Chapter 63 Part Two Results Chapter 15 Science 3

3 Except for a few specialists who were notoriously remote from everyday life, the mathematical revolution passed quietly.On the other hand, it is almost impossible for a revolution in the social sciences not to hit the general public, because it obviously affects them, and people generally believe things are getting worse.The amateur scientist and academic in Peacock's novel basks tenderly in sympathy or fondling jeers; the economist and propagandist in the Steam Intellect Society have a very different fate. The following two revolutions are clear examples, and the convergence of the two has produced Marxism, which is the culmination of the social sciences.The first revolution continued the glorious pioneering work of rationalists in the 17th and 18th centuries, establishing norms equivalent to the laws of physics for human inhabitants.Its earliest triumph was the construction of a systematic deductive theory of political economy, and by 1789 great progress had been made in this regard.The second revolution is the discovery of historical evolution, which essentially belongs to this era and is closely related to Romanticism.

The audacity of the classical rationalists was manifested in the belief that the necessary laws of logic apply equally to human consciousness and free decision. The "laws of political economy" fall into this category.The belief that these laws, like the laws of gravity (to which they are often compared), do not shift with one's likes and dislikes, provided early nineteenth-century capitalists with a ruthless certainty and tended to imbue their Romantic opponents with an equally barbaric irrationalism.In principle, economists are of course right, although they clearly exaggerate the generality of the assumptions on which their inferences are based (the supply of "other goods" being "held constant"), and sometimes exaggerate their own intelligence.If the population of a town doubles, while the number of dwellings remains the same, then, other things remaining the same, the rents of houses must rise, and this cannot be changed by anyone's will.Such propositions gave rise to the power of the deductive system constructed by political economy (mainly in England, although to a lesser extent also in the old scientific centers of the eighteenth century, such as France, Italy, and Switzerland).The period from 1776 to 1830, as we have seen; The mathematically described relationship between population growth rate and means of subsistence.The supporters of Malthus's Essay on Population were reveling in the discovery of the fact that it has been proved that the poor are always poor, and that generosity and donations to them must make them poorer.In fact, "Population" is neither original nor persuasive, as its proponents claim.Its importance lies not in its ideological achievements, because this aspect is not outstanding, but in its advocacy of scientific methods to treat some purely personal and arbitrary decisions such as sex life as a social phenomenon.

The application of mathematical methods to society was another major development of this period.French-speaking scientists lead the way in this regard, no doubt thanks to the excellent mathematical atmosphere of French education.Therefore, Adolphe Quetelet of Belgium pointed out in his epoch-making book "Sur l'Homme" (Sur l'Homme, 1835) that the statistical distribution of human characteristics follows known mathematical laws, according to which, He extrapolated the possibility of merging the social sciences with physics with what has long been regarded as exaggerated confidence.The possibility of making statistical generalizations about the population and making reliable predictions based on the generalizations has been long awaited by probability theorists (the starting point of Keitel's entry into social science), and it is also the possibility that companies such as insurance companies must rely on to do practical work. long-awaited by people.But Keitel and an enthusiastic contemporary group of statisticians, anthropologists, and social investigators applied these methods to a far wider field and created what is still the main mathematical tool for the investigation of social phenomena. .

These developments in the social sciences were revolutionary and, like chemistry, followed advances made earlier in theory.However, the social sciences also have a new and commendable unique achievement, which in turn benefits the biological sciences and even natural sciences such as geography, namely, the discovery that history is a logical evolutionary process, not just It is the chronological change of various events.The relationship between this innovation and the dual revolution is so obvious that it hardly needs argument.Thus, the discipline known as sociology (a term invented by Comte around 1830) arose directly from the critique of capitalism.Comte, widely regarded as the founder of sociology, began his career as private secretary to the Count Saint-Simon, a pioneer utopian socialist. (Although, as we have seen, it is not easy to classify Saint-Simon's thought, it seems pedantic to discard the established habit of calling him a utopian socialist.) Sociology The most formidable contemporary theorist, Marx, saw his theories as tools to change the world.

The creation of history as an academic discipline is perhaps the least important aspect of this historicization of the social sciences.Indeed, the fashion for writing history was all the rage in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century.Rarely have we seen so many people make sense of their world by sitting at home writing tomes of histories: Karamzin in Russia, Geijer in Sweden, Pala in Bohemia Palacky, each the founder of historiography in his own country.In France, where the need to try to understand reality in terms of the past was particularly strong, the French Revolution soon became Thiers, Mignet, Buonarroti, Lamartine and the great Michelet, etc., Conduct in-depth and partisan research topics.It was a heroic age of historiography, but, except as historical documents, documents, or occasional records of genius, the French Guizot, Augustin Thierry and Michelet, the Dane Niebuhr and Sismondi in Switzerland, Hallam, Lingard, and Carlyle in England, and countless German professors, but very little has survived.

The most lasting consequences of this historical awakening have been found in the technical spheres of documentation and historiography.Collecting written or non-written cultural relics of the past has become a common hobby.Although nationalism is perhaps the most important motivating factor of history: historians, lexicographers, and collectors of folk songs are often the founders of national consciousness among peoples who have not yet awakened; Attempts to attack by steam power of the time.Therefore, France founded the Ecole des Chartes (1821), Britain founded the Public Record Office (Public Record Office, 1838), the German Confederation began publishing "Monumenta Germaniae Historiae" (Monumenta Germaniae Historiae, 1826), and The credo that history must be based on a critical evaluation of source materials was established by the prolific Leopold von Ranke (1795%–1886%).At the same time, as we have seen (see Chapter 14), linguists and students of folklore compiled basic dictionaries of their national languages ​​and collections of national oral traditions.

The incorporation of history into the social sciences had the most immediate impact on the study of law, theology, and especially the new linguistics.In the field of law, Friedrich Karl von Savigny established the historical school of jurisprudence (1815); Doctrine believers.Linguistics also developed initially in Germany, where the most powerful center for the dissemination of the historiographical method.It is no accident that Marx was a German.The ostensible impetus for linguistics came from European conquests of non-European societies.Sir Jones's pioneering study of Sanskrit (1786) was the result of the British conquest of Bengal; Champollion's interpretation of hieroglyphs (his major work on the subject was published in 1824) was the result of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt; Rawlinson (Rawlinson)'s interpretation of cuneiform (1835) reflects the ubiquity of British colonial officials.However, linguistics is in fact not limited to discovery, description and classification.In the hands of great German scholars, such as Franz Bopp (1791-1867) and the Brothers Grimm, it became a veritable second social science; In apparently uncertain fields, general laws of application are found (the first being political economy).Unlike the laws of political economy, however, the laws of linguistics are essentially historical, or rather evolutionary. (Oddly enough, until this century, no attempt was made to apply the methods of mathematical physics to what is considered one of the more general "communication theories" of linguistics.)

Their basis rests on the discovery that the Indo-European language family, which has a wide range of languages, is related to each other.This finding is supplemented by the apparent fact that every extant written European language has been markedly changed over long periods of time and will, presumably, continue to be changed.The problem for the linguist was not only to demonstrate and classify the connections between languages ​​using the method of scientific comparison, which was widely done at the time (for example, the comparative analysis carried out by Cuvier); Yes, and mainly to explain the historical process by which they must have evolved from a common mother tongue.Linguistics was the first science to put evolution at its core.It is of course fortunate that the Bible does not say much about the history of language, and what the Bible says about the creation and early history of the earth, as biologists and geographers have learned to their cost, Obviously too explicit.Naturally, therefore, linguists are much less likely to get swamped by Noah's flood or stumble over the first chapter of Genesis than their hapless allies.If there is anything mentioned in the Bible, it agrees with linguists: "The whole earth speaks the same language, with the same accent." Linguistics is also fortunate because, among all the social sciences, it is the only one that does not directly study human beings— —Men are always reluctant to believe that their actions are determined by anything other than their free choice—but study words directly, which do not complain like men.Therefore, it is free to face the fundamental problem that has always existed in the discipline of history: how to deduce a large number of real life from the operation of unchanging universal laws.And apparently is an often unpredictable case.

Although Pope himself had long since proposed the theory of the origin of grammatical inflections, the pioneers of linguistics had not actually made much progress in explaining language change.Instead, they built something like a genealogical table for the Indo-European languages.They made a number of inductive generalizations about the relative rates of change of elements of different languages, and things like "Green's Law" (which states that all Germanic languages ​​undergo certain consonant changes, and that a branch of Germanic dialects followed another similar change a few centuries later. changes.) These are very broad historical generalizations.But throughout the course of this pioneering quest, they never doubted that the evolution of language is not simply a matter of establishing chronology or recording linguistic change, but that it should be governed by universal linguistic laws akin to the laws of science. Explanation.