Positivism, History of

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Positivism is the name of a social and intellectual movement that tried to learn from the mistakes of the Enlightenment project that eventuated, first, in the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution of 1789, and second, in the irrationalism of the Weimar Republic following Germany's defeat in World War I. While it has been customary to distinguish between the quasipolitical movement called ‘positivism’ originated by Auguste Comte in the 1830s and the more strictly philosophical movement called ‘logical positivism’ associated with the Vienna Circle of the 1930s, both shared a common sensibility, namely, that the unchecked exercise of reason can have disastrous practical consequences. Thus, both held that reason needs ‘foundations’ to structure its subsequent development so as not to fall prey to a self-destructive scepticism. In this respect, positivism incorporates a heretofore absent empiricist dimension to the risk-averse orientation to the world historically associated with Platonism.