ABSTRACT
Emile Durkheim view of the division of labor had a political goal similar to that of other social scientists—to prevent the conflicts among social classes in industrialized society from degenerating into civil war, as they had during the Paris Commune. The methodological problems of the political and social sciences were also at the center of Max Weber interests. The conviction that armed conflict, such as that between governmental forces and the Parisian Communards in 1871, would have provoked the disintegration of the European moral and social order made many social scientists cautious. In the late-nineteenth-century intellectual context, a positivist methodology applied to social realities came to be considered capable of providing basic certainties useful for life lived in common. Herbert Spencer believed in the necessity of applying the principle of evolution to social phenomena because evolution clarified the genesis and growth of human association.
