The French Revolutionary Roots of Political Modernity in Hegel's Philosophy, or the Enlightenment at Dusk

Abstract

Readers of Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosophie positive which began to appear just before Hegel's death might well have imagined, from the work's title, that they were about to confront an interpretation of Hegel's philosophical system. If Hegel himself had assembled his writings as systematically as his doctrines, that collective title would probably have embraced their meaning with greater accuracy than any other. The positivity of Comte's philosophy was of course strikingly different from Hegel's and was in a crucial sense meant to supplant it, replacing it with a genuinely scientific understanding of society, just as metaphysics had earlier overturned theology. Over the past hundred and fifty years or so, Comte's positive philosophy – which he also termed sociology – has in its various formulations by his disciples come to encapsulate the proper agenda of the human sciences for a post-metaphysical, post-Hegelian, age.