Auguste Comte and Consensus Formation in American Religious Thought—Part 1: The Creation of Consensus

Kenneth Sacks

doi:10.3390/rel8080147

Abstract

French intellectual Auguste Comte was the most influential sociologist and philosopher of science in the Nineteenth Century. This first of two articles summarizes his complex life’s works and details reactions to them by Transcendentalists and Unitarians, from its American introduction in 1837 until just after the Civil War. Using public speeches and published essays, the article analyzes the ways in which intellectuals supported and criticized Comte’s theories. Because he wrote in such abstract and difficult French, criticisms centered not on the nuances of his work, but more superficially on his alleged atheism. These attacks occur because of a variety of consequences of the Civil War that had little to do directly with Comte’s philosophy. Instead, Comte was a convenient vehicle for expressing anxiety over a modernism that included an accelerated threat against religion posed by technology and science and the emerging dominance of that secular knowledge in universities. The second article will analyze Comte’s influence on later Transcendentalists and other post-Unitarian thinkers.

Highlights

French intellectual Auguste Comte was the most influential sociologist and philosopher of science in the Nineteenth Century
Comte was a convenient vehicle for expressing anxiety over a modernism that included an accelerated threat against religion posed by technology and science and the emerging dominance of that secular knowledge in universities
Somewhat under the influence of his Harvard colleagues who had developed pragmatism—the lecture centers on William James—the Spanish philosopher argued that Transcendentalism had proposed the proper epistemology for the prevailing scientific attitudes of his own day: Transcendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set of dogmas about what things exist; it is not a system of the universe regarded as a fact, or a collection of facts

Summary

Introduction

One of the most public and prolific of the latter, Joseph Henry Allen, in “The Religion of Humanity,” observed that: Observes contemporary authority on Comte, Michel Bourdeau: Founding social science constitutes a turn in the history of humanity.

Results

Conclusion