- Length
- 900 pagesMartineau's condensed English translation, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 1853
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Free onlineA usable out-of-copyright text is freely available
Course in Positive Philosophy
The book that named sociology and proposed that the study of society could be a science like the others. Its law of three stages was one of the most widely believed ideas of the nineteenth century and is now believed by nobody, which makes the question of what survives it worth asking.
- Date
- 1830-1842
- Author
- Auguste Comte
- Region
- Paris
- Language
- French
- 1853 English, Harriet Martineau A condensation into two volumes; public domain, and retranslated into French for Comte's followers Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Opens — Starts a line of argument nothing before it was answering
- Form
- Lectures
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
Enormously influential in the nineteenth century, in France, Britain, Latin America and Turkey, and now read almost entirely as history.
What the book says
Six volumes proposing that human knowledge passes through three stages and that the last of them has now to be extended to society. In the theological stage, events are explained by the will of beings behind them; in the metaphysical, by abstract forces and essences that are the same explanations with the personalities removed; in the positive, we stop asking why things ultimately happen and ask only how they regularly do, stating laws that connect observed phenomena and predict others. Comte's claim is that the sciences reach this stage in a fixed order, from the most general and simple to the most complex and dependent - mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology - and that one field remains outside it. The study of society is still theological and metaphysical, argued by appeal to rights, contracts and human nature, and Comte proposes to found it as a positive science, for which he coins a name: sociology. He divides it into statics, the study of what holds a society together, and dynamics, the study of how it changes, and insists that the complexity of the subject requires methods the physical sciences do not need.
What it argues
That explanation itself has a history, and that the mature form of it abandons the search for ultimate causes. The positive method does not ask what heat is in its essence but states the laws by which it behaves, and Comte's claim is that this renunciation is not a loss but the condition of every advance the sciences have made. The hierarchy of the sciences follows: each rests on the one before, none reduces to it, and each acquires positive method later than its predecessor because its subject is more complex. Sociology is last because it is hardest, and it requires a method the earlier sciences do not - historical comparison, since a society cannot be experimented on and its present state is unintelligible without its past.
How it argues
By classification and by history, at enormous length and without much grace. Comte's method is to survey each science, show what stage it has reached and what obstacles delayed it, and derive the general law from the pattern. He does not argue for the three stages so much as exhibit them repeatedly, which is why the doctrine reads as a framework imposed rather than a finding. The prose is repetitive and abstract, and Martineau's decision to condense it by two-thirds was an editorial judgement most readers have endorsed.
The moment
France after the Revolution and the Empire, with the old order gone, no settled replacement, and a generation of thinkers asking what could hold a society together now. Comte had been secretary to Saint-Simon and broke with him bitterly. He held no university post, lectured privately, suffered a severe breakdown in 1826, attempted suicide, and lived on subscriptions raised by admirers including Mill. In his last decade he founded a Religion of Humanity with a calendar, sacraments and a priesthood, and this cost him most of the followers the earlier work had won.
How it travelled
Further than its philosophical merits explain. Mill promoted Comte in Britain and later published a book distinguishing what he thought valuable from what he thought absurd. Positivism became a political programme in Brazil, whose flag carries a Comtean motto, and shaped reform movements in Mexico, Turkey and elsewhere. Durkheim's founding of academic sociology takes Comte as its point of departure while discarding most of his content, and the word he coined outlived every doctrine attached to it.
The strongest objection
That the three stages are a scheme with no way of being wrong. Comte presents them as a law discovered from the history of the sciences, but the evidence is the history read in their light: any explanation invoking agency is theological, any invoking abstractions is metaphysical, and anything else is positive - so every case fits, and no case could fail to. The narrower objection, pressed since Mill, is that renouncing the search for causes was never actually the method of the physical sciences, which have been highly productive in asking exactly the questions Comte forbade. And the Religion of Humanity is not simply an eccentric coda: it suggests that a philosophy which had removed every source of authority found itself obliged to manufacture one.
Why read it
In Martineau's condensation and in extracts. The opening statement of the three stages and the chapter founding sociology are the parts with historical importance; the volumes on the individual sciences are of interest mainly to historians of those sciences. It is the least rewarding book to read directly in this group and among the most consequential.
- First printed
- 1830
- First in English
- 1853
- Digitised
- Yes
Harriet Martineau's English version of 1853 condensed the six volumes into two and was so successful that Comte had it translated back into French for his own followers.
Martineau's 1853 condensation is public domain and is how most English readers have encountered the work. There is no complete modern English translation.
Where it stands
Historical. Nobody holds the law of three stages, the hierarchy of the sciences is not how anyone now describes their relations, and the term positivism has been reused so often - by the Vienna Circle, by legal theorists, by social scientists - that Comte's own version is rarely what is meant. What survives is the question he put: whether the study of societies can be a science, and if so what kind.
On quoting this book
The French is public domain and Martineau's English is too, but hers is a condensation rather than a translation and cannot be quoted as Comte. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How far the later Religion of Humanity is continuous with the earlier system is the standing question and divided his followers in his lifetime. Whether Martineau's condensation, which is how the English-speaking world received him, distorts the argument is discussed and rarely resolved, since no complete English version exists to compare it with. Whether Comte or Saint-Simon originated the central ideas was disputed acrimoniously by both. And the relation between his positivism and the logical positivism of the twentieth century is one of name more than of doctrine, which is a persistent source of confusion.