Auguste Comte and Consensus Formation in American Religious Thought—Part 2: Twilight of New England Comtism

Kenneth Sacks

doi:10.3390/rel8080151

Abstract

Auguste Comte was the most influential sociologist and philosopher of science in the Nineteenth Century. Part 1 summarized his works and analyzed reactions to them by Transcendentalists and Unitarians from 1837 until just after the Civil War. Part 2 examines in detail the post-war Transcendentalist and liberal Unitarian institutions of the Free Religious Association and the Radical Club and their different approaches to spiritual faith based on intuitionalism and reliance on scientific proof. In the background to their disputes is the positivism of Auguste Comte, who served as an easy source of common criticism. But at the same time as they wrote against positivism, both intuitionalists and those who relied on science were significantly influenced by Comte. Once again, as in part 1, a community of discourse was formed through the need to create social bonds at the expense of careful evaluation of the philosophy they criticized.

Highlights

Auguste Comte was the most influential sociologist and philosopher of science in the Nineteenth Century
At the same time and there emerged a group of critics of Comte—mainly more traditional Unitarians, but eventually many post-Unitarians and Transcendentalists—who typified his work as an expression of atheism and, otherwise of little worth
The Civil War period marked a watershed in the reaction against Comte due both to the wider dissemination of the System with its unpalatable social applications and to disruptive social forces: the accelerated threat against religion posed by technology and science, the dominance of that secular knowledge in universities, and a more bureaucratically organized society

Summary

Introduction

Auguste Comte was the most influential sociologist and philosopher of science in the Nineteenth Century. In 1871, Abbot, co-founder of the FRA and influential editor of the association’s weekly Index, delivered a public lecture entitled, “Intuitionalism versus Science; or the Civil War in Free Religion.”

Results

Conclusion