The Contributions of Auguste Comte – Positivism
INTRODUCTION
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the social world was increasingly viewed by Enlightenment thinkers as part of the natural universe; indeed, many were concluding that the natural and social sciences could be used to promote human progress. This perspective was not accepted by all, and in fact, it took well over a century for the various social sciences to become institutionalized inside and outside of academia. Over a century, beginning in the early 1700s, the idea that human beings and their social world could be studied scientifically had been gaining momentum; and by the time Auguste Comte began to publish his Course of Positive Philosophy (1830, 1842) and to proclaim that the day of sociology had arrived, this was no longer such a radical idea.
THE ORIGINS OF COMTE’S POSITIVISM
Like most scholars of his time on the European continent, the young Comte was a child of the Enlightenment, especially the Scientific Revolution, which had begun to offer the hope that science could be used in the name of human progress. By the time Comte had begun to write, the moral fervour of the French Philosophers had been combined and tempered with the view that science could be the tool for reconstructing society along more humane and just lines. While Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the first figure in the Enlightenment to give articulate expression to the modern scientific method, legitimating the great achievements in astronomy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was Isaac Newton’s law of gravity that provided a vision of what scientific inquiry could be: formal laws stating the fundamental relationships among basic properties of the universe. It would take over a century to see clearly that the discovery of such laws could better the conditions of humankind, but Newton provided the model of how elegant science could be. Comte would take the slowly accumulating recognition of science as the means for human progress and forge this recognition into sociological positivism.
The first clear evidence of the transition to seeing science as the key to reconstructing society can be found in the works of Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755), who engaged in analysis that suggested the possibilities for a science of society resembling Newton’s great law. In his The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu advocated that society must be considered a ‘thing’, its fundamental properties and dynamics could be discovered through systematic observation and analysis. Many of the ideas in Comte’s synthesis in the next century - the search for laws, the hierarchy of the sciences, and the movement of societies through stages, for example - are to be found in rudimentary form in Montesquieu. Jacques Turgot (1727-81) and Jean Condorcet (1743-94) further instilled in Comte the idea of human progress through stages, especially the movement of systems of ideas. These thinkers also codified the French Philosophers’ notions of social justice and societal betterment into a more scientific form of expression. Thus, a science of society was becoming not only possible, but in true Enlightenment fashion, it was to be used to construct a better society and, thereby, further human progress.
THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY OF AUGUSTE COMTE
In 1822, Auguste Comte published the first clear statement of his positive philosophy in an article titled ‘Plan of the Scientific Operations Necessary for Reorganizing Society’. For Comte, it was essential to create a ‘positive science’ like other sciences, and this science would be based upon empirical observations that would be used to generate and test abstract laws of human organization. This new science was to be called ‘social physics’ and once the laws of human organization have been discovered and formulated, they should be used to direct the operation of society. Therefore, society's scientists were to guide the course and direction of human organization. One of the most fundamental laws of human organization was the ‘law of the three stages’ - an idea which he clearly borrowed from Turgot, Condorcet and Saint-Simon - with each stage being typified by a particular kind of ‘spirit’ - a notion that first appeared in Montesquieu’s The Spirit and was reinforced by Condorcet and Saint-Simon. These well-known stages were the ‘theological-military’, ‘metaphysical-judicial’, and ‘scientific-industrial’ or positivistic. Society had now entered the last stage, so it was possible to have a true science of social organization. For Comte, the age of sociology had arrived; and it was to be very much like Newtonian physics in the formulation of abstract laws on the forces of the social universe that could then be used to reconstruct society.
The Course of Positive Philosophy is a long work, and its goal was to unify all of the sciences while advocating a place for sociology among the sciences. In many ways, Positive Philosophy is a history of science through the prism of the law of three stages and an effort to establish a program for the new science of society with respect to (1) theory, (2) methods, (3) substance and (4) advocacy.
For your information [The Course of Positive Philosophy (Cours de Philosophie Positive) was a series of texts written by the French philosopher of science and founding sociologist Auguste Comte between 1830 and 1842. Within the work, he unveiled the epistemological perspective of positivism. Harriet Martineau translated The works into English and condensed them to form The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1853).]
1. The nature of sociological theory
Statements about the role of theory in the new science may be found throughout the first few chapters of Positive Philosophy. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Comte was inspired by Newton’s law of gravity and believed that equivalent principles could be developed in sociology.
The first characteristic of Positive Philosophy is that it regards all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws. Our business is - seeing how vain is any research into what are called Causes whether first or final - to pursue an accurate discovery of these Laws, with a view to reducing them to the smallest possible number. By speculating upon causes, we could solve no difficulty about origins and purpose. Our real business is to analyse accurately the circumstances of phenomena, and to connect them by the natural relations of succession and resemblance. The best illustration of this is in the case of the doctrine of Gravitation. (Comte, 2000, p. 31)
This short quotation introduces several important issues critical to the positivist project as it was to unfold over the next one hundred and fifty years.
First, there is the obvious reference to the goal of all theory: to articulate abstract laws about the operation of the social universe.
Second, is the nature of these laws, but here matters become a bit vague. In the context of Comte’s time, the reference to ‘first causes’ had several meanings: (a) first in the sense of God, (b) first in the sense of what initiated a phenomenon in the distant past and (c) first in the sense of the more proximate forces that set a phenomenon in motion. Search for such causes creates problems of placing trust in non-worldly entities (that is, God), of seeking the ‘Big Bang’ of a social phenomenon in the ultimate past, and of engaging in an infinite causal regress (that is, if A is caused by B, what caused B? Perhaps C, which was caused by D, and so on in a constant regress). Comte proposed the concept of 'natural relations of succession and resemblance' instead of causality. This idea suggests that the Law of Gravitation states relations among basic forces, with gravitation magnitude being a function of body size and distance. However, there is no causal connection, and sociological laws remain a debate. Comte's words evoke a debate that has not been resolved at both philosophical and scientific levels.
Third, the reference to final causes is vague. He states that he means ‘purpose’, but does he mean some ultimate goal or a function? It simply is not clear, and if he means to function, he did not follow his own advice since Comte reintroduced functional analysis into social theory.
Fourth is a clearly stated view that sociological theory will have relatively few laws because abstract statements should be reduced to ‘the smallest number possible’. Comte thus had an image of sociological theory as resembling the astrophysics of his time; indeed, as was also the case with Spencer, positivism emerges as an effort to emulate astrophysics in generating very abstract laws that state the basic nature of relations among generic forces in the social universe.
Yet, Comte also recognized that these abstract laws need to be applied to specific empirical contexts; and he proposed a kind of division of labour in the natural sciences and, hence, in sociology:
we must distinguish between the two classes of Natural science - the abstract or general, which have for their object the discovery of laws which regulate phenomena in all conceivable cases, and the concrete, particular, or descriptive, which are some- times called Natural sciences in a restricted sense, whose function is to apply these laws to the actual history of existing beings. The first are fundamental, and our business is with them alone; as the second are derived, and however important, they do not rise to the rank of our subjects of contemplation. (Comte, 2000, p. 45)
In this passage, emphasis on the abstract, general and generic is maintained, but Comte implies something else: deductions from these abstract laws to particular cases. From its beginnings, positivism held to a view of theory as highly abstract but also as amenable to translations to particular contexts.
2. The basic methodological strategies
While positivism aims to develop the laws of human organization, Comte took seriously the methodological question of how to collect data to test theories and, at times, induct theoretical principles from systematically collected and analysed data. He presented four basic methodological strategies.
a. Observation: He draws upon Montesquieu’s idea of considering social phenomena as ‘things’ or, as he phrased the matter, as ‘social facts’. When viewing the social as a thing or fact, observations stay away from biased moral judgement and focus on social forces' statical and dynamical properties. Sociology was, therefore, to be the science of social facts.
b. Experimentation: Comte did not have in mind laboratory experiments but, rather, naturally occurring situations where a pathological force interrupts the normal flow of events. Under these conditions, where the normal state of the social organism is interrupted by a pathological condition, it becomes possible to see how the more normal social processes reassert themselves in an effort to manage the pathology. Comte analogized to the physician, arguing that sociologists could do much the same thing for the ‘body social’; just as the physician can learn about normal body functioning by observing disease, the sociologist could understand the normal functioning of society by observing social pathologies.
c. Comparison: Comte also had a biological view of comparative anatomy (or structure and dynamics) between societies. But he also had a view of comparison between different types of social forms evident among ‘lower’ animals and comparisons with past and present social forms of human organization. By such comparisons, it becomes possible to see what is similar and dissimilar and what is present and absent across various forms; and from these types of comparisons, knowledge about the fundamental properties of the social world of humans would be revealed.
d. Historical analysis: Comte law of the three stages is such a historical method, examining the movement of ideas and corresponding structural arrangements across history. In looking at societies over time, Comte argued, their dynamical qualities are revealed and it is these that will be formulated into laws of human organization.
3. The Substance of Sociology: statics, dynamics and the Organismic Analogy
Like Saint-Simon, Comte saw sociology as an extension of biology in its study of organisms. Sociology was to be the study of social organization, with an emphasis on social wholes. For ‘there can be no scientific study of society, either in its conditions or its movements, if it is separated into portions, and its divisions are studied apart’ (Comte, 2000, p. 188). So, the basic goal of sociology was to produce laws like those in the astrophysics of his time, the subject matter was an extension of biology. Thus, positivism in sociology was originally very much married to functional analysis; subsequent positivists like Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim would continue this alliance of searching for laws like those in physics on a subject matter defined in biological terms.
Comte divided sociological analysis of social organisms into ‘statics’ and ‘dynamics’. He wanted to study structure (statics), but true to his Enlightenment ideals, he also wanted to view society as progressing (dynamics).
a. Social Statics: It is the analysis of functions of social parts to the whole. The parts to be analysed by sociology were not individuals (these were to be the subject matter of biology) but the units organizing individuals. In Comte's functional view, the ‘family’ composed minimally of husband and wife, is the most elementary unit of social organization, with this elementary unit becoming the basic building block for larger social units.
b. Social dynamics: It is confined to the law of the three stages in which the nature of ideas, structural forms and their modes of integration are examined for the theological, metaphysical and positivistic stages. The historical trend is forever more differentiation of structural units and new forms of integration (i.e. power, mutual dependence, and more generalized cultural symbols).
4. Advocacy and the Reconstruction of Society
Comte’s positivism always contained a basic line of advocacy: science is superior to any other system of thought for examining the structure and dynamics of society; laws of these dynamic properties can provide the tools for reconstructing society. Sociology is the ‘queen science’ because it has been the last to go positivistic, but with its emergence, all domains of the universe can now be examined scientifically. As a result, the laws of the universe - physical, biological and social - can be used to make a better society. Comte assumed that the laws themselves would inform policy-makers of the proper direction of the social order.
From its beginnings, positivism had an engineering component, or if one prefers, an emphasis on social practice.8 The laws of human organization were not just to be discovered for their own sake; they are to be used and applied to problematic conditions. Ironically, sociological practice as it has evolved in sociology over the past one hundred years often mounts critiques of positivism, whereas, in fact, the thrust of positivism was always to use general laws for engineering applications.
Comte in retrospect
Although Comte, in a bemused fashion, as one who postulated the law of the three stages, the hierarchy of sciences with sociology as the queen science, and the now often rejected view that sociology could be a true natural science. We can ask if this is any way to treat a founder, but there can be little doubt that the founder of sociology is not highly regarded today. There is, of course, some basis for this low regard, but his advocacy for positivism remains sound. Sociology can be a natural science; the subject matter of this science is social structures (statics) and social processes (dynamics); the goal of sociology is to develop abstract general laws on the forces that explain the operative dynamics of this subject matter; these laws should be constantly assessed against the empirical facts; and the verified laws of sociology should be used in engineering applications. Comte’s positivism is simply an advocacy for what all scientific disciplines do; our retrospective view of Comte as a flawed figure comes not only from the fact that Comte was indeed an odd man but also from contemporary sociology’s ambivalence over its scientific prospects.
Cited
HANDBOOK of SOCIAL THEORY Edited by George Ritzer and Barry Smart
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