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Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (1887). Preface to the 2nd edition (1912)

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In the front ranks of the men who created a new socio-political consciousness in this way stood scholars like Schmoller, Brentano, and Knapp, each working in a different spirit. Adolf Wagner and Albert Schäffle laid claim – with notable success – to principled rigor and systematic generalizations in the great conflict of socialism against capitalism (or individualism): Wagner, who in his work Grundlegung [der politischen Oekonomie], under the influence of a true Socialist (Rodbertus), formulated the brief for the expansion of the activity of the state, for legal theory in relationship to all private property, for the rights of the national economy against those of the private economy; Schäffle, working in a kindred spirit but with even stronger philosophical pretensions, set out to describe the structure and life of the social body. He shared Herbert Spencer's “organistic” notion of sociology (in fact, he was strongly influenced by him), but while Spencer arrived at the postulate of administrative nihilism, Schäffler tended to advocate administrative universalism. Both men, however, see the development of culture in light of the development of life, that is, of the theory of the origin of species, and they draw conclusions that, no matter how irrefutable they may be in their individual elements, soon end up on the slippery slope of speculation between fear and hope. By contrast, August Comte intended to positivize and thus justify sociology in the sense that he wanted to initiate the definitive and correct shaping of social life and politics through the definitive and correct theory. This, too, was to follow a law of development, but solely that of the development of human thought, the law of the three stages. A certain connection to Hegelian dialectics is unmistakably evident in his thinking, and the idea of a creative synthesis of the practical currents characterizes the progressive intellectual tendencies of the nineteenth century in general.

The view that culture developed out of barbarism and savageness – that is, that humanity developed from animal-like conditions – was already held by all enlightened thinkers since the seventeenth century, having replacing the belief in paradisiacal origins and glories. That view was then obscured by the Restoration and Romanticism and had to be recaptured on the basis of Darwinism; but by its nature it is much less the application of a biological theory of development than the latter is the generalization of the former. In Hegel, as in Comte, this essential autonomy is still clearly evident.

What distinguishes Comte is the fact that under the powerful influence of Saint-Simon, he assumed a critical stance toward progress, modernity, and liberalism. So did the Romantics, as well as those who advocated tradition, [the values of] the Middle Ages, and authority. But Saint-Simon and Comte took this stance on the grounds of progress itself, on the grounds of modernity and liberalism. Without wishing to return to faith and feudalism, they recognized the predominance of a positive and organic order in the Middle Ages, and they also recognized the essentially negative and revolutionary character of modernity, though without denying science, enlightenment, and freedom; on the contrary, they affirmed and emphasized these all the more.

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