Auguste Comte Biography

Auguste Comte or Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte was a prominent French philosopher. He introduced a new discipline, 'Sociology,' and divided this subject in two categories - “social statics,” which denotes the forces holding society together and “social dynamics”, which indicates the forces responsible for social change. He, for the first time, proposed the idea of positivism, a philosophy of science that gained wide recognition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Most of his work reflect the influence of the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon. He endeavoured to cure the social maladies of the 'French Revolution' with the help of his newly developed positive philosophy. His law of three stages is an attempt to describe the historical sequence of human mind in three steps - theological, metaphysical, and positive. Due to his development of specific philosophy for each discipline of science - mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology - he is regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense. In an article written for “Le Censeur Europeen,” a journal of the liberal opposition of that era, he put his view against equal access to jobs in government sector. Apart from enriching the field of Sociology, his social theories provided the basis for the formation of “Religion of Humanity.”