AUGUSTE COMTE
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) Born in the French city of Montpellier on January 19, 1798, Auguste Comte grew up in the period of great political turmoil that followed the French Revolution of 1789–1799. In August 1817, Comte met Henri Saint- Simon and became his secretary and eventually his close collaborator. Under Saint-Simon’s influence, Comte converted from an ardent advocate
of liberty and equality to a supporter of an elitist conception of society. Saint-Simon and Comte rejected the lack of empiricism in the social philosophy of the day. Instead they turned for inspiration to the methods and intellectual framework of the natural sciences, which they perceived as having led to the spectacular successes of industrial progress. They set out to
develop a “science of man” that would reveal the underlying principles of society much as the sciences of physics and chemistry explained nature and guided industrial progress. During
their association the two men collaborated on a number of essays,most of which contained the seeds of Comte’s major ideas. Their alliance came to a bitter end in 1824 when Comte broke with Saint-Simon for both financial and intellectual reasons. Comte saw this new
science, which he named sociology, as the greatest of all sciences. Sociology would include all other sciences and bring them all together into a cohesive whole. Financial problems, lack
of academic recognition, and marital difficulties combined to force Comte into a shell. Eventually, for reasons of “cerebral hygiene,” he no longer read any scientific work related to
the fields about which he was writing. Living in isolation at the periphery of the academic world, Comte concentrated his efforts between 1830 and 1842 on writing his major work, Cours de Philosophie Positive, the work in which he actually coined the term sociology.
Comte devoted a great deal of his writing to describing the contributions he expected sociology would make in the future. He was much less concerned with defining sociology’s subject matter than with showing how it would improve society.
