AUGUSTE COMTE In order to know where you are going you need to know where you came from

and modern intellectual thought, at least as its understood hegemonically emanating from the Euro-American canon, passed from the Enlightenment through Comte and many others into modern sociology. Overview/Introduction What creates social order instead of anarchy or chaos? Once society sets off on a particular course, what causes it to change? These are questions at the heart of the thought of Auguste Comte and the 19th century concept of positivism. Comte spent his life considering these questions and devising the right way, in his opinion, to answer them. Positivism is the application of the scientific approach to the social world The scientific approach is the use of objective, systematic observations to test theories. The idea of applying the scientific method to the social world, known as positivism, was first proposed by Auguste Comte. With the French revolution still fresh in his mind Comte left the small conservative town in which he had grown up and moved to Paris. The changes he experienced in this move combined with those France underwent in the revolution, led Comte to become interested in what holds society together. And the questions we put on the board As Comte considered these questions, he concluded that the right way to answer them was to apply the scientific method to social life. Just as this method had revealed the law of gravity, so, too, it would uncover the laws that underlie society. Comte called this new science Sociology the study of society . From the Greek logos meaning the study of and the Latin socius meaning companion or being with others.Comte stressed that this new science not only would discover social principles but also would apply them to social reform. Sociologists he believed would reform the entire society, making it a better place to live. To Comte, however, applying the scientific method to social life meant practicing what we might call armchair philosophy drawing informal observations of informal life. He did not do what todays sociologists would call research and today in fact positivism is viewed by the majority as problematic and deeply flawed. Nevertheless, Comtes insistence that we must observe and classify human activities in order to uncover societys fundamental laws is an important rung on the intellectual ladder we still climb today. The Man and his time Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier, France in 1798. His family was a devout Catholic one, At 14 Comte announced that he had "naturally ceased believing in God." Abandoned the royalist sympathies of his family and became a republican. As a result, the young Comtes relationship 1

with his family was strained throughout his relatively short life. The revolution coupled with the industrialism that was about to transform 19th century society were creating a new form of society, where old traditional values no longer held sway. Comtes schooling and contemporaries that gave him the ability to conceive of a different form of society. Two outstanding events in Comtes early life which help to explain the nature of his more mature thought. Attendance at the cole Polytechnique. Founded in 1794 at the height of the radical phase of the French Revolution, the cole Polytechnique trained military engineers and was quickly transformed into a school for the advanced sciences. For Comte, however, the cole Polytechnique became a model for a future society ordered and sustained by a new elite of scientists and engineers (enter the technocrat). The technocrats - a industrial-scientific elite who would make informed decisions for the betterment of society. Fiction of the times, Comtes sociological positivism was forged at the same time as Balzac was describing in fictional form the rise of the industrialists and the bankers within a French culture still permeated by the old aristocratic values. In 1816, Comte led a protest of students against the manners of one of the tutors there and was expelled. He spent a few months with his parents and then returned to Paris. It was in Paris that the eighteen year old Comte met many of the intellectuals who would inspire his work and began reading the political economists Adam Smith (1723-1790) and J. B. SAY (1767-1832) as well as histories by WILLIAM ROBERTSON (1721-1793) and David Hume (1711-1776). Comtes sociology was overly intertwined with his own ideas of the correct polity. In his view, society had broken down as a result of the French Revolution. The Revolution was a good thing -- the Revolution had also been necessary because the ancien regime -- based as it was on obsolete theological knowledge -- no longer served as a respectable basis for shared opinions. It was the progress of the sciences that had undermined this basis. The Revolution offered no grounds for the reorganization of society because it was negative -that is, the Revolution destroyed the old without creating the new. What was needed was a new common creed to take the place of the Catholic orthodoxy which the Revolution had finally and irrevocably undermined for all educated men The task then, was to provide a new religion and a new faith. And, of course, a new clergy was needed, a higher clergy. To replace the Catholic clergy Comte proposed a scientific-industrial elite that would announce the invariable laws of a new social order. The ancien regime and its destruction by the French Revolution had to be synthesized and made meaningful by a new clergy of elites: the technocrats. This was absolutely necessary to meet the problems brought about by the collapse of the ancien regime as well as those problems created by industrial society. This insight, religious in nature and intuitive in form, was then reformulated by Comte and his followers in terms of what they were to call a "positive science." The goal of Comtes positive polity was never an affluent society. Affluence meant very little to Comte. Instead, what he sought, indeed, what he spent his entire career trying to obtain, was moral order. His positive science and religion urged everyone "to live for others." The dominant motive of Comtes positivism was not speculative but practical. His purpose was for him, most clear -- the reformation of the social order. "The object of all my labor," Comte wrote, "has been to re-establish in society something spiritual that is capable of counter-balancing the influence of 2

the ignoble materialism in which we are at present submerged." With this statement in mind, Comte continues the 18th and 19th century preoccupation with human liberation -- whether the Church, tyranny, materialism or government, man must liberate himself. Comte died aged 59. He, like many of the great thinkers, ended up a little doo la lee, or crazy if you will. A good example if this comes from late in his career where he proclaimed himself the high priest of humanity. His Work The Positive Philosophy was his first great work, and in it he propounds his theory that all institutions are based upon the ideas of men which are formed in three successive stages theology, metaphysics and finally from the positive. Concentrate on four main areas. 1) Positive Classification of the Sciences 2) Social Physics 3) Social Statics 4) Social Dynamics These areas are taken directly from his book, so bear with me if some of the theories are things that we would have a great problem with believing or suggesting today in the 21st century. Board for Comte, something is positive insofar as it is precise, certain, useful, an organising tendency for society, and relational rather than precise. 1) Positive Classification of the Sciences Here Comte says ON studying the development of human intelligence, it is found that it passes through three stages: (1) The theological, (2) the metaphysical, (3) the scientific or positive. In the theological stage it seeks to account for the world by super-natural beings. In the metaphysical stage it seeks an explanation in abstract forces. In the scientific, or positive, stage it applies itself to the study of the relation of phenomena to each other. Comtes positive philosophy emanated from his historical study of the progress of the human mind. His sole interest, however, was the western European mind of the Enlightenment which we can now say was a major flaw in his work The Enlightenment The Enlightenment advocated Reason as the primary basis of intellectual authority. As a movement it occurred solely in Germany, France, Britain, and Spain, but its influence spread beyond. Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were also heavily influenced by Enlightenment era ideas. The Enlightenment is linked with the Scientific Revolution, both movements emphasized reason, science, and rationality. Science was positive, based on facts not conjecture. Hence Positivism formed an integral part of the Enlightenment tradition: science and facts opposed metaphysics and speculation; faith and revelation were no longer acceptable as sources of knowledge. 3

GALILEO AND NEWTON Increasing disaffection with repressive rule, Enlightenment thinkers believed that systematic thinking might be applied to all areas of human activity, carried into the governmental sphere in their explorations of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders, though many were religious, believed they would lead their states to progress after a long period of tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny, which they imputed to the Middle Ages. The movement helped create the intellectual framework for the American and French Revolutions, the Latin American independence movement etc. and led to the rise of classical liberalism, democracy, and capitalism.. The enlightenment view, holds that the mind of man [sic] is intendedly rational and scientific, that the dictates of reason are equally binding for all regardless of time, place, culture, race, personal desire, or individual endowment, and that in reason can be found a universally applicable standard for judging validity and worth. (Shweder 1984:27) From the enlightenment flowed a desire to discover universals: the idea of natural law, the concept of deep structure, the notion of progress and development, and the image of the history of ideas as a struggle between reason and unreason, science and superstition. It basically means that all people live their lives by reason and evidence. They seek empirical knowledge of what causes what and its quest for human universals. Comtes positivism is child of the enlightenment.It believed that truth about the world is accessible and that a properly disciplined rational mind can derive universal objective truths from material evidence; and that a scientific method can be applied to any dimension of reality, from the movement of planets to human sexual behaviourSuch investigation was meant to produce objective knowledge, universally valid knowledge about the world. A major problem of positivism however is that it was a culturally specific project, a culture bound enterprise and definition of progress linked to Euro-America. For example, Western style progress when enforced on other societies and cultures led and often leads to a loss political autonomy and increases in economic impoverishment and environmental degradation, and destruction of systems of social relations and values that clash with the Wests way of seeing things. Return to Comte and his Positive Classification of the Sciences The history of the sciences according to Comte shows that each science and society goes through three successive stages: the theological, the metaphysical and the positive. Progress through the three stages was not only inevitable but irreversible. Comtes view of each of the three stages is as follows: [1] the theological -- man views nature as having a will of its own. This stage also contains three stages. (i) animism: objects have their own will, (ii) polytheism: divine wills impose themselves on objects and (iii) monotheism: the will of God imposes itself on objects. [2] metaphysical -- thought substitutes abstractions for a personal will. Here, causes and forces replace desires. The world is one great entity in which Nature prevails. And finally [3] positive -4

the search for absolute knowledge, the first cause, is abandoned. In such a scheme, each stage corresponds to a specific form of mental development. There is also a corresponding material development. All human thought, he argued, has passed through three separate stages, the theological, the metaphysical and the positive In the theological state the human mind seeks for origins and final causes, analysing all phenomena as the result of supernatural forces; feelings and imagination predominate and Comte divided the theological state into three separate periods: Fetishism: nature defined in terms of mans (sic) feelings Polytheism: a multitude of Gods and spirits) Monotheism: The existence of one God and the gradual awakening of human reason with its constraint on the imagination For Comte, each stage and substage of evolution necessarily develops out of the preceding one: for example the final substage of monotheism prepares the way for the metaphysical stage in which human thought is dominated by abstract concepts, by essences and ideal forms. In the final stage of evolution thought abandons essences and seeks laws which link different facts and their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Each science develops in exactly the same way passing through these separate stages, but they do so at different rates: knowledge reaches the positive stage in proportion to the generality, simplicity and independence of other disciplines. As the most general and simple of the natural sciences, astronomy develops first, followed by physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. Each science develops only on the basis of its predecessors within an hierarchal framework dominated by the law of increasing complexity and decreasing generality. In the COURSE OF POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY, Comte attempted to demonstrate that each science is necessarily dependent on the previous science, that is, science can only be understood historically as the process of greater perfection. For example, before there can be an effective physics, there must be astronomy. Furthermore, the history of the sciences reveals the law that as the phenomenon become more complex, so to do the methods of those sciences. In contrast to Descartes who saw only one right method of inquiry -- the geometrical method -- Comte believed that each science develops by a logic proper to itself, a logic that is revealed only by the historical study of that science. 2) Social Physics

Social physics was Comtes way of countering the theological polity and metaphysical polity ruling society at the time. The metaphysical polity was required to combat the theological; but now it has served its destructive purpose, and tends to become obstructive, for, having destroyed the old, it will not permit the new. Its chief dogma has always been liberty of conscience with the liberty of press and speech which that implies; but liberty of conscience really means little more than absence of intellectual regulation; and even as liberty of conscience is out of the question in astronomy and chemistry, so it is out of the question in social physics. 5

1830s Comte founded positivism as a distinctive movement, gave its name, and in lesson 47 of the fourth volume of his course of Positive Philosophy also named this new science of social physics sociology. The conjunction of physics and social was not accidental. For him sociology was the final science, crowning the hierarchy of sciences, employing the same lawful methods and Reasoning as all positive sciences and making possible a mature scientific philosophy. Comte is most famous for his law of three stages, which claims that civilisation (and every field of knowledge) passes from a nave, animistic, theological stage, through a more abstract, metaphysical-philosophical stage, to a final, scientific or positive stage. The final science which Comte claimed to have discovered and one which had not yet entered its positive stage, was Sociology. It was sociology, he claimed, that would give ultimate meaning to all the other sciences -- it was the one science which held the others together. Only sociology would reveal that man is a developing creature who moves through three stages in each of his sciences. The theological and metaphysical philosophies having failed, what remains? Nothing remains but the positive philosophy, which is the only agent able to reorganize society. The positive philosophy will regard social phenomena as it regards other phenomena, and will apply to the renovation of society the same scientific spirit found effective in other departments of human knowledge. It will bring to politics the conception of natural laws, and deal with delicate social questions on impartial scientific principles. It will show that certain wrongs are inevitable, and others curable; and that it is as foolish to try to cure the incurable in social as in biological and chemical matters. A spirit of this kind will encourage reform and yet obviate vain attempts to redress necessary evils. Social physics then, or sociology to be more precise was particularly dependent on its immediate predecessor in the hierarchy, biology. The science of biology is basically holistic in character beginning not from isolated elements, as in chemistry and physics, but from organic wholes. The distinctive subject matter of sociology is society as a whole, society defined as a social system. Sociology is this the investigation of the action and reaction of the various parts of the social system. Individual elements must be analysed in their relation to the whole, in their mutual relation and combination. As with biological organisms, society forms a complex unity irreducible to its component parts. Society cannot be decomposed into individuals any more than a geometric surface can be decomposed into lines, or a line into a point. Knowledge of the parts can flow only from knowledge of the whole, not vice versa. Direct quote from volume two of Postive science in biology, we may decompose structure anatomically into elements, tissues and organs. We have the same things in the social organismforms of social power correspond to the tissuethe elementis supplied by the family, which is more completely the germ of society than the cell or fibre of the body, organs can be cities the root of the world being the nucleus of the term civilisation. Pathological situations for example develop with the social organism, for example, when the natural laws governing the principles of harmony or succession are disturbed by element analogous to diseases in the bodily organism. Parts 3 and 4 go together and help to further illuminate the Comtes analogy between biology and sociology 6

3)

Social Statics

4)

Social Dynamics

Comte assimilated biological terms and models to his sociology arguing that the distinction between anatomy and physiology enabled sociology to differentiate structure from function, dynamics from statics, social order from progress. Hence Comtes sociology was divided into two distinct parts. On the one hand, there was social statics, that is, the study of socio-political systems relative to their existing level of civilization. On the other hand, there was social dynamics which entailed the study of the three stages.

Statics and dynamics then, are branches of the science of sociology because for Comte all living beings exist under dynamic and static relations. To further elaborate what statics and dynamics are: Comtes notion of Statics is concerned with clarifying the interconnection between social facts functional for a social system like the division of labour, the family, religion, and government. While Social Dynamics is the empirical study of these interconnections as they change in different types of society and Comte decribes this aspect of sociology as the historical method. Comte also added a division between order and progress. Order exists when there is stability in fundamental principles and when the majority of the members of society hold similar opinions. Progress, on the other hand, was identified with the period following the Protestant Reformation up to the French Revolution. What was now needed, Comte told his readers, was a synthesis of order and progress in a higher, scientific form. Once a science of society had been developed, opinions would once again be shared and society would be stable. Once there was true social knowledge, people would not be as willing to fight over religious or political opinions. Liberty of conscience, Comte declared, is as out of place in social thought as in physics, and true freedom in both areas lies in the rational submission to scientific laws. The gradual awareness and understanding of these laws is what Comte meant by the word progress. Comte preoccupation with the question of social order and progress. The problems of the postrevolutionary age could be resolved only through the application of positive science and the principles of industrial organisation derived from the empirical study of social development Social Statics and Social Dynamics His Ideas: A recap

All human thinking, both for individual persons and for historical cultures, follows the law of the three stages: first seeking explanation in animistic purposes (the theological stage), then in abstract entities (the metaphysical stage), and finally in lawful observable correlations among variables (the positive stage). There is a definite order among the positive sciences, in which the lower, simpler, and more general are presupposed by the higher, more complex, and more particular; this ordering 7

provides both for the unity of the sciences, as successive branches from a common stem, and also for the recognition of historically emergent distinctive methods within different empirical subject matters. The crowning science, the most complex and consequently the last to emerge as an empirical domain of invariant lawfulness, is sociology. Sociology and positive philosophy finally will ground an urgently needed reorganization of politics, ethics, and religion. Religious ritual, when brought into harmony with scientific intellect, is vital for the cultivation of feeling, thus providing motivation for the transformation and nurture of healthy society.

Positivism Positivism embraced a number of different meanings which included a belief in science as the foundation of all knowledge (scientism as it has been called), the employment of statistical analysis in social theory, the search for causal explanations of social phenomena and the fundamental laws of historical change or of human nature. A definition to take down: In a broad sense, positivism is the philosophical expression of scientism, the view that empirical science is the primary cultural institution, the only one that produces clear, objective, reliable knowledge claims about nature and society that accumulate over time and thereby the only enterprise that escapes the contingencies of history. For positivists, that reliability is proportional to the proximity of claims to observed facts the empirical basis of knowledge. Every substantive claim not tested by experience is sheer human fabrication. Main tenants of Positivism Assumption of a real world Fundamental properties of the social universe Theoretical Clarity Positive (or scientific) method Parsimony Abstraction Veracity Multiple Methodologies Evidence Knowledge production 8