Corporate social-scientism in Whyte's 'Organization Man'

Seventeenth in a series of seventeen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, & 16)

In the previous post in this series, I distinguished between, on the one hand, the social-scientism of the early positivists and, on the other hand, the X-club's scientism, which was championed by T. H. Huxley, among others. I hummed and hawed about the latter variety's label (e.g., reductive-scientism, eliminative-scientism). I should simply have called it physical-scientism. For adherents of physical-scientism, the physical sciences, armed as they were with the new evolutionary theory, were poised to solve all the erstwhile mysteries about human beings, thereby putting the humanistic and social sciences out of business.

I've said that critics of social-scientism trace its lineage to 19th-Century France, particularly to the work of Comte and Saint-Simon. Hayek and others trace it back to the founding of the École Polytechnique.

French social-scientism was largely a left-wing creature. The French association of social-scientism with the political left probably inspired the American cold-war use of 'scientism' as a term of abuse in political debate. On that note, it's interesting that one of the more famous deployments of 'scientism' in 1950s America saw the word applied not to big government but, rather, to big, private corporations. I have in mind William Hollingsworth ('Holly') Whyte's use of the term in The Organization Man (1956), the third chapter of which is called 'Scientism'.

[Here's Whyte interviewed on PBS. I think Whyte would have liked The Wire.]

Citing Hayek and Voegelin, Whyte introduces 'scientism' as follows:

The first denominator is scientism. This is the practical part of the Social Ethic, for it is the promise that with the same techniques that have worked in the physical sciences we can eventually create an exact science of man. (Whyte, The Organization Man [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002/1956], p. 23)

That's a nice, in-a-nutshell statement of social-scientism.  Like Hayek and van Duzer, Whyte traces the ideology back to France:

With the founding of the École Polytechnique in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century scientism was given another forward push; Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte energized a formidable school with the promise of positivism (Ibid., p. 25). 

To display the extent to which private corporations have taken up social-scientism, Whyte quotes from advertising, personnel, and public-relations journals. He quotes an editorial in Public Relations Journal, according to which, 'The challenge of social engineering in our time is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago' ^{(Ibid., p. 26)}. Whyte embraces the phrase, 'social engineering' ^{(Ibid., p. 27)}, a locution with which I, myself, was more familiar as an epithet for the batch of concerns that he addresses. Perhaps 'social engineering' has displaced 'scientism' as the preferred term of abuse for social-scientism.

I believe that social-scientism in its corporate incarnation is the brand of scientism on which Sebastian Benthall and Adam Elkus focus in their interesting posts on scientism. Benthall links this kind of scientism to recent enthusiasm about 'big data'. Elkus characterizes scientism as,

a generalized philosophy that argued modern life was too complex, bewildering, and dangerous for the common man to navigate without the aid of enlightened elites, who would use supposedly scientific methods to direct society through managerial control of social life and the flow of information. Hence, Scientism is really about the idea that a small group of people might be uniquely endowed to engineer the fates of others due to superior knowledge and rationality.

Positivists vs. Darwin's bull-dog (social-scientism vs. reductionist-scientism, Part II)

Sixteenth in a series of seventeen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, & 17)

In my last post on scientism, I claimed to have excavated distinct uses in that word's history (and in the history of the French scientisme). I labeled the older use social-scientism. This use was directed primarily at Saint-Simon, Comte, and their followers. These philosophers and scientists were not in thrall to reductionism; they did not, for example, prophesy the reduction of other sciences to physics. Nor did they envisage the elimination of special sciences (such as sociology). In fact, Comtean positivists embraced a levels picture, on which the special sciences (such as biology and sociology), while dependent upon lower, more general empirical sciences (such as physics and chemistry), were nonetheless capable of explaining phenomena that could not be accounted for in the terms of the more basic sciences. In short, the special sciences were taken to do distinctive explanatory work that could not, even in principle, be accomplished without them. Still, critics used the word 'scientism' to ridicule the Comteans' vision of sociology as an empirical science that held the key to understanding all human activities in terms of observed uniformities of conduct, a science that could be used to revamp society.

I called the second use of 'scientism' reductionist-scientism. I should, perhaps, have called it eliminative-scientism, for its critics were horrified by the prospect of a physical science, such as biology, putting both the old, humanistic disciplines and the newer, social sciences out of work by giving an exhaustive explanation of these disciplines' putative subject matter. The critics feared that biology would eliminate the social sciences and the humanistic disciplines by answering all the sensible how- and why-questions that could be posed about human beings. For its critics, the impetus behind this type of scientism was Darwinian theory, and its champions were members of the X-Club.

In an old periodical, I found a fierce exchange between a Comtean positivist and the most famous member of the X-Club -- well, fierce by Victorian standards. The positivist was Frederic Harrison, and the X-Clubber was 'Darwin's bulldog', T. H. Huxley.

"TH Huxley" by Carlo Pellegrini - Vanity Fair, 28 January 1871. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

What follows are selections from Harrison's contribution, in which Harrison defends a levels view of the sciences. He wants to police the boundaries between the sciences, ensuring that evolutionary theory does not gobble up the explananda of other scientific fields of inquiry. Harrison writes:

I am quite aware that Prof. Huxley has elsewhere formulated his belief that biology is the science which 'includes man and all his ways and works.' If history, law, politics, morals, and political economy, are merely branches of biology, we shall want new dictionaries indeed. (A Modern Symposium II: the Soul and Future Life, first published in The Nineteenth Century [September, 1877]: 175)

More generally, Harrison ridicules Huxley for 'fancying that one science can do the work of another' (Ibid. 178). Harrison acknowledges that everything in the proprietary domain of the human sciences depends on the phenomena that are described in the more basic physical sciences. Still, he takes Huxley to task for

that hallucination of his about questions of science all becoming questions of molecular physics. The molecular facts are valuable enough; but we are getting molecular-mad, if we forget that molecular facts have only a special part in physiology, and hardly any part at all in sociology, history, morals, and politics; though I quite agree that there is no single fact in social, moral, or mental philosophy, that has not its correspondence in some molecular fact, if we only could know it. (Ibid., 178-9)

Harrison is vague about the nature of the dependence relation in question -- he doesn't say 'emergence' or 'supervenience' -- but he stresses that it does not supply an explanation of the dependent items. Again, in his words:

We both agree that every mental and moral fact is in functional relation with some molecular fact. ... But, then, says Prof. Huxley, if I can trace the molecular facts which are the antecedents of the mental and moral facts, I have explained these mental and moral facts. That I deny; just as much as I should deny that a chemical analysis of the body could ever lead to an explanation of the physical organism. Then, says the professor, when I have traced out the molecular facts, I have built up a physical theory of moral phenomena. ... [T]here is no such thing, or no rational thing, that can be called a physical theory of moral phenomena, any more than there is a moral theory of physical phenomena." (Ibid., 172-3, emphases in original)

"Frederic Harrison" by Carlo Pellegrini - Vanity Fair,23January1886. Licensed as Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Harrison's emphasis is squarely on the relations between sciences (their taxonomies and laws) rather than on the entities or facts that fall within the purview of any given science. He says:

We do not diminish the supreme place of the spiritual facts in life and in philosophy by admitting these spiritual facts to have a relation with molecular and organic facts in the human organism -- provided that we never forget how small and dependent is the part which the study of the molecular and organic phenomena must play in moral and social science. (Ibid., 158, italics added)

In view of these quotations, it's safe to say that Harrison would side with the critics who accused Huxley of eliminative-scientism. Nevertheless, many of those critics would charge Harrison with social-scientism, for he remained committed to the program of naturalistic social sciences that broadly follow the empirical methods of the physical sciences and that will, eventually, describe laws of human functioning that afford as complete an understanding of us as can be had. The methods in question needn't invoke empathy, or Verstehen. As Harrison remarked in another context, 'We take man as he is and history as we find it, and we seek to interpret the whole on one uniform scientific method' ('The Creeds - Old and New', The Nineteenth Century, No. XLIV, [October, 1880]: 526-49, at 544).

Social-scientism vs. reductionist-scientism (Part I)

Fifteenth in a series of sixteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 & 16)

I've distinguished two strands in the use of 'scientism'. On the one hand, there's what I've called 'the mid-20th-Century' use (post 9), or the 'cold-war use' (post 11), which channels apprehensions about left-wing political agendas, especially Marxism. In post 11, I conjectured that this deployment of the term echoes some of the concerns behind the earliest uses of the French 'scientisme'. In both cases, 'scientism(e)' gave voice to dark forebodings about radical, 'socialist' agendas whose aim was to jettison much of tradition in a drastic redesign of society. Such radical programs were linked to science by their putative roots in the new social sciences.

Let's coin the label social-scientism for the kind of scientism that was being attacked in these uses. Who was supposed to be guilty of social-scientism? While cold-war fulminations targeted Marxism, the earlier French uses of 'scientisme' were more often motivated by opposition to the visions of Saint-Simon and Comte (and their followers). My understanding of the earlier French concerns is suggested by Richard G. Olson's work. In his Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Olson writes: 

The Saint-Simonians unquestionably understood themselves as scientists, developing a science that comprehended the events of the social as well as of the natural world. Moreover, nearly thirty years before Friedrich Engels appropriated the term 'scientific socialism' for the doctrines that he and Karl Marx had developed, Karl Grün (1817-87) had applied the term to Saint-Simonianism (Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, [Urbana, IL: the University of Illinois Press, 2008], p. 59).

In both the cold-war and earlier French castigations, social-scientism was reviled for its supposed reduction of persons to mere cogs in a machine, social bits and pieces susceptible of the same sort of understanding to be had in the physical sciences. To be sure, proponents of social-scientism might abjure attempts to reduce special sciences to physics, denying that the subject matter of the social sciences (or of any science other than physics) could be reduced to that of any more basic science. Nonetheless, they (e.g., Comtean positivists) held that the same sort of method that had met with such stellar success in the physical sciences now promised an understanding of humanity (if only it were applied to that subject matter). The kind of intellectual operation at work in this method involved the subsumption of the subject matter under universal laws of nature, themselves to be discovered by empirical study.

Note that those who were charged with social-scientism need not be taken by their critics to have embraced reductionist materialism or, indeed, any metaphysics at all. Instead, they were seen as using their science to plot other people's lives, designing a new social order in which people were treated as pawns to be manipulated rather than as free agents to be let alone. (Such worries about social-scientism are echoed by libertarian animadversions about social engineering.)

Note, also, that since social-scientism was associated with socialism, its critics tended to be conservative traditionalists. However, many who have warned of the dangers of scientism have been further to the left on the political spectrum.

This observation brings us to the second strand in the uses of 'scientism'. The main theme in this second strand is a concern about reductionist programs in which a physical science (such as biology) threatens to gobble up the subject matter of the old humanistic disciplines or of the newer social sciences. Let's call scientism of this second variety reductionist-scientism. This is the kind of scientism that members of the X-Club were thought to embrace. Critiques of reductionist-scientism were more likely to include the accusation that its adherents were committed to a materialistic metaphysics. Clearly, concerns about this brand of scientism were fueled by the advent of evolutionary theory. The concerns were exacerbated by the subsequent rise of social Darwinism. Opponents of reductionist-scientism included not only traditionalists but many left-wing authors as well.

The current use of the term 'scientism' incorporates elements from both social-scientism and reductionist-scientism, although the influence of the latter variety has been more pronounced in the past few decades.

'Scientism' 13 - Charlton on the difference between positivism & scientism

Thirteenth in a series of sixteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 & 16).

The relation between the phrases 'positivism' and 'scientism' is ambiguous. Some use 'scientism' as a synonym for 'positivism' (see Leszek Kolakowski's uses in The Alienation of Reason [1968]; e.g., p. 160 and pp. 177-8). Others take positivism to be a proper subset of scientism (my preferred use). Still others take the two groups to be disjoint.

An example of this latter use can be found in D. G. Charlton's admirable book Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire, 1852-1870. (Oxford University Press, 1959) Charlton reserves 'positivism' for the view of those positivists who remained true to the anti-metaphysical tenets of that philosophy and who did not pretend to draw ethical results from science (or from reason). 'Scientism' then refers (for Charlton) to distortions of positivism that erect ethical or metaphysical doctrines (e.g., materialism) on a putatively scientific basis (Charlton 1959, p. 2; cf. p. 224). Charlton's use of 'scientism' is clarified by this line about Claude Bernard: 'He rejects the claim of scientism that science alone can offer a new ethic of life and reorder civilization'. (Charlton 1959, p. 81)

Chapters 3-7 of Charlton's book distinguish between, on the one hand, those authors who stayed true to positivist epistemology by remaining agnostic about metaphysics and ethics (and much else) and, on the other hand, those who betrayed positivism by laying claim to knowledge beyond what was verifiable, thereby lapsing into scientism. By Charlton's lights, only Bernard and Émile Littré were true positivists while Comte, himself, Ernest Renan, and Hippolyte Taine had unwittingly forsaken positivism for scientism. Here's an interesting remark that Charlton makes about Taine:

He illustrates with especial clarity one of the most significant distortions of positivism in the mid-nineteenth century, a distortion arising from the intermingling of German idealism and Anglo-French positivism. The addition of Hegel and positivism produces scientism: this is the equation demonstrated in the philosophies of Taine and Renan alike. (Charlton, Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire [Oxford University Press, 1959], p. 154)

I quote this intriguing passage but, won't delve into it here.

Charlton's use of 'scientism' connects with what I said in the final paragraph of post 11. Indeed, much of Charlton's book is devoted to 'catching out' supposed positivists in moments of betrayal.

In short, for Charlton, since science is silent on metaphysics, ethics, etc., positivism urges silence on such matters.* 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' (though I don't mean to say Wittgenstein was a positivist). For Charlton, scientism won't shut up about the 'whereof'.

*The nature of this urging is unclear. It's normative, so, by positivist standards, it isn't based on scientific method, which itself consists of normative claims....Though perhaps at that point they rely only on hypothetical imperatives.

January philosophy links

Eric Banks interviewed about his new book The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived. Banks wrote an earlier book called Ernst Mach's World Elements.

Thomas Dixon on the history of the term 'altruism' (in a series called 'Philosophical Keywords'). In giving the rationale for this new blog project, Dixon mentions 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view, expressed in the latter’s Aids to Reflection (1825), that there were cases when "more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign".’

Seyla Benhabib on the Charlie Hebdo massacres.

At Siris, 'the Key to Mill's Utilitarianism'.

David Auerbach's 4th post on Simmel's Philosophy of Money.

Duncan Richter has a couple of new drafts (developed from blog posts) on Winch, Wittgenstein, and religious experience.

Isabelle Kalinowski on 'Max Weber and Capitalism's Strange Reality'.

'Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 2)'.

More about Putin's philosopher, Ivan Ilyin.

Eric Voegelin at 114.

Musical interlude:


'The story of historian Natalie Zemon Davis, as she tells it, is largely one about the benefits that have accrued to an outsider'.

Elucidations podcast of Sally Sedgwick on Hegel and Kant.

Rebuilding a positivist church in Brazil:

The positivist ritual consists of classical music, readings from Comte’s works, debate and invocations to the Supreme Being. It was conducted weekly until one night in 2009 when the roof, its wooden beams weakened by Brazil’s notorious tropical termites, suddenly caved in.

In E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Master Flea', Peregrinus (aka Mr. Peregrine Tyss) uses 'a microscope that allows him to observe people’s thoughts from the motion of their physical brain and nerves', thereby anticipating Herbert Feigl's autocerebroscope (elaborated upon by Paul E. Meehl). Hoffmann's 'Automata' (pdf) made io9's short list for the Victorian Hugos (1886, the year of its English translation).  Here's Hoffmann's 'Sandman'. At Gutenberg.

'Take me then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate the justice of my ideas by my facial expression.' In 'Shadows of the Coming Race' (1879) by George Eliot, we're outwitted and displaced by self-reproducing, mechanical zombies. Eliot's reflections were prompted by T. H. Huxley's 'On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata'.

Here's a neat old book, Contemporary Thought in France, in which Félix de Dantec (one of the early users of 'scientisme') is said to have adopted Huxley's epiphenomenalism. The book was written by Isaac Benrubi and translated from the German by Ernest B. Dicker in 1926 (the year of its initial publication).

Parts 1 and 2 of 'C. S. Lewis and the Inklings' on CBC Radio.

Harald Sack on 'Alfred Tarski and the Undefinability of Truth'.

Logicians in fiction:

Laura Mae Isaacman interviews Yannick Grannec about Grannec's The Goddess of Small Victories, 'a fictional story that re-imagines the life of mathematician Kurt Gödel and his wife Adele'.

Re. Richard Montague: Sacha Arnold on echoes of Montague in Samuel Delany's pornutopic Mad Man and in Aifric Campbell's Semantics of Murder.

Bertrand Russell was a basis for Scogan, an unflattering character in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. Russell was also a model for Sir Joshua Malleson in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, for Thornton Tyrell in Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and for Mr. Apollinax in a poem by T. S. Eliot. Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It is about Russell, Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore.

'Scientism' 9 - X Club (1870s)

Ninth in a series of fourteen posts  (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

In my previous post on this topic, I said that 'scientism' was used several times during the 1870s in response to the works of T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall. These two scientists belonged to the the X Club, which (according to Ruth Barton) aimed to weaken the Church of England's influence over scientific institutions.

The use of 'scientism' increased after 1874, the year of Tyndall's Belfast Address. 1874 was also the year in which Huxley published 'On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata', which he apparently presented at the same Belfast meeting at which Tyndall spoke (although this source says that Huxley gave the talk in 1870 and only published it in 1874). Tyndall's address and Huxley's 'Hypothesis' each provoked widespread controversy and debate in British and American journals and surely must have played an important role in the spread of the cry 'Scientism!'

I said (in post # 8 of this series) that the label 'scientism' was at first applied not to positivists but, instead, to the supposed materialists in the X Club. In spite of their shared enthusiasm for the sciences, the positivists and X-Clubbers were not on friendly terms with each other. Huxley had called Comte's positivism 'Catholicism minus Christianity'; he classed positivism among the 'sickening humbugs'; and Huxley had a vigorous debate with the positivist Frederic Harrison, whose criticisms of materialism included some thinly veiled ad hominems directed at Huxley. (Another X-Club member, Herbert Spencer, produced his own critique of Comte.)

I would have expected the positivists to be the first to be charged with scientism. As we have seen, 'scientism' sometimes carries the connotation that one adheres to a new, secular worldview, a comprehensive framework of belief that is meant to replace religion and that purports to be built upon science; and it was Comte, after all, who called for an actual 'religion of humanity'. Moreover, the English positivists actually did build a secular church (or two).

But in the 1870s, it was members of the X Club (and some of its invited speakers, such as W. K. Clifford) who were said to be guilty of scientism. The term seems to have been meant to impute, first, an epistemology. In the rhetorical excesses of its critics, adherents of scientism were sometimes represented as believing that the methods of science would give us exhaustive knowledge of reality. However, no one in the X Club can reasonably be interpreted as having championed such a hubristic epistemology. At most, Huxley and the others adopted the more modest view that insofar as something can be known (more accurately, known about) at all, it can be known only via the methods of science.

As I noted in post # 8, the metaphysics that scientism allegedly implied drew much of the fire from critics in the early and mid-1870s, and this metaphysics was materialism. According to the critics, scientism's proponents took reality to be nothing beyond the world revealed by science, and every part of that world was (supposedly) either physical or entirely dependent on physical things. (The latter disjunct accommodates Huxley's psychological model in which mental events aren't physical but are mere by-products, epiphenomena, of a material system.) The critics thus portrayed scientism as being wedded to a materialistic metaphysics in which everything is material or dependent on material things. More plausibly, though, the X-Clubbers and their allies made only the more modest claim that everything encompassed by our knowledge (thus far) is material or is dependent upon material things.

(In fact, Huxley's views on materialism and metaphysics were much more complicated than his critics implied [as Sherri Lyons has argued]. Tyndall was impressed by the explanatory gap between consciousness and physical states (à la du Bois-Reymond; more here) and may have been an idealist; he was influenced by Kant, Fichte, F. Schlegel, Carlyle, and Emerson [as Ruth Barton and others have stressed]. And Spencer, also aware of the explanatory gap, opted for the 'Unknown Reality' of neutral monism [see the final paragraph of his 'First Principles'].)

So, in the late Nineteenth Century, 'scientism' was used by defenders of Christianity as a label for an epistemological and metaphysical outlook that affords no support for traditional theistic belief. Most of those who were charged with scientism belonged to the X Club, which had challenged the institutional power of the Church of England. The phrase 'scientism' was used to mark these individuals as materialists.

Here's a rough stab at a definition of 'scientism' (as used by its 1870s critics): Scientism is the doctrine that all beliefs about the nature of reality should be warranted by the methods of the natural sciences; the result of this epistemic policy is materialism.

The X-Clubbers would perhaps balk at the suggestion that they had advanced any such prescription for forming beliefs about the nature of reality (the really real, the basic furniture of the universe, etc.). That's metaphysics, after all, which they eschew in favour of agnosticism. They stick to the observable phenomena. Of course, this response would not placate their critics, who would take Huxley and the others still to be committed to the doctrine that any beliefs we may form about the world -- whether about its ultimate nature or about the terrain through which we navigate in our daily lives (or about the mechanisms that explain the phenomena in that terrain) -- should be justified by the methods of the natural sciences, a policy which yields a materialistic picture of the known world and agnosticism about whether there's anything more. The critics would also argue that this scientistic doctrine cannot itself be supported by means of natural-scientific method.

These early uses of 'scientism' don't share the political connotations that attended the term's mid-20th-Century uses. Indeed, the X-Clubbers generally opposed socialism. Perhaps the 20th-Century association of scientism with socialist views was a product of French influence, but that's sheer speculation on my part.

'Scientism' 8 - Early uses (1870s)

Eighth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

The English word 'scientism' came to be used in its modern sense in the 1870s. In these early uses, those who are said to be guilty of scientism are not positivists. Instead, the guilty parties are the supposed materialists, T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall. Huxley and Tyndall were not, strictly speaking, materialists. Still, they did take the position that states of matter determine mental states and that the latter appear to be entirely dependent upon the former (so that there can be no independent mental substance). This stance sufficed at that time to secure the designation 'materialist'. Of course, Huxley and Tyndall were closely associated with Darwin's evolutionary theory, a theory which was taken by Huxley and Tyndall to imply a wholly physical origin of animal minds.

Some quick observations about these early uses:

• While the English word 'scientism' may yet have a French origin, its 1870s uses give no indication of a French source. 
• 'Scientism' was at first used primarily to signify a metaphysical doctrine (materialism); its epistemological dimension, the connotations that would implicate the positivists (and which are implied in the passage from Canon Barry [below]), came to the fore later in the 1870s. (The epistemological sense of 'scientism' is prominent in Dawson's 1877 attack on W. K. Clifford.)
• The following passages appeared in semi-popular magazines. Huxley and Tyndall, in addition to being scientists, were populizers of science. 'Scientism', then, was first used in pop-science contexts.
• In 1870, Huxley published Lay Sermons: Addresses and Reviews. I wonder if that title suggested to critics the idea that Huxley championed an alternative religion, which they then called scientism. The positioning of scientism as a religion is evident in the following quotations of Frothingham ('credo of a new religion') and Hecker ('votaries'). [Added, Jan. 10, 2015: Interestingly, in January of 1870, R. H. Hutton published a piece in the Spectator called 'Pope Huxley'.]

In 1871, D. R. Goodwin (a professor in Philadelphia's Episcopal Theological Seminary) published an article called 'Huxley's Writings' in The American Presbyterian Review. On its last page, we find this passage:

If, in the face of the increasingly triumphant exultations of modern scientism, in the face of its sneering sarcasms and insolent taunts, strangely mingled with insinuating appeals to a friendly and charitable judgment, any of the friends of Christian philosophy, morality and religion, are dismayed and despondent, let them be reassured by the patent fact, that with all its boasted progress towards the annihilation of the Christian Faith, modern speculation has not yet got one step beyond the positions of Benedict Spinoza and David Hume. (Goodwin, 'Huxley's Writings' American Presbyterian Review New Series, v. 3 [1871]: 302-333, at 333)

Here, 'scientism' needn't be given its more recent interpretation. Indeed, Goodwin might have taken the term's meaning, strictly speaking, to be no different from that of 'science'. Still, he at least associates the word with its more recent anti-religious implications.

'Scientism' next appears up in an 1872 book review in the Methodist Quarterly Review (Fourth Series, v. 24 [1872]: 339-342). The review is of Martyn Paine's Physiology of the Soul and Instinct, as distinguished from Materialism. The anonymous reviewer remarks that 'with modern scientism the problem is how to account for the system of things without a God' (p. 340). Here, the author seems to take atheism (or at least agnosticism) to be part of the meaning of 'scientism'.

In 1876, Frederick Frothingham used 'scientism' in his contribution to a Unitarian magazine. He asks,

Is it not so plain as to be well-nigh self-evident that the true Radicalism can have no sympathy with that spirit which, however it may claim the name of Radicalism, is not radical, and though boasting of scientism is not scientific,—which identifies itself with, and declares as scientific truths, what are yet, and perhaps for ages, if not always, must remain surmises, and proclaims these as the credo of a new religion?' (Frothingham, 'Our Work in the Light of Some Present Demands' The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine 6 [1876]: 117-133, at 128) 

Also in 1876, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker uses 'scientism' three times in his review of St. George Jackson Mivart's book Lessons from Nature as manifested in Mind & Matter. The word appears twice on the first page and once on the final page of the review.

On the first page, Hecker writes, 'Yet it is sadly true that the votaries of scientism are on the increase, and that Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, and Tyndall usurp ... a place lately held by Mill, Renan, Strauss, and Hegel' (Hecker, 'Mivart's "Lessons from Nature"' The Catholic World, 24 [1876]: 1-13, at 1). Hecker then dismisses the view that matter harbors the 'promise and potency of every form and quality of life'. (The quoted phrase [unattributed by Hecker] is from John Tyndall's 'Apology for the Belfast Address', Tyndall's defense of a very influential talk given in 1874 [which was ridiculed by James Clerk Maxwell in some poems].) Hecker then says, 'It is evident that scientism is more rigorously skeptical than rationalism or the materialism of the eighteenth century -- in a word, that it is supremely nihilistic' (Ibid.).

Finally, in 1877 Canon Barry rejects the 'scientism' of T. H. Huxley. Barry uses the term on p. 114 of A modern symposium. Subjects: The soul and future life, by Frederic Harrison [and others] and, The influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief, by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen [and others]. Interestingly, Barry applies the label not to the Comtean positivist Frederic Harrison but, instead, to the supposed materialist Huxley:

Mr. Harrison's earnest and eloquent plea against the materialism which virtually, if not theoretically, makes all that we call spirit a mere function of material organization ..., and against the exclusive 'scientism' which, because it cannot find certain entities along its line of investigation, asserts loudly that they are either non-existent or 'unknowable,' is strong, and (pace Prof. Huxley) needful. (Barrry, A Modern Symposium [1877], p. 114)

Incidentally, the first use that I've found of 'scientism' in a literary context is in George Bernard Shaw's marathon 1921 play (90 000 words long), Back to Methuselha, which includes this line: 'On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious as they are mostly squalid.'

'Scientism' 3 - Observations (cold war)

Third in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

Some quick observations about the mid-20th-Century use of 'scientism':

• It was used in a more overtly political way by both religious and non-religious authors who tended towards the right end of the political spectrum. 
• The term was generally used to brand its target as a Faustian, secular religion, implying that adherents of the targeted view, though they pretended to superior rationality, had in fact made their own leap of faith. 
• The destination of this leap of faith was in the first instance a 'liberal' ideology, in which a Whiggish belief in progress and an overly rosy view of human nature figured prominently. (This aspect of the term's function fades in the libertarian uses.)
• The phrase was rhetorically convenient for right-wing authors, since it assimilated secular liberalism with Marxism (a more obvious secular religion that was optimistic about history and human nature and that made a great show of being a purely rational science).

The overtones of imputed religiosity are especially clear in the quotations of Foerster ('devotion'), Morgenthau ('dogmatic'), and Voegelin ('creed' and 'dogmas').

Some of the quoted passages seem haunted by a fear of Marxist communism, which is more pronounced in the passage by Polanyi ('soul-destroying tyrrany'). The fear also comes through as a concern about loss of freedom (esp. in the passages from Lewis and Polanyi), with the suggestion in Hayek's 1942 statement that there's something 'slavish' about scientism.

It's interesting to see how the French 'scientisme', originally directed against Saint-Simon and Comte (who really did envision secular institutions that mimicked religion), morphed into the English 'scientism', which was used just before and during the Cold War as an epithet for a broader array of secular views.

My sense is that today, 'scientism' has largely shed its overtly political connotations and is more often used simply to imply that someone has illegitimately applied phsyical-scientific method beyond its proper domain.

'Scientism' 1

First in a series of fourteen posts (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

The use of the English term 'scientism' echoes that of the French 'scientisme'. Both words have primarily been terms of abuse, implying the application of scientific methods beyond their proper domain. Peter Schöttler has traced the French phrase back to the 1840s. It seems to have arisen from disputes between Comtean positivists and more conservative, religious authors. Some of the Comteans embraced the label. Here, for instance, is Felix le Dantec in 1911:

I believe that science ... alone can solve all the issues that have meaning ... and I think it will penetrate to the mysteries of our emotional life and explain to me even the origin and structure of hereditary anti-scientific mysticism cohabiting with the most absolute scientism. But I am also convinced that men posed many questions that mean nothing."  (le Dantec, Le chaos et l'harmonie universelle [F. Alcan, 1911])

[Please excuse my linguistic feebleness, but the above rendering is my Google-assisted translation of le Dantec's French.]

Aided by Google's Ngram, James Schmidt has charted the early development of the English 'scientism', noting a spike in its use around 1920. Schmidt identifies two sources of this increase. One was a 1919 theological book by Charles Gray Shaw’s (The Ground and Goal of Human Life [reviewed in The Personalist 4 (1923): 67-9]). Shaw takes Comte and Spencer to be paradigms of scientism (Comte's name appears more than twenty times in the index of Shaw's book). Here's Shaw: 'The attempt to socialize science or to make sociality scientific has been the undoing of scientism; so that who can deny that Comte and Spencer have made scientism appear silly?' (p. 177) Shaw regarded scientism as being inimical to 'individualism'. In one of his earliest uses of 'scientism' in the above-linked book, Shaw says,

The scientism which now attempts to interpret the world for man had its beginning with the inception of modern thought; but it was not until the science of the organic world advanced beyond the study of the inorganic that scientism gained the upper hand and drove the self from the world of things. How such scientism arose and how it achieved its victory over the self, must now become the subject of analytical investigation

Shaw's writing abounds in ill-defined abstractions, including not only scientism but, also, its putative contraries (among which are 'aestheticism' and the 'spiritual').

Schmidt says that the other source of 'scientism's' 1920 spike was an article by Charles Cestre on the plight of labourers. Cestre's use seems idiosyncratic, though he, too, sees a tension between scientism and individualism. (Here's Part II of Schmidt's history of 'scientism'.)

Among the most prominent uses of 'scientism' before 1950 was that of Friedrich von Hayek. In his 1942 paper, 'Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I', Hayek introduced the term as follows:

To preclude any misunderstanding on this point we shall, wherever we are concerned, not with the general spirit of disinterested inquiry but with that slavish imitation of the method and language of Science, speak of 'scientism' or the 'scientistic' prejudice. Although these terms are not completely unknown in English, they are actually borrowed from the French, where in recent years they have come to be generally used in very much the same sense in which they will be used here. It should be noted that, in the sense in which we shall use these terms, they describe, of course, an attitude which is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed. The scientistic as distinguished from the scientific view is not an unprejudiced but a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigating it. (Hayek, 'Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I' Economica 9 [1942]: 269 [italics added])

I've omitted Hayek's three footnotes from the above passage. In one of them, he cites two French sources re. the use of 'scientisme'. One of them is J. Fiolle's Scientisme et Science (Paris, 1936). The other one is André Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (4th ed.).