Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857

Auguste Comte was a French philosopher and one of the founders of sociology, a term he coined. He developed the doctrine of positivism, according to which authentic knowledge proceeds from observation and the discovery of laws, and he proposed a law of three stages through which human thought passes from the theological to the metaphysical to the positive or scientific. In his later work he attempted to organize a secular Religion of Humanity. Comte's vision of a scientific social science influenced John Stuart Mill, Emile Durkheim, and the early development of the social sciences.

Auguste Comte was born in 1798 in Montpellier into a Catholic and royalist family from which he soon broke. Admitted in 1814 to the Ecole polytechnique, he was expelled in 1816 along with his class for political agitation, and from 1817 to 1824 served as secretary, collaborator, and then antagonist to the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, with whom he formed many of the ideas he would later present as his own.

His major works are the six volumes of the Course in Positive Philosophy (1830-1842) and the four volumes of the System of Positive Polity (1851-1854), supplemented by the Catechism of Positivism and a number of smaller writings. Throughout his career he supported himself precariously through tutoring and subscriptions, and in his later years he founded the Religion of Humanity, complete with calendar, sacraments, and a priesthood of positivist intellectuals.

Comte coined the term sociology and is generally counted as one of its founders. His law of three stages — theological, metaphysical, and positive — his classification of the sciences, and his vision of a society organized by positive knowledge shaped nineteenth-century scientism, the early sociologies of Mill, Spencer, and Durkheim, and the political program of positivism in Latin America. He died in Paris in 1857.