Auguste Comte and Positivism

At the end of the nineteenth century, the novelist Anatole France

(1844–1924) proclaimed Auguste Comte (1798–1857) to be on the
same level as Descartes, considering that his philosophy of positivism
had permeated universal consciousness. Such praise would have
pleased Comte, who fancied himself to be Descartes’ successor.
Indeed, one could argue that French thought today is as much
indebted to positivism as it is Cartesianism.

The word ‘positive’ derives from ‘positus’, the past participle of

‘ponere’, which is the Latin verb meaning ‘to place’ or ‘set down’. By
the time of the Enlightenment, ‘positive’ connoted set down by
human authority and had an anti-religious ring to it. ‘Positive
sciences’ were considered studies that yielded factual, certain
knowledge, based on observations, unlike theology. The expression
was used by Condorcet (1743–94) and Germaine de Staël (1766–
1817), who sought to make politics and morality ‘positive sciences’ in
order to reduce the social friction they were causing. These two
thinkers influenced the early nineteenth-century social reformer
Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). In works published from 1802 to
1813, he called for the creation of a positive science of man to guide
the reconstruction of society, which, despite the French Revolution,
was still dominated by obsolete feudal and theological elite. This
science of politics and morality would become part of an entirely
new synthesis of knowledge derived from the positive sciences. This
‘positive system’ would be called ‘positive philosophy’. Saint-Simon
argued that the positive system would be constructive unlike the
Enlightenment and would usher in a harmonious scientific and
industrial society because every society reflected the dominant
philosophy of the time. Workers, industrialists, scientists and other
productive people would replace the parasitic elite and dedicate
themselves to the common good. Although Saint-Simon stressed the
importance of creating a coherent system of ideas as the key to
intellectual and social harmony, he was himself an autodidact who
relied on brilliant collaborators to help him achieve his goal. One
such collaborator was Auguste Comte.

Born in 1798 in Montpellier, Comte experienced first-hand the

turmoil caused by the French Revolution. His Catholic, royalist
parents were displeased when, as an adolescent, he denied the
existence of God and became a republican. He left home for Paris to
study at the École Polytechnique, which expelled him for
insubordination in 1816. A year later, he took a job as Saint-Simon‘s
secretary, but the older reformer increasingly made practical appeals
to industrialists for support and turned his attention to improving
political economy. Comte believed Saint-Simon had not sufficiently
laid the groundwork for social reorganization and left his mentor in
1824 to make a name for himself.

Dedicated to developing Saint-Simon’s earlier ideas, which were

scattered through his various works, Comte hoped to create a new
intellectual system that would lead to a moral and political
revolution and thereby complete the Revolution of 1789. In order to
make sure that everyone was in agreement, the philosophical system
had to encompass only positive knowledge, which would be
universally accepted because it was factual. By positive, Comte
meant certain, precise, real (as opposed to mysterious), relative,
useful and constructive. He called his positive philosophy ‘positivism’
in the second volume of his major work, the Cours de philosophe
positive (1830–42), published in 1835, using a term occasionally used
by the followers of Saint-Simon. Positivism regarded as legitimate
only knowledge based on the scientific method, that is, on
observations of real, concrete phenomena. Observations, whether
they were direct or indirect, should lead to general descriptive laws
expressing the ways in which phenomena resembled each other or
succeeded each other in time. These laws had to describe how, not
why, known and knowable phenomena functioned. They could not
explain these phenomena by speculating about divine entities or first
or final causes, which were beyond the human capacity for
observation. Comte supported a variety of means of scientific
investigation: induction (especially in experimentation), deduction
(especially the use of rationalism), and the necessity of creating a
priori provisional hypotheses in order to guide research and connect
facts. He argued that one could not even make effective
observations without first having some kind of theory to prove or
disprove. This argument challenged traditional empiricism, which in
his eyes reduced research to useless data collection. Although a
mathematician, he was also critical of statistical research, especially
in social matters, because he feared it was too simplistic. In addition,
Comte underscored the provisional nature of scientific laws, for he
believed knowledge was not only limited but relative. To be useful,
these scientific laws had to make predictions, which laid the basis for
activities benefiting individuals, humanity or the environment.
Condemning the Enlightenment and liberalism for condoning
excessive individualism and anarchy, Comte boasted that positivism
was constructive and unifying. Scientific research had to have a
service aspect, that is, a moral component. Though later criticized for
being technocratic, scientistic and socially indifferent, positivism was
never ‘value-free’.

Comte maintained that the triumph of positivism was inevitable

thanks to his law of three stages, which stated that every field of
knowledge as well as every individual and society experienced three
levels of development thanks to the human urge to understand and
explain occurrences. In the first, theological stage, people believed
they could know reality and attributed occurrences to fictitious
entities, that is, one or more gods. (There were three sub-stages:
fetishism, polytheism and monotheism.) Society was dominated by
priests and military men (especially monarchs), representing the
spiritual and temporal powers that always existed. The second,
metaphysical stage was one of transition. The supernatural forces
were replaced by abstract entities such as Nature. Society began to
industrialize and found itself ruled increasingly by lawyers, who
spoke of rights and parliaments, and metaphysicians, that is,
philosophers who speculated about behaviour, using abstract terms.
The third stage was the positive one, where people gave up the
search for the origins and purpose of the universe and used the
scientific method to determine the relationships between observable
phenomena.

Comte’s law of history was connected to his classification of the

sciences: each science, according to him, advanced through these
stages based on the simplicity of the phenomena they studied and
the distance of these phenomena from humans. Each science
depended on knowledge provided by the sciences that preceded
them in the hierarchy. The sciences developed in this order:
mathematics (which was a special case), astronomy, physics,
chemistry and biology. Now that biology was a science, it was time to
extend the scientific method to the study of social phenomena,
which were the most complex phenomena and those closest to
humans.

Comte called this new science ‘sociology’ in 1839. Once sociology

became a science, based on observations, comparisons,
experimentations and especially the historical method, a task that
Comte believed he was accomplishing in the Cours, the system of
positive philosophy would be complete, and a new positivist republic
could be established because this new study would guide social
policy in the future and ensure the moral goals of scientific thinking.
Society would be directed by regenerated industrialists (the new
temporal power) and positive philosophers (the new spiritual
power), men who had a general knowledge of the sciences and
would shape the educational system to instil common knowledge
and values. Positive philosophers would be helped by workers, who
were uncorrupted by bourgeois society, and women, who were
morally gifted. Eventually, five hundred or so positive republics
committed to peaceful, productive activities would dot the globe.

Comte maintained in what is sometimes called his ‘second career’

that the positive meant also the ‘sympathetic’. Positivism would
unite people because it would not only create a body of common
knowledge but encourage emotional attachments. To him,
individuals (and society) grew both intellectually and emotionally;
this dual growth differentiated them from animals. His vision of
progress thus consisted of the growth of the intellect and the
development of ‘altruism’, a word he coined around 1850 as he
found his contemporaries too driven by egoism. In his second great
work, the Système de politique positive (1851–54), Comte argued
that social solidarity could be encouraged by a seventh science,
morality, which would be devoted to feelings, and a new secular
religion, the Religion of Humanity. Although Comte did not believe in
God, he still had spiritual longings, mirroring the increased interest in
religion during romanticism. He wanted God to be replaced by
Humanity, which in his eyes was not a metaphysical entity because
people who made up Humanity were real beings. Instead of worrying
about their religious salvation or their own self-interest as they did in
the past, people would study, love, and act to improve Humanity and
its conditions of existence. This focal point would bring them
together, reviving the root word of religion, relier, which means ‘to
connect’. As individuals were socialized to live for others, order and
progress would be ensured.

This new religion flummoxed his detractors and even his followers
who were deemed ‘incomplete positivists’ if they did not accept it.
Was Comte regressing to the theological stage of history, especially
as he often proclaimed himself to be the Great Priest of Humanity in
charge of a hierarchy of priests, who would oversee non-stop
festivals, sacraments and prayers? Was he mentally imbalanced
thanks to the sudden death of a woman he loved, Clotilde de Vaux,
who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1846? Was their relationship the
reason he now stressed the importance of the emotions? These
questions damaged his reputation, made it difficult for respected
intellectuals to admit his influence, and continue to challenge Comte
scholars, many of whom have emphasized the break in his
development in the mid-1840s. However, even at the end of the
Cours, completed three years before he met de Vaux, he had warned
against excessive faith in science, which could not solve every
problem; suggested scientists were narrow-minded, egotistical
specialists; discussed the need to systematize morality and base it on
the social instinct and duties; promoted universal love; and called for
the establishment of a ‘Positive Church’.

When Comte died in 1857, less than forty members belonged to the
Positivist Society, the club that he had established after the
Revolution of 1848. Despite the small number of active adherents,
positivism had garnered a great deal of attention in France and
abroad as it represented a rich font of ideas. It appealed to those on
the Left, who appreciated the emphasis on progress, republicanism,
secularization, workers’ interests and science, and those on the
Right, who liked the stress on order and social hierarchy, duties to
the family and community, and the need for dogmas and regulations.
People tended to cherry-pick the elements of the synthesis that they
liked, often omitting, consciously or unconsciously, to acknowledge
Comte’s influence because they deemed him insane, contradictory,
tyrannical and/ or inept at writing elegant prose, an unforgivable sin
in France. The number of ‘positivisms’ seemed to increase. At the
same time, the term ‘positivism’ gained currency to denigrate one’s
enemies in a debate, muddying its meaning even further.