Comte, Auguste | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

One of the French founders of modern sociology, Isidore-Auguste-Marie-François-Xavier Comte, better known simply as Auguste Comte (1798–1857), was born in Montpellier on January 19 (30 Nivose Year VI in the revolutionary calendar) and tried to reconcile the ideals of the Revolution of 1789 with early nineteenth century society. Comte's higher education began at the École Polytechnique in Paris, although he was expelled after two years following a quarrel with one of his mathematics professor. He then briefly studied biology at the École de Médecine in Montpellier before returning to Paris. Among his early influences, the philosophy of the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) had the greatest impact. In 1817, Comte began his close association with Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), one of the founders of French socialist thought who envisaged the reorganization of society by an elite of philosophers, engineers, and scientists. After an angry break between the two in 1824, Comte spent the next twenty years delivering lectures on "social physics." He suffered periods of intense mental collapse and died isolated and bitter on September 5 in Paris.

Building on Condorcet's theory of human progress, Comte constructed what he called a "positive philosophy." Central to his philosophy was the "law of the three stages" between theological (mythological or fictitious), metaphysical (abstract), and positive (empirical and descriptive) knowledge. Over the course of history and across a broad range of disciplines and dimensions of human culture, the myths of theology have been gradually replaced by the general principles of metaphysics that were, in Comte's own time, being superseded by positive or empirical scientific knowledge. The positive stage constitutes the highest stage of human history because it is only when science has become "positive" that human beings will truly understand the world. For Comte, astronomy was the first science to become positive, because its phenomena are universal and affect other sciences without itself being affected. Because it is so complex, the last science to become positive is "social physics" or sociology.

Comte divided social physics into statics and dynamics, order and progress. The idea of order appears in society when there is stability because all members hold the same beliefs, a stage that occurred with the triumph of medieval Christianity. The idea of progress appeared with the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. For Comte, the contemporary challenge was to reconcile or synthesize order and progress, because revolution had destroyed the medieval sense of order but not yet created a new one to take its place. According to Comte, this new order required not only science but religion, with a new clergy to preach the laws of society. Comte eventually proposed himself as the high priest of this new scientific religion, and from 1844 signed his works, "The Founder of Universal Religion, Great Priest of Humanity."

Comte has been severely criticized for proposing that a technocratic elite was needed to educate and discipline society (see, for instance, the remarks on Comte in his contemporary John Stuart Mill's book On Liberty, 1859). But Comte was also interested in the moral improvement of humanity as a whole, and a social order in which self-interest is restrained within the bounds of an appreciation of the good of others as well as oneself. Morality for him was constituted by devotion to the whole of society. Such an idea clearly represented a critique of the unqualified competitiveness characteristic of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the need for some authoritarian, technocratic guidance—perhaps imbuedto some degree with a religious sensibility—to facilitate the creation of a legal framework that supports qualified capitalist competition is not easily dismissed.

The importance of Comte must be placed in the historical context of a century in which vast systems of ideas were being fashioned in response to the forces unleashed by the French and Industrial Revolutions. Although the law of the three stages sounds contrived, and his plans for a new positive religion utterly fantastic, Comte succeeded in introducing the scientific study of society into nineteenth century intellectual discourse. His vision of a science of society to complement the emerging science of nature remains of fundamental importance to the relationship between science, technology, and ethics.

Enlightenment Social Theory;; Secularization.

Comte, Auguste. (1853). The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Harriet Martineau. London: J. Chapman.

Comte, Auguste. (1865). A General View of Positivism, trans. J. H. Bridges. London: Trübner.

Comte, Auguste. (1875–1877). The System of Positive Polity, trans. J. H. Bridges, et al. London: Longmans, Green.

Comte, Auguste. (1958). The Catechism of Positive Religion, trans. Richard Congreve. London: Kegan Paul.

Mill, John Stuart. (1866). Auguste Comte and Positivism. Philadelphia: Lippencott. One of the best introductions to Comte's work, by one of his contemporary admirers and critics.

Pickering, Mary. (1993). Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Excellent study of Comte's early life and difficulties; places his ideas within the context of the intellectual history of early nineteenth century France.

Scharff, Robert C. (1995). Comte after Positivism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. A detailed consideration of Comte's ideas and of their applicability in the early twenty-first century.

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