The development of the conception of spiritual power in the writings of the young Auguste Comte: The critical role of Adam Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’

Abstract

This article calls attention to the young Comte’s reading of Adam Smith’s essay on the ‘History of Astronomy’ and how this reading figured in the development of a conception of spiritual power. It begins by bringing greater precision to contemporary Comte scholarship and identifying a series of reformulations in the young Comte’s diagnosis of a ‘modern crisis’. What he saw first as a political problem of constitutional law and material sanctions he came to see as a social problem of collective attitudes and moral sanctions. Comte’s understanding that the modern crisis was fundamentally a social problem owed much to what he appreciated as Adam Smith’s ‘elevated view’ of the division of labour. Comte’s response to this social problem was to begin to imagine spiritual power as a re-entry strategy of moral education. Here the ‘History of Astronomy’ played a critical enabling role in Comte’s developing conception of spiritual power. Read together with Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the ‘History of Astronomy’ allowed Comte to ground the possibility of a religious positivism in the ‘positive facts’ of his sociological positivism: the generalisation of specialisation, he could argue, created the very specialists in generality who could respond to the modern crisis with moral education. Now, however, the ‘History of Astronomy’ also offered a critical foil to Comte’s conception of spiritual power. Comte read the ‘History of Astronomy’ without Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments; Comte thereby separated the sociology of the savants that he had taken from the ‘History of Astronomy’ from its association with the voluntaristic agency of ralliement or pull. As Comte transitioned from the ‘écrits de jeunesse’ to the composition of the Cours, the distinctiveness of his conception of spiritual power was that it increasingly looked to mediaeval precedents of moral authority and to the agency of push or réglement.