Sociology derives from vulgar evolutionism and cannot grasp the dialectical principle

Evidence

Sociology has been an attempt to create a method of historical and political science in a form dependent on a pre-elaborated philosophical system, that of evolutionist positivism, against which sociology reacted, but only partially. It therefore became a tendency on its own; it became the philosophy of non-philosophers, an attempt to provide a schematic description and classification of historical and political facts, according to criteria built up on the model of natural science. It is therefore an attempt to derive “experimentally” the laws of evolution of human society in such a way as to “predict” that the oak tree will develop out of the acorn. Vulgar evolutionism is at the root of sociology, and sociology cannot know the dialectical principle with its passage from quantity to quality. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1524

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s genealogy of sociology as ‘philosophy of non-philosophers’ grounded in evolutionist positivism — a usable concept for how a field’s methodology inherits an unacknowledged philosophy.
• XREF: Connects to the reading list project on how academic disciplines unknowingly inherit philosophical assumptions — echoes the law-merchant reading on how institutions carry unexamined theoretical baggage.

Related

• Positivist sociology borrows natural-science criteria and lacks the dialectical principle (similarity 0.88)
• Splitting praxis into sociology and metaphysics erases the dialectic. (similarity 0.85)
• Sociology attempts an exact positivist science of social facts (similarity 0.85)
• Every sociology presupposes a philosophy of which it is a subordinate part (similarity 0.85)
• Sociology emerged as political science declined under positivist theories (similarity 0.83)
• Reducing a philosophy to a systematic sociology is naive metaphysics. (similarity 0.80)
• Treating society as naturally evolutionary impoverished the concept of the State (similarity 0.79)