Auguste Comte

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (Montpellier, 1798 – Paris, 1857) was a French philosopher and writer who is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. He formulated positivism, a doctrine that aimed to ground a new social order on scientific knowledge. He is also one of the founders of sociology, a word he coined and a discipline he placed at the top of the sciences. Born under the young French Republic, his thought grew out of the upheaval of the French Revolution, which he read as the sign of an imminent transition to a new kind of society.

Comte studied at the Lycée Joffre and the University of Montpellier before entering the École Polytechnique in Paris. When the school closed for reorganization in 1816, he continued his medical studies in Montpellier, and he did not seek readmission when it reopened. Irreconcilable differences with his Catholic, royalist family led him back to Paris, where he supported himself with modest jobs. In 1817 he found an apartment in the capital and, later that year, became secretary and disciple of Henri de Saint-Simon, who introduced him to intellectual circles. The partnership lasted about seven years and ended in a bitter split, partly over the question of how much of their shared work Saint-Simon had claimed. Afterwards Comte went through a period of mental reorganization that he called "cerebral hygiene", aimed at freeing himself from his former master's influence.

His major achievement was the Course in Positive Philosophy, published between 1830 and 1842. In it he argued that human knowledge passes through three stages: the theological, in which events are explained by supernatural wills; the metaphysical, which relies on abstract entities; and the positive, in which reason confines itself to laws that can be checked against experience. He arranged the sciences in a hierarchy running from mathematics through astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology, culminating in sociology, which he considered the most complex of them all. For Comte, social laws were as regular as natural ones, and the family was the basic social unit. Against the legacy of the Enlightenment, represented by Voltaire and Rousseau, he defended a social order founded on science rather than on negative criticism or utopias. This gave his reformist project a conservative cast in politics.

Later in life his thought turned toward the religious. After the death of Clotilde de Vaux in 1846, whom he had loved without ever being able to marry her, he developed the Religion of Humanity, a secular cult meant to give positivist societies the cohesion that traditional religion had once supplied. He published the four volumes of the System of Positive Polity between 1851 and 1854 and left unfinished the Subjective Synthesis, whose first volume appeared in 1856. He died in Paris on 5 September 1857 of stomach cancer.

His influence was wide. Thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, his closest friend, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkheim absorbed, criticized or reshaped his ideas. Positivism also had a notable political afterlife: the motto "Order and Progress" on Brazil's flag derives from Comte's positivist formula, whose philosophical triad also included altruism. He is credited with coining the word "altruism", though this is not certain.