Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte, in full

Isidore-Auguste-Marie- TABLE OF CONTENTS
François-Xavier Comte
Introduction
(born January 19, 1798,
Montpellier, France—died Life
September 5, 1857, Paris), Thought
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
Auguste Comte, drawing by Tony Toullion,
Comte’s father, Louis Comte, a tax of cial, and his mother,
19th century; in the Bibliothèque Nationale,
Paris. Rosalie Boyer, were strongly royalist and deeply sincere
Roman Catholics. But their sympathies were at odds with
H. Roger-Viollet
the republicanism and skepticism that swept through
France in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Comte
resolved these con icts 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 rst 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 scienti c 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 in uence 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 in uenced 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 con ict but were adrift in
feeling, thought, and action; they lacked con dence in established sentiments, beliefs, and
institutions but had nothing with which to replace them. Comte thought that this condition
was not only signi cant 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 veri ed 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 rst time.

Comte shared Saint-Simon’s appreciation of the growing importance of modern science and
the potential application of scienti c 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 scienti c 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 ve parts: his rigorous adoption of
the scienti c method; his law of the three states or stages of intellectual development; his
classi cation 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 uni ed
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, nal causes, and other abstractions; and nally
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 classi cation 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 nally 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 eld and systematized its content. Comte divided sociology into
two main elds, 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 in uenced 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 scienti c 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

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica

"Auguste Comte". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2017. Web. 11 Aug. 2017
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Auguste-Comte>.