Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920.

Levy, David

It has long been understood that liberalism in the United States underwent a tremendous transformation at the turn of the twentieth century. From a system of thought that preached free individualism, equality (at least among white males), and a weak central government, American liberalism moved quickly after 1890 toward its modem incarnation. Soon liberals were emphasizing social justice, community responsibility, increased federal responsibilities, and the necessity for scientific expertise. For a long time historians have tried to analyse the economic, social, and intellectual influences that brought about this transformation. In this important book, Gillis J. Harp argues that one crucial intellectual influence has been ignored: American disciples of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, he contends, made critical contributions to the formation of modem liberalism in the United States.

The process of transplantation began in 1851 with the arrival in New York City of Henry Edger, a sort of evangelist for Comte's positivism. Edger interested a group of the city's intellectuals and professionals in Comte's philosophy of scientism and social development and, importantly, in his curious new Religion of Humanity. Gradually, the circle fell apart, but Comte's ideas, cleansed of his bizarre religious rituals (but not of his insistence on the importance of religious emotions) filtered into the thought of the rising generation of social reformers, sociologists, and writers. Instrumental in the process was a fascinating thinker named Thaddeus B. Wakeman, and one of Harp's major contributions is to resurrect from relative obscurity this too little known intellectual.

Harp attempts to show, by examining selected progressive thinkers, one at a time, how Comte's ideas survived and how they influenced American liberalism. In addition to Wakeman, he examines a few minor figures of the second generation of American Comtists. His later chapters, however, concentrate on a handful of well known intellectuals: the multifaceted thinker Lester Frank Ward, the utopian novelist Edward Bellamy, the pioneering sociologists Albion Small and Edward A. Ross, and the political philosopher Herbert Croly.

Harp's effort is rendered particularly tricky by the unusual combination of ideas that comprised Comte's original philosophy. The Frenchman was a confirmed atheist, but he also constructed a new religion modelled on Roman Catholicism and charged to worship and serve "the goddess Humanity." He had little use for democracy, equality, or individualism, but advocated an interventionist government, led by an elite of scientists, capitalists, and experts who would bring order and progress to the organic community. He was a rigid empiricist and generally regarded as the founder of the science of sociology, but he also insisted on the importance of religious emotions and a life of altruism. These views were bound to cause trouble among those who might find one or another aspect of his thought attractive, while objecting to other features. Thus some who sympathized with his radical atheism were appalled by his social conservatism; some attracted by his devotion to empirical scientific investigation were repulsed by his formulation of a new religion; some ready to gravitate toward an interfering central government were unable to subscribe to Comte's purposes for that government or to agree that an undemocratic elite of experts and scientists should run it.

Because of the strange combination of Comte's ideas, Harp is able to find "traces" or "echoes" or "fragments" of his thought even in thinkers who denounced him -- as almost all of the men he discusses, at one time or another, for one reason or another, did. Most of them, for example, tended to "Americanize" Comte's teachings, modifying them with whiggish influences from the nation's traditional faiths. Thus Harp's thinkers were nearly all a good deal more democratic than Comte and had greater respect for individual liberty and democratic equality. Nevertheless, if any of them advocated a strong and active centralized state governed by a class of social experts, or evinced a sympathy for the religious emotions, or spoke the language of social organicism, Harp suggests that they qualify, at least to some exent, as American Comtists. Of course readers will find some of these connections to Comte more convincing than others. The brief section that attempts to tie Bellamy to Comte may be the least persuasive and there are parts of the discussions of Small and Ross that some may find a little far-fetched. On the other hand, Harp rests most of his argument on the two cases of Lester Ward and Herbert Croly, and there, appropriately, he is on very firm ground. It is hard to finish those two chapters and not conclude that Harp's view of the presence of a Comtean influence is correct.

There are many attractive features to this book. Harp's clear style, intellectual dexterity, and solid scholarship should certainly be mentioned. But perhaps the most admirable aspect of his argument is the modesty with which he puts it forward. He is extremely careful not to claim too much. Both when he deals with individual thinkers and when he tries to assess their impact as a group, he is ready to acknowledge that Comte's positivism was only one ingredient in the transition to modern liberalism -- an important ingredient and a hitherto ignored one, but one among others. Harp only asks that we consider Comte's influence too as we ponder the development of twentieth-century political thought. In fact, his worthy book will force us to do so from now on.