Comte, Auguste (1798–1857)

Auguste Comte is known as the founder of sociology and the father of the paradigm of positivism. He was born Isidore Marie Auguste Francois Xavier Comte on January 17,1798, at Montpellier, in southwestern France, at the culmination of the French Enlightenment. As a scholar, Comte wrote about the historical development of the special sciences in general, and the historical development of the interpreting human mind in particular. He saw each science and each explanation of it unfolding through time, passing from a religious stage (theology), through a metaphysical stage (philosophy), to an ever more empirical stage (science).

As a young man, Comte excelled in his studies. In August 1814 he entered competition for the entrance exams and was admitted to the École Polytechnique in Paris, an elite school that espoused the French Enlightenment ideals of republicanism and progress. Although he found Napoleonic tyranny distasteful, he preferred it to the restoration of the monarchy, and thus supported Napoleon during his years at the school. However, in April 1816 his studies were halted when the school closed owing to conflict between students and administration over the school's outmoded methods of examination. Comte did not reapply for admission when the school reopened and instead supported himself by tutoring in Paris.

In the summer of 1817, Comte made a social connection invaluable to his career as a scholar. He met Henri Saint-Simon, the 60-year-old director of the periodical L'Industrie, whom he then began to work for, in his own mind as a collaborator but apparently in the mind of Saint-Simon as a protégé and disciple. By 1824 this difference of perspectives erupted into a disagreement about whether or not one of Comte's essays ought to be published in his own name or under the name of Saint-Simon. They also disagreed about the importance of activism and theory, Saint-Simon favoring the former and Comte favoring the latter, and Comte disagreed with the tinge of religiosity that Saint-Simon gave [Page 207]his thought and writing. The differences were irreconcilable, and the two parted ways.

After some tumultuous years following the split with Saint-Simon, Comte became ever more ambitious in his thought. This is the point at which he began to develop his conceptions of positivism, the “law of three stages,” and social science as the dominant unifier of all other sciences, all of which he discussed in his masterpiece, Cours de philosophie positive, written from 1830 to 1842.

Comte's positivism can be seen as a paradigm commensurate with the values and ideals developed during the Age of Enlightenment. One premise of the paradigm is that knowledge comes from the positive affirmation of theories through scientific methods such as observation. However, it is important to note that he felt it was necessary for theory to precede any type of observation so as to inform the observer what to look for.

For Comte, scientific positivism was the capstone of human social evolution. It is the third stage in his law of three stages, being preceded by the metaphysical stage, which is preceded by the theological stage. The theological stage itself was divided into three phases those being fetishism (object worshipping), polytheism, and monotheism. The theological stage, Comte argued, embodied man's earliest social existence. It is during this stage that humankind uses God or supernatural forces as an explanation for things and as an apex from which societal order descended. Thus, nature was mythically conceived and humans made no accurate causal connections between phenomena in nature. Comte thought that humanity had been in this stage until the French Enlightenment, and thus that this stage comprised the bulk of human history up to 1750 CE.

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