France in a quite remarkable fashion.
As a religion, Saint-Simonianism was still-born and such was the manifest
absurdity of many of its rituals and beliefs that one cannot but be reminded of
the earlier failure to establish the religion of theophilanthropy under the Directory.
Here was a religion which mistook humourless solemnity for authentic spirituality
and which, in Enfantin’s hands, came dangerously close to being that of the sexual
predator. With no meaningful concept of God, it provided an exemplary illustration
of the pantheism that so disquieted Tocqueville. Yet it would be a mistake to regard
the Saint-Simonian religion as nothing more than an amusing, if at times discon-
certing, episode. This is so for the primary reason that it set a pattern for later social
religions. This aspect of the question will be explored at greater length in the next
chapter but here we might note the manner in which the ‘new Christianity’ sought
to purge the old of its doctrinal impurities and erroneous beliefs whilst at the same
time replicating the hierarchical and unitary model of the Catholic Church. Simi-
larly, the new faith sought to re-establish social harmony and unity by putting an
end to the philosophical doubt and uncertainty for so long denounced and abhorred
by the Holy See. One sacerdotal caste was being called upon to replace another.
In his day, one of the best-known advocates of the need for a new religion was
Pierre Leroux.55 He had broken with the Saint-Simonians in opposition to En-
fantin’s more outlandish views but over the course of the next decade he developed
a sophisticated and appealing doctrine that encompassed many of the dimensions
of faith traditionally addressed by the established Church. His ‘true definition of
religion’, set out in what was his most notable work, De l’Humanité,56 sought to
define both the deity and the immortality of our being. His central message was one
of God’s immanence in this world—‘It is a God who is immanent in the universe,
in humanity, and in each person that I worship’, he wrote57—and from this he
concluded that there was a ‘harmony’ and ‘identity’ between humanity and man.58
As we perfected ourselves, so we perfected others. We became ‘l’Homme huma-
nité’. Leroux also shared the widely held view that some form of religion was
necessary to ensure the stability of society, but unlike his Saint-Simonian brethren
he did not believe that this entailed the creation of a new priestly caste. Rather, as
his later writings were to reveal, he placed his hopes in the formation of a national
church and in a religion without a theocracy.59 Leroux considered freedom of
religious conscience to be of only ‘temporary value’.60
54 See my ‘Democracy before Tocqueville: Michel Chevalier’s America’, Review of Politics, 68
(2006), 398–427.
55 See David Owen Evans, Le Socialisme Romantique: Pierre Leroux et ses contemporains (1948) and
Bruno Viard (ed.), A la source du socialisme français (1997). The latter text contains an extensive
selection of Leroux’s writings.
56 Pierre Leroux, De l’Humanité, 2 vols. (1840).
57 Ibid. i, p. vii.
58 Ibid. 247–67.
59 D’une Religion nationale, ou du culte (1846).
60 Ibid. 130. In this work Leroux addressed Bayle’s hypothesis of the desirability of a society of
atheists.
354
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
Leroux was not to be the only former Saint-Simonian who accepted the task of
defining a religion of humanity. Nor, for all the admiration he evoked among his
contemporaries,61 was he to be the most celebrated of those who did so. Saint-
Simon was fortunate to employ two young men of exceptional ability as his private
secretary. The first was the future historian, Augustin Thierry; the second was
Auguste Comte, the acknowledged founder of positivist sociology.62 Comte joined
Saint-Simon’s service in 1817, having been expelled as a student from the École
Polytechnique along with the rest of his year, and he remained there until 1824,
seemingly content to be described as Saint-Simon’s ‘pupil’. In those early years it is
virtually impossible to distinguish the ideas of Comte from those of Saint-Simon
but gradually the disciple became tired of the demands and mounting jealousy of
his master and an acrimonious separation became the inevitable outcome. Never-
theless, for the most part, Comte succeeded only in systemizing ideas found in
inchoate form in Saint-Simon’s richly variegated corpus. Indeed, Comte was
systematic to a fault.
Comte’s best-known idea, first glimpsed in Saint-Simon’s Mémoire sur la science
de l’Homme of 1813 but given its first full articulation by Comte in his Système de
politique positive of 1824,63 was that ‘by the very nature of the human mind, each
branch of our knowledge is necessarily subject in its course of development to pass
successively through three different theoretical states: the theological or fictional
state; the metaphysical or abstract state; the scientific or positive state’.64 During
the first stage, the human mind directed its search to the very nature of being, to
first and final causes, and concluded that phenomena were ‘products of the direct
and continuous action of more or less numerous supernatural agents’.65 During the
second, transitional, stage the search to understand the nature of things continued
but now explanation was attributed to such metaphysical entities as forces, proper-
ties, qualities, and powers imagined to be inherent in certain objects. By contrast,
the third or final stage was, in Comte’s opinion, ‘the definitive mode of any science’
and here the mind contented itself with relating observable phenomena to general
laws. This was expressed by Comte as follows: ‘in the positive state, the human
mind, recognizing the impossibility of attaining absolute concepts, gives up the
search for the origin and destiny of the universe and the inner causes of phenomena,
and confines itself to the discovery, through reason and observation combined, of
61 See the sketch of Leroux provided by George Sand in Viard, A la source du socialisme français,
304–5.
62 See Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1993 and
2009). See also Henri Gouhier, La Jeunesse d’Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, 3 vols.
(1933–41) and La Vie d’Auguste Comte (1965).
63 The first version of this text was published as the third cahier of Saint-Simon’s Catéchisme des
industriels: see Œuvres de Saint-Simon, ix. 7–207. It was later republ. by Comte under the title of Plan
des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société. In English see ‘Plan of the Scientific Work
Necessary for the Reorganization of Society’, in H. S. Jones (ed.), Auguste Comte: Early Political
Writings (Cambridge, 1998), 47–144.
64 Œuvres de Saint-Simon, ix. 75.
65 Stanislav Andreski (ed.), The Essential Comte (London, 1974), 20. This is a translation from
Comte’s slightly later work, the Cours de Philosophie Positive, begun in 1826.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
355
the actual laws that gove
rn the succession and similarity of phenomena’.66 Accord-
ing to Comte, if all the branches of science passed through these three stages of
development, they did not do so at a uniform pace. The classification of the
sciences, he affirmed, was determined by their decreasing generality of validity
and the increasing complexity of their subject matter, and this produced an order
that corresponded to their historical emergence: mathematics had been followed, in
turn, by astronomy, physics, chemistry, and physiology. However, there was much
more to Comte’s endeavour than an attempt to define and defend a conception of
positivist science that would, in his words, reduce ‘the totality of acquired knowl-
edge to one single body of homogeneous doctrine’.67
The second, and more important, task Comte set himself was to bring an end to
the historical legacy of instability and disorder bequeathed by the French Revolu-
tion. Here too Comte was working a rich vein already mined by Saint-Simon.68
‘From a moral point of view’, Comte wrote in ‘Considérations philosophiques sur
les sciences et sur les savans’ published in Saint-Simon’s Le Producteur,69 ‘society is
today obviously in a state of true and profound anarchy’. This stemmed from the
absence of any dominant system capable of producing ‘a single communion of
ideas’. From this, Comte continued, flowed unrestrained individuality, universal
excesses of egoism, the predominance of purely material considerations, and
corruption erected into a system of government. If this disorder were to persist,
Comte concluded, there could be ‘no other outcome than the complete dissolution
of social relations’.70 This was so, he further explained, because, while the social
system which corresponded to the theological and metaphysical stage of our mind
was disintegrating, the spiritual and temporal reorganization of society had yet to be
completed. We lived in the shadow of what remained of the theological and
military era. It was, Comte therefore wrote, ‘the great and noble enterprise’ of his
generation to put an end to this crisis by developing the ‘organic doctrine’ that
would determine the exclusive direction of all the details of society. This was to be
done not by taking the backward step of restoring theological philosophy to its
position of pre-eminence but by completing positive philosophy in such a way that
it would replace theology definitively and this itself was to be achieved by extending
scientific method to the study of society, by founding what Comte described as
‘social physics’.71
Shortage of space (as well as the sheer tedium induced by Comte’s repetitive and
dreary writing style) prevents a detailed examination of the methodological dimen-
sions of this important argument. Central to it was the contention that social
66 Andreski, Essential Comte, 20.
67 Ibid. 39.
68 See in particular Saint-Simon, Considérations sur les mesures à prendre pour terminer la Révolution
(1820).
69 Le Producteur, 1 (1825), 289–305, 348–73, 450–69; in English see ‘Philosophical
Considerations on the Sciences and the Scientists’, in Jones, Auguste Comte, 145–86.
70 Le Producteur, 1 (1825), 369–70. This argument was developed at greater length in
‘Considérations sur le pouvoir spirituel’, Le Producteur, 1 (1825), 607–14.
71 Such, Comte announced, was the principal aim of his Cours de Philosophie: see Andreski, Essential
Comte, 27.
356
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
phenomena were as susceptible to both observation and prediction as natural
phenomena and that they could be investigated by means of what Comte called
‘the historical operation’. ‘The spirit of this science’, he wrote, ‘consists above all in
seeing, through the detailed study of the past, the true explanation of the present
and the general appearance of the future.’72 Specifically, Comte argued that
social physics could be subdivided into the twin sciences of social statics, the
study of the conditions of existence of a society, and social dynamics, the study
of the laws of movement of a society. Together they studied the coexistence and
the succession of phenomena and in doing so disclosed not only the interdepen-
dence of all parts of the ‘social organism’ but also what Comte referred to as ‘the
positive theory of order . . . [and] of social progress’.73
What, at this early stage of his intellectual development, were the conclusions
that Comte drew from these formulations? The most obvious was that the course of
civilization was subject to ‘a natural and constant law’ and that this course was ‘only
modifiable, to a greater or lesser extent, in its speed, within certain limits, by a
number of physical and moral causes which can themselves be estimated’.74 The
second was that, to date, the prevailing disposition of the theological and meta-
physical school had been to ‘conceive social phenomena as arbitrarily modifiable to
an indefinite extent’.75 From this had originated the harmful legislation and violent
revolutions of the recent past. Next, only a ‘positive politics’ could enable the
human race to ‘escape from the condition of arbitrariness’ and therefore it was an
absolute imperative that politics should be elevated to the rank of the sciences of
observation. Political science was to be a branch of physics.76 Comte further
concluded—again echoing the voice of his master—that this elevation of politics
to a new rank could only be effected by the scientists because, within the new social
system dominated by industry, they alone possessed the requisite capacity and
theoretical authority. No less Saint-Simonian in tone was Comte’s conclusion that,
in an age of scientific politics, the government of things would replace that of
men.77
These views were most thoroughly set out in Comte’s magisterial Cours de
philosophie positive, begun in 1826 and published in six volumes between 1830
and 1842.78 It was this set of lectures that was to have an enormous influence both
upon Comte’s contemporaries and subsequent generations, and not only in France.
The English writer George Henry Lewes, now probably best known as the
paramour of novelist George Eliot, wrote of it in his History of Philosophy that
‘A new era has dawned. For the first time in history an Explanation of the world,
society, and man is presented which is thoroughly homogeneous, and, at the same
time, thoroughly in accordance with accurate knowledge.’79 John Stuart Mill, as
testified in his Auguste Comte and Positivism, was similarly impressed. Yet these
same writers had scarcely a good word for such subsequent Comtean publications
72 Le Producteur, 1 (1825), 356.
73 Andreski, Essential Comte, 148.
74 Œuvres de Saint-Simon, ix. 109.
75 Andreski, Essential Comte, 143.
76 Œuvres de Saint-Simon, ix. 193.
77 Ibid. 131.
78 (1830–42).
79 George Henry Lewes, The History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte (London, 1867), ii. 590.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
357
as Le Calendrier positiviste (1849), the Système de politique positiviste (1851�
�4), and
Le Catéchisme positiviste (1852). To quote Lewes again, he wrote that ‘I have never
been able to accept the later works as more than magnificent efforts to construct an
Utopia.’80 J. S. Mill was less charitable. Of the Système de politique positiviste he
simply remarked that it was ‘the completest system of spiritual and temporal
despotism which has ever yet emanated from a human brain, unless that of possibly
Ignatius Loyola’.81 For many of his readers Comte’s increasing preoccupation with
the formulation of a religion of humanity seemed a betrayal of his earlier positivism
and, moreover, something to be deplored.
Comte did not see it that way, preferring to emphasize ‘the perfect harmony of
the efforts that characterized my youth with the works accomplished by my
maturity’.82 The evidence suggests that he did so with some justification. In his
earliest writings, Comte inveighed against ‘the anarchic state of the intellect’ and
damned Protestantism’s approval of the right of private judgement, commenting
that ‘there is no freedom of conscience in astronomy’.83 In one of his most
important texts of the period, Considérations sur le pouvoir spirituel,84 he affirmed
his faith in the necessity of a spiritual power and argued that its distinctive function
was the ‘government of opinion’ and the ‘direction of education’. To that end, its
task was to develop the ‘system of ideas and habits necessary to prepare individuals
for the social order’ and to secure ‘the voluntary subordination of private interest to
the common interest’. The extent and intensity of this spiritual power, Comte
remarked, could be gauged by observing ‘the Catholic clergy in the era of its
greatest vigour and its most complete independence’.85 Temporal power would
be subordinated to spiritual power.
In the Cours de Philosophie Positive itself, the argument moved overtly at its
conclusion from social physics to social ethics. Under the new philosophic regime
there would exist both ‘a complete mental coherence’ and ‘the scientific ascendancy
of the social point of view’. ‘When’, Comte wrote, ‘a true education has familiarized
modern minds with the notions of solidarity and perpetuity that the positive
contemplation of social evolution suggests in so many cases, then will be felt the
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