In the 1848 Discours sur l'ensemble du positivisme (A General View of Positivism), published in the middle of the June Days of the 1848 Revolution, during an apogee for positivism as a movement, Auguste Comte proposes a dual, complex role for art and the artist of the positive age.2 First, he says, art will lose the towering, if excentric, place it holds in the current social system: it will lose its autonomy, irregularity, exuberance and power, the separate realm through which artists engage and influence social activity. But, second, art will acquire a new force, and the artist, having come to accept his dependence on science, industry and technique, will become the figure who outlines the future.

It is an astonishing formulation. One might expect art to decline in the positive age, to become incidental or ornamental, a genre of comfortable if pointless pictorial speculation that enlivens without genuinely affecting. It is not merely, as Mary Pickering (3: 204) notes, that in the positive future “the mind would gain satisfaction in directing its energy toward the arts.” Comte proposes, in fact, that not only will art participate in the regeneration of society and, indeed, that of human nature itself— not only will it come up with depictions of the present and the future, of ideals to follow— but it will indeed form systematic utopias.