MARXISM AS A POSITIVE SCIENCE 57 misunderstanding that ^a natural science' for Marx meant a positivist enquiry on the model of physics. There is perhaps ground for this misunderstanding. Even in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which allegedly represent Marx at his Hegelian best, the text is littered somewhat indiscriminately with the term 'positive5. Thus Marx speaks indifferently of ""the positive annulment of private property', the ^positive community', ^the positive nature of private property'.5 At the same time it is impossible to hold that Marx's conception of the positive is that of positivism as we understand today. For in the very same essay he belabours natural science for^its abstract materialist, or rather idealist orientation", for its lack of connection with human life. He himself believed that ^even when I carry out scientific work etc an activity which I can seldom conduct in direct association with other men, I perform a social, because human act".6 It must be remembered that the man who influenced the young Marx's attitudes towards the new science was not Comte for whom he had little regard but Saint-Simon. For both these men science was not a set of techniques but an entire manner of thinking^even a way of life, replacing religion as the main force which was to hold society together. But Saint Simon's interest in science was inextricably tied up with an interest in the study of social change and even revolution. As Gouldner puts it tf^..under Saint-Simon's formulations, French Positivism never committed itself to the assumption "once useful, always useful'. Saint-Simon's was not a Panglossian optimism that saw this as the best of possible worlds, but rather was a vision of the modern social world as incomplete, as suffering from immaturity."7 Marx and Comte If we accept Gouldner'5 idea that sociology underwent a binary fission post-Saint-Simon, then Maix and Comte clearly belong to the two different traditions that got established as a result. It was Comte who attempted to make positive science an instrument of conserving rather than changing,, of the preservation of the status quo. And it was he who taught that positive philosophy ^will be teaching society that in the present state of their ideas, no political change can be of supreme importance, while the perturbation attending change is supremely mischievous, in the way both of immediate hindrance, and of diverting attention from the true need and procedure. Again the positive spirit tends to consolidate order, by the natural development of a wise resignation to incurable political evils. A true resignation—that is a permanent disposition to endure, steadily, and without hope of compensation, all inevitable evils, can proceed only from a deep sense of the connection of all kinds of natural phenomena with invariable laws. If there are f^s I doubt not there are) political evils which, like some personal sufferings, cannot be remedied by science, at least proves to us that they are incurable, so as to calm our restlessness under pain by the conviction that it