Durkheim’s and Simmel’s reactions to antisemitism and their reflection in their views on modern society

Abstract

If one ever asked oneself what sociology is all about, one could do worse than consulting Auguste Comte’s 1822 manifesto, Prospectus des travaux scientifiques n8cessaires pour r8organiser la societ8, the Plan of the Scientific Works Necessary for the Reorganization of Society. It sketches out the historical-structural task that the new discipline, whose name Comte later popularized, was supposed to fulfil, namely to end-but-preserve—as the Germans would say, aufzuheben—the Revolution: safeguard its achievements from reaction as well as from further revolutions. Sociology would do so by separating the good bits of modernity from the bad bits. The former Comte saw as grounded in a secular, macrohistorical trend of European history and civilization, the latter in the undisciplined hubris of troublemakers led astray by metaphysical nonsense peddled by the Enlightenment, or more precisely, by the non-positivistic strand of the Enlightenment. Sociology would study and understand the laws of history and silence the metaphysical troublemakers. Sociology’s commitment to making that messy thing called society safe for modernity (the industrial-capitalist world system of nation states constituted and populated by modern individuals) remained tricky. Spanners were thrown into the machinery left, right, and centre by people who were not so positive about the positive state of society. Rather ironically, most of those who continued and developed the Comtean project of sociology did so by basing it on some of those ghastly metaphysical ideas from the Enlightenment, notably those of Immanuel Kant. Sociology, at least in France and Germany, emerged mostly as a set of differing blends of positivism and Kantian, or neo-Kantian, idealism. Even more ironic, though, is the fact that there were some admirers and followers of at least some aspects of Comte’s philosophy who were rather hostile to the progressivist, more liberal project into which positivism as sociology had morphed