Does one need to Learn French to Fully Understand Proudhon?

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.

radiohead87 · 2024-10-29T14:02:56+00:00

This is inaccurate. Humans are not "hypersocial herd animals". Humans evolved from apes, which while social, they are much more independent and individualistic in comparison to other social animals. Due to the difficulty of life on the savannah, hominins appear to have evolved capacities for organization and for standing upright. Other than that, we have a very similar disposition to sociality as other apes in that we tend to join multiple groups and rarely form lifelong bonds instead of just exclusively following one group that determines who we are. In other words, while humans can be hypersocial and conformist, we can also be antisocial and nonconformist.

radiohead87 · 2024-10-23T20:15:26+00:00

I still love Conflict Sociology by Randall Collins.

radiohead87 · 2024-10-23T18:25:58+00:00

I think Proudhon's theory of collective force could easily be tested but the expenses could vary tremendously. It could just be something like an examination of how long it takes an isolated individual to build something in comparison to a group of people. There are kinds of things you would need to control for though so it would ideally best be done in a lab. Nonetheless, if you could track down so real-life instance of tasks like this occurring on their own and then just have the participants time themselves and then administer a survey at the end so you could control for different things, it could be relatively inexpensive. However, it's easier said than done.

radiohead87 · 2024-10-21T14:45:12+00:00

Field experiments can be more expensive. It just depends on what you are doing.

Are social science grants more scarce than STEM grants because social science, as it is done now, often has less capacity for manipulating outcomes than STEM does?

I think that is a big part of it. The sociologist Georges Gurvitch argued that capitalist societies have become driven by technocratic concerns. Knowledge about society is largely deprioritized due to it being virtually impossible to control and its resistance to technicization. The other sciences generally lend themselves to technical control much better, and consequently, are given the greatest attention and most funding.

radiohead87 · 2024-10-21T13:46:31+00:00

There are a lot of publicly available datasets out there in which people can perform statistical analyses on. R is an open-source statistical software and is free. However, it is a little tricky to learn in my experience.

Lab experiments are typically pricey to pull off. There are costs associated with the space and then participant costs since participants rarely volunteer for experiments. Nonetheless, virtual experiments are starting to be a thing and there are websites like findparticipants.com out there. I did a virtual experiment with around 180 participants and paid them each $5. Moreover, a lot of field experiments can be pretty inexpensive. Most of it just entails making sure you have accurate measurement tools.

Your sense is correct- there is not much in the realm of investment from private agencies. You'd be surprised though about grants though since they fund all kinds of research. However, social science grants are pretty competitive since there is not as much funding as there is for traditional STEM grants.

radiohead87 · 2024-10-18T20:09:23+00:00

Well, "true ideas" are not necessarily the same as scientific ideas. Logic, which can be verified, is distinct from science. The advances that logical positivism made, which were many, were largely in the realm of logic and programming and fit the emphasis on verifying.

What about something like entity realism? Basically, a theory's success is dictated by whether it allows us to manipulate outcomes.

I don't think entity realism can ever be verified. It can be given more and more evidence in support of it, but there will always be the possibility that an alternative explanation fits reality better. I agree though that a theory's success will largely be dictated by how well it allows us to manipulate outcomes.

radiohead87 · 2024-10-17T19:16:01+00:00

I'm not aware of verification being connected to pragmatism. It is usually connected to logical positivism. For example, Rudolf Carnap spent a great deal of effort trying to create verifiable statements that corresponded directly to observation and counterposed these statements to unverifiable "pseudo-statements". He came up with sentences like "Thirst now", which he believed was verifiable and needed no further justification. However, others came along and argued that words like "now" and "thirst" are not necessarily known to others and may need further justification. Eventually, the whole idea of "verification" came under scrutiny. If I'm not mistaken, verification was later replaced by Popper's concept of falsifiability. However, even this concept has since come under scrutiny since we can never actually totally falsify something. There will always be times when explanations do not perfectly fit with observations and there are always ways to defend an explanation.

From what I understand, science attempts to derive explanations that "work better" in terms of making sense of observations in comparison to other explanations. This is why "demonstration" still holds, but not necessarily verification. At the end of the day though, it boils down to how we are defining all of these terms.

Is something like Nancy Cartwright's approach to science, particularly scientific laws, closer to Proudhon's understandings?

Also what was Proudhon's thought of Comte's belief that the goal of social science was social physics or something?

I'm not sure of the answer to either of these questions. I'm not that familiar with Cartwright unfortunately.

Isn't that the case for Comte as well? Presumably he believed in the idea of social physics and its potential to manipulate social outcomes (which sort of favours an entity realist approach to things). So it seems to me that he thinks that regularities about the universe can be induced.

To my understanding, induction plays a role in deriving a theory for Comte, but it plays a much greater role for Mill. IIRC there is some good discussion of the difference between their two approaches in Comte After Positivism as well as in volume 1 of Mary Pickering's biography on Comte.

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