II.
A society is composed of families: it is not itself a greater family. Neither is it an assemblage of contiguous families living together. The family and society are distinguished from each other by very clear differential characteristics.
The family is a “union” of an essentially moral nature, and secondarily intellectual.[256] The chief constituent of the family is found in the affective functions, (the mutual tenderness of husband and wife, of the parents for the children, etc.). Society is, on the contrary, not a union, but a co-operation” of an essentially intellectual nature, and secondarily moral. Undoubtedly, an association of men cannot be conceived as subsisting without their sympathetic feelings being interested in it. Nevertheless, when we pass from the consideration of the single family to the co-ordination of several families, the principle of co-operation necessarily ends by prevailing. So Rousseau’s theory is not false on all points. Metaphysical philosophy, especially in France, says Comte, has undoubtedly committed an error of capital importance by attributing the very creation of the social state to this principle, for it is evident that co-operation, far from having been able to produce society, presupposes it. But if we confine this assertion to society properly so-called (the family being set aside) it is not so startling. For, if co-operation could not “create” human societies, it alone at least, has been able to “communicate to these spontaneous associations a definite character and a lasting consistency.”
This co-operation is called to-day “the division of labour.” Comte knew this expression: Adam Smith had already made it famous. If Comte did not make use of it, it is because economists had limited the idea and the term to “merely material usages.” He wishes, on the contrary, to consider co-operation in the whole of its rational extension. It then becomes an extremely general principle, dominating the whole of social statics, and finding its application in the greatest as in the most limited social groups. This principle leads us to regard not only individuals and classes, but also, in many respects the different peoples, “as participating together in a suitable way and a determined degree, in an immense common work whose development unites those actually co-operating with the series of their successors and their predecessors.” Thus we see the relation between the dynamical and the statical laws of social continuity which binds successive generations, with social solidarity which unites men living in the same period. This solidarity arises especially from the division of labour. The latter is the “primitive cause” of the extension and of the growing complexity of the social organism, which may be conceived as comprising the whole of our species.
The founder of social statics, Aristotle, had formulated its most general principle: “separation of offices and combination of efforts.”[257] Without the “separation of offices” there would only be an agglomeration of families and not a society. But the indispensable counterpart of the separation of offices is the combination of efforts, that is to say a general thought which directs them, in a word, a government.
Thus, the ideas of society and of government are implied in one another. Indeed, there is no society properly so-called without the division of social labour, a division immediately generating consequences which make government a necessity. Society in developing grows more and more complex. Instead of a small group of a few families, it ends by numbering hundreds, thousands, and even millions of them. At the same time the division of labour often gives rise to individual differences, at once intellectual and moral. Minds are developed, but each one according to its special line, at least according to that of his profession or of his class. The communion of feeling and of thought tends to become weaker. This last is not the least serious inconvenience. Smith had already pointed it out from the economical point of view, and the utopian reformers, Fourier especially, have shown strongly its extent and its dangers.
This is, according to Comte, what it is the mission of a government to remedy. Its social function consists in repressing and in opposing as far as possible the tendency to the scattering of ideas, of feelings, and of interests. This tendency is the result of the very development of society, and left to itself, it would end by stopping this development. Government may thus be defined in its abstract and elementary function as “the necessary reaction of the whole upon the parts.”[258]
Government, at first, appears “spontaneously.” As Hobbes clearly saw, it is then in the hands of those to whom force belongs. But it soon becomes regularised and organised into a definite social function. As, in the development of the sciences, the growing differentiation of their object rendered research more and more special, and at last caused the appearance of a particular class of learned men, (the philosophers), whose own function is to attempt the synthesis of human knowledge; so, in the division constantly more ramified of social functions, a new one had to be constituted, “capable of intervening in the accomplishment of all the others, unceasingly to recall in them the thought of the whole, and the feeling of common solidarity.”
We are then entirely mistaken, when we want to reduce the function of government to “vulgar attributions of material order.” Government is not a simple institution of police, a guarantee of public order, nor, as was said in the XVIII. century, a necessary evil which will reduce itself to a minimum with progress, or even will tend to disappear. On the contrary, the more a society is developed, the more indispensable the function of government becomes in it, the more importance it assumes. Progress in the future will make a more and more considerable place for it in social life. Although it does not itself realise any determined social progress, government necessarily contributes to whatever progress society can make.
If the idea of the division of labour is not to be understood in a purely material and economical sense, the principle of social cohesion, which Comte calls government, cannot any more be founded upon a single conformity of interests. This would not suffice to maintain a human society. For such a society to subsist, there must be a certain “communion” of beliefs, and feelings of sympathy, which themselves depend in a certain measure upon these beliefs. Undoubtedly, society could not resist a deep and durable divergence of interests. But it would still less resist incompatibility of feelings, and especially of beliefs among its members. In a word, the basis of human society is intellectual before all things. And, as the first object of the mind of man is the interpretation of the world which surrounds him, the constitutive basis of human society is religion. The groups which are united in the same general conception of the universe are part of the same society. Hence, in the past, we see endless conflicts between the societies whose religions were different; hence, in the future, the unity of the human species will finally become entirely rallied around positive religion.
If this is the case, government, which is by definition the highest and most general social function which represents the “spirit of the whole,” cannot be confined to temporal action. Its object is not only to assure the security of property and of persons. It must at the same time strengthen and preserve that “communion” of beliefs which is the basis of human society. It must guarantee the union of intellects, by establishing and teaching universally accepted principles. It must, in a word, be a “spiritual power.” In this capacity, in positive society, it will exercise an action at least equal to that enjoyed by the catholic clergy in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, as long as the Popes preserved its supreme direction.
These consequences are legitimately drawn from Comte’s principles. His philosophy made social reorganisation dependent upon the reorganisation of morals, and the reorganisation of morals upon that of ideas. He was, therefore, in social statics, to seek for the foundation of society in the harmony of intellects and to define government by its spiritual as much as by its temporal function.