Auguste Comte
French philosopher
in full Isidore-auguste-marie-françois-xavier Comte
born January 19, 1798, Montpellier, France
died September 5, 1857, Paris
Main
French philosopher known as the founder of sociology and of
positivism. Comte gave the science of sociology its name and
established the new subject in a systematic fashion.
Life.
Comte’s father, Louis Comte, a tax official, and his mother,
Rosalie Boyer, were strongly royalist and deeply sincere
Roman Catholics. But their sympathies were at odds with the
republicanism and skepticism that swept through France in
the aftermath of the French Revolution. Comte resolved these
conflicts at an early age by rejecting Roman Catholicism and
royalism alike. He was intellectually precocious and in 1814
entered the École Polytechnique—a school in Paris that had
been founded in 1794 to train military engineers but was
soon transformed into a general school for advanced
sciences. The school was temporarily closed in 1816, but
Comte soon took up permanent residence in Paris, earning a
precarious living there by the occasional teaching of
mathematics and by journalism. He read widely in philosophy
and history and was especially interested in those thinkers
who were beginning to discern and trace some order in the
history of human society. The thoughts of several important
French political philosophers of the 18th century—such as
Montesquieu, the Marquis de Condorcet, A.-R.-J. Turgot, and
Joseph de Maistre—were critically worked into his own system
of thought.
Comte’s most important acquaintance in Paris was Henri de
Saint-Simon, a French social reformer and one of the
founders of socialism, who was the first to clearly see the
importance of economic organization in modern society.
Comte’s ideas were very similar to Saint-Simon’s, and some
of his earliest articles appeared in Saint-Simon’s
publications. There were distinct differences in the two
men’s viewpoints and scientific backgrounds, however, and
Comte eventually broke with Saint-Simon. In 1826 Comte began
a series of lectures on his “system of positive philosophy”
for a private audience, but he soon suffered a serious
nervous breakdown. He made an almost complete recovery from
his symptoms the following year, and in 1828/29 he again
took up his projected lecture series. This was so
successfully concluded that he redelivered it at the Royal
Athenaeum during 1829–30. The following 12 years were
devoted to his publication (in six volumes) of his
philosophy in a work entitled Cours de philosophie positive
(1830–42; “Course of Positive Philosophy”; Eng. trans. The
Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte).
From 1832 to 1842 Comte was a tutor and then an examiner
at the revived École Polytechnique. In the latter year he
quarreled with the directors of the school and lost his
post, along with much of his income. During the remainder of
his life he was supported in part by English admirers such
as John Stuart Mill and by French disciples, especially the
philologist and lexicographer Maximilien Littré. Comte
married Caroline Massin in 1825, but the marriage was
unhappy and they separated in 1842. In 1845 Comte had a
profound romantic and emotional experience with Clotilde de
Vaux, who died the following year of tuberculosis. Comte
idealized this sentimental episode, which exerted a
considerable influence on his later thought and writings,
particularly with regard to the role of women in the
positivist society he planned to establish.
Comte devoted the years after the death of Clotilde de
Vaux to composing his other major work, the Système de
politique positive, 4 vol. (1851–54; System of Positive
Polity), in which he completed his formulation of sociology.
The entire work emphasized morality and moral progress as
the central preoccupation of human knowledge and effort and
gave an account of the polity, or political organization,
that this required. Comte lived to see his writings widely
scrutinized throughout Europe. Many English intellectuals
were influenced by him, and they translated and promulgated
his work. His French devotees had also increased, and a
large correspondence developed with positivist societies
throughout the world. Comte died of cancer in 1857.
Comte was a rather sombre, ungrateful, self-centred, and
egocentric personality, but he compensated for this by his
zeal for the welfare of humanity, his intellectual
determination, and his strenuous application to his life’s
work. He devoted himself untiringly to the promotion and
systematization of his ideas and to their application in the
cause of the improvement of society.
His other writings include Catéchisme positiviste (1852;
The Catechism of Positive Religion) and Synthèse subjective
(1856; “Subjective Synthesis”). In general, his writing was
well organized, and its exposition proceeded in impressively
orderly fashion, but his style was heavy, laboured, and
rather monotonous. His chief works are notable mainly
because of the scope, magnitude, and importance of his
project and the conscientious persistence with which he
developed and expressed his ideas.
Thought.
Comte lived through the aftermath of the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, at a time when a new,
stable social order—without despotism—was sought. Modern
science and technology and the Industrial Revolution had
begun transforming the societies of Europe in directions no
one yet understood. People experienced violent conflict but
were adrift in feeling, thought, and action; they lacked
confidence in established sentiments, beliefs, and
institutions but had nothing with which to replace them.
Comte thought that this condition was not only significant
for France and Europe but was one of the decisive junctures
of human history.
Comte’s particular ability was as a synthesizer of the
most diverse intellectual currents. He took his ideas mainly
from writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries. From
David Hume and Immanuel Kant he derived his conception of
positivism—i.e., the theory that theology and metaphysics
are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge and that positive
knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties
and relations as verified by the empirical sciences. From
various French clericalist thinkers Comte took the notion of
a hypothetical framework for social organization that would
imitate the hierarchy and discipline found in the Roman
Catholic church. From various Enlightenment philosophers he
adopted the notion of historical progress. Most importantly,
from Saint-Simon he came to appreciate the need for a basic
and unifying social science that would both explain existing
social organizations and guide social planning for a better
future. This new science he called “sociology” for the first
time.
Comte shared Saint-Simon’s appreciation of the growing
importance of modern science and the potential application
of scientific methods to the study and improvement of
society. Comte believed that social phenomena could be
reduced to laws in the same way that the revolutions of the
heavenly bodies had been made explicable by gravitational
theory. Furthermore, he believed that the purpose of the new
scientific analysis of society should be ameliorative and
that the ultimate outcome of all innovation and
systematization in the new science should be the guidance of
social planning. Comte also thought a new and secularized
spiritual order was needed to supplant what he viewed as the
outdated supernaturalism of Christian theology.
Comte’s main contribution to positivist philosophy falls
into five parts: his rigorous adoption of the scientific
method; his law of the three states or stages of
intellectual development; his classification of the
sciences; his conception of the incomplete philosophy of
each of these sciences anterior to sociology; and his
synthesis of a positivist social philosophy in a unified
form. He sought a system of philosophy that could form a
basis for political organization appropriate to modern
industrial society.
Comte’s “law of the three stages” maintained that human
intellectual development had moved historically from a
theological stage, in which the world and human destiny
within it were explained in terms of gods and spirits;
through a transitional metaphysical stage, in which
explanations were in terms of essences, final causes, and
other abstractions; and finally to the modern positive
stage. This last stage was distinguished by an awareness of
the limitations of human knowledge. Knowledge could only be
relative to man’s nature as a species and to his varying
social and historical situations. Absolute explanations were
therefore better abandoned for the more sensible discovery
of laws based on the observable relations between phenomena.
Comte’s classification of the sciences was based upon the
hypothesis that the sciences had developed from the
understanding of simple and abstract principles to the
understanding of complex and concrete phenomena. Hence, the
sciences developed as follows: from mathematics, astronomy,
physics, and chemistry to biology and finally to sociology.
According to Comte, this last discipline not only concluded
the series but would also reduce social facts to laws and
synthesize the whole of human knowledge, thus rendering the
discipline equipped to guide the reconstruction of society.
Though Comte did not originate the concept of sociology
or its area of study, he greatly extended and elaborated the
field and systematized its content. Comte divided sociology
into two main fields, or branches: social statics, or the
study of the forces that hold society together; and social
dynamics, or the study of the causes of social change. He
held that the underlying principles of society are
individual egoism, which is encouraged by the division of
labour, and the combination of efforts and the maintenance
of social cohesion by means of government and the state.
Comte revealed his conception of the ideal positivist
society in his System of Positive Polity. He believed that
the organization of the Roman Catholic church, divorced from
Christian theology, could provide a structural and symbolic
model for the new society, though Comte substituted a
“religion of humanity” for the worship of God. A spiritual
priesthood of secular sociologists would guide society and
control education and public morality. The actual
administration of the government and of the economy would be
in the hands of businessmen and bankers, while the
maintenance of private morality would be the province of
women as wives and mothers.
Though unquestionably a man of genius, Comte inspired
discipleship on the one hand and derision on the other. His
plans for a future society have been described as ludicrous,
and Comte was deeply reactionary in his rejection of
democracy, his emphasis on hierarchy and obedience, and his
opinion that the ideal government would be made up of an
intellectual elite. But his ideas influenced such notable
social scientists as Émile Durkheim of France and Herbert
Spencer and Sir Edward Burnett Tylor of Great Britain.
Comte’s belief in the importance of sociology as the
scientific study of human society remains an article of
faith among contemporary sociologists, and the work he
accomplished remains a remarkable synthesis and an important
system of thought.
Ronald Fletcher
Harry Elmer Barnes
