THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLOGY IN FRANCE: THE HISTORICAL DISCONTINUITY OF THE COUNTERREVOLUTION

From the beginning, sociology has aspired to scientific status, yet attainment of this goal has always proved elusive, and sociology is currently beset by a severe crisis of confidence. The historical roots of this crisis have been concealed because the history of sociology has usually been written in the "whig" mode as a record of its progress toward greater scientific success.;The roots of the present crisis of legitimacy in sociology can be traced back to the tremendous impact that the fundamental historical discontinuity of the French Revolution had on the formation of sociology as a distinct discourse in the early nineteenth century. In the eyes of Maistre and Bonald, the two leading theorists of the Counterrevolution, the French Revolution proved that political regimes were inherently unstable. Only the enduring social relationships of language, religion, family, and community could be relied on in a world of endemic political crisis and discontinuity.;The Counterrevolution made the "social" the central concept of a new discourse about society, which replaced the traditional discourse of classical political theory, which had traditionally made the "political" the highest virtue of collective life. Although Saint-Simon and Comte, who are usually considered the founders of sociology, ostensibly differed from Maistre and Bonald in many ways, they absorbed the idea of the "social" into their systems of thought, and its various aspects became the distinctive domains of future sociological research.;Modern sociology is torn between its scientific and moral objectives. Its true history reveals that it began as a moral endeavor to reconstruct the social fabric of a shattered worldview. The strategy of discontinuity could be applied to the history of the other social sciences, which are also in crisis.;An alternative approach used here inverts the normal focus on the "winners," the successful and obviously influential thinkers in the history of sociology. It considers instead the largely neglected contributions of some of the "losers" of history, the theorists of the French Counterrevolution, to the early history of sociology. Adapting some of the theoretical insights of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, this method also looks for dramatic discontinuities like the French Revolution, which have interrupted the intellectual continuity that is usually taken for granted in whig intellectual history.