J.S. MILL: SOCIOLOGY

See reading guide, Mill, System of Logic.
Lecture: Mill's Logic of social science.

In his analysis of the logic of history and social sciences Mill was much influenced by French writers of the Saint Simonian school and especially Auguste Comte. This school divided history into 'organic' and 'transitional' periods. In organic periods human personalities and institutions are coherently organized in a stable system, the workings of each part complementing and reinforcing the workings of the others. But this cannot last forever, stability is never absolute: the system starts to come apart, there follows a period of more or less disorder and confusion, in which the parts of society pull against or collide with one another, personalities and institutions do not suit one another, people are dissatisfied and disappointed and change becomes rapid - until out of the struggle another stable organization develops, another 'organic' period. So on this view it is possible to draw non-arbitrary lines across history, to recognise distinct 'periods', though some of these will be periods of transition or revolutionary periods without any high degree of coherence. (Marx and Engels follow the same line of thought.)

Mill adopted this idea. In presenting it he uses the term consensus, which he says is borrowed from physiology. These days it has a different meaning - a consensus is when we all think the same about something. What he means by consensus is something like sympathy (consensu, quam sympatheian Graeci appellant', 'by consensus, which the Greeks call sympathy', Cicero De divinatione, II.xiv.34: the Latin consensus and the Greek sympathy mean the same thing). Sympathy means undergoing the same effect together. (Adam Smith's sympathy is one kind of sympathy in this more general sense - in which the effect is an emotion.) Physicists speak of the sympathetic vibration of strings - if you pluck one string of a musical instrument others will also begin to vibrate as the sound waves impinge on them. This is a sympathetic vibration. So apply this to social matters. What Mill says is that a change in one part of society will induce changes (not necessarily similar changes) in many other parts - in all other parts eventually. A part here means either an individual or an institution. A change in one person leads to changes in other persons, and in the workings of the institutions to which those persons belong. A change in an institution, in some part of its structure, will induce changes in the persons who belong to it, and in other institutions. So this is what Mill means by consensus: not agreement - he doesn't mean that all members of an institution will think the same - but mutual influence, connectedness. He stresses the modifiability of human beings: if we were all rigidly set in our ways, each would be isolated, effects on one would not induce changes in others. But in fact we are all responsive and changes at one point lead to changes at another.

'Whatever affects... any one element of the social state, affects through it all the other elements... We can never... understand... the condition of a society in any one respect, without taking into consideration its condition in all other respects. There is no social phenomenon which is not more or less influenced by every other part of the condition of the same society... There is, in short, what physiologists term a consensus, similar to that existing among the various organs and functions of the physical frame' (Logic, VI.ix.2).

If one part changes, it affects another part, which also changes: and that will in turn affect the first part. You get angry, that may make your friends angry and that may make you angrier - or it may make you regretful. Or your anger may make your friend sorry and then you will feel sorry. As Mill often says, in social matters cause and effect react upon one another.

In an organic state of society, the relationships of the parts is such that if one part changes the reaction of other parts restores that part to its original state. The system is in a stable equilibrium maintained by feedbacks. In a 'transition' period this does not happen - the change in one part leads to changes in other parts which do not lead to a restoration of the original state.

Of course there is no a priori reason why there have to be any organic periods - why the elements of society should ever fall into a relationship such that reactions restore the earlier state. Historical knowledge seems to suggest that in fact there have been stable periods: but often historians find upon closer examination that what looked like a stable period was in fact one of flux. Some historians say that history should not be divided into 'periods'. Maybe stability is imposed by the minds of historians looking for a simple intelligible story: and maybe such simplicity will never survive the test of detailed examination. Or maybe the detailed researcher loses the wood among the trees. But even if there have in the past been organic periods, there is no guarantee that in the future the elements of society will again fall into a stable relationship: maybe the present or the next 'transition' period will continue to the end of history, not being a transition to anything.

To return to Mill. Following Comte, he says there are two kinds of sociological inquiries, one concerned with the coexistence of social elements, the other with succession. The possibility of the first is perhaps easier to see in reference to organic periods. The sociologist can study the interrelationship of the coexistent parts of this stable system. For example, assuming that 20th century Australia is such a system, you could study the relationships among various political institutions (state and commonwealth, parties etc.), of these with the courts, police, army, public service, churches, press, etc., including (Mill would want to emphasize) ethology, or as we might say socialization and personality change - how the various sorts of individuals in this country are distributed, how they come to be as they are, how they change, etc. Mill refers to 'political ethology', for which the modern term would be the study of political culture. Well, all this and more is the study of relationships among the coexistent parts of this supposedly stable system.

But sociology can also study the succession of social states, and this is especially what Mill wants to see. One organic period gives way to a transition period, which leads to another organic period and so on: are there any 'laws' according to which such succession takes place?  ('Laws of motion', as Marx would say.)

Mill writes: 'There are two kinds of sociological inquiry. In the first kind, the question proposed is, what effect will follow from a given cause, a certain general condition of social circumstances being presupposed.... But there is also a second inquiry, namely, what are the laws which determine those general circumstances themselves... what are the causes which produce... states of society generally?... What is called a state of society is the simultaneous state of all the greater social facts or phenomena.... When states of society and the causes which produce them, are spoken of as a subject of science, it is implied that there exists a natural correlation among these different elements; that not every variety of combination of these general social facts is possible, but only certain combinations; that, in short, there exist uniformities of coexistence between the states of the various social phenomena. And such is the truth; it is indeed a necessary consequence of the influence exercised by every one of these phenomena over every other. It is a fact implied in the consensus of the various parts of the social body... But the uniformities of coexistence obtaining among phenomena which are the effects of causes must... be corollaries from the laws of causation by which these phenomena are really determined. The mutual correlation between the different elements of each state of society is therefore a derivative law, resulting from the laws which regulate the succession between one state of society and another... the fundamental problem, therefore, of the social science is to find the laws according to which any state of society produces the state which succeeds it and takes its place' (Logic VI.x.1-2).

This is a very ambitious project. Mill is not talking about an existing science of society, but one that he wants to see developed. And we may suspect that the project is too ambitious - that it is beyond human capacity to formulate laws determining the succession of social states. Especially to make predictions: the most we can hope for, perhaps, is to understand in some small measure some of the causes of some of the successions that have taken place. Mill himself acknowledges the difficulty of the project: 'This branch of the social science would be as complete as it can be made if every one of the leading general circumstances of each generation were traced to its causes in the generation immediately preceding. But the consensus is so complete (especially in modern history) that, in the filiation of one generation and another, it is the whole which produces the whole, rather than any part a part' (Logic VI.x.6).

'... it would evidently be a great assistance if it should happen to be the fact that some one element in the complex existence of social man is pre-eminent over all others as the prime agent of the social movement. For we could then take the progress of that one element as the central chain, to each successive link of which the corresponding links of all the other progressions being appended ...' (VI.x.7).

'If it should happen': perhaps we won't be so lucky. In fact Mill thinks we have been lucky - that this does happen to be the fact. 'Pre-eminent... as the prime agent': well, as we'll see in a minute, not so much an agent as a parameter. There is something, he thinks, that sets limits to what the other agents, the other causes, can produce. 'The central chain', to which the other chains could be tied - 'the corresponding links of all the other progressions'. This is metaphor. The idea that in the filiation of generations the whole produces the whole could perhaps be represented as a rope or a 'tuft' - the threads all being tangled together. But it may happen, he says, that there is something like a bundle of chains, with a central chain. Furniture making would have a history in which what each generation does is linked to what the previous generation did - techniques are handed down - but influenced by some more central history - the history of artistic taste, or the social history of which sections of society need and can have which sort of furniture. One generation of furniture makers supplies mostly furniture for castles and great country houses, the next generation (using the same techniques) supplies furniture for middle-class homes. Or whatever. Something like this is suggested by the metaphor of a central chain to which other chains are linked.

So what is the central chain? 'The evidence of history and that of human nature combine... to show that there really is one social element which is thus predominant... This is the state of the speculative faculties of mankind' (ibid). He is not contrasting speculation and practical knowledge here; he just means knowledge. The central historical chain is the history of human knowledge. You may say, so what else would a philosopher think? But Mill is not naive. His meaning is simply this: that the effects of whatever other motives people may have are always limited by what they know how to do. Although he talks of knowledge as the 'prime agent', he does not really mean what these words suggest. 'It would be a great error, and one very little likely to be committed, to assert that speculation, intellectual activity, the pursuit of truth, is among the more powerful propensities of human nature... But notwithstanding the relative weakness of this principle among other sociological agents, its influence is the main determining cause of the social progress; all the other dispositions of our nature being dependent on it for the means of accomplishing their share of the work. Thus (to take the most obvious case first) the impelling force to most of the improvements effected in the arts of life is the desire of increased material comfort; but as we can only act upon external objects in proportion to our knowledge of them, the state of knowledge at any time is the limit of the industrial improvements possible at that time; and the progress of industry must follow, and depend on the progress of knowledge' (ibid).

And what are the laws of the progress of knowledge? If we can discover them we are well on the way to understanding the laws of the succession of states of society. Mill doesn't think that much has been discovered about the laws of the progress of knowledge, but there is something: Comte's law of the 'three stages'. Comte holds that human knowledge has passed through three stages, the theological, the metaphysical and the positive. In the theological stage phenomena are regarded as effects of action by gods and spirits - of superhuman persons. In the metaphysical stage they are regarded as effects of abstractions situated inside things - of gravity, of magnetism, of electricity etc. In the 'positive' stage the attempt to find underlying causes behind or within phenomena is abandoned, and science is regarded as knowledge of the patterns of phenomena - there is, or may be, no reality behind appearances, and in any case science is not concerned with it but with appearances (with 'phenomena' - the Greek word meaning appearances).

Comte's position is sometimes called 'positivism', sometimes 'phenomenalism' and it is in fact the philosophy of David Hume. Mill was a Humean too. Mill says that when you talk of a physical object you are referring simply to a 'permanent possibility of sensation' - if you do certain things, you will experience certain sensations. Whether anything lies behind these sensations to guarantee this permanent possibility we can never know. (In psychology the counterpart of this theory is behaviourism: the doctrine that psychologists study psychological phenomena or appearances - how people behave, what patterns there are - but do not attain knowledge of minds underlying this behaviour.)

Whether Comte's 'three stages' theory is anything more than an 'empirical law', indeed whether it is true at all, and whether it is likely to give much insight into the succession of social states, I leave with you.

Let me say, in conclusion, that J.S. Mill has been an immensely influential writer in philosophy and across the whole range of the social or behavioural sciences, including sociology, psychology, the study of personal development and education, and economics. He was not a highly original thinker, but his syntheses of the ideas in his intellectual tradition were the textbooks throughout the English-speaking world during the 19th century and into the 20th century: they were translated into French and German and were also influential in other language communities. Take almost any 19th century or early 20th century (up to the 1950s) British, American or Australian academic or writer in philosophy or the social sciences, and you'll find that, if he is not a disciple of J.S. Mill, then he is Mill's critic.

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