Blackwell Reference Online

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Auguste Comte named sociology and established the French realist approach to the subject. He was born Isidore Auguste Marie François-Xavier Comte on January 19, 1798 in the French Mediterranean city of Montpellier during the aftermath of the great French Revolution. In his early teens he rejected the conservative Roman Catholic monarchist views of his parents and declared himself a republican and a free thinker. A prodigy in mathematics, at 15 he passed the nationally competitive entrance exams for the prestigious École Polytechnique, but had to wait a year until he met the minimum age of admission. A charismatic student leader, in April 1816 Comte was expelled from that school and Paris when a student demonstration was used as an excuse to purge anti-monarchist students. Dropping his first name, he returned to Paris as Auguste Comte in July. Comte supported himself as a private tutor and attended public lectures on an array of scientific topics. At one of these he met the philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon and soon accepted a position as Saint-Simon's secretary and editorial assistant. Their relationship terminated in a bitter falling out in 1824. That year Comte also married Caroline Massine, a former Parisian prostitute. In 1826 Comte initiated work on a series of lectures intended to organize all scientific knowledge into a coherent single system. In the course of writing he ... log in or subscribe to read full text