Metaphor and History

Nisbet takes particular aim at nineteenth-century notions of historical determinism—of idealistic and materialist varieties alike, and no less of early twentieth-century images of biological determinism—functionalist and organic varieties alike. The sources derive largely from the Enlightenment thirst for change, embellished by Kant’s ceaseless search for the laws of progress and Condorcet’s attempt to convert the idea of progress into a passion for change as an end unto itself. Nisbet is unyielding in locating the mischief of unexamined contemporary “laws” of development in Comte’s typologies of scientific religion, especially his notion that knowledge uniquely resides in “the selectist part, the vanguard of the human race” that Comte took for granted that largely resides in “the greater part of the white race, or the European nations.” 

Nisbet ruefully reminds his readers that such racialist and nationalist sentiments were not limited to the supposed founder of sociology, but “would have been found utterly acceptable by Hegel, Marx, Spencer, Morgan, Tylor and the other social evolutionists of the century”