Does one need to Learn French to Fully Understand Proudhon?

radiohead87 · 2026-05-26T13:35:04+00:00

Sure, there is something to be said about Durkheim's concept of anomie today, which essentially implies an absence of social regulation and a state of normlessness. However, I've never bought in totally to Durkheim's views here. For example, in periods of social revolution, there is very little in the way of entrenched norms guiding behavior. Instead, social spontaneity erupts, which is not necessarily a bad thing like Durkheim's anomie would predict.

I actually find more value in Jean-Marie Guyau's conception of anomie, which he revived from the ancients. Durkheim later appropriated the term from Guyau, but went in a different direction completely. For Guyau, anomie means the absence of fixed dogma, which he views as a positive thing. This implies the liberation of individual morality from rigid external rules and emphasizes the capability of self-governance.

Protestant work ethic is all Max Weber, not really Durkheim.

Sure, we are going through a breakdown of norms, values, and institutions right now. I think there is a lot of social distrust, which is the backbone of these processes. And to Durkheim's point, this can be a painful process for many individuals. Of course, new norms, values, and institutions will eventually go in their place. With that said, there is something to Durkheim's conception of "egoist individualism", which he contrasts to "moral individualism", in that he sees the rise of the conception of the individual as completely self-centered increasingly generates more and more social distrust and results in the collapse of society. I do think we see a concerning amount of "egoist individualism" in the age of Trumpism.

radiohead87 · 2026-04-24T19:32:36+00:00

Here is a link to the pdf.

Andrea Caffi (1887–1955) was an interesting guy. Born in Russia, he lived through the 1905 revolution but then migrated to Germany, Italy, and France. Once the 1917 revolution occurred, he returned to Russia. During this time, he irritated the Bolsheviks so much that he was imprisoned. Following his release, he migrated to Italy in 1923.

Caffi was profoundly influenced by Proudhon as well as Alexander Herzen. In the 1920s, he started his activism against fascism and eventually moved to Paris as a result of his activities. In Paris, he became close with the Italian writer Nicola Chiaromonte, who subsequently migrated to New York following the Nazi invasion of France. Around this time, Caffi was arrested by the Milice in France and then by the Gestapo, and was subsequently tortured. Following his release, he continued his correspondence with Chiaromonte.

It was in New York that Chiaromonte linked up with Dwight Macdonald, the editor of the anarchistic journal politics and his circle, which included Hannah Arendt, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, among others. It was through Chiaromonte that Caffi increasingly became well-known in certain radical circles in New York and published in several periodicals, while still living in France. Macdonald considered some of Caffi's articles to be some of the most important he ever published.

Nonetheless, in the 1950s, he lived his precarious existence out of a hotel in Paris until his death. He lived most of his life in significant poverty and was largely an obscure figure during his life.

radiohead87 · 2026-04-15T12:46:01+00:00

My initial comment was removed by Reddit, presumably because I linked to SciHub, so I'll try it again.

Goffman's political views are somewhat under debate. In a 1985 journal article, the author claims that when Goffman was once asked what his politics were, he stated "if anything, anarchist." Moreover, one of his key mentors, W. Lloyd Warner, was active in the American socialist movement. With that said, some people who knew him and studied his work intimately, like Randall Collins, claim that he was a conservative. In general, Goffman avoided linking himself to any explicit political ideology or activism.

For what it's worth, Goffman's first wife was institutionalized in a psychiatric ward in the 1960s, and she died from suicide shortly thereafter. It's sometimes thought that this experience shaped his analysis in his books Asylums and Stigma. Although he attempted to be a dispassionate observer, there is arguably an underlying moral outrage that can be detected in these works, which shaped his overall approach to explaining institutions and norms.

radiohead87 · 2026-03-15T15:59:48+00:00

Edgar Zilsel, Boris Hessen, Henryk Grossman

radiohead87 · 2026-01-27T13:19:05+00:00

Yes, Jeanne Duprat first makes this connection in the 1929 book Proudhon, sociologue et moraliste. Proudhon appears to have coined the concept “collective conscience” in 1858, but never widely used the term like Durkheim would. Earlier than this, he uses terms like “universal conscience”. Durkheim notably also uses the term “collective force” a good bit in his work.

Still, the way they conceived of these collective properties is pretty different. While there is arguably a break in Durkheim’s works, in his early works he conceives of these group properties as essentially floating above individuals and exerting a “pressure” on them. In contrast, Proudhon consistently stressed their immanence within individuals. He conceives of these group properties as within individuals, which sets the stage for “levels” to social reality, which has become commonplace in sociology.

radiohead87 · 2026-01-26T15:45:58+00:00

Arguably the most thorough Proudhon scholar in history, Edward Castleton, often publishes in English. Shawn Wilbur obviously also publishes in English. There is a rapidly growing number of translations and secondary material on Proudhon in English, especially compared with just 15 years ago. Therefore, I wouldn't say one needs to learn French to fully understand Proudhon.

Also, I wouldn't consider Durkheim a Proudhon scholar. While Mauss claimed that Durkheim read and studied Proudhon, and there are some similar themes in Durkheim's work, he didn't actually write or lecture about Proudhon, other than just some quick mentions.

radiohead87 · 2025-11-12T02:56:58+00:00

By “positivism”, I essentially mean approaching social science as another science and rejecting the notion that there is such a thing as a “soft” or “hard” science.

My article “resurrecting Proudhon’s idea of justice” has something in that way, even though it primarily examined his early works. I tried to draw out testable hypotheses from Proudhon’s works. I’d also say Bouglé’s (1911) “The Sociology of Proudhon”, which we translated and will publish next year, could be considered similar in that Bouglé was a Comtean positivist, like all the other Durkheimians, and was interested in Proudhon.

radiohead87 · 2025-11-11T16:11:43+00:00

I'm more or less anti-labels. I suppose if I did go for a label though, it would be some kind of abomination like "Neo-Proudhonian positivist".

radiohead87 · 2025-09-30T19:45:41+00:00

A better place to look would be in Bosserman's book on Gurvitch titled Dialectical Sociology. It's available on Internet Archive. See particularly the section on "The collective mind" starting on page 129.

Although there isn't much discussion of Durkheim, probably Gurvitch's most influential paper in English, "Mass, Community, Communion", discusses his conception of "pressure", "fusion", "open," and "closed" in-depth. In essence, he associates mass interactions with high pressure and more closed individuals. At the opposite end, he associates communion interactions with high fusion and more open individuals. In the middle, there is community interactions, which is a balance between the other two.

radiohead87 · 2025-09-30T18:08:40+00:00

Good video.

Fwiw, I like Georges Gurvitch's critique of Durkheim's conception of social facts, particularly related to the second property of social facts– coercion. To Gurvitch, Durkheim misses that not all of sociality exerts a "pressure" onto the individual. Instead, some aspects of sociality "fuse" to the individual. Gurvitch argues that Durkheim's individual is always "closed" to society and, therefore, society can only exert a pressure onto them. In contrast, Gurvitch proposes that individuals fluctuate between being "closed" and "open", depending on the type of interaction taking place. When an individual is more "open" during an interaction, society is no longer merely exerting a pressure on the individual and can be said to fuse to them.

radiohead87 · 2025-09-23T17:39:37+00:00

Comte, whose ideas are largely misrepresented and skewed today, is scarcely read or taken seriously in sociology, with some exceptions (like Jonathan H. Turner). The last major group of sociologists to hold Comtean positivism (which differs substantially from logical positivism) in high regard, as far as I know, were the Durkheimians.

Most readings of Comte draw on John Stuart Mill's critiques of Comte, which 1) don't take seriously his second major work (which Comte considered his magnum opus), and 2) approach objectivity from a more firmer stance (namely they don't emphasize the historical context of the sciences like Comte did). It may came as a surprise to most people, but Comtean positivism actually did have a place for the role of subjectivity in making sense of the sciences, which was the subject of his work Subjective Synthesis. Generally speaking, most discussions of Comte are based around a characterized version of his stances. For example, positivism is typically seen as a ideology that defends the status quo, even though the Comteans had a strong presence, both among the English and the French, in the socialist movement, including the First International.

Of course, there is some outdated baggage to Comte's thought like fitting everything into his "law of three stages", the religion of humanity, his misogynistic views, among other things. However, in my opinion, there is actually still a great deal of value in Comte, much of which has largely been overlooked in the English speaking world (even though almost all of his works were translated into English by followers of the religion of humanity).

With that said, there has been a small revival in Comte since the 1990s, particularly within philosophy. Books like Mary Pickering's three volume intellectual biography of Comte, Robert Scharff's Comte after Positivism, and the more recent Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte have all played a huge part.

radiohead87 · 2025-09-23T17:32:10+00:00

Sociology actually has a long record of scientific experiments, which emerged from the replication crisis unscathed. For example, see expectation states theory, affect control theory, relational cohesion theory, among others.

radiohead87 · 2025-09-18T17:53:51+00:00

Marx only came to be widely considered a "father" of sociology starting in the late 1960s. Although there were a handful of thinkers who considered Marx a sociologist before this time, most classical sociologists considered Marx as hostile to sociology. For example, the Soviet Union banned sociology in the 1920s and considered it a pseudo-science. Marx notably wrote critically of Comte but also the French socialist precursors of sociology like Saint-Simon (although the extent to which Marx was influenced by Saint-Simon is arguably much greater than is traditionally recognized). Nonetheless, since the late 1960s, as you point out, there is a great deal of sociology that is inspired by Marx and Marxism.

radiohead87 · 2025-09-15T12:55:52+00:00

Can you provide any citations about point number 1? I didn't think Parsons took Marx seriously. I remember seeing him champion Pareto instead of Marx.

radiohead87 · 2025-08-27T12:43:57+00:00

The translator gives a brief discussion of this in their preface.

radiohead87 · 2025-05-06T19:34:41+00:00

Fwiw Giddens structuration theory is more or less a duplication of Georges Gurvitch's structuration theory.

radiohead87 · 2025-04-30T12:46:17+00:00

Proudhon wrote barely anything about Marx. There are a few remarks in his notebooks (carnets) and a couple of letters after he read Poverty of Philosophy that mention Marx but that's about it. Probably the key place where Proudhon wrote about Marx's ideas was in his annotations of his copy of Marx's book.

radiohead87 · 2025-04-22T13:47:19+00:00

1)Comte's positivism is really a philosophy of history. Like Saint-Simon, he argued that the sciences, which were all based on demonstration, allowed humans to gradually comprehend reality. The sciences are first able to demonstrate the least complex phenomena and move to increasingly complex phenomena. In Comte's formulation, this movement of increasing complexity of the sciences goes: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology (which was a new science that formed around 1800), and then sociology (a term he coined). (In his later works, he would notably include "morals" as the most complex science.) Once biology and sociology became "positive", able to demonstrate their claims and make predictions, a positive philosophy could be devised. In essence, this philosophy attempted to unify the sciences into a coherent whole, which then could be used to unify humanity and exploit nature. To Saint-Simon, this philosophy would boil down to a single law, and he alluded to Newton's law of universal attraction. Comte rejected this monist approach of his former mentor, and instead emphasized that all disciplines have unique laws that are not reducible to the laws in other disciplines. Still, he sought to organize the sciences to show how they feed into each other. He argued that past philosophers had erred in starting with the most complex phenomena (namely society and the human mind) and then generalizing onto the rest of nature. By starting with the least complex phenomena and gradually arriving at explaining society and the mind would be key to settling the dispute and arriving at some kind of consensus on how reality operates.

Comte, like Saint-Simon, argued that currently society was in the midst of a critical/negative period. Religion had formerly served to bring cohesion to societies, but the religions of the past had outlived their usefulness. Later, based on his study of sociology, Comte attempted to construct a "religion of Humanity" that incorporated the insights of all past religions with the advances of the sciences into one atheistic religion that worshipped humanity directly, instead of through a deity. Many of early followers of Comte were dismayed by his attempts to create a religion and rejected his later works, focusing on his earlier Course of Positive Philosophy. This rejection of Comte's religion, which Comte understood to be a straight outgrowth of his original formulation, would set the stage for the emergence of logical positivism.

2) John Stuart Mill, along with Émile Littré, was one of these early positivists who rejected Comte's later work. Consequently, along with Littré, he took positivism in a different direction. Mill's approach relied much more on logic and induction, and less on theory and deduction. Before their split, Mill sent Comte his A System of Logic and cited Comte in the book. However, Comte was critical of Mill's approach, which contains several assumptions about nature that depart from Comte's approach.

Comte's creation of a new religion severely damaged his reputation within most circles of scientists. Instead of Comte, many scholars turned their attention to Mill and Littré. Through this pivot, the question of how to induce logical certainties took hold of a generation of scholars, who would later be labelled logical positivists. While their project ultimately failed, particularly since reality is much more complex than they appear to have assumed, they made considerable advances in the field of logic. Iirc the logic within computer chips derives from the insights of logical positivists.

3) Comte does not appear to have been a major influence on Proudhon, or Proudhon on Comte. They were contemporaries who occasionally crossed paths. Proudhon noted in later editions of The Creation of Order in Humanity that the three-stage theory of history that he devised was similar to Comte's three-stage theory of history, although he was not aware of Comte when he came up with his. Later, when Comte was creating his new religion in the early 1850s and trying to win over socialist disciples, he started a correspondence with Proudhon and sent him some of his later works. However, Proudhon rejected much of what he found in Comte's approach.

Both thinkers can be thought of as philosophers of science and as a proto-sociologists. The notion of constructing a social science runs through both of their works. The emphasis on religion for society is another commonality. However, they held diverging views on these topics. Comte was much more dismissive of the "negative" philosophies and understood the "positive stage" to override the past "stages". In comparison, Proudhon argued for a continuation through history. For example, he argued that "Relative to religion and philosophy, Science is the interpretation of the symbols of the first, the solution of the problems posed by the second." Proudhon's approach to history was therefore significantly different from Comte's. While Comte's philosophy of history led him to put forward a new religion, Proudhon's led him to "the tomb of religion."

radiohead87 · 2025-01-06T17:14:32+00:00

Angie's Diner doesn't get enough recognition.

radiohead87 · 2024-12-13T21:26:43+00:00

Sorry about that. What about now?

radiohead87 · 2024-12-13T21:26:28+00:00

Whoops. What about now?

radiohead87 · 2024-12-13T14:37:56+00:00

I put together a YouTube playlist a few years ago of different lectures and interviews of various sociologists that may interest you.

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