-Bishal Oli
Born : January 19 , 1798 Montpellier France Died : September 5, 1857 (aged 59) Paris France
Comte’s Life
Comte’s father, Louis Comte, a tax official, and his mother, Rosalie Boyer, were strongly royalist and deeply sincere Roman Catholics. But their sympathies were at odds with the republicanism and skepticism that swept through France in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Comte resolved these conflicts at an early age by rejecting Roman Catholicism and royalism alike. He was intellectually precocious and in 1814 entered the École Polytechnique—a school in Paris that had been founded in 1794 to train military engineers but was soon transformed into a general school for advanced sciences. The school was temporarily closed in 1816, but Comte soon took up permanent residence in Paris, earning a precarious living there by the occasional teaching of mathematics and by journalism. He read widely in philosophy and history and was especially interested in those thinkers who were beginning to discern and trace some order in the history of human society.
His’s most close acquaintance in Paris was Henri de Saint-Simon, a French social reformer and one of the founders of socialism, who was the first to clearly see the importance of economic organization in modern society. Comte’s ideas were very similar to Saint-Simon’s, and some of his earliest articles appeared in Saint-Simon’s publications. There were distinct differences in the two men’s viewpoints and scientific backgrounds, however, and Comte eventually broke with Saint-Simon. In 1826 Comte began a series of lectures on his “system of positive philosophy” for a private audience, but he soon suffered a serious nervous breakdown. He made an almost complete recovery from his symptoms the following year, and in 1828/29 he again took up his projected lecture series. From 1832 to 1842, Comte was a tutor and then an examiner at the revived École Polytechnique. In the latter year he quarreled with the directors of the school and lost his post, along with much of his income. During the remainder of his life he was supported in part by English admirers such as John Stuart Mill and by French disciples, especially the philologist and lexicographer Maximilien Littré.
Comte married Caroline Massin in 1825, but the marriage was unhappy and they separated in 1842. In 1845 Comte had a profound romantic and emotional experience with Clotilde de Vaux, who died the following year of tuberculosis. Comte idealized this sentimental episode, which exerted a considerable influence on his later thought and writings, particularly with regard to the role of women in the positivist society he planned to establish.
Comte devoted the years after the death of Clotilde de Vaux to composing his other major work, the Système de politique positive, 4 vol. (1851–54; System of Positive Polity), in which he completed his formulation of sociology. The entire work emphasized morality and moral progress as the central preoccupation of human knowledge and effort and gave an account of the polity, or political organization, that this required. Comte lived to see his writings widely scrutinized throughout Europe. Many English intellectuals were influenced by him, and they translated and promulgated his work. His French devotees had also increased, and a large correspondence developed with positivist societies throughout the world. Comte died of cancer in 1857.
Thought of Auguste Comte
Comte lived through the aftermath of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, at a time when a new, stable social order—without despotism—was sought. Modern science and technology and the Industrial Revolution had begun transforming the societies of Europe in directions no one yet understood. People experienced violent conflict but were adrift in feeling, thought, and action; they lacked confidence in established sentiments, beliefs, and institutions but had nothing with which to replace them. Comte thought that this condition was not only significant for France and Europe but was one of the decisive junctures of human history.
Comte’s particular ability was as a synthesizer of the most diverse intellectual currents. He took his ideas mainly from writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries. From David Hume and Immanuel Kant he derived his conception of positivism—i.e., the theory that theology and metaphysics are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge and that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations as verified by the empirical sciences. From various French clericalist thinkers Comte took the notion of a hypothetical framework for social organization that would imitate the hierarchy and discipline found in the Roman Catholic church. From various Enlightenment philosophers he adopted the notion of historical progress. Most importantly, from Saint-Simon he came to appreciate the need for a basic and unifying social science that would both explain existing social organizations and guide social planning for a better future. This new science he called “sociology” for the first time.
Comte shared Saint-Simon’s appreciation of the growing importance of modern science and the potential application of scientific methods to the study and improvement of society. Comte believed that social phenomena could be reduced to laws in the same way that the revolutions of the heavenly bodies had been made explicable by gravitational theory. Furthermore, he believed that the purpose of the new scientific analysis of society should be ameliorative and that the ultimate outcome of all innovation and systematization in the new science should be the guidance of social planning. Comte also thought a new and secularized spiritual order was needed to supplant what he viewed as the outdated supernaturalism of Christian theology.
His’s main contribution to positivist philosophy falls into five parts: his rigorous adoption of the scientific method; his law of the three states or stages of intellectual development; his classification of the sciences; his conception of the incomplete philosophy of each of these sciences anterior to sociology; and his synthesis of a positivist social philosophy in a unified form. He sought a system of philosophy that could form a basis for political organization appropriate to modern industrial society.
His’s “law of the three stages” maintained that human intellectual development had moved historically from a theological stage, in which the world and human destiny within it were explained in terms of gods and spirits; through a transitional metaphysical stage, in which explanations were in terms of essences, final causes, and other abstractions; and finally to the modern positive stage. This last stage was distinguished by an awareness of the limitations of human knowledge. Knowledge could only be relative to man’s nature as a species and to his varying social and historical situations. Absolute explanations were therefore better abandoned for the more sensible discovery of laws based on the observable relations between phenomena.
Comte’s classification of the sciences was based upon the hypothesis that the sciences had developed from the understanding of simple and abstract principles to the understanding of complex and concrete phenomena. Hence, the sciences developed as follows : from mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry to biology and finally to sociology. According to Comte, this last discipline not only concluded the series but would also reduce social facts to laws and synthesize the whole of human knowledge, thus rendering the discipline equipped to guide the reconstruction of society.Though Comte did not originate the concept of sociology or its area of study, he greatly extended and elaborated the field and systematized its content. Comte divided sociology into two main fields, or branches: social statics, or the study of the forces that hold society together; and social dynamics, or the study of the causes of social change .
Comte revealed his conception of the ideal positivist society in his System of Positive Polity. He believed that the organization of the Roman Catholic church, divorced from Christian theology, could provide a structural and symbolic model for the new society, though Comte substituted a “religion of humanity” for the worship of God. A spiritual priesthood of secular sociologists would guide society and control education and public morality. The actual administration of the government and of the economy would be in the hands of businessmen and bankers, while the maintenance of private morality would be the province of women as wives and mothers.
Comte’s Findings Summarize
He has given three major stages of social evolution and development. Comte organized and classified social thought and gave birth to the entire analysis of the evolution of human thinking. Three stages are :
Theological stage
•The first stage of human evolution(nomadic stage)
•Used to believe in supernatural terms
•Hunting and Gathering mode of life
Metaphysical stage
•The second stage of human evolution developed rational knowledge
•Rationalism(reasoning helped to find out some order in the natural world)
The Positive Stage or Positivism
• Represents the scientific way of thinking, intellectual way of looking at the world
•Dominated by science and technology
•Suits for highly industrialized and E-society
Finally
Comte was a great social thinker. He was the first to pronounce the word social physics. It seems that we have to learn a lot from his published books. Sociology developed from him, we consider him as the father of sociology. Motivated by Comte, today’s sociologists need to give more height to the subject of sociology.