Comte, Auguste

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COMTE, AUGUSTE

COMTE, AUGUSTE (1798–1857), founder of sociology and positivism.

Although desirous to distinguish himself from the French revolutionaries and Napoleon, who had wreaked havoc in his youth, Auguste Comte shared their desire to launch a new era in European history. He envisioned a new global order based on secular republicanism and marked by an intellectual and emotional consensus.

Born in Montpellier, France, on 19 January 1798, Comte rebelled as a boy against the royalism and Catholicism of his parents. A brilliant mathematician, he marveled at the power of the sciences and studied at the Ècole polytechnique, the prestigious engineering school in Paris. After being expelled for insubordination in 1816, he began in 1817 to work for Henri de Saint-Simon, a prominent social reformer. Comte later tried to deny Saint-Simon's influence after their rupture in 1824. Nevertheless, Saint-Simon showed him that the nascent industrial society had to be based on a scientific system of knowledge—a "positive philosophy"—that had to include the study of society. Having read Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat; 1689–1755), Condorcet (Marie-Jean de Caritat; 1743–1794), and the idèologues (liberal social theorists), Comte realized the significance of Saint-Simon's scattered insights. In 1826 he made his first attempt to bring knowledge together in a public course, but after a few lectures, he went mad. When he emerged from his asylum months later, he contributed articles to a journal run by the Saint-Simonians, yet he refused to join their cult. In the 1830s, he procured a position as a tutor and administrator at the Ècole polytechnique, where he tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to obtain a chair. He was eventually fired. Living off of his disciples' contributions, he died on 5 September 1857.

Comte's masterpiece is the six-volume Cours de philosophie positive (Course of Positive Philosophy), published between 1830 and 1842. It introduced his intellectual synthesis, called positivism. According to Comte's law of three stages, the main branches of knowledge and indeed all societies, which reflect the prevailing system of ideas, go through three stages. During the theological stage, people explain events by attributing them to a god or several gods. (There are three substages: fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism.) Priests and kings run society. During the metaphysical stage, personified nonsupernatural abstractions like Nature are said to cause occurrences. Philosophers and lawyers dominate society. During the positive stage, people stop looking for first causes and seek scientific laws that describe how, not why, phenomena function. Knowledge is considered valid only if it is based on the "positive" or scientific method and is limited to what can be observed. According to Comte's classification of the sciences, the six main sciences arrived at the positive stage in the following order, which was determined by the simplicity of their subject matter and their distance from humans: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and the study of society. The Cours discussed the development of each of these branches of knowledge, thus inaugurating the history of science.

Referring to the findings of the phrenologist Franz Gall (1758–1828), Comte maintained that because biology now was a positive science, it was time for the study of society to be wrested from the theologians and metaphysicians and to become a science. He called this new science sociology in 1839. It contained two parts: social dynamics, the study of progress (whose main historical law was the law of three stages), and social statics, the study of order. Once he established sociology as the keystone of positivism, he assumed that an intellectual revolution would commence. It would lead to a moral revolution, which would usher in a new social and political order, doing away with the anarchy from the Revolution of 1789. The government of the new positive era would comprise a temporal power composed of industrialists and a spiritual power made up of positive philosophers. Administered by these separate powers, a new secular "Occidental Republic" would work for the betterment of all in a spirit of consensus. Comte's ambitious scheme of renewal, based on a grand view of history and the creation of an organic community, appealed to leading intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill and Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littrè.

The more controversial part of Comte's life is his so-called second career, when he launched a new religion. Some scholars attribute this religion to Comte's midlife crisis. In 1845, three years after he separated from his wife, Caroline Massin, Comte fell in love with a budding novelist, who was seventeen years younger than he. Clotilde de Vaux rejected his amorous advances but grew close to him before she died of tuberculosis a year later. Crushed, Comte considered her responsible for a dramatic shift in his philosophy. Yet before meeting her, Comte had been interested in the moral reform of society. Living during the period of Romanticism, attracted to Catholic conservative thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), and eager to gather the support of workers, whose marginality reminded him of his own, he never presented ideas alone as the principal motivators of people; it was important to address their feelings. In addition, as the women's movement became prominent, he tried to attract female supporters by referring to the importance of the emotions and countering the influence of the Catholic Church. In the late 1840s, thanks in part to his excitement about the Revolution of 1848, he launched a new secular religion, the Religion of Humanity, which flowed logically from positivism. People were to make society, or Humanity, not only the focus of their scientific studies but also the object of their love and activities. To encourage this new cult and the growth of sociability, or altruism, a word he coined, Comte devised prayers, a new calendar, and sacraments, many of which were derived from Catholicism. Around the same time, he came out in favor of a dictatorial state, especially as he placed his hopes on the new government of Napoleon III (r. 1852–1871), who, however, soon disappointed him. Comte discussed his religion and his plan for a new global order that would comprise five hundred republics in his four-volume Système de politique positive (1851–1854; System of Positive Polity, 1875–1877). It appealed to individuals who rejected God but felt uncomfortable with atheism. Some disciples, however, accused him of betraying his scientific agenda.

Comte's doctrine influenced philosophy, sociology, the history of science, and historiography. Because its assault on the church and monarchism appealed to the left and its defense of order and authority made it attractive to the right, positivism had diverse followers throughout Europe and Latin America. The Brazilian flag displays Comte's motto "Order and Progress."