[This article is part of the Open Peer Review-Publication series “Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitism in International Perspective”]
von Marcel Stoetzler
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If one ever asked oneself what sociology is all about, one could do worse than consulting Auguste Comte’s 1822 manifesto, ‘Prospectus des traveaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la societé’, the ‘Plan of the Scientific Works Necessary for the Reorganization of Society’ (Comte 1998). It sketches out the historical-structural task that the new discipline, whose name Comte later coined, was supposed to fulfil, namely to end-but-preserve – as the Germans would say, aufzuheben – the Revolution: safeguard its achievements from reaction as well as from further revolutions. Sociology would do so by separating the good bits of modernity from the bad bits. The former Comte saw as grounded in a secular, macro-historical trend of European history and civilization, the latter in the undisciplined hubris of troublemakers led astray by metaphysical nonsense peddled by the Enlightenment, or more precisely, by the non-positivistic strand of the Enlightenment. Sociology would study and understand the laws of history and silence the metaphysical troublemakers.
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Sociology’s commitment to making that messy thing called society safe for modernity (the industrial-capitalist world system of nation states constituted and populated by modern individuals) remained a tricky assignment. Spanners were thrown into the machinery left right and centre by people who were not so positive about the positive state of society.
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