The French Philosophical Crisis of the 1860s and the Invention of the “Positivist School”

Abstract

Historians frequently highlight the long-term influence of a “positivist tradition” upon French philosophy, but they disagree about its theoretical content as well as about its personnel. This chapter retrieves the origins of the struggle to define positivism in France, showing how the label “positivist school” was invented in the 1860s. This label was mostly promoted by spiritualist philosophers and Catholic theologians: both relentlessly attacked what they saw as novel and dangerous, materialist and deterministic, regimes of inquiry. According to the agenda pursued by the groups involved in this hostile fabrication of “positivism,” each adopted different definitions of the “positivist school” and its representatives. Emile Littre, Hippolyte Taine, and Ernest Renan were lumped together under this label. This chapter assesses the adequacy of this construction and explores the links each of the mentioned thinkers had with Auguste Comte’s positive philosophy.