Blackwell Reference Online

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Love for the principle and Order for the base; Progress for the goal. Auguste Comte , Système de politique positive In our postmodern world, where doubts about the inevitability of progress and the value of rationalism have weakened utopian impulses, Auguste Comte appears at first glance to be a quaint, outmoded figure. The “founder” of sociology and positivism seems to evoke a faraway era, when the benefits of social planning and the validity of knowledge went largely unquestioned. Yet as Robert Scharff (1995 , p. 6) has recently suggested, the theories of this important nineteenth-century French philosopher have perhaps never been so relevant. Comte foreshadowed many issues that contemporary thinkers are grappling with today: the basis of truth, the role of politics in modern society, the root of moral crises, the significance of memory, and the problem of gender, class, and racial identities. More complex than is commonly assumed, Comte's contribution to social theory bears renewed examination. Comte's reputation rests on his dual achievement of establishing a new discipline, sociology, and closely connecting it to a novel philosophical system, which he called positivism. In the Cours de philosophie positive , published in six volumes between 1830 and 1842, Comte argued that because theory always precedes practice, the reconstruction of the post-revolutionary world could be ... log in or subscribe to read full text