Medieval and Early Modern Thought

The classical inheritance was carried, argued over and transformed for a thousand years. Then, between roughly 1500 and 1750, European thinkers produced most of the modern vocabulary for talking about society: power analysed apart from virtue, the state as an artificial construction, inequality as a human product rather than a natural fact, and laws understood as having social causes.

That last move is the one that matters most here, and the man who made it is the one Durkheim regarded as the real beginning.

Paris, 1721. An anonymous book appears, purporting to be the correspondence of two Persian noblemen travelling in France. It is a sensation.

The device is simple and devastating. Usbek and Rica write home describing what they see, and because they are strangers they describe it literally — with no idea which features are significant and which are merely how things are done.

They report that the French king is a great magician, since he can persuade his subjects that a piece of paper is money; and that there is another magician, called the Pope, who makes people believe that three are one and that bread is not bread. They describe Parisian women's fashions changing so fast that a mother cannot recognise her daughter's dress. They note that the French are astonished at the idea of a man having several wives, while maintaining an elaborate system of mistresses. Rica records that when he walked through Paris in Persian dress everyone stared, and that when he adopted European clothes he became invisible — whereupon people who learned he was Persian would exclaim, "How can anyone be Persian?"

The author was Montesquieu, and the Persian Letters is a hundred and fifty pages of 1.1.2's habit, executed as literature: the strange in the familiar, produced by refusing to let the reader's own society pass as natural.

Twenty-seven years later the same man published The Spirit of the Laws, and did it systematically.

The period this lesson covers looks like political philosophy, and much of it is. So why does a sociology course spend a lesson on it?

Because in the middle of the philosophy, three genuinely sociological moves are made.

One: power is separated from virtue and analysed as it operates (Machiavelli). Not what a ruler should be, but what actually works and why.

Two: social order is treated as an artificial product requiring explanation (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau). Not a natural or divine given, but something human beings construct — which immediately raises the question of how, and makes the problem of order a research question rather than a settled fact (1.2.1).

Three: institutions are given social causes (Montesquieu). Laws, customs and forms of government are not arbitrary choices or timeless truths but stand in determinate relations to climate, terrain, economy, religion, population and manners — and can be studied comparatively.

The third is the decisive one for us. It is the claim that social arrangements are caused, and the causes are social, which is what Durkheim would later call the founding principle of the discipline (4.2).

Before: Augustine and Aquinas

Briefly, because the medieval contribution is real and mostly indirect.

Augustine (354–430) divided humanity between the City of God and the earthly city, oriented respectively to love of God and love of self. The earthly city is necessary and fallen; political order restrains sin rather than realising virtue. The sociological residue: a durable strain of realism about political order as constraint rather than perfection — which reappears in Hobbes, in Machiavelli's assumptions about human motives, and, secularised, in a great deal of conflict theory.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) drew on the newly recovered Aristotle — via the Arabic transmission described in 3.1.4 — to argue that human beings are naturally social and political, that political authority is therefore natural rather than merely a remedy for sin, and that human law derives its force from natural law accessible to reason. Two residues: society understood as natural rather than merely conventional, and a universalistic standard against which particular laws can be judged, which runs into modern rights thinking and into 2.1.8's search for criteria that travel.

Machiavelli: power as it is

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), a Florentine official who lost his position when the republic fell, wrote The Prince in 1513 and the far longer Discourses on Livy in the same years.

The famous move. He announces that he will write about what rulers actually do rather than what they ought to do, because "a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good." Political conduct is therefore to be judged by its effects, and the qualities that preserve a state may not be the qualities a good man would possess.

Note precisely what is sociological here: the separation of an analytic question (what maintains power?) from an evaluative one (what is virtuous?). That is the same separation 1.3.3 called value-freedom and 1.5.2 called debunking, and it is why Machiavelli is claimed as an ancestor by realists of every stripe.

Virtù and fortuna. Virtù is not virtue but capacity — energy, skill, decisiveness, the ability to act well in circumstances. Fortuna is contingency: what circumstances happen to present. Political outcomes arise from the interaction, and the successful actor is the one whose disposition matches the times. There is a genuine theory of agency-within-constraint here (1.3.1), and a genuine account of why the same person succeeds in one period and fails in another.

The Discourses, which are more interesting and less read. Machiavelli the republican argues that Rome's greatness came from its internal conflict: the tumults between the plebeians and the patricians, far from weakening the republic, produced its laws and its liberty, because each class checked the other's ambition.

Read that against 1.3.4. It is an argument that conflict is productive of order — that a society without contending groups is not more harmonious but more easily dominated — and it anticipates Simmel's and Coser's functions of conflict (5.2) by four centuries.

The contract tradition

Three thinkers, one shared device, three different conclusions. The device: imagine human beings without political authority, and ask what would follow.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), writing Leviathan in 1651 during and after the English civil wars. In the state of nature, with no common power, human beings — roughly equal in capacity, competing for the same goods, and rationally fearing each other — fall into a "war of every man against every man," in which there is no industry, no culture, no society, and life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The remedy is a covenant by which each surrenders the right of self-governance to a sovereign whose power must be undivided and unchallengeable.

You met this in 1.2.1 as the canonical statement of the problem of order. Add here what makes it modern: order is an artefact. It is constructed by human beings out of fear and reason, not given by nature or God. Once that is said, the question of how societies actually cohere becomes available for investigation — and every answer in 1.2.1 is a reply to Hobbes.

John Locke (1632–1704). The state of nature is not war but inconvenience: there is a natural law, but no impartial judge to apply it. Government is therefore instituted by consent for the protection of life, liberty and property, holds power in trust, and may be dissolved if it breaks the trust. Two residues for sociology: a theory of property as arising from labour mixed with nature, which Marx would engage at length; and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding's argument that the mind begins without innate ideas — the ancestor of every claim in 2.3.1 that human beings are formed by experience.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) is the most sociological of the three, and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) is a text that could sit in Part 8 with very little adjustment.

His argument: human beings in a natural condition are neither good nor wicked but self-sufficient and largely solitary, moved by amour de soi — simple self-preservation — and by pity. Inequality among them is trivial: differences of strength and age.

Then, through settlement, agriculture and metallurgy, people begin to live together, compare themselves, and require each other's regard. Amour propre appears: the desire to be esteemed relative to others, which is inherently competitive and insatiable. And with the division of labour comes property. Rousseau's famous sentence: "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society."

Three sociological claims are packed into this, and all three are still live.

Inequality is a social product, not a natural fact — differences of wealth, rank and power arise from arrangements, and Rousseau distinguishes them sharply from natural differences. That is 1.2.2's founding distinction.

Amour propre is a theory of recognition: the claim that once people live together, their sense of themselves depends on others' regard, which becomes a competitive good. This runs directly into Cooley (2.3.2), into Veblen's conspicuous consumption (4.6), into Bourdieu's symbolic capital (2.1.13), and into Honneth's struggle for recognition (5.6).

And the "chains" line. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" opens The Social Contract (1762) — where Rousseau's answer is the general will: legitimate authority arises when citizens legislate collectively for the common good, so that in obeying the law they obey themselves. The concept is genuinely difficult, has been read as both radically democratic and dangerously authoritarian, and is worth knowing as an unresolved problem rather than a settled doctrine.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) published The Spirit of the Laws in 1748 after roughly twenty years of work. It is long, uneven, and contains the decisive move.

The central proposition. Laws should not be studied in isolation. They stand in relations — to the form of government, to the physical character of the country, to its climate and terrain, to the way its people make a living, to their religion, wealth, numbers, commerce and manners. The totality of these relations he calls the spirit of the laws. And a law that suits one nation may be ruinous in another, because the surrounding conditions differ.

Read that slowly. It is the claim that institutions have social causes and must be explained comparatively — which is a research programme, and it is why Durkheim wrote his Latin thesis on Montesquieu, calling him a founder of the science of societies, and why Raymond Aron opened his history of sociological thought with him rather than with Comte.

The typology. Three forms of government — republic, monarchy, despotism — each with a distinctive animating principle without which it cannot function: virtue (civic commitment) in a republic, honour in a monarchy, fear in a despotism. Note what this is: a claim that a political structure requires a corresponding disposition in its members, and decays when that disposition disappears. That is a proposition about the relation between institutions and personality types, and it is testable.

The separation of powers. His reading of the English constitution — legislative, executive and judicial powers distinct and checking one another — descends from Polybius' mixed constitution (3.1.4) and passed directly into the American and many later constitutions. Few social-scientific ideas have had a more concrete institutional legacy.

And the honest problems. Montesquieu's climate theory — that heat produces languor and servility, cold produces vigour and liberty — is wrong, and it fed a long tradition of environmental explanations for European superiority that did real damage. His treatment of "Oriental despotism" is a founding text of exactly the discourse Said would analyse (6.7), and it should be read as evidence for that argument. His position on slavery is complicated: he wrote a famously savage satirical chapter against it, and elsewhere his relativism strains.

Hold him as 1.5.3 requires: the method is a genuine foundation; several of the substantive claims are wrong and consequential; and the fact that the founder of comparative social science also helped found Orientalism is not an embarrassment to be hidden but a finding about how the discipline began.

Go deeper

Vico, briefly and importantly

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), a Neapolitan professor of rhetoric, published the New Science in 1725. Almost unread in his lifetime, he matters for one principle.

Verum ipsum factum — the true is the made. We can have genuine knowledge of the social and historical world, Vico argued, in a way we cannot of nature, because we made it. Human institutions — languages, laws, myths, customs — are human products, and can therefore be understood from the inside.

That is a claim about the possibility and the method of social science, and it is the direct ancestor of Weber's verstehen (1.3.3), of the interpretive tradition, and — read a certain way — of 2.4.1's whole argument. Vico also proposed a cyclical account of nations passing through ages of gods, heroes and men, with a ricorso or return, which places him alongside Ibn Khaldun and Polybius (1.2.3).

What the contract tradition is and is not

An essential clarification, because this is the most common misreading in the whole lesson.

The state of nature is not a historical claim. Neither Hobbes nor Locke nor Rousseau is offering an anthropology of early humanity — and where Rousseau comes closest, he explicitly says he is setting the facts aside to reason about what must be. It is an analytical device: strip away political authority in thought, and see what has to be explained.

Why this matters. Read as history, contract theory is simply false: there is no evidence of pre-social solitary humans, and everything in 2.3.1 says there could not be. Read as a device, it does something valuable — it makes political authority require justification rather than being a given, and it makes the problem of order visible as a problem.

The sociological criticisms are nonetheless serious and worth knowing: the "individuals" of the state of nature are suspiciously like seventeenth-century European property-holders, complete with their motives; the device makes society look like an aggregation of pre-formed individuals, which is exactly the error 1.3.5 and 2.3.1 dismantle; and feminist scholarship — Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract is the standard reference — has argued that the social contract presupposes a prior and unexamined settlement about the subordination of women, since the "individuals" who contract are heads of households.

The line into sociology

To be concrete about the inheritance, since this Topic is about origins.

From Machiavelli: the analysis of power apart from virtue; conflict as productive of order. From Hobbes: the problem of order as a problem; society as artefact. From Locke: property from labour; the mind as formed by experience. From Rousseau: inequality as a social product; recognition as a social need; the general will as an unresolved problem about collective self-rule. From Montesquieu: institutions as socially caused; comparative method; typologies with animating principles; and — through Durkheim's thesis on him — a direct line into the discipline's self-understanding. From Vico: we can know society because we made it.

Every one of those is a component of Parts 4 and 5. This is the toolbox arriving.

"The state of nature is a historical claim." It is an analytical device. Read as history it is false; read as a device it makes authority require justification.

"Machiavelli said the end justifies the means." He did not write the phrase, and the Discourses show a committed republican who thought class conflict produced liberty. Read both books.

"Rousseau thought we should return to nature." He explicitly denies it. His argument is that inequality is a social product, not that society should be abandoned.

"Montesquieu's climate theory is a harmless curiosity." It is wrong and it fed a long tradition of environmental explanations for European superiority. Say so when you cite him.

"Contract theory describes society as it is." It describes a fictional starting point in order to make a problem visible — and it smuggles in seventeenth-century individuals, as its critics have shown.

"Aquinas is just theology." His Aristotelian claim that human beings are naturally political, and his natural-law standard for judging particular laws, both run into modern social and legal thought.

Why it matters

It gives you the origin of the problem of order as a problem. After Hobbes, cohesion cannot be assumed. Everything in 1.2.1 is an answer to a question this period made askable.

It gives you inequality as a research object. Rousseau's distinction between natural and social inequality is the founding move of Part 8, and his amour propre is the founding move of every later theory of status, recognition and conspicuous display.

It gives you the comparative method with a causal claim attached. Montesquieu's "spirit of the laws" — institutions standing in determinate relations to their conditions — is the programme Durkheim and Weber would execute.

And it shows the discipline's founding entanglements. The same period, and in Montesquieu's case the same book, produced comparative social science and Oriental despotism. That is not a footnote to the history of sociology; it is the reason Part 6 is a Part rather than a chapter.

Augustine bequeathed political realism (order as restraint); Aquinas, via the Arabic transmission of Aristotle, bequeathed society as natural and natural law as a universal standard.

Machiavelli separated the analysis of power from the evaluation of virtue (virtù and fortuna), and in the Discourses argued that class conflict between plebeians and patricians produced Roman liberty — conflict as productive of order (1.3.4, 5.2).

The contract tradition treats order as an artefact: Hobbes (war of all against all; undivided sovereignty), Locke (natural law without a judge; property from labour; the mind formed by experience), Rousseau (inequality as a social product; amour propre as competitive need for regard; the general will).

The state of nature is an analytical device, not history — and its "individuals" import seventeenth-century assumptions, as Pateman's critique of the sexual contract argues.

Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws makes the decisive move: institutions stand in determinate relations to climate, terrain, economy, religion, numbers, commerce and manners, and must be explained comparatively. Durkheim wrote his Latin thesis on him. His typology attaches an animating principle to each form of government; his separation of powers descends from Polybius. His climate theory is wrong and his Oriental despotism is a founding text of Orientalism.

Vico: verum ipsum factum — we can know the social world because we made it; the ancestor of verstehen.

Natural law — a universal moral order accessible to reason, against which particular laws may be judged (Aquinas).

Virtù / fortuna — Machiavelli's capacity for effective action, and the contingent circumstances it must meet.

State of nature — the analytical device of imagining human beings without political authority.

Social contract — the notional agreement by which political authority is instituted.

Leviathan — Hobbes' undivided sovereign, instituted to escape the war of all against all.

Amour de soi / amour propre — Rousseau's distinction between simple self-preservation and the competitive desire for others' esteem.

Natural vs social inequality — Rousseau's founding distinction between differences of body and differences of rank, wealth and power.

General will — Rousseau's collective will oriented to the common good, in obeying which citizens obey themselves.

The spirit of the laws — Montesquieu's totality of relations between a nation's laws and its conditions.

Animating principle — the disposition (virtue, honour, fear) each form of government requires in its members.

Separation of powers — the distribution of legislative, executive and judicial authority among distinct bodies.

Verum ipsum factum — Vico's principle that we can know what we have made.

The sexual contract — Pateman's argument that the social contract presupposes an unexamined prior subordination of women.

One — write a Persian letter. Describe one institution of your own society — an examination, a wedding, a job interview, a religious ceremony — as a literal-minded visitor would, refusing to know which details are significant. Montesquieu's device is still the fastest route to 1.1.2's habit.

Two — apply the spirit of the laws. Take one law or rule in your society and list its relations: to the economy, the terrain, the religion, the family form, the population. Which relation is doing most of the work?

Three — natural or social? Take three inequalities around you and sort them by Rousseau's distinction. Then notice how many of the "natural" ones turn out on inspection to be arrangements (1.2.2).

Four — find the animating principle. Take an institution you belong to and ask what disposition it requires in its members to function. Then ask what happens to it when that disposition disappears.