In the nineteenth century, European attitudes, both among intellectuals and the public, shifted toward widespread support for imperialism, but the tensions between such views and long-standing values sometimes gave this support a tortuous and melancholy character. This was the case with two eminent liberal imperialists, both famous as champions of liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. Each rejected the other’s justifications for foreign expansion and described his own country’s policies in terms so negative that they might have served better to justify opposition, testifying that there was a destabilizing tension in the backing both gave to imperial expansion. One occasion on which harsh and direct criticism of empire was voiced was expressed was at the outbreak of the “Opium War” in 1839, a conflict whose complex origins belie the old myth that it was undertaken to stuff the dangerous drug down Indian throats. The chapter ends by examining reasons why this opposition was unable to hold back the imperial juggernaut and notes that a significant number of non-European anti-imperial activists found London and Paris hospitable places for their activities.

This chapter considers how the exceptionalism of Western naturalism was given legitimacy through an appeal to narratives of progress. These narratives were indebted to a Protestant model that divided history into two periods—one in which miracles were genuine, followed by another in which they were not. The latter was associated with fraudulent Catholic miracles. Protestants also understood the Reformation as having ushered in an age of light after a period of medieval darkness. Eighteenth-century philosophes generalised and extended this argument, contending that the miracle reports from all historical periods were fraudulent. History could now be divided into an earlier period characterised by a naïve credulity in relation to miracle reports, followed by a more mature phase of history during which there was increasing recognition of the falsity of miracle reports. These same eighteenth-century thinkers also arrogated to themselves the mantle of enlightenment. The progressivist histories characteristic of the early social sciences and endorsed by advocates of scientific naturalism were doubly indebted to religious models since they also drew upon providential or eschatological notions of historical directionality. This raises the question of whether their progressivist philosophy of history is problematically dependent upon covert theistic assumptions.

For Kuhn, textbook science is both a misleading rational reconstruction and an actual driver of normal science. Ludwik Fleck’s account of how textbooks stabilize scientific collectives illuminates the latter. Auguste Comte’s distinction between the theoretical method of instruction, which presents science ahistorically as a system of rational conclusions, and the historical method of instruction, which presents science as a series of effects, illuminate the former. Current STEM textbooks still employ the theoretical method, which obscures the role of historical accident when theory choice is underdetermined by rules. Kuhn and his mentor James B. Conant, in contrast, promote a case study approach. In our new learner-centered educational paradigm, we will need a new textbook science, one that leaves actual books behind.

Chapter 7 treats two philosophers who directly influenced Durkheim: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Looking at their use of the society–organism analogy, their versions of functional explanation and functional analysis, and their conceptions of what a scientific sociology must be like helps one to understand both the content of Durkheim's positions and why he held them. Three types of functional explanation employed by Comte are relevant: two forms of existential functional explanation as well as functional analysis, which makes no claims regarding the existence of what it analyzes but "explains" what it is by specifying the function it serves and showing how its features are suited to accomplishing that purpose without implying anything about how it originated or why it persists. The chapter argues that Comte and Spencer rely too heavily on the society–organism analogy, leading to an overly biologistic understanding of normative critique available to social pathologists.

J. S. Mill’s protest at ‘vulgar’ uses of the past gave way in the 1830s to an eclectic science of history which drew on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Saint-Simonians, and Auguste Comte. Book VI of A System of Logic (1843) sketched a theoretical outline of progress whose scientific conversion came about when it was connected, indirectly, to the ultimate laws of psychology. The triumph of sociology reflected Mill’s settled view that society was increasingly a historical phenomenon, shaped less and less by the psychological laws from which Thomas Hobbes, Bentham, and the ‘geometric’ reasoners had deduced their political ideas. This realisation, Barrell argues, pulled in two directions. While it provided a logic and vocabulary of historical relativism, its theoretical sketch of progress was neither relative nor concretely historical because it encompassed the ‘whole previous history of humanity’ as a progressive chain of causes and effects. This double consciousness, I have argued, can be profitably situated within German historicism, French science sociale, and English utilitarianism, all of which acknowledged the logical dissonance between historical facts and their theoretical reconstruction.

J. S. Mill in the 1830s and early 1840s, Barrell argues, thought extensively about the practical problems of historical enquiry. His progressive theory of historiography, sketched in the article on Jules Michelet, rejected presentism and the resort to ‘everyday experience’. This rejection was bolstered by his reception of German Historismus, Romanticism, and ‘Continental’ philosophy, all of which set out to de-familiarise and imaginatively reconstruct the past. The best modern historians, J. S. Mill argued, were more attentive than their eighteenth-century predecessors to the past’s animating uniqueness, and it is significant that Hume, Gibbon, and other eighteenth-century luminaries barely featured in his account. At the same time, his defence of general principles provided continuities with Scottish philosophical history and the utilitarian tradition in which he was raised. Thomas Carlyle’s account of the French Revolution, while innocent of presentism, was ultimately conjectural and uncritical, whereas Grote’s History of Greece combined criticism with philosophical insight, placing it somewhere between the second and third stages of historical enquiry.

This chapter examines J. S. Mill’s writings on universal history, beginning with his reviews of Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Henry Buckle, and ending with Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophetic account of democracy and Mill’s timely socialism. Barrell argues that we must take seriously the two historical perspectives from which Mill theorised politics: the first looked to the special causes which determined the timeliness or untimeliness of a given doctrine, reform, or phenomenon, while the latter looked to general causes and the region of ultimate aims. The first depended logically on the second. Any attempt to historicise the study of politics – by making laws relative to time and place, for example – must reckon with civilisation’s provisional trends. The debate surrounding Mill’s universalism and relativism, Barrell concludes, can be helpfully understood in these terms. While Mill’s argument is difficult to credulously follow, his intentions were clear: general and special circumstances always coexisted, and because they coexisted the past was both irreducibly distinct and uniform in its development. One consequence of this intellectual remapping might be to re-establish continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in keeping with Mill’s self-professed eclecticism.

Chapter 6 considers the work of two positivist liberals, Pavel Miliukov and Maksim Kovalevskii, with particular reference to the constituent liberal idea of progress. The chapter argues that the idea of progress played a seminal role in their understanding of the significance of liberalism for Russia, and that this is the source of both important strengths and deep tensions within their careers as liberal politicians. More specifically, the chapter analyses to what extent their political activities and writings relied on a deterministic view of history, and how they sought to reconcile their positivist beliefs with the claims of flesh-and-blood individuals. While these men deserve a place in Russia’s liberal pantheon, the elements of their thought that support a teleological view of history as progressing upwards towards a perfect society sit in tension with non-dogmatic, pluralistic forms of liberalism.

The chapter presents Bergson as an underacknowledged yet first-rate social theorist, demonstrating that in Two Sources Bergson is in extensive, albeit implicit, dialogue with his two great predecessors in the tradition -Émile Durkheim and Auguste Comte - and that his encounter with them turns on three questions at the heart of sociology as a unique field of inquiry: first, what binds people together in society? second, what is the origin of society? and third, what is the nature of social change? By working through Bergson’s engagement with these key authors and themes, the chapter presents Bergson’s own original theory of society and sociability, which, as with all his work, centers on creativity, but this time in connection with personal and collective transformation.