At the heart of Auguste Comte's program for resolving the ‘crisis’ of (early) industrial society — and explicitly so with the publication, in 1851, of Système de politique positive ou Traité de sociologie — was a project for ‘positivising’ religion by instituting (as its subtitle announced) la religion de l'Humanité. My aim in this inquiry is to interrogate that project, together with the wider conceptualisation to which it was linked.

Today, no doubt, to suggest that Comte's labyrinthine synthesis of philosophy, science, sociology, politics and religion is worth reexamining, let alone from its religious side, will meet with scepticism. We have learnt very well to mistrust all systematisers, and we are bored with the shibboleths of the nineteenth century. Who cares, any more, about Comte's totalising scientism, or about the organised idolatry of la société which it underwrote? Why dig up Positivism, only (presumably) to bury it again? One answer, I mean to show, stems from Comte's crucial but underrecognised place in the formation of modern, and postmodern, French thought. Another concerns the continuing (or renewed) pertinence of fundamental thinking about the social itself as a topic for reflection. Yet another would argue the value of grappling with Comte as a way to clarify problems in the vantage point (political, reflexive, emancipatory) from which, in the first place, these considerations press into view.

This will already make clear that the interrogation I have in mind is not only the hard questioning of a suspect caught near the scene of a crime.