COMTE, AUGUSTE

French social philosopher, often called the father of modern systematic sociology; b. Montpellier, Jan. 19, 1798; d. Paris, Sept. 5, 1857.

Life. The son of devoutly Catholic and Royalist parents, from earliest school age Comte was known for his intellectual brilliance and also for habitual defiance of authority. The first quality won him many academic prizes as well as precocious admission to the famous École Polytechnique in Paris; the second, however, brought about his early dismissal for leadership of a student insurrection. Added to these was a third quality, possibly of psychotic nature, that led to a temporary mental breakdown in early manhood and, in later life, to messianic delusions that alienated all but the most zealous of his followers.

Shortly after his academic dismissal in 1816, Comte took up residence in Paris, when he became acquainted with the utopian socialist C. H. saint-simon. Although the exact influence of this extraordinary mind on Comte is subject to scholarly dispute, it was during his association with Saint-Simon that Comte acquired the interest in social reconstruction that subsequently governed his life. The two men broke in extreme bitterness, however, about 1823, and Comte, thereafter, never acknowledged Saint-Simon in any way as an influence on his work. The major intellectual influences on him (which he himself fully acknowledged) were the enlightenment, from which came his interest in social development, and the early 19th-century French Catholic conservative reaction to the Enlightenment, from which he derived his interest in order and stability (see traditionalism).

Thought. Comte's earliest writings were essays, of which the most notable was the "Prospectus of the Scientific Works Required for the Reorganization of Society," published in 1822 with an introduction by Saint-Simon. In this learned and original piece, Comte set forth germinally most of the ideas that he later incorporated in his more systematic works. He disclosed his underlying vision of a Europe disorganized and alienated by the forces of modernism—nationalism, centralization, religious dissent, secularism, revolution—that had broken up the consensus of the Middle Ages without producing anything to replace it. The prime requirement of the modern age, he declared, was a new philosophy, one rooted in science, that would do for the present and future of Europe what Christianity had done in the medieval period, that is, serve as the basis of intellectual certainty, moral consensus, and social stability. Comte had no use for the democratic ideas of the Enlightenment and the french revolution. He saw in them metaphysical fallacies that could only subvert the social order. It was his attack on the Revolution and its equalitarian ethos that made him, for all his anti-Catholic, antimonarchist ideas, a favored name of the extreme right in French politics at the end of the 19th century.

The New Science. The outlines of Comte's new science—which he referred to variously as social physics or sociology, having expressly coined the latter word—are to be found in the Cours de philosophie positive, published

between 1830 and 1842. This work rests on Comte's "law of the three stages," undoubtedly the best-known of all his contributions. The "law" states that society and, within it, all disciplines of thought must pass with iron necessity through three stages of development: the religious, the metaphysical, and finally the "positive," or scientific. According to Comte, each of the natural sciences—astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology, in precisely that order—had already passed through these stages. Each had attained its third, that is, its scientific stage, and the intellectual scene was therefore ripe, for the first time in history, for the emergence of a science of society—the one area of knowledge still confined to the realms of religion and metaphysics. This new science of sociology Comte proposed to organize, like each of the preceding natural sciences, into a statics and a dynamics, the first sphere being the study of order and stability; the second, the study of societal movement or, as Comte called it, progress. Comte, like many other intellectuals in the 19th century, was preeminently a philosopher of progress, but, unlike the others, he posited his law of progress upon intellectual rather than social or economic factors. Because of the boldness and the extraordinary sweep of knowledge displayed in his work, Comte's philosophy (which became known far and wide as positivism) was honored by some of the leading

minds of Europe, among them Alexander von Humboldt and John Stuart mill. Mill indeed, in his Logic, made Comte's work the very basis of his own prescription of the method of the social sciences.

Maturity. The final period of Comte's intellectual life was marked by the publication of the Système de politique positive (1851–54). Although remarkable in its conception and its learning, it is the most bizarre and controversial of Comte's works, infused with messianic visions that were absent from his earlier writings. This vast work may be seen from any one of three perspectives: utopian, religious, or scientific.

Under the utopian perspective there is a detailed preview of life in the positivist society that Comte never doubted would develop, first in Europe, then throughout the world. Comte foresaw the positivist society as one governed by scientists and intellectuals working in close harmony with industrialists. It would be hierarchical, not equalitarian; republican, not democratic. Its underlying theme would be consensus and articulation, rather than individual rights or freedom, which Comte regarded as "metaphysical fallacies." Every possible detail of life in the positivist utopia is spelled out, down to the names of the months and days of the reformed positivist calendar and the colors of the vestments to be worn by luminaries at public assemblies.

The Positive Polity is also a religious work, for by middle age Comte's view of positivism had become suffused with a profoundly religious flavor. Much of its emphasis is on the hieratic and liturgical, and it reveals an appreciation of the Middle Ages and of Catholicism that was lacking in Comte's earlier writings. Positivism, he declared, would, in scientific fashion, carry on the work of Catholicism. Society became for him the true deity; he prescribed modes of worship and scientist-rulers called priests. It was this emphasis that produced, following the book's publication, scores of "positivist societies," especially in England and the United States, all of them founded on Comte's "religion of humanity." Not without reason, his work was called by some critics "Catholicism minus Christianity."

Nevertheless, the Positive Polity is a work of social science—protoscience, perhaps—for along with its messianic cast and its religious and utopian leanings, it contains frequent penetrating analyses of the social order. The division between "statics" and "dynamics," drawn from the earlier work, is carefully maintained. Under the first, Comte analyzes kinship, social class, religion, morality, language, and other elements of the social bond. Stripped of their bizarre locutions and worshipful value contexts, these analyses are incisive and sometimes profound. Comte's treatment of the political, social, and psychological character of the family was unequaled in the century, save possibly by Frédéric le play. Comte's "dynamic sociology," although it took up the familiar 19th-century theme of inevitable progress, included insights into European history, particularly into the social nature of the Middle Ages and its breakup, that were the equal of any in his age. There is, in short, ample justification for Comte's subtitling his work "a treatise on sociology," the first such use of the term to be found in European thought.

Comte cannot be placed with Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl marx, or Le Play as a foremost influence in laying the foundations on which such men as Ferdinand Tönnies, Max weber, Georg Simmel, and Émile durkheim subsequently built the structure of contemporary sociology. His unstable commitment to causes and values that subverted his own ideal of science—such as his messianic utopianism and religion of humanity—prevented that. But no one in the century more successfully conveyed the desideratum of a science of society and of the necessity of science—rather than revolution—as an element in the building of the good society.

Bibliography: f. s. marvin, Comte (London 1936). f. e. manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Mass. 1962). m. degrange, The Curve of Societal Movement (Hanover, N.H. 1930). l. lÉvy-bruhl, The Philosophy of Auguste Comte (New York 1903).

[r. a. nisbet]