Positivism & Anti-Positivism

[The Vegan Marxist]

What are the main differences between these two sociological analysis'? I know Marx prefers anti-positivism, but why exactly? Reason I'm asking is because I'm about to start majoring in Sociology & I'm hoping to get ahead of the game.

[Red Saxon]

Maybe because Empiricism (a facet of Anti-Positivism) says that you need individual experience to truly learn things. For example, you can't understand the plight of the workers until you yourself are a worker.

Something along those lines, that is just how I've come to understand it.

[leftace53]

Positivism analyzes human events and interaction that occurs the scientific method and empiricism. Anti-positivism is more qualitative than quantitative, where they rely more on interviews rather than pre-set surveys.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Positivism analyzes human events and interaction that occurs the scientific method and empiricism. Anti-positivism is more qualitative than quantitative, where they rely more on interviews rather than pre-set surveys.

So why did Marx see this as a better way of analyzing society?

[Red Saxon]

So why did Marx see this as a better way of analyzing society?Maybe so you wouldn't see the worker as something to be studied and more as something to equate yourself with, as something on a more personal level.

[mikelepore]

I know Marx prefers anti-positivism

Does anyone have sources for this? I've never heard of it.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Does anyone have sources for this? I've never heard of it.

Well, from all that I've read, Marx was very much against positivism as laid out by Comtean.

[¿Que?]

Positivism as explained by Comte was supposed to be the final stage of society whereby religion was displaced by science as an organizing principle. Comte believed that an educated and scientifically trained elite should rule society and that those who did not fully understand the sciences should be indoctrinated into a institutionalized religion like order with the scientific elite acting as monks or priests. In this respect, Comte's positivism was not unlike the technocratic currents that run through this board.

Positivism came to mean different things though. A very basic definition (basically the way they define it to undergrads at school so as not to confuse them) is that positivism is simply equated with the application of the scientific method in a very strict "value-free" way. It does not reject qualitative inquiries per se, although it does stress the fact that one cannot generalize from these methods. Thus, positivists prefer quantitative studies, because as they see it, they're a more accurate way to assess general principles.

However, positivism is not simply the application of the scientific method. The best explanation of positivism I've ever read is from a book called A Brief History of Science by A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall. It's a really obscure book I found at a second hand bookstore a long time ago, which I believe comes from a cybernetic approach. It really points to the failures of positivism from a scientific perspective. I was going to quote a passage, but I'm feeling lazy, and since I can't find it on the internet, I would have to type it all out, which I don't feel like doing.

Suffice it to say that positivists tried in vain to remove the observer from the observation, to put it simply. They believed theoretical constructs which could not be immediately verifiable directly by measurement were nothing more than poetry not science. Thus the theory of the atom or the electron or Freud's unconscious could not be appropriately called science to the positivists (this is all paraphrase from the book I mentioned).

Marx could not be a positivist because for one thing, grand theories of the Marxist variety go against the positivist idea of positing only what is immediately observable and measurable. You cannot measure class consciousness (well, you can find indicators, but not really measure it precisely), you cannot measure historical forces (again indicators do exist), or many other basic Marxist concepts. They are theoretical constructs grounded on empirical observation, but unquantifiable in any specific way (although it is possible to operationalize these concepts, but I'll refrain from explaining this).

Also, Marx had a very specific goal in mind with his theory, which was not merely observation, measurement, and description. Marx also believed that the ultimate goal was to change society, to ignite a social revolution. In this sense, Marx epitomized anti-positivism, because while positivism is content to analyze the world as it is, Marx was hell bent on attacking it's very foundation.

Marxism is fundamentally opposed to positivism, and in this, there is basically a pretty solid consensus.

[mikelepore]

There is a lot of consensus that Marx said a lot of things that he never really said. If anyone finds a primary source please post something about it here.

[Zanthorus]

In the postface to the second German edition of Capital (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm) (Which thanks to the endless debates with Rosa I now know practically off by heart :p ) he makes fun of the Positivists for reproaching him for "confin[ing him]self to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing receipts (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future." There is also the fact that Marx takes a definite standpoint, "the standpoint of... human society or social humanity" (Theses on Feuerbach) which is fundamentally opposed to the positivist idea that you can stand outside the process of history as a purely neutral and scientific observer.

[BAM]

I like what Marx writes about him in a letter to Engels:


I am studying Comte on the side just now, as the English and French are making such a fuss of the fellow. What seduces them about him is his encyclopaedic quality, la synthèse. But that is pitiful when compared with Hegel (although Comte is superior to him as a mathematician and physicist by profession, i.e., superior in the detail, though even here Hegel is infinitely greater as a whole). And this shitty positivism came out in 1832!

[mikelepore]

So is the meaning here that, according to Marx, positivism is not a way to understand history and sociology? Was he also critical of positivism in the natural sciences (physical sciences and life sciences)?

[BAM]

I think he's just saying that, in terms of "bourgeois" thought, Comte's positivism is inferior to Hegel's system. But note, he says Comte is "superior in the detail" when it comes to maths and physics ...