POSITIVISM

The fundamental axiom of positivism, the system of thought founded by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), is that everything, not only the natural world but also human morality and religion, should be ordered on the basis of science. The word positive (positif in French), deriving from the Latin ponere (to put or place) had been used in the sense of "relating to fact" from the sixteenth century and in opposition to "metaphysical" from the eighteenth century, when the encyclopedists had first begun attempting to synthesize human knowledge. Comte stands very much in the tradition of Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and his colleagues, attempting to ground political and social thought on the same rational basis as the natural sciences.

Another synonym for positive, in Comt's view, was relative, the Kantean belief that one can know nothing about things in themselves but only the relations between them. Positivism accordingly abandons the search for causes in favor of the laws of relation. All human conceptions, according to Comt's law of the three stages, pass from the theological through the metaphysical to the positive stage; from being seen as the result of super-natural agencies or abstract essences they are finally regarded as related to each other by fixed and invariable laws. This had long been recognized in the physical sciences; what was new in Comte was the attempt to devise a science of society, a social statics or order based on social dynamics or history. Comte attempted to give system and scientific rigor to the widespread contemporary confidence in a grand narrative of human progress.

Many of Comt's contemporaries were happy enough with his synthesis of the sciences, the Cours de philosophie positive, which appeared in six volumes from 1830 to 1842, but were less happy with the dictatorial tendencies that became all too evident in the second of his major works, the Système de politique positive (published from 1851 to 1854), setting out the details of his religion of humanity, on the basis of which society should be ordered. There is a continuing debate over the continuity between the two "halves" of Comt's career. There can be no doubt that Comte always intended positivism to provide a complete explanation of all phenomena, including the human sciences. The problem, at least for Comt's followers, was the detail with which Comte spelled out the way in which he believed society should be ordered.

Comte came to see the religion of humanity as the natural successor to Christianity. Much of his work is devoted to analyzing the merits and defects of Catholicism, which had provided the Middle Ages with a set of beliefs on which to base human morality. Those beliefs had gradually been eroded, however, by the Western Revolution, firstly under Protestantism and then under deism. Now, according to Comte, it was necessary to devise a new synthesis of knowledge on which to base human behavior, thus avoiding the anarchy and disorder that had been the result of the French Revolution (year one of the positivist calendar began in 1789). Positive morality was erected on the basis of the contemporary "science" of phrenology and faculty psychology, advocating the gradual strengthening of the altruistic instincts at the expense of the egoistic, a process involving an elaborate system of prayer and meditation based on "real" angels of the house (mothers, wives, and daughters).

Comt's French followers, historians of science such as Pierre Laffitte and Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littre, author of the famous dictionary of medicine, tended to play down the later Comt's attempted reconstruction of religion. Pioneering sociologists such as Émile Durkheim also drew more on the early work, helping to establish the new discipline of sociology on a genuinely scientific basis. This was also the case with Comt's most famous English disciple, John Stuart Mill, whose System of Logic (1843) culminated in the "Logic of the Moral Sciences." Mill advocated new sciences of the mind (psychology), of morals (ethology), and of society (sociology). In Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865) he distinguished clearly between the acceptable Comte of the Cours and the unaccep-table high priest of humanity of the later work. His posthumously published Three Essays on Religion (1874), however, was surprisingly sympathetic toward the general aim of reorganizing religion on a humanist basis.

The most enthusiastic popularizer of Comt's philosophy of the sciences was George Henry Lewes, George Eliot's partner, whose widely read Biographical History of Philosophy, first published in 1845–1846, went through several editions, the third and fourth (1867 and 1871) displaying his continuing faith in their revised title, The History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte. Other prominent positivists, much read in their own time but now largely forgotten, included Frederic Harrison and Edward Spencer Beesly, professor of history at University College London from 1860 to 1893. Both were actively involved in the development of working men's colleges and in the legitimization of the trade unions in the 1860s and 1870s. They saw to it that positivism was much discussed by politicians, historians, and theologians as well as by scientists in mid-to-late Victorian Britain. The official Positivist Society remained small in numbers, but everybody who was anybody in the world of late-Victorian Britain had to have a position on positivism as a general philosophy. Novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing (tutor to Harrison's children), and Mrs. Humphry Ward (Mary Augusta Ward) studied Comte carefully and developed their own views in relation to his.

Positivism made a particularly powerful impact in Latin America where intellectual elites considered it a tool for emancipating their nations from the economic backwardness, political and moral anarchy, and pre-scientific culture for which they blamed their former colonial powers. Under Julio de Castilhos, the first republican governor of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, positivism continued to guide state- and nation-building in Brazil over most of the twentieth century. The country's republican flag, with its motto of "order and progress," was reconfirmed after each regime change, and Brazil remains the only country worldwide that still has a positivist church.

The lasting legacy of positivism should probably be seen as the foundation of the new academic disciplines of sociology and the history of science. The logical positivists of the 1930s owed little to Comte, merely sharing his dislike of metaphysics. Modern humanism, attempting to gain recognition of the legitimacy of a lifestyle based entirely on human values, sees Comte himself as an embarrassment. His reputation has certainly not been enhanced by biographical studies focusing on his supposed madness and eccentricity. He can claim nevertheless to have articulated many of the basic assumptions of his time, albeit in an idiosyncratic and ultimately unacceptable manner.

See alsoComte, Auguste; Science and Technology; Secularization; Sociology.

bibliography

Chadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1975.

Hentschke, Jens R. Positivism gaúcho-Style: Julio de Castilhos's Dictatorship and Its Impact on State and Nation-Building in Vargas's Brazil. Berlin, 2004.

Kolakowski, Leszek. Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1972.

Simon, Walter Michael. European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century: An Essay in Intellectual History. Ithaca, N.Y., 1963.

Wright, Terence R. The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1986.

T. R. Wright