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Chapter Seven - Comte's Civic Comedy: Secular Religion and Modern Morality in the Age of Classical Sociology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2018

Thomas Kemple
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia in Vancouver
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Summary

Introduction: Beyond the Law of the Three Stages

In the history of sociology, August Comte has largely become a forgotten founder or a figure of fun. The familiar bust of him sculpted by Antoine Injalbert in 1902 that now sits in the Place de la Sorbonne— where his disembodied head is flanked by his beloved Clotilde de Vaux posing as a Madonna and Child and by a proletarian teaching himself how to read— attracts at most mild curiosity or an amused glance from the afternoon coffee crowd. At best his work is approached with embarrassment— considered pathetic because religiously ecstatic— or indifference, insofar as it is assumed to be superseded because scientifically refuted. The many volumes that make up his Course in Positive Philosophy (1830– 42) and System of Positive Polity (1851– 54) are usually reduced to a casual line or two in hurried commentaries that summarize “the law of the three stages— theological, metaphysical, positivist”; a few anecdotes about his dispute with his mentor Saint- Simon; his troubles in securing an academic position; his odd relationships with women; or a hurried recitation of the famous positivist motto— “Love, Order, Progress.” The conventional wisdom is that Comte advocated his eccentric system of thought more persistently than he was able to realize it in practice. When his intellectual career and personal life later became so thoroughly intertwined, he could only fail to deliver on what he preached. John Stuart Mill's judgment has become the prevailing consensus: Comte's consistency is to be admired, but “the melancholy decadence of a great intellect” in his later work is lamentable (quoted in Gane 2013, 209). His legacy must therefore be laid to rest, mourned or even actively suppressed since the path beginning from him (à compter de Comte) ultimately leads nowhere.

Nevertheless, traces of Comte periodically reappear in modern social science discourse in the form of phases or “recyclings” that retrace his path from scientism and secularism to religious conversion and post- metaphysical closure. Michel Serres sees the gap left by Comte's encyclopedic ambition as a symptom of the recurring intellectual malaise that has haunted Western thought in the twentieth century, at least in its French variations:

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Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2017

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