Comte's Sociologies

Abstract

T r HE MAN, Auguste Comte, whose invention of the word we are here assembled to celebrate, was born in the year I798 and died in i857. From these simple facts, two very important considerations for the evaluation of Comte's work emerge: first, it is only eighty years since his death; and second, the man was alive from I798 to I857. These deductions are made neither to show my proficiency in arithmetic nor to excite your sense of humor. They show, in the first case, that since Comte died but eighty years ago, he can not properly be thought of as belonging to antiquity or even to a distant past; he can be thought of only as a modern, in the accurate sense of the word. As regards the second deduction, I am not making a humorous remark. Nothing could be more dangerous for a sociologist. When I say that Comte was alive from I798 to I857, I want to be taken quite seriously, just as I want to be taken seriously later when I tell you about my cat. Now if the two deductions just drawn are incontestable, then the stereotype of Comte as a philosopher of ancient vintage, whose bust, alongside those of Aristotle and others, gathers deepening dust, and whose works have long ago been distilled and concentrated and drawn off into encyclopedia articles,-a stereotype which implies that neither the man nor his works have any further interest or value for modern scholars, i.e., those who have entered graduate school since the World War,-this stereotype, I repeat, of Comte as an ancient philosopher must be destroyed. To begin with, Comte was not a philosopher at all, at least, in what may be called the professional sense. Contrast him with Spencer, for example. Spencer dealt with sociology only because he was writing a synthetic philosophy in which a sociology, as he defined it, had a place, and to that sociology he applied philosophic principles which had been clearly defined long before his study of sociology had been entered upon. Comte, in contrast, undertook a philosophical task only because he felt that it alone afforded a sure approach to the sociology which was always his goal. Spencer in other words became a sociologist because he would be a philosopher; Comte was temporarily a philosopher because he would be a sociologist. A sociologist! Both the thought and the word were new to the last century. Well might one ask, as Montesquieu did concerning the Persian, How can one be a sociologist? The answer is not difficult. There was, to begin with, the revolutionary turmoil of the time, which turned men's