Subject: - Sociology

B.A. LLB. – 1, Sem. - 1

Auguste Comte
Submitted to: Deepika Nayak
Submitted by: Vansh Rathee

A biographical sketch: -

 His full name was Isidore Auguste Marie Francois Xavier Comte.
 He was born on 19th of January 1798 at Montpellier, France.
 He was founder of systematic branch of knowledge in 19th century.
 A French positive philosopher, Comte was the first thinker who presented a scientific study
of society
 Auguste Comte is known as the “father of sociology” prior to him many thinker has
expressed their views regarding different aspects of social life, but it was he who felt the
need of science.

Introduction

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is the founder of positivism, a philosophical and political movement
which enjoyed a very wide diffusion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It sank into an
almost complete oblivion during the twentieth, when it was eclipsed by neopositivism. However,
Comte’s decision to develop successively a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of physics,
a philosophy of chemistry and a philosophy of biology, makes him the first philosopher of science
in the modern sense, and his constant attention to the social dimension of science resonates in
many respects with current points of view. His political philosophy, on the other hand, is even less
known, because it differs substantially from the classical political philosophy we have inherited.

Comte’s most important works are (1) the Course on Positive Philosophy (1830–1842, six
volumes, translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste
Comte); (2) the System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of
Humanity, (1851–1854, four volumes); and (3) the Early Writings (1820–1829), where one can
see the influence of Saint-Simon, for whom Comte served as secretary from 1817 to 1824. The
Early Writings are still the best introduction to Comte’s thought. In the Course, Comte said, science
was transformed into philosophy; in the System, philosophy was transformed into religion. The
second transformation met with strong opposition; as a result, it has become customary to
distinguish, with Mill, between a “good Comte” (the author of the Course) and a “bad Comte” (the
author of the System). Today’s common conception of positivism corresponds mainly to what can
be found in the Course.

Auguste Comte’s Life and work

Comte was born in Montpellier on January 20, 1798 (‘le 1er pluviôse de l’an VI’, according to the
Revolutionary calendar then in use in France). Having displayed his brilliance in school, he was
ranked fourth on the admissions list of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in 1814. Two years later,
the Bourbons closed that institution, and its students were dismissed. In August 1817, Auguste
Comte met Henri de Saint-Simon, who appointed him as his secretary to replace Augustin Thierry.
The young Comte was thus initiated into politics and was able to publish a great number of articles,
which placed him very much in the public eye. (The most important of these articles were
republished by him in 1854 and remain the best introduction to his oeuvre as a whole.) In April
1824, he broke with Saint-Simon. Shortly afterward, in a civil wedding, he married Caroline
Massin, who had been living with him for several months. In April 1826, Comte began teaching a
Course of Positive Philosophy, whose audience included some of the most famous scientists of the
time (Fourier, A. von Humboldt, Poinsot). It was suddenly interrupted because of a ‘cerebral crisis’
due to overwork and conjugal sorrows. Comte was then hospitalized in the clinic of Dr. Esquirol.
Upon leaving, he was classified as ‘not cured’. He recovered gradually, thanks to the devotion and
patience of his wife.

The resumption of the Course of Positive Philosophy in January 1829, marks the beginning of a
second period in Comte’s life that lasted 13 years and included the publication of the six volumes
of the Course (1830, 1835, 1838, 1839, 1841, and 1842). In addition, during this period, more and
more of his ties with the academic world were severed. After being named tutor in analysis and
mechanics at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1832, in 1833 he sought to create a chair in general history
of science at the College de France, but to no avail. Two unsuccessful candidacies for the rank of
professor at the Ecole Polytechnique led him in 1842 to publish a ‘personal preface’ to the last
volume of the Course, which put him at odds with the university world forever. The two years that
followed mark a period of transition. In quick succession, Comte published an Elementary Treatise
on Analytic Geometry (1843), his only mathematical work, and the Philosophical Treatise on
Popular Astronomy (1844), the fruit of a yearly course, begun in 1830, for Parisian workers. The
Discourse on the Positive Spirit, also from 1844, which he used as the preface to the treatise on
astronomy, marked a sharp change of direction by its emphasis on the moral dimension of the new
philosophy: now that the sciences had been systematized, Comte was able to return to his initial
interest, political philosophy. Public recognition of the positivist Comte, as opposed to the saint-
simonian, twenty years earlier, came with Emile Littre’s articles in Le National.

The year 1844 also marked his first encounter with Clotilde de Vaux. What followed was the ‘year
like none other’ that launched what Comte himself called his ‘second career’. The main theme of
the second career was the ‘continuous dominance of the heart’. An abundant correspondence
testifies to Comte’s passion, who, in spite of a heavy teaching load, found the time to start working
on the System of Positive Polity, which he had announced at the end of the Course. After Clotilde’s
death, in April 1846, Comte began to idolize her, to such an extent that it became a true cult. A
few months later, his correspondence with Mill, begun in December 1841, came to an end. The
next year, Comte chose the evolution of Humanity as the new topic for his public course; this was
an occasion to lay down the premises of what would become the new Religion of Humanity. He
was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution of 1848: he founded the Positivist Society,
modelled after the Club of the Jacobins, and published the General View of Positivism, conceived
of as an introduction to the System to come, as well as the Positivist Calendar. In 1849, he founded
the Religion of Humanity.

The years 1851–1854 were dominated by the publication of the four-volume System of Positive
Polity, which was interrupted for a few months in order for him to write the Catechism of Positive
Religion (1852). Comte now lived off of the ‘voluntary subsidy’ begun by the followers of his in
England and now also granted to him from various countries. In December 1851, Comte applauded
the coup d’état by Napoleon III, who put an end to the parliamentary ‘anarchy’. Littre refused to
follow Comte on this point, as on the question of religion, and broke with him shortly after. Soon
disappointed by the Second Empire, Comte shifted his hopes to Czar Nicholas I, to whom he wrote.
In 1853, Harriet Martineau published a condensed English translation of the Course of Positive
Philosophy.
Disappointed by the unenthusiastic response his work got from the workers, Comte launched an
Appeal to Conservatives in 1855. The next year, he published the first volume of a work on the
philosophy of mathematics announced in 1842, under the new title of Subjective Synthesis, or
Universal System of the Conceptions Adapted to the Normal State of Humanity. Increasingly
occupied by his function as High Priest of Humanity, he sent an emissary to the Jesuits in Rome
proposing an alliance with the ‘Ignacians’.

Comte died on September 5, 1857, without having had time to draft the texts announced up to 35
years before: a Treatise of Universal Education, which he thought he could publish in 1858, a
System of Positive Industry, or Treatise on the Total Action of Humanity on the Planet, planned
for 1861, and, finally, for 1867, a Treatise of First Philosophy. He is buried in the Pere-Lachaise
cemetery, where his Brazilian followers erected a statue of Humanity in 1983.

Comte’s Positivism

Comte first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in The Course in Positive
Philosophy, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed by the
1848 work, A General View of Positivism (published in English in 1865). The first 3 volumes of
the Course dealt chiefly with the physical sciences already in existence (mathematics, astronomy,
physics, chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two emphasised the inevitable coming of social
science. Observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and classifying
the sciences in this way, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern
sense of the term. Comte was also the first to distinguish natural philosophy from science
explicitly. For him, the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could
adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex "Queen Science" of human
society itself. His work View of Positivism would therefore set out to define, in more detail, the
empirical goals of sociological method.

Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its
quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'.

Comte's stages were:

(2) By the "Metaphysical" stage, Comte referred not to the Metaphysics of Aristotle or other
ancient Greek philosophers. Rather, the idea was rooted in the problems of French society
subsequent to the French Revolution of 1789. This Metaphysical stage involved the justification
of universal rights as being on a vaunted higher plane than the authority of any human ruler to
countermand, although said rights were not referenced to the sacred beyond mere metaphor. This
stage is known as the stage of investigation, because people started reasoning and questioning,
although no solid evidence was laid. The stage of investigation was the beginning of a world that
questioned authority and religion.

(3) In the Scientific stage, which came into being after the failure of the revolution and of
Napoleon, people could find solutions to social problems and bring them into force despite the
proclamations of human rights or prophecy of the will of God. Science started to answer questions
in full stretch. In this regard he was similar to Karl Marx and Jeremy Bentham. For its time, this
idea of a scientific stage was considered up-to-date, although from a later standpoint, it is too
derivative of classical physics and academic history. Comte's law of three stages was one of the
first theories of social evolutionism.

The religion of humanity

In later years, Comte developed the 'religion of humanity' for positivist societies in order to fulfil
the cohesive function once held by traditional worship. In 1849, he proposed a calendar reform
called the 'positivist calendar'. For close associate John Stuart Mill, it was possible to distinguish
between a "good Comte" (the author of the Course in Positive Philosophy) and a "bad Comte" (the
author of the secular-religious system).[10] The system was unsuccessful but met with the
publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) to influence the proliferation of various
Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century, especially through the work of secularists
such as George Holyoake and Richard Congreve.
Law of three stages

The law is that each of our leading conceptions – each branch of our knowledge – passes
successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the
Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive. — A. Comte

The Law of Three Stages is the evolution of society in which the stages have already occurred or
are currently developing. The reason why there are newly developed stages after a certain time
period is that the system "has lost its power" and is preventing the progression of civilization,
causing complicated situations in society.

The first stage, the theological stage, relies on supernatural or religious explanations of the
phenomena of human behavior because "the human mind, in its search for the primary and final
causes of phenomena, explains the apparent anomalies in the universe as interventions of
supernatural agents". This turned mankind towards theology and the creation of gods to answer all
their questions.

Fetishism: The Theological Stage is broken into three sections, Fetishism, Polytheism, and
Monotheism. Fetishism is the philosophy in which mankind puts the power of a god into an
inanimate object. Every object could hold this power of a god, so it started to confuse those who
believed in Fetishism and created multiple gods and formed Polytheism.

Polytheism: The basic meaning of polytheism is the belief in an order of multiple gods who rule
over the universe. Within polytheism, each god is assigned a specific thing in which they are the
god of. Examples of this would be the Greek god, Zeus, the god of the sky/lightning, or Ra, the
sun god, in Egyptian mythology. A group of priests were often assigned to these gods to offer
sacrifices and receive blessing from those gods, but once again, because of the innumerable
number of gods, it got confusing, so civilization turned to Monotheism.

Monotheism: Monotheism is the belief in one, all powerful god who rules over every aspect of the
universe. The removal of emotional and imaginational aspect of both Fetishism and Polytheism
resulted in intellectual awakening. This removal allowed for the Enlightenment to occur as well as
the expansion of the scientific world. With the Enlightenment came many famous philosophers
who brought about a great change in the world. This is the reason why “Monotheism is the climax
of the theological stage of thinking."