Positivism

Auguste Comte and the Early Positivist Program

Many thinkers (Francis Bacon [1561–1626], Madame de Staël [1766–1817], Henri de Saint-Simon [1760–1825]) have been associated with different philosophical and epistemological positions later associated with positivism. However, it is generally the French sociologist Auguste Comte [Page 2081](1798–1857) who is regarded as the father of positivism. In the history of philosophical thought, late-19th-century positivism was a theoretical movement in reaction to different branches of idealisms, Kantism, and Hegelianism, to which it proposed a greater emphasis on empirical knowledge. In his Cours de philosophie positive (The Course in Positivist Philosophy, 1830–1842), Comte described his positivist perspective as an approach seeking to ground theoretical models on empirical knowledge and observations. Once acquired through cognitive processes, knowledge had to be verified through empirical testing. Empir icism, therefore, was brought back to the forefront of epistemology. To the extent that it was led by an adequate conception of science, un esprit positif (a positive spirit), Comte was tremendously confident as regards the future of modern societies. His writings were no stranger to a national context that had celebrated a culte de la raison (cult of reason) after the Revolution. One could still find a similar optimism in the work of Marie Curie (1867–1934).

Comte's philosophical project was much broader than a mere philosophical or epistemological intervention. Following Staël and many of his contemporaries, Comte's conception of science was embedded in a teleological philosophy of history where the triumph of science was linked to the triumph of humanity. The core of his philosophy of history comprised the description of three evolutionary stages: theological, metaphysical, and positivist. With the last stage, humanity was seen as realizing its full cognitive and political potential with the elimination of anterior, primitive, or chimerical schemes of cognition. Positivism's political project was also conceived as an antidote to social “disorder,” the latter being an important preoccupation for the emerging social sciences of the late 19th century. Comte's espousal of a form of social evolutionism was not unusual in this context. Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) had a similar conception of history, and so did Karl Marx (1818–1883), Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936), and Max Weber (1864–1920), who adopted a teleological reading of history, even though they did not locate the motor of history in the same social processes. Comte spent the end of his life trying to build a religion of humanity in accordance with positivist principles.

...