Auguste Comte Biography

Auguste Comte, or Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte, was a prominent French philosopher. He introduced the discipline of Sociology and divided it into two categories: social statics, which denotes the forces holding society together, and social dynamics, which refers to the forces responsible for social change. Comte was the first to propose the idea of positivism, a philosophy of science that gained widespread recognition in the second half of the 19th century. Much of Comte's work reflects the influence of the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon. He sought to address the social upheavals of the French Revolution through his newly developed positive philosophy. His law of three stages described the historical evolution of the human mind in three phases: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive stages. Due to his development of specific philosophies for each scientific discipline—mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology—he is regarded as the first modern philosopher of science. In an article written for Le Censeur Européen, a journal of the liberal opposition of that era, Comte expressed his opposition to equal access to government jobs. Beyond his contributions to sociology, his social theories also provided the foundation for the Religion of Humanity.