Comte, Auguste

Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the grand systematiser of positivism and the founder of a would-be science of society that he was the first to call “sociology,” is a formative, if neglected, figure in the development of modern social theory. Described by Althusser as “the only mind worthy of interest” produced by nineteenth-century French philosophy, Comte's thought parallels Hegel's in the scope of its synthesising ambition. His thought similarly bridged between the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century and the currents of historicism and social reform from which the social and cultural sciences emerged in the nineteenth.

Comte was a precursor of Durkheim, an affine (with Saint-Simon) of Marx, and an important reference point for Nietzsche, particularly in his critique of metaphysics as a miscegenated halfway house between theology and science. Both politically and in his conception of the social, Comte attempted to chart a middle course between Enlightenment progressivism, which in his view was vitiated by individualism and had become purely negative after 1789, and counterrevolutionary conservatism, which understood order but not progress and unrealistically sought a return to the ancien régime. Hence his explicit debt to both Condorcet and Maistre, and his constant watchword of “order and progress.”

Comte's work was driven by a great sense of urgency and mission. In the face of “the great crisis” of European society, his sociology was intended to provide the secure basis for a programme of reconstructive social reform. This would complete the work of the French Revolution and provide the emerging industrial society with an appropriate cognitive, moral, and institutional framework. The establishment of sociology, Comte thought, would also complete the scientific revolution by bringing human phenomena within the orbit of positive study. This, in turn, would make possible a general synthesis of the sciences, whose dissemination through a revamped school curriculum was itself a key element of the program. Most of Comte's voluminous oeuvre, including his six-volume Systême de philosophie positive and his four-volume Systême de politique positive, was intended to train intellectual cadres to carry out this work. The religious dimension of his project became explicit in the later part of Comte's career, when he sought to organise positivism—with Humanity as its cultic centre, love as its core principle, and himself as grand-prêtre—as a new world-religion to replace Christianity. As indicated, however, by his early essay “Sur le pouvoir spirituel,” in 1826, Comte had from the outset conceived his task in quasi-ecclesiastical terms. The scientific intelligentsia, with a corps of generalists at the apex, would replace the Christian church as industrialism's spiritual power, just as positivism and humanism would replace theology as the unifier of thought and feeling.

Comte, born in Montpellier, was the rebellious eldest son of a petit-bourgeois Catholic and royalist family. Following his father's advice, he entered the École Polytechnique in 1815 to study mathematics, with a view to a career as a mining engineer. A moderate but fervent republican and anticlerical, he was, however, expelled after involvement in student protests against the Bourbon restoration, then banned from admission to the civil service exam after he refused to promise good behaviour. He moved back to Montpellier and studied biology for a term at l'École de Médecine before returning to Paris, where he changed his name from Isidore to Auguste and remained for the rest of his life. A restless autodidact, he was at first, via [Page 129]Scottish political economy, drawn to the Saint-Simonians. In 1817, he became Saint-Simon's secretary, editor, and personal assistant. They had an acrimonious parting in 1824, after Comte accused his mentor of publishing Comte's work under his own name. Thereafter, Comte eked out an existence, partly through the support of his first wife, the free-spirited Caroline Massin, partly through private tutoring, and partly through a post he retained for the following decades as an external examiner (in secondary schools) in mathematics. This was the only regular academic position he ever held, despite, during the 1830s, campaigning aggressively for a professorial chair at the École Polytechnique, which he had hoped to use as an institutional base for his wider project of intellectual reorganisation. In 1847, he set up the Positivist Society, which became thereafter his main vehicle and source of financial support.

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