Comte, Auguste

Comte, Auguste 1798-1857

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auguste Comte was a French philosopher best known for founding the field of sociology and the philosophical school of positivism. Born into a Catholic and monarchial family in Montpellier on January 17, 1798, he rejected Catholicism and royalism at the age of thirteen and entered the progressive École Polytechnique in Paris three years later. He soon began a close association with the French social reformer Claude Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and served as his secretary for several years. After breaking with Saint-Simon and then suffering a mental collapse in 1827, Comte recovered and published the six volumes of his seminal Course of Positive Philosophy between 1830 and 1842. He also served as a tutor and examiner at the École Polytechnique beginning in 1832, but was dismissed in 1842 as a result of a dispute with its directors. He had gained a considerable following by this point, and for much of the remainder of his life his admirers and disciples supported him financially. In the early 1850s he began formulating his own humanitarian and non-theistic religion, the Religion of Humanity. His second and final major work, the four-volume System of Positive Polity, was published from 1851 to 1854. Soon afterward Comte’s perennially poor health deteriorated even further, and he died of stomach cancer on September 5, 1857.

Comte is perhaps most famous for his “law of three stages,” according to which intellectual and social development progresses through three chronological steps: the theological stage, in which events are attributed to the actions of gods and supernatural forces; the metaphysical stage, in which the world is explained through abstract concepts such as “nature” and “final causes”; and the final, positive stage, which is characterized by a willingness to simply observe the world without searching for a metaphysical cause or final principle that governs it. Comte believed that the “positive” method that had triumphed in mathematics, astronomy, and physics would eventually prevail in other fields such as economics and politics; this belief system made him an important forerunner of positivistic social science as it emerged in the mid-twentieth century, which held that mixing “facts” and “values” would entail a betrayal of scientific thinking. According to Comte, the positive method would culminate in a new science, sociology, the goal and achievement of which would be nothing less than the synthesis of all human knowledge and the resolution of the crisis of the modern world through the reorganization of society.

Comte maintained that nearly all social problems could be solved by organizing society into an all-embracing hierarchical system in which an intellectual elite helps to regulate education and public morality, an outlook which the English biologist Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895) described as “Catholicism minus Christianity” (Pickering 1993, p. 17). The English philosopher John Stuart Mill may have overstated the case in arguing that Comte aimed at establishing “a despotism of society over the individual, surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers” (Comte 1975, p. xxviii), but it is difficult to deny that Comte’s emphasis on hierarchy and obedience put him sharply at odds with liberalism and democracy.

SEE ALSO Mill, John Stuart; Positivism; Sociology

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aron, Raymond. 1965. Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, the Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848. Vol. 1 of Main Currents in Sociological Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Comte, Auguste. 1975. Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings. Ed. Gertrud Lenzer. New York: Harper and Row.

Pickering, Mary. 1993. Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Dennis C. Rasmussen