Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857) was a French philosopher and writer who founded the doctrine of positivism and coined the term sociology for the scientific study of society. [1] In his Cours de philosophie positive he argued that human thought passes through theological, metaphysical and positive stages, and that the social sciences should adopt the observational methods of physics and biology. [2] His later work proposed a secular Religion of Humanity built on the principle of altruism, a word he introduced. [3]
Early life and education
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte was born on 19 January 1798 in Montpellier into a Catholic and royalist family, whose beliefs he rejected as a young man. [1] He studied at the lycée in Montpellier and in 1814 entered the École polytechnique in Paris, where he absorbed the scientific and reformist outlook of the school. The institution was closed by the restored monarchy in 1816 and Comte, sent home with the other students, never completed a degree.
He remained in Paris, supporting himself by tutoring in mathematics. In 1817 he became secretary and collaborator to the social theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, an association of seven years that shaped his conviction that industrial society required a new intellectual and moral foundation. The two quarrelled over authorship and parted in 1824. [2]
The positive philosophy
Comte began a course of public lectures on his system in 1826, but suffered a severe mental breakdown and attempted suicide before it was completed. [1] He resumed the project and published the six volumes of the Cours de philosophie positive between 1830 and 1842, supporting himself meanwhile as a tutor and examiner at the École polytechnique.
The work sets out the law of three stages, according to which each branch of knowledge passes from theological explanation through metaphysical abstraction to the positive stage, in which it seeks only the invariable laws linking observed phenomena. [3] Comte arranged the sciences in a hierarchy of increasing complexity and decreasing generality, running from mathematics through astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology to the science of society, which he first called social physics and then sociology. [2] He divided this new discipline into social statics, the study of order, and social dynamics, the study of progress.
The Religion of Humanity
After 1844 Comte's thought took a more explicitly moral and religious direction, associated with his attachment to Clotilde de Vaux, who died in 1846. [1] In the Système de politique positive, published between 1851 and 1854, he proposed a Religion of Humanity with its own calendar, rituals and priesthood of scientists, directed to the worship of humanity as a collective being and governed by the maxim of living for others.
This later system alienated many of his admirers, including John Stuart Mill, who had promoted his earlier work and helped support him financially. [3] Positivist churches were nonetheless founded in several countries, with particular influence in Brazil, whose national motto Order and Progress derives from Comte's formula. [2]
Later life and legacy
Comte lived his final years in reduced circumstances in Paris, sustained by subscriptions from followers, and died there on 5 September 1857. [1]
His insistence that social phenomena are subject to discoverable laws established the programme of scientific sociology later taken up and revised by Émile Durkheim and others. [4] Positivism as a general theory of knowledge, and the sharp separation of science from metaphysics that it proposed, remained a major current in European thought well into the twentieth century.
