com>
To: Martha Gimenez <gimenez@csf.colorado.edu> Subject: Re: Marx and Sociology

I have read a good portion of Marx and have never seen the word "sociology" in his work. As you know, Compte coined the word. I don't think that it it achieved much more than the status of a neologism until the early 20th century. Marx died in 1883, before Durkeim occupied the first chair in sociology. If I know Marx, he would have probably used the term pejoratively.

Hope this helps.

Ralph Larkin

Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:33:13 EST
From: LLPSN@aol.com
To: gimenez@csf.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Marx and Sociology

In his recipe collection, he noted that someday sociology will understand the basis of good food :) :)

Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:41:31 -0500
From: Carl Dassbach <dassbach@mtu.edu>
To: Martha Gimenez <gimenez@csf.colorado.edu>,

PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu> Subject: Re: Marx and Sociology

Highly unlikely that Marx used the term because the term was coined by Comte in the late 1840's and really doesn't become widely used, as far as I can tell, until much later. There is some indication that Comte knew of Marx but Comte called Marx "too metaphysical."

Most likely Marx would have had some sympathy for the "project" of Sociology as defined by Comte - to reveal the unchanging laws of human social life - because Marx's himself repeatedly wrote about the "laws" of capitalism. But in retrospect, we could also say that this sympathy may have been misplaced or inappropriate. Both Marx and Comte were certainly under the sway of Positivism but, in my opinion, Comte was much more "positivistic" than Marx because Comte believed that we could not only uncover laws of human social behavior but use these laws to control society and insure "orderly progress." Remember, for example, Comte's famous dictum "We understand in order to predict, we predict in order to control."

In my opinion, whatever positivistic elements we see in Marx are less a consequence of Marx's genuine sympathy for a positivist program ala Comte and more due to the fact that no mind can reach beyond (out run)its time. (The appropriate Mannheimian term is the "standsortgebundenheit des denkers" - all thinking is bound by location in history and society). Hence, I would argue that Marx used the jargon of positivism not because he believed in a Comtean project of control but because it was the most "advanced" language of the social sciences at that time. But where the language of positivism was an end for Comte, it was merely a way station for Marx. One the one hand, it represented a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking about and discussing human social life but, on the other, his thinking actually went beyond positivism.

PS - In retrospect, I now suspect that the above is an inadvertent gloss on the first section of Althusser's Reading Capital which I still believe, although I haven't looked at it in over 20 years, is an important work on Marxist/materialist epistemology and the philosophy of science. The remainder of Reading Capital is, on the other hand, a gloss on the introduction to the Grundrisse. I also believe people should pay far more attention to the Introduction to the Grundrisse, especially the section on the Method of Political Economy. It seems to me that too many people are too busy "taking" Marx in new directions - Marx and Suicide? - when there is still a considerable amount of Marx which is not adequately understood.

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 11:02:08 -0500
From: "Adair, Stephen (Sociology)" <AdairS@mail.ccsu.edu> To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu> Subject: RE: Marx and Sociology

I am unaware of Marx ever using the word sociology. He was however certainly aware of Comte's work, although he appears not to have bothered himself much with it. In Capital (toward the middle of chapter 13 on Co-Operation, p. 315 in the New World Paperbacks edition), there is a wonderfully sarcastic (and perhaps overly simplistic) dismissal of Comte. Marx writes, "The leadership of industry is an attribute of capital, just as in feudal times the funtions of general and judge, were attributes of landed property." He then includes the footnote: "Auguste Comte and his school might have shown that feudal lords are an eternal necessity in the same way that they have done in the case of the lords of capital."

This slap anticipates the critique of functionalism, and thus Marx immediately perceived the essential logical weakness.

Stephen Adair
Department of Sociology and Social Work Central Connecticut State University
New Britain, CT 06150
(860)832-2979
adairs@ccsu.edu

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 12:54:50 -0500
From: "Rodney D. Coates" <coatesrd@casmail.muohio.edu> To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu> Subject: Re: Marx and Sociology

While the term does not appear in the works of MArx we do see in Engels worke term.. "But Feuerbach is absolutely incapable of achieving anything with these maxims. They remain mere phrases, and even Starcke has to admit that for Feuerbach politics constituted an impassable frontier and the "science of society, sociology, was terra incognita to him". from his Ludwid Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy part 3.

some might want to check out an old text translated and edited by T.B. Bottomore et ot.. entitled Karl Mark: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy" published in 1964..from the forwrd T.B. Botomore states "These selections from his early writings reveal Marx liberating himself from the philosophical tradition of Hegel, and creating a science of society which strikingly anticipates modern sociology."

rodneycoates

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 13:39:53 EST
From: WSheasby@cs.com
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu> Subject: Re: Marx and Sociology

Hi Carl, Martha and othersMarx
did use the term 'sociology' and was familiar with the work of the British Sociology group of statisticians, Spencerians, and Comtists, with a few reformers in the bag. He refers to one of their Congresses. Decades ago, when I thought it mattered, I started to write an article on Marx and Sociology.

Marx had supreme contempt for postivism and this entire tendency, and only took seriously the gathering of statistics, designing a survey questionnaire himself in 1880. Marx saw the confused intellectual lineage of the positivists, who came out of the reactionary romantic organicist tradition that Marx critiqued throughout his life, while trying to reconcile the relation of Historical Laws to Natural Laws through his theory of reification.

Marx cut his teeth on the dispute over methodological individualism and holism in his critique of Hegel's attempted synthesis of Fichte and Spinoza. I don't think Althusser really understood any of that, and a more reliable guide to reading Capital is Georg Lukacs.

At the WSSA meeting in San Diego on April 24 I'll give a paper that focuses on 'The Ecology of Reification.'

Sociology would have passed into the antiquarian encyclopedias along with Phrenology (another 'science' that Marx studied and joked about, to the bewilderment of some biographers), had it not been for Marx's decisive confrontation with the whole enterprise as his sceptre rose up to stalk Europe and America in the form of an aroused working class. This 'debate with Marx's ghost' is the real origin of modern social theory, viz. Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, Pareto, Mosca, Michels, Small, Veblen, Sombart, Toennies, and so on.

The Socialist Party is publishing a pamphlet I wrote on 'Corporation Capitalism: How the System Hid for a Hundred Years' that deals briefly with the way sociology nibbled and quibbled Marx back into his grave, while the marginalists exorcised value out of economics and thus the -ism out of Marx's Capital. Those interested can send me their street address and I'll mail a copy when it is published.

_Walt Contreas Sheasby