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Sociology and Idealism in Britain 1880–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Stefan Collini
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It is something of a commonplace in the history of sociological theory that during the classical period of the development of the subject, when Weber and Durkheim and others were formulating the stock of ideas upon which subsequent theory has so largely drawn, no significant contribution was forthcoming from Britain. Parsons' The Structure of Social Action was probably the most influential single source of this view, and it is one which was subsequently popularized by Hughes, Annan and others. It is now sufficiently well established to have been taken as the explanandum in several recent essays. Where the explanation has been looked for in intellectual terms, this has generally involved some variation on the theme of the ‘curious strength of positivism’ in British thought. The gist of this claim is that the intellectual climate in Britain was (and is) marked by a tradition of empiricism in philosophy and individualism in social thought which was unreceptive to the abstract theory and the social-structural concepts which are integral to classical sociology. The significance of the British empirical tradition in philosophy has been particularly insisted upon. This makes it all the more important to point out that it was precisely during this period that what is generally referred to as Idealism was the dominant philosophy in Britain, a philosophy characterized by its thoroughgoing rejection of nominalism and empiricism in favour of the metaphysical tradition derived mainly from Kant and Hegel, a philosophy, I shall argue, which was potentially a fruitful basis for the development of sociological theory.

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Research Article
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European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , May 1978 , pp. 3 - 50
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Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1978

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References

(1) Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action. A study in social theory with special reference to a group of recent European writers (New York 1937Google Scholar; 3rd edition, 2 vols, Glencoe 1968); Hughes, H. Stuart, Consciousness and Society. The reorientation of European social thought 1830–1330 (New York 1958Google Scholar; repr. London 1967); Annan, Noel, The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Political Thought. Hobhouse, L. T. Memorial Lecture (London 1959)Google Scholar. Parsons' analysis also provides the framework for the outstanding study of British social thought in the preceding period, Burrow's, J. W.Evolution and Society: A study in Victorian social theory (Cambridge 1966Google Scholar; second edition, 1970), as is explicitly acknowledged on pp. XII–XIII and 260–1, where he deftly discusses the question ‘why did England make no distinct contribution to the rethinking of the fundamental concepts of social thought at the turn of the century’, and recognizes the temptation to find the answer in ‘the natural dispostion of the English intellectual climate to positivistic modes of thinking’.

(2) For exampleAnderson, Perry, Components of the National Culture, New Left Review, (1968), 1–57Google Scholar, on ‘The sociology of no sociology’: ‘Britain may be defined as the European country which—uniquely—never produced either a classical sociology or a national Marxism’; ‘Why did Britain never produce a Weber, a Durkheim, a Pareto or a Lenin, a Lukács, a Gramsci? The peculiar destiny of the nineteenth-century industrial bourgeoisie in Britain is the secret of this twin default’, pp. 11, 15. Abrams, Philip, The Origins of British Sociology 1834–1314. An essay with related papers (Chicago 1968)Google Scholar: ‘The history of British sociology before 1914—indeed before 1945—is in no sense a success story’ and the ‘problems of institutionalization’ constituted the chief reason for ‘this failure’, p. 4.

(3) And it is still the case that the lack of ‘a climate of theoretical speculation’ and the ‘conspicuous absence of a coherent body of theory’ are considered to distinguish sociology in Britain. ‘British sociology continues to be influenced by a tradition of commonsense empiricism tempered to the concerns of middle range domestic problems and enlightened social policy’. Morgan, David, British Social Theory, Sociology, IX (1975), 119–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(4) From his earliest studies, Parsons argued ‘it is ultimately the character of English philosophy which shuts out sociology’ in the sense of a study of the social as such. Parsons, Talcott, Economics and Sociology: Marshall in relation to the thought of his time, Quarterly Journal of Economics, XLVI (1931–1932), p. 337Google Scholar, n.

(5) It is indisputable that Idealism was the single most important philosophical movement in Britain during most of this period, and there is no need here to go into the intricate problems of the extent and duration of its ‘dominance’. For a brisk assertion that it was the dominant school, see Quinton, Anthony, Absolute Idealism, Proceedings of the British Academy, LVII (1971), 303–29Google Scholar.

(6) Indeed, one sociologist has recently announced, rhetorically but revealingly, that ‘it is impossible now to think of what sociology was like before Parsons’.Goldthorpe, John, An Introduction to Sociology (Cambridge 1968), p. 54Google Scholar.

(7) Most historians follow Hughes in dealing with what he called the ‘“heartland” of Western society: France, Germany (including Austria) and Italy’, op. cit., p. 12. The peculiarities of the situation in Austria are well brought out in Torrance, John, The Emergence of Sociology in Austria, Archives européennes de sociologie, XVII (1976), 185–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(8) The information upon which these judgements are based is drawn from the following sources: Abrams, Origins of British Sociology: Burns, E. M., The Social Sciences as Disciplines: Great Britain, Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences, Vol. I (London and New York 1930)Google Scholar; Clark, T. N., Prophets and Patrons: The French university and the emergence of the social sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (particularly important in showing that Durkheim's personal success did not result in much permanent penetration of the French educational system); Fletcher, Ronald (ed.), The Science of Society and the Unity of Mankind. A memorial volume for Morris Ginsberg (London 1974)Google Scholar; Janowitz, Morris, Professionalization of Sociology, in Merton, Robert K. et al. , Varieties cf Political Expression in Sociology (Chicago 1972)Google Scholar; Lukes, Steven, Éimile Durkheim: his life and work, A historical and Sociocritical study (London 1973)Google Scholar; Macrae, D. G., The Basis of Social Cohesion, in Robson, W. A. (ed.), Man and the Social Sciences (London 1973)Google Scholar; Bendix, Reinhard and Roth, Guenther, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (New York 1970)Google Scholar (Chapter 11 shows the institutional weakness of sociology in Germany by the 1920s); Oberschall, Anthony (ed.), The Establishment of Empirical Sociology (New York 1973)Google Scholar; Shils, Edward, Tradition, Ecology and Institution in the History of Sociology, Daedalus, XCIX (1970), 760–826Google Scholar, (which contains a great deal of relevant comparative information); Tiryakian, Edward A. (ed.), The Phenomenon of Sociology (New York 1971)Google Scholar; Torrance, The Emergence of Sociology in Austria.

(9) Aided by their contributions to British journals: thus, Tönnies' Welby Prize Essay on ‘Philosophical Terminology’ appeared in Mind in 1899, and Durkheim's paper ‘on the Relations of Sociology to the Social Sciences and to Philosophy’ was read (by Bernard Bosanquet) to the Sociological Society in I904. an published in Sociological Papers in 1905. Durkheim's work, in particular, was well known in Britain from the publication of De la division du travail social onwards.

(10) E.g., Havelock Ellis reviewed Durkheim's Le Suicide in 1898, George Unwin reviewed Simmel's Philosophic des Geldes in 1901, and so on.

(11) Shils, Tradition, Ecology and Institution, p. 782. Bendix and Roth suggest that Weber was by no means a famous figure in Germany before 1914 (Scholarship and Partisanship, ch. 11).

(12) Although the influence of the Neo-Kantians is well established, Weber's relationship to the Hegelian tradition is noted by Bendix who suggests that it has been rather neglected in previous studies of Weber's intellectual development. Bendix, Reinhard, Max Weber: An intellectual portrait (London 1966 [first published New York 1959]), p. 388Google Scholar and note. And, of course, Parsons has testified to the crucial importance of the German speculative tradition, and its recognition of varying levels of abstraction, for the initial development of his own theory: Parsons, Talcott, ‘On Building Social Systems Theory: A Personal History, Daedalus, XCIX (1970), p. 830Google Scholar.

(13) This is well brought out in the essays dealing with Green's ‘individualism’ in Lewis, H. D., Freedom and History (London 1962)Google Scholar, and in Kemp, J., Green, T.H. and the ethics of self-realization, in Vesey, G.N. (ed.), Reason and Reality, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, V (London 1972)Google Scholar.

(14) Quinton, among others, insists upon this very strongly (‘Absolute Idealism’, previously cited); see alsoHaldar, Hiralal, Neo-Hegelianism (London 1927)Google Scholar.

(15) Bradley, F.H., Ethical Studies (London 1876 [second editionGoogle Scholar, revised with additional notes by the author: Oxford 1927]); all citations are from the Oxford Paperback edition, with Introduction by Richard Wollheim (London 1962).

(16) It is an indication of the prevailing mode of treating such topics that Bradley pointedly remarks that ‘we will not call to our aid the life of animals, nor early societies, nor the course of history, but we will take men as they are now’ (p. 166).

(17) This he took to be the teaching of science: ‘On the descent of mental qualities, modern investigation and popular experience, as expressed in uneducated vulgar opinion, altogether, I believe, support one another’ (p. 169). In a note added in his 1924 revision, he had to reconsider: ‘Are Philosocivilized tendencies hereditary? How far is very doubtful’. He also recognised that his arguments only suggested the action of sociability as such: ‘It all holds good against individualism, but does not all hold in favour of this or that particular community as distinct from others of more or less the same general character’. Note added to p. 170.

(18) Bosanquet, Bernard, The Philosophical Theory of The State (London 1899)Google Scholar. All citations are from the fourth edition (London 1923).

(19) Durkheim, Éimile, Sociology and Philosophy, trans, by Pocock, D. F., with Introduction by Peristiany, J.G. (London 1953), pp. 59Google Scholar, 96.

(20) He even suggested that ‘wealth has weight because people give it weight; but no one need give weight to wealth in politics or social intercourse unless he likes’, and he took a very idealised view of how ‘labourers and mechanics’ could realize the qualities of a ‘gentleman’ (p. 289 and n.).

(21) This affinity, and its relation to the underlying optimism of Bosanquet's social philosophy, is commented upon in Collini, Stefan, Hobhouse, Bosanquet and the State: philosophical idealism and political argument in England 1880–1918, Past and Present, LXXII (1976), 86–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(22) Both quotations from the Memoir by Latta, Robert, prefixed to Ritchie's posthumously published Philosophical Studies (London 1905), pp. 8Google Scholar, 34.

(23) Ritchie, D.G., Social Evolution, first published in The International Journal of Ethics for 1896, and reprinted in Ritchie, D.G., Studies in Political and Social Ethics (London 1902), pp. 7–8Google Scholar.

(24) Ritchie, D.G., Nature and Mind. Some notes on Professor Ward's Gifford Lectures, Philosophical Review, IX (1900), pp. 265Google Scholar–6.

(25) Ritchie, D.G., What are Economic Laws?, Economic Review, II (1892), 359–77Google Scholar. The article was a reply to an article in the previous issue of the journal by the Cambridge economic historian, the Rev. William Cunningham, arguing that economics is a purely theoretical subject like logic or geometry and so had no place for the language of ‘causes’ and ‘laws’. They completed their exchanges in Ibid. pp. 538–44, and Ritchie modified his article very slightly in response to Cunningham's reply; all citations are from this version, as reprinted in Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, With Other Philosophical Studies (London 1893).

(26) In this context he remarked that ‘the attempt to escape history in dealing with human phenomena makes the restoration of the particular historical background of the theorist essential to the understanding of the professedly abstract theory’. He offered as examples Ricardian economics and Austinian jurisprudence: ‘In each case the attempt to work out “pure theory” unadulterated by history, has resulted in the “theory” being unintelligible and inexplicable except in the immediate surroundings of those who have enunciated it’ (p. 157 and n.).

(27) Cf. his discussions of language on pp. 168–70 with his claim on p. 171 that ‘there are very many economic phenomena which are dependent on individual action and social approval, e.g. the different forms of land-tenure, the degree in which freedom of bequest is permitted, and the kind of contracts which are sanctioned by law and custom. All these may be and have been altered—not indeed by the arbitrary will individuals acting in isolation, but by the will of individuals approved of by the general consent, or submitted to by the general acquiescence of the community’.

(28) Which he saw as dominated by ‘the dogmatic exaggeration of Mr. Benjamin Kidd’ and ‘the facile metaphors of the late Henry Drummond’. D.G. Ritchie, review of Mackintosh, Robert, From Comte to Benjamin Kidd: The Appeal to Biology or Evolution for Human Guidance (London 1899)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in The International Journal of Ethics (1899–1900), at p. 252Google Scholar. I take up the question of the attitude of Ritchie and the other Idealists towards existing ‘sociology’ in section III, below.

(29) The bulk of Ritchie's essays were written when he was in his thirties and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. After taking the chair of Logic and Metaphysics at St. Andrews in 1894, he was heavily involved in teaching and administrative responsibilities, and increasingly suffered various sorts of illness until his death in 1903. The duties of his chair meant that what writing he did do during these years was more concerned with the traditional problems of epistemology and meta-physics than with social theory (see the memoir by Latta, pp. 11–15).

(30) See, for example, Darwinism and Politics (London 1889)Google Scholar, The Principles of State Interference (London 1891)Google Scholar, and Studies in Political and Social Ethics (London 1902)Google Scholar, all of which are collections of his occasional political writings.

(31) Muirhead, J.H., Is the Family Declining, International Journal of Ethics, VII (1896), 33–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mackenzie, J. S., An Introduction to Social Philosophy (Glasgow 1890)Google Scholar—see also his Outlines of Social Philosophy (London 1918)Google Scholar, which was intended to replace the earlier volume, and his Lectures on Humanism, with Special Reference to its Bearings on Sociology (London 1907)Google Scholar; Hetherington, H.J.W. and Muirhead, J.H., Social Purpose: A contribution to a philosophy of civic society (London 1918)Google Scholar.

(32) Jones, Henry, The Working Faith of a Social Reformer and Other Essays (London 1910), pp. 51, 56Google Scholar.

(33) Sydney [sic] Ball, , Current Sociology, Mind, N.S., X (1901), pp. 161–2Google Scholar. Ball is not included in the standard discussions of British Idealism, presumably because he wrote so little actual philosophy, but he surely belongs here. He was a disciple of Green's at Oxford in the late 1870s before going to study at Göttingen; as ‘Greats’ Tutor at St. John's College, Oxford, he expounded a generally Idealist philosophy. His more specifically political writings (he was the founder of the Oxford Fabian Society and an advocate of ‘moral Socialism’) are certainly informed by an Idealist viewpoint. See Ball, Oona Howard, Sidney Ball: Memories and Impressions of‘An Ideal Don’ (Oxford 1923)Google Scholar.

(34) Dhummond, Henry, The Ascent of Man (London 1894), p. 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(35) Of course, such debates presupposed, rather than denied, the existence of some common ground. Exaggerating this point, C. J. Dewey has suggested that there was a ‘convergence’ between Sidgwick's moral and social theory and that of the Idealists, in ‘Cambridge Idealism’: utilitarian revisionists in late-nineteenth century Cambridge, Historical Journal, XVII (1974), 63–78Google Scholar. The evidence against this suggestion is presented in Stefan Collini, Idealism and ‘Cambridge Idealism’, ibid., XVIII (1975), 171–77.

(36) H. Sidgwick, The Scope and Methods of Economic Science (the Presidential Address to the ‘Economic Science and Statistics’ section of the British Association), reprinted in his Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses (London 1904). Quotation from this and the two succeeding essays is from this edition.

(37) Kidd, Benjamin, Social Evolution (London 1894)Google Scholar; the book ran to nineteen printings in its first four years, according to Halévy (Elie Halévy, Imperialism and the Rise of Labour [first edition, in French, 1926] London 1961, p. 19)Google Scholar. As a result of the success of his book, Kidd was asked to write the article on ‘Sociology’ for the 10th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1902, where he could authoritatively confirm the equation of the subject with biological social theory. This was the first edition of the Encyclopaedia to include an article on sociology, itself an indication of the increased attention recently paid to it.

(38) Social Evolution, pp. 33, 35.

(39) Political Prophecy and Sociology (first published in 1894 in The National Review), in Miscellaneous Essays, p. 233. Sidgwick perceptively noted that the success of Kidd's book reflected a very general belief in laws of social development: ‘When this attitude of mind is widely prevalent among educated persons generally, innovators whose social and political ideals are really in their inception quite unhistorical, are naturally led to adopt the historical method as an instrument of persuasion. In order to induce the world to accept any change they desire, they endeavour to show that the whole course of history has been preparing the way for it […] It is astonishing how easy it is plausibly to represent any desired result as the last inevitable outcome of the operation of the laws of social development’(pp. 218–9).

(40) The Relation of Ethics to Sociology (first published in 1899 in International Journal of Ethics), in Miscellaneous Essays, pp, 249, 263.

(41) Green, T.H., Prolegomena to Ethics, edited by Bradley, A.C. (Oxford 1883), p. 4Google Scholar. (The book was based on lectures given several years earlier). The first part of the book had already been published as three articles in Mind for 1882 under the revealing title ‘Can there be a natural science of man ?’ For the vogue of ‘anthropology’, see Burrow, Evolution and Society, ch. IV.

(42) Wallace, William, Ethics and Sociology, Mind, O.S., VIII (1883), 222–50Google Scholar, quotation at p. 225.

(43) Ritchie, D. G., Social Evolution, in Studies in Political and Social Ethics, pp. 1–2Google Scholar, 3.

(44) He seems to have come to his knowledge and appreciation of them between 1897 and 1899. In ‘The Relation of Sociology to Philosophy’, Mind, N.S., VI (1897), 1–8Google Scholar, he is much less well-in-formed, is rather more critical of sociology, and relies for some of his opinions of French sociology on Marcel Bernès, one of Durkheim's earliest critics (Lukes, , Émile Durkheim, p. 314)Google Scholar. Bosanquet retained a strong interest in Durkheim's work, though always critical of its ‘materialist’ tendency: see his essay ‘Atomism in History’ (a lecture of 1911) in Bosanquet, Bernard, Social and International Ideals (London 1917)Google Scholar.

(45) Bosanquet, , The Philosophical Theory of the State, pp. 40, 42, 47, 48–9Google Scholar; Ball, , Current Sociology, p. 171Google Scholar.

(46) Mackenzie, , Lectures on Humanism, pp. 1, 5–6, 9Google Scholar; he was referring to the exposition of the idea of ‘orthogenic evolution’ as the line of ‘the growth of mind’ in Hobhouse, L.T., Democracy and Reaction (London 1904)Google Scholar, ch. iv. It is hardly surprising that Idealists looked favourably on this concept, since it was essentially a working out of an Idealist notion of teleology in biological terms. (I am, at present, engaged in a much larger study of the place of Hobhouse's thought in relation to the turn-of-the-century debates about Liberalism and Sociology, in which I hope to Neodocument and substantiate this interpretation more fully).

(47) Hetherington, and Muirhead, , Social Purpose, pp. 78, 100, 119Google Scholar. The passages selected for praise are usually Lonthose where these writers come closest to an Idealist view, e.g. p. 100 on Maclver's recognition of the different degrees to which individuals can enter into the ‘real end of society’.

(48) I have in mind the way in which Hobhouse, Maclver, Ginsberg and others made a criticism of Idealism, particularly the theory of the General Will, one of the foundations on which they built their own sociological constructions. For Hobhouse, , in addition to his famous The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London 1918)Google Scholar, see how his own theory is related to a criticism of Idealism in his essay Sociology, in McDowall, R. J. S. (ed.), The Mind (London 1927)Google Scholar; Maciver, R. M., Community, A sociological study (London 1917)Google Scholar, esp. Appendix on ‘A Criticism of the Neo-Hegelian Identification of Society and State’; also his The Modern State (London 1926)Google Scholar; Ginsberg, Morris, Is there a General Will?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XX (1920), 89–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also his Sociology (London 1934)Google Scholar. I develop this point more fully below.

(49) Bendix, and Roth, , Scholarship and Partisanship, p. 37Google Scholar.

(50) Just how long is well brought out in Torrance, John, Max Weber: methods and the man, Archives européennes de sociologie, XV (1974), 127–165Google Scholar.

(51) Lukes, , Émile Durkheim, p. 66Google Scholar, quoting the contemporary opinion of A. Espinas.

(52) Anon, review of Bouglé, C., Les sciences sociales en Allemagne, in Mind, N.S., VI (1897), 426–7Google Scholar.

(53) Actually, despite the merits of Lukes' Émile Durkheim and Clark's Prophets and Patrons, the initial basis of the Durkheimian ascendancy is still rather elusive.

(54) This section draws on material discussed more fully in Collini, Hobhouse, Bosanquet and the State.

(55) Quoted by Latta in the memoir in Ritchie, , Philosophical Studies, p. 42Google Scholar.

(56) Among the best known examples areAron, R., The Main Currents of Sociological Thought, I (London 1968 [first published in French in 1965]), esp. IntroductionGoogle Scholar; Runciman, W.G., Social Science and Political Theory (Cambridge 1963)Google Scholar, passim; Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision (Boston 1960)Google Scholar, esp. chs. IX and X.

(57) Abrams rightly remarks that ‘modern British sociology was built, more than anything else, as a defense against Spencer’ (Origins of British Sociology, p. 67), but by 1920 the negative importance of Bosanquet was almost as great.

(58) Abrams, , Origins of British Sociology, p. 87Google Scholar; MacRae, Donald G., Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse 1864–1929, L.S.E. The Magazine of the London School of Economics, XLIII (1972), p. 10Google Scholar. Cf. Fletcher, Ronald, The Making of Sociology, Vol. II (London 1971), p. 135Google Scholar; ‘Hobhouse, from 1907 to his death in 1929, was probably the most dominant influence on the making of sociology in Britain’.

(59) Hobhouse, L. T., The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London 1918), pp. 17, 77Google Scholar.

(60) Hobhouse, L.T., ‘Sociology’ (first Intropublished in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. XI (New York 1920))Google Scholar, in Hobhouse, L. T., Sociology and Philosophy: A centenary collection of essays and articles edited by Ginsberg, Morris (London 1966), p. 23Google Scholar. See also p. 25: ‘The political philosopher is convinced that the state is society’. And see the attack on Idealism in Hobhouse, ‘Sociology’ in R. J. MacDowall (ed.), The Mind, previously cited.

(61) Although not finally published until 1917, the Preface is dated September 1914. For further information see his autobiography, As a Tale that is Told: The autobiography of R. M. MacIver (Chicago 1968)Google Scholar, and Bramson, L. (ed.), On Community, Society and Power: Selected writings of R. M. MacIver (Chicago 1970)Google Scholar, esp. ‘Introduction’.

(62) MacIver, , As a Tale that is Told, p. 65Google Scholar; he denied the claims of sociology in his first article, Ethics and Politics, International Journal of Ethics, XX (1909), 72–86, esp. p. 77 and nGoogle Scholar.

(63) MacIver, R. M., Society and State, Philosophical Review, XX (1911), 30–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 34. The substance of this article was reproduced as an Appendix to Community, entitled ‘A Criticism of the Neo-Hegelian Identification of “Society” and “State”’.

(64) As a Tale that is Told, pp. 75–103. Of course, his contribution might well have been very different had he stayed in Britain: it is hardly a wild exaggeration of the influence of institutions to suggest that one would be more prone to write sociological textbooks as Professor of Sociology at Columbia than as Assistant to the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen.

(65) And like Hobhouse he returned to the charge in later works (see, for example, The Modern State (New York 1926))Google Scholar, and eventually obtained the ultimate recognition of the importance of his criticisms—a reply in Mind from Muirhead, the self-appointed guardian of the honour of the memory of Idealism: Muirhead, J. H., Professor MacIver's Criticism of the Idealistic Theory of the General Will, Mind, N.S., XXXVII (1928), 82–7Google Scholar.

(66) Consider McDougall's rejection of Idealism in The Group Mind (London 1920)Google Scholar or Wallas's, in Human Nature in Politics (London 1908)Google Scholar; also his Our Social Heritage (New Haven, Conn., 1921), for example p. 202Google Scholar. Indeed there were so many such attacks that in 1924 Muirhead had to write three articles by way of reply: see his ‘Recent Criticisms of the Idealist theory of the General Will’, Mind, N.S., XXXIII (1934), 166–75, 233–41. 361–68Google Scholar.

(67) And although the pluralists did not write sociology as such, theirs was in a sense an inherently ‘sociological’ political theory—and certainly one which defined itself in opposition to Idealism as represented by Bosanquet. For some early examples of this, see Barker, E., The Discredited State, The Political Quarterly, V (1915), 101–121Google Scholar; Cole, G. D. H., Conflicting Social Obligations, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XV (1914–1915), 140–159Google Scholar (and reply by Bosanquet, Ibid.160–3); Laski, H. J., Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven 1917)Google Scholar. At this time, A. D. Lindsay, too, was a critic of Bosanquet who was sympathetic to pluralism; see his articles, The State in Recent Political Theory, The Political Quarterly, I (1914), 128–145Google Scholar; The State and Society, in Creighton, L. et al. , The International Crisis (London 1916)Google Scholar; and his later Bosanquet's Theory of the Will, General, Aristotelian Society Supplement (1928)Google Scholar (a symposium with H. J. Laski). But the relation with Idealism, in general terms, is ambivalent in these writers: Rousseau is appealed to more than any other philosopher, and there is one fairly obvious line of descent which can be traced back through Figgis and Maitland to Gierke and German historical jurisprudence. And in fact, I think it could be argued that the ultimate influence of some of the figures involved in this movement was to frustrate rather than foster the growth of distinctively sociological studies in Britain. Consider, for example, the strategic position of Barker who developed his own strongly classical version of ‘Political Science’ at Cambridge, or of Lindsay who continued the tradition of ‘Politics, Ethics and Economics’ which ultimately issued in the P.P.E. course, which for so long was Oxford's answer to sociology.

(68) Muirhead later wrote, exaggeratedly but not fantastically, that ‘British Idealism has been from the first a philosophy of religion’. The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London 1931), p. 197Google Scholar. Melvin Richter, among others, has developed the idea of Idealism as a ‘substitute faith’; see his The Politics of Conscience: T.H. Green and his Age (London 1964)Google Scholar.

(69) Bosanquet, , Philosophical Theory of the State, pp. 240, 47Google Scholar.

(70) Jones, , Working Faith of a Social Reformer, pp. 6, 17Google Scholar.

(71) Hetherington, and Muirhead, , Social Purpose, pp. 10, 117, 121Google Scholar.

(72) Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London 1958)Google Scholar; one of the best discussions of it is Macintyre, Alasdair, The Idea of a Social Science, reprinted in Ryan, Alan (ed.), The Philosophy of Social Explanation (London 1973)Google Scholar, which also contains other articles relevant to this controversy.

(73) R. M. MacIver, Sociology 1904–29, reprinted in Bramson (ed.), On Community, Society and Power, p. 229.

(74) Bradley, F. H., The Presuppositions of Critical History (London 1874)Google Scholar, reprinted in his Collected Essays, Vol. I (Oxford 1935)Google Scholar. There is a useful critical edition with commentary by Pierre Fruchon (Paris 1965).

(75) Except in a few occasional essays, ranging from Ritchie, D. G., Rationality in History, in Seth, A. and Haldane, R. B. (eds.), Essays in Philosophical Criticism (London 1883)Google Scholar, to A. S. Pringle-Pattison (to which Seth changed his name in 1898), The Philosophy of History, Proceedings of the British Academy (1921–1923), pp. 515–29Google Scholar. I am grateful to Mr. Peter Nicholson for this last reference, and generally for allowing me to profit from his unrivalled command of the literature of British Idealism.

(76) Collingwood was drawn to the philosophical problems of history at a very early stage, but his most famous statement was, of course, The Idea of History (Oxford 1946)Google Scholar; see p. 145 where he quotes Bosanquet's characterization of history as ‘the doubtful story of successive events’ which, constituted ‘a hybrid form of experience, incapable of any considerable degree of “being or trueness”’, and criticizes him for ‘conceiving the proper object of knowledge platonically as a timeless world of pure universality’. By contrast, he referred to Oakeshott's, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge 1933)CrossRefGoogle Scholar as ‘the highwater mark of English thought upon history’ (p. 159). Oakeshott, and even to some extent Collingwood himself, ought perhaps to be regarded as sympathetic to the tradition of British Idealism rather than as belonging to it.

(77) Bosanquet's, History of Aesthetic (London 1892)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is a well-known example of the first category, and Green's, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (first published separately, London, 1895)Google Scholar of the second. In addition, of course, they undertook or sponsored the translation of important philosophical works from the German (Kant and Lotze as well as Hegel), and that indefatigable entrepreneur of philosophy, J. H. Muirhead, was involved in several enterprises in the history of philosophy, and also edited the (subsequently named) ‘Muirhead Library of Philosophy’ for fifty years.

(78) The attitude of many historians is captured by Maitland's reported remark about Political Science—“either it is history or it is humbug”—but even those who were more sympathetic, like J. B. Bury or Oscar Browning, accepted that, as the latter put it, ‘at present the whole field of sociology is too vague for our purposes’. Both quotations from Clark, G. Kitson, A hundred years of the teaching of history at Cambridge 1873–1973, Historical Journal, XVI (1973), p. 543Google Scholar. For an example of Bury's positivistic sympathy for sociology, see: The place of modern history in the perspective of knowledge (1904), in Temperley, Harold (ed.), Selected Essays of J. B. Bury (Cambridge 1930)Google Scholar. Spencer was notoriously hostile to the historians and constantly berated ‘the ordinary historian who, thinking of little else but the doings of kings, court-intrigues, and international quarrels, victories and defeats, concerning all of which no definite forecasts are possible, asserts there is no social science’. Spencer, Herbert, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (London 1904): II, p. 253Google Scholar.

(79) I am grateful for discussions with John Burrow on this point, but my remarks are too brief to do justice to the issues involved. For a properly subtle account of the transcomplexity of one aspect of English historical thought during this period, see Burrow, J. W., ‘The Village Community’ and the Uses of History in Late-nineteenth Century England, in McKendrick, N. (ed.), Historcical Perspectives: Studies in English thought and society (London 1974)Google Scholar.

(80) Consider his letter to Sidgwick of 22.1.1900 about the relation of Gierke's theory to that of the British Idealists, and to Pollock of 18.10.1890 where he complains that Gierke's ‘splendid’ book is ‘too metaphysical’. Fifoot, C. H. S. (ed.), The Letters of F. W. Maitland (Cambridge 1965), pp. 209Google Scholar, 86. In his famous ‘Introduction’ to his translation of part of Gierkes Die Deutsche Gennossenschaftsrecht, he is drily scornful both of ‘a sociology emulous of the physical sciences [which] discourses of organs and organisms and social tissue’, and, ‘among the summits of philosophy’, of ‘a doctrine, which makes some way in England, [which] ascribes to the State, or, more vaguely, the “community”, not only a real will, but “the” real will’. Gierke, O., Political Theories of the Middle Ages, translated and introduced by Maitland, F. W. (Cambridge 1900), p. xiGoogle Scholar.

(81) See Toynbee, Arnold, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (first published 1884Google Scholar, reprinted with Introducical thought tion by T. S. Ashton, Newton Abbot, 1969); also Toynbee, Gertrude (ed.), Reminiscences and Letters of Joseph and Arnold Toynbee (London, n.d. [1910])Google Scholar.

(82) It is worth noting that Bosanquet's very brief discussion of historical method (‘Atomism in History’) takes its examples from the French debate between the disciples of Langlois and Seignobos (and the ‘slips of paper’ method—his strictures on this resemble Collingwood's on ‘scissors drily and paste’ history), and those of Durkheim.

(83) Also, of course, the growth of anthropological interest was stimulated by Britain's imperial connections, though it is much too simplistic to regard it as some Cornform of ‘colonial ideology’. Nor does it seem to me to be very helpful to suggest that ‘the paradox of an anthropology where there was no sociology’ (which is anyway an anachronistic description) is to be resolved by recognising how the dominant ideology meant that Britain could only ‘export its totalisations’ (Anderson, Components of the National Culture', pp. 56, 47).

(84) Sidgwick, , Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses, p. 263Google Scholar.

(85) As quoted byBosanquet, , The Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 122Google Scholar.

(86) See particularly Murray, Gilbert, The Rise of the Greek Epic (Oxford 1907)Google Scholar; Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis, A study of the social origins of Greek religion (Cambridge 1912)Google Scholar; Cornford, F. M., From Religion to Philosophy (London 1912)Google Scholar.

(87) For an example of Harrison's attraction to Durkheimianism see Lukes, , Émile Durkheim, p. 399 and nGoogle Scholar.

(88) Bosanquet, , Social and International Ideals, pp. 34, 40Google Scholar. In the second edition of The Philosophical Theory of the State (1910), Bosanquet also recognized that ‘a new spirit is abroad in the study of Greek antiquity’ and again singled out Murray's book for praise (p. 31, n.).

(89) See Malinowski, Bronislaw, A Scientific Theory of Culture (Chapel Hill 1944)Google Scholar. British anthropology was, of course, more diverse than this reference, and indeed this paragraph, suggests, but its diversity does not seem to have attracted the Idealists' attention.

(90) For some indication of the range of this controversy, see the addresses collected in Smyth, R. L. (ed.), Essays in Economic Method 1860–1913 (London 1962)Google Scholar.

(91) Parsons, Talcott, Wants and Activities in Marshall, Quarterly Journal of Economics, XLVI (1931–1932), 101–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Economics and Sociology: Marshall in relation to the thought of his time, Ibid. 316–47. (The substance of the first, but much less of the second, article was reproduced as ch. IV of The Structure of Social Action). Marshall, Alfred, Principles of Economics (London 1890, eighth edition: 1920), p, 1Google Scholar.

(92) Winch, Donald, Marginalism and the boundaries of economic science, The History of Political Economy, IV (1972), 325–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Torrance (‘Emergence of sociology in Austria’, section 5) considers the counter-sociological influence of marginalist economics in Austria where it was also well established.

(93) Hutchison, T. W., A Review of Economic Doctrines 1870–1929 (Oxford 1953)Google Scholar concludes that at the end of his period ‘the fundamental motivating assumptions and beliefs of British economists remained essentially similar in outline to those which had moved Jevons and Marshall’ at the beginning (p. 430).

(94) Sidgwick, , Scope, and methods of economic science (in Miscellaneous Essays), p. 198Google Scholar; Marshall, , Principles, p. 771Google Scholar, n.; Pigou, A. C., quoted in Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines, p. 430Google Scholar. A. W. Coats has indicated the extent of Marshall's authority during this period, particularly in Sociological aspects of British economic thought 1880–1930, Journal of Political Economy, LXXV (1967), 706–29Google Scholar.

(95) As Hutchison points out, in Britain the emphasis ‘was much more strongly on the “history” and less on the “economics”, than in the work of Schmoller and his followers’ (p. 21). Cliffe Leslie was probably the only significant exception, but the views of figures as different as Ashley and Marshall would need to be considered in more detail.

(96) DrRitchie, D. G.,. Cunningham and economic laws, Economic Review, II (1892), p. 541Google Scholar.

(97) Marshall, , Principles, p. 689Google Scholar.

(98) Bosanquet, , Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 28Google Scholar. It was by concentrating on this concept that Parsons was later to demonstrate so convincingly the fundamental instability of Marshall's theoretical system, in that such surreptitiously nor-sociolmative factors were a way of smuggling in implicitly sociological conceptions for which, explicitly, there was no place in the neo-classical economics of marginal utility see, particularly, Parsons, ‘Wants and Activities in Marshall’).

(99) Bonar is not strictly an Idealist philosopher, being for the greater part of his life a government official who also wrote bookeconomics: but as a pupil of Caird at Glas-widegow and of Green at Balliol, and then an purassociate of Muirhead and others in their educational enterprises, he certainly moved in the ambiance of Idealism, and his major work, Philosophy and Political Economy in some of their Historical Relations, published in Muirhead's Library of Philosophy in 1893, is informed by a broadly Idealist approach.

(100) Bonar, , op. cit., pp. 4–5Google Scholar. The only place where Bonar did mention ‘sociology’ was in referring to the application of evolutionary theory (p. 361).

(101) As Smith himself later described his development, whatever light he came to see was somewhat less than blinding. Returning from ‘a long holiday […] during most of which I let my mind lie fallow’, and ‘finding myself in Naples […] I was struck with the evidence which the booksellers' shops there displayed of a widespread local interest in philosophy, and purassociate chased two or three volumes by Benedetto Croce whose name was only slightly known to me’. ‘On my return to Oxford I found myself through my election to the Waynflete Professorship of Moral and Meta-physical Philosophy, assigned the task of thinking out a philosophy’ in which task, to judge by the results, his browsing stood him in good stead. J. A. Smith, Philosophy as the Development of the Notion and Reality of Self-consciousness, in Head, J. H. Muir (ed.) Contemporary British Philosophy: personal statements, Second Series (London 1925), PP. 320–1Google Scholar.

(102) As the organ of the Oxford Christian Social Union and the vehicle for moralising on the social problem, the Economic Review was always a likely base from which to launch attacks on orthodox economics but never a likely source of a new theory. It attracted, however, the requisite amount of disdain and hostility from the Marshallians—see Coats, Sociological Aspects of British Economic Thought.

(103) Smith, J. A., On Some Fundamental Notions of Economics, I: Wealth, Economic Review, XXIII (1913), 366–81, quotation at pp. 371, 380Google Scholar.

(104) J. A. Smith, Ibid. II: Capital, and III: Labour, ibid., XXIV (1914), 48–64, and 283–97. Smith could hardly have been encouraged to pursue the argument of his first article by the stinging reply which it elicited from a representative of orthodoxy: P. Sargant-Florence, Professor Smith and Dr. Marshall, ibid., XXIV (1914), 170–85. The correspondence between Marising shall and Cannan reveals their reaction to Smith's attack—they regarded it as ‘bosh’—and their decision to get a junior Marshallian to reply to it; see Coats, Sociological aspects of British economic thought.

(105) Caird, Edward, The Moral Aspect of the Economical Problem (London 1888), p. 17Google Scholar.

(106) Hughes, , Consciousness and Society, p.76Google Scholar. Irving Zeitlin makes the point by asking us to substitute, for the sociologists he considers, ‘an equal number of different theorists who never explicitly participated in the debate with Marx's ghost, and reflect on whether social theory would then be of equal quality’.Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory (Englewood Cliffs 1968), p. 322Google Scholar.

(107) Thus Giddens, remarking ‘upon the fact that no British author of comparable status to Durkheim or Weber emerged in their generation’, argued ‘it is unquestionably true that one factor responsible was the absence, in Britain, of a really significant revolutionary socialist movement’. Giddens, Anthony, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber (Cambridge 1971), p. 185CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stedman Jones goes further and finds the fact that ‘Marx's work evoked little response in England’ to be the reason why Britain did not ‘participate’ in these innovations in social thought. Jones, G. Stbdman, History: the poverty of empiricism, in Blackburn, Robin (ed.), Ideology in Social Science: Readings in critical social theory (London 1972), pp. 100–102Google Scholar.

(108) Taylor, Charles, Marxism and Empiricism, in Williams, Bernard and Montefiore, Alan (eds.), British Analytical Philosophy (London 1966), pp. 227–230Google Scholar. Beyond suggesting that Idealism ‘was only an interlude in a long tradition of empiricism’, Taylor does not attempt to answer this question; but to be fair to him it must be said that he makes no claims to be considering the issue historically in his brief analytical essay.

(109) Bosanquet, for example, remarked of ‘the materialist conception of history’: ‘Primarily connected with the name of Marx, it may also be illustrated by many contentions of Buckle and Le Play, and has become, indeed, the formula of a school’, Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 26.

(110) For a recent account of the Marxism Briof this period in these terms, see Bottomore, Tom, Marxist Sociology (London 1975) ch. IICrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(111) Wolfe, Willard, From Radicalism to Socialism: men and ideas in the formation of Fabian socialist doctrines 1881–1889 (London 1975), p. 208Google Scholar. See also DrHobsbawm, Eric, Marx and the Victorian critics, in his Labouring Men (London 1964)Google Scholar.

(112) Macintyre, Stuart, Marxism in Britain 1917–33, unpublished Ph. D. dissertation (Cambridge 1976), pp. 7–8Google Scholar. I am grateful to Dr. Macintyre for permission to quote from his dissertation.

(113) Bosanquet, , The Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 29Google Scholar.

(114) For example, by Ball, , Current Sociology, p. 169Google Scholar. It was also treated in this way in a classification of ‘sociologies’ in Barth, P., Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie (Leipzig 1897)Google Scholar, which received some attention in Britain (it was reviewed by Hicks, G. Dawes in Mind, N.S., VIII (1899), 114–7)Google Scholar. It may well have accounted for much of the difference between Bosanquet's 1897 article and the corresponding chapter in The Philosophical Theory, since he seems to have read Barth's book and in the latter work follows his classification in several places.

(115) Ritchie, , What are economic laws?, 173Google Scholar.

(116) Bosanquet, , Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 28Google Scholar. Bonar dealt at some length with Marx's economics, but found his theory ‘as strictly deductive as Ricardo's’, and repeated the usual criticisms of his one-sided view of history. It is perhaps some indication of the distance between our understanding of Marxism and Bonar's that he found Engels ‘more philosophical than Marx' and endowed with ‘a much clearer philosophical vision than his master’. Bonar, , Philosophy and Political Economy, pp. 344, XVI, 346Google Scholar.

(117) Hobhouse, L. T., Liberalism (New York 1964 [first published London, 1911]), p. 88Google Scholar.

(118) Croce, Benedetto, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, translated by Meredith, C. M., with Introduction by Lindsay, A. D. (London 1913), pp. XII–XIIIGoogle Scholar. Lindsay was to make a further contribution to the recovery of the Hegelian dimension of Marx in Britain with his Karl Marx's Capital: An introductory essay (London 1925)Google Scholar, which grew out of that fusion of the Glasgow-Balliol Social tradition with W. E. A. and Clydeside experience so characteristic of British socialist thought at this time. See Drusilla Scott, A. D.Lindsay, A biography (Oxford 1971), esp. pp. 97–9Google Scholar.

(119) This impression is borne out by the relevant parts ofPierson, Stanley, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism: The struggle for a new consciousness (Ithaca 1973)Google Scholar.

(120) On this tradition, see Abrams, , Origins of British Sociology, and , T.S. and Simey, M. B., Charles Booth: social scientist (Oxford 1960)Google Scholar.

(121) The different sorts of ‘Individualism’, and the variety of relations between them, are discriminated in Lukes, Steven, Individualism (Oxford 1973)Google Scholar.

(122) This is discussed more fully in Collini, Hobhouse, Bosanquet and the State.

(123) See Mowat, C. L., The Charity Organization Society 1869–1913 (London 1961)Google Scholar, and, for a more critical analysis, Jones, G. Stedman, Outcast London. A study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society (Oxford 1971)Google Scholar, Part III.

(124) Bosanquet, Bernard (ed.), Aspects of the Social Problem (London 1895), pp. V, 103Google Scholar. His wife, Helen Dendy Bosan quet, was a prominent C.O.S. publicist and social investigator, and a well-known writer on such topics, as social work and the family.

(125) Bosanquet, , Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 4Google Scholar.

(126) Muirhead, J. H., The Starting Point of Poor Law Reform (London 1910)(first published in 1909 under the title By What Authority?), p. 88Google Scholar.

(127) See, for example, the way in which Hobhouse puts his findings to the service of the campaign for a minimum wage and related welfare measures; Hobhouse, L. T., The Labour Movement (third edition: London 1912), esp. pp. 31–38Google Scholar.

(128) The Webbs' ‘institutional’ studies might need to be considered further in this context, but while ‘The art of note-taking’ was the highpoint of their methodological reflections, they were unlikely to be attended to sympathetically by the Idealists.

(129) See, for example, Stedman Jones, Outcast London. The continuity of attitudes towards poverty is emphasized, from a rather different point of view, in Hen-Nock, E. P., Poverty and Social Theory in England: The experience of the 1880s, Social History, I (1976), 67–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(130) Giffen, Robert, The Progress of the Working Classes, Journal of the Statistical Society (1883)Google Scholar (reprinted in Abrams, Origins of British Sociology, pp. 157–76) was probably the best-known statement of this view. But a similar account of the facts, though a different evaluation of them, can be found in writers of very different political persuasion—e.g. Hobson, J. A., The Crisis of Liberalism: new issues of democracy (London 1909)Google Scholar (repr., edited by P.F. Clarke, Brighton 1974), pp. 159–60.

(131) Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is generally considered simply as a diluted—and distorted—version of Weber's Protestant Ethic. Here it is worth recalling that the book was initially given as the Scott Holland Memorial Lectures, and in the Preface Bishop Gore emphasized their common task of ‘reawakening the conscience of Englishmen to the social meaning of the religion of the Incarnation’ and ‘the need of accurate research into the causes which have so disastrously obscured it’. In similar Christian Social Union vein, Tawney made clear that he hoped his work would be a contribution to the current debate about setting religious or moral limits to economic activity, and hence ‘to see from a new angle the problems of our own age’, Tawney, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A historical study (London 1926 [lectures given in 1922]), pp. IX–X, 13, 5Google Scholar; see also pp. 277, 279, 283.

(132) Bosanquet, Bernard, The Antithesis between Individualism and Socialism Philosophically Considered, in The Civilization of Christendom and Other Studies (London 1893), pp. 302–357Google Scholar.

(133) Consider, for example, Andreski's injuction to ignore ‘everything that appears […] to be mistaken or superseded’ in the work of previous ‘sociologists’, their ‘errors and foibles’, on the grounds that ‘if we cut out from the works of old masters what has become untenable, their contributions dovetail like parts of a jigsaw puzzle’. Andheski, Stanislav, ‘Introduction’ to Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology (London 1969), pp. IX–XGoogle Scholar.

(134) Particularly in American text-books: Spencer, Tarde and Hobhouse figured much more prominently than Marx, Durkheim and Weber, and of course native figures like Ward, Giddings and Small received a great deal of attention, Before long, it may seerr. appropriate to begin a book by asking ‘Who now reads Parsons?’

(135) Peel, J. D. Y., Herbert Spencer: The evolution of a sociologist (London 1971), pp. 239–40Google Scholar.

(136) Giddens, , Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, pp. VIII, 244Google Scholar.

* This article was written in the Spring of 1976, and a shortened version was presented at the 1976 Social Science History Association Conference in Philadelphia. I am indebted to the University of Sussex and to the Committee on the History and Epistemology of the Sciences of Man for sponsoring my participation in that conference, and I am grateful to many friends and colleagues there and elsewhere for suggestions and criticisms.—This article was to have been published in 1977, but, for editorial reasons, had to be held over to the present issue. The editors wish to express their regret at this delay.