Auguste Comte

In one line

Comte founded sociology, named it, and argued that human thought and human society pass through three stages ending in the scientific, which is why society can now be studied scientifically at all.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Auguste Comte, 1798 to 1857, is regarded as the father of sociology. He coined the word sociologie in 1838, in the fourth volume of his Cours de philosophie positive, published in six volumes between 1830 and 1842. His principal contributions are positivism, the doctrine that genuine knowledge is confined to what can be established by observation and the discovery of laws; the law of three stages, that human thought passes through the theological, the metaphysical and the positive; the hierarchy of the sciences, which places sociology last and highest; and the division of sociology into social statics, the study of order, and social dynamics, the study of progress.

MU prints "August Comte". The name is Auguste Comte.

Where he stood

Comte wrote in France after the Revolution, in a society whose old order had been destroyed and whose new one had not settled, and in a Europe being remade by industry. His question was the one [What Sociology Is] identifies as the discipline's founding question: what holds a society together, and how does it change. His answer was that the same method that had succeeded in the natural sciences could be applied to society, and that a science of society would supply the intellectual basis on which a stable social order could be rebuilt.

He first proposed to call the new science social physics, and abandoned the name after Adolphe Quetelet used it for statistical work in 1835, coining sociologie in its place.

1. Positivism

The doctrine. Genuine knowledge is positive knowledge: it rests on observed facts and on the laws of invariable succession and resemblance discovered among them. Speculation about first causes and ultimate purposes is not knowledge, because nothing can be observed that would settle it.

What follows for sociology.

1. Society can be studied by the methods of science: observation, experiment so far as it is possible, comparison, and, distinctively for Comte, the historical method, which studies a society by tracing its development.
2. The object is to discover laws, that is, regularities of coexistence and of succession.
3. Knowledge is for use. Comte's formula was that science yields prevision and prevision yields action: understanding the laws of society permits its problems to be addressed.
4. Metaphysical and theological explanation is set aside, not refuted, since it is treated as belonging to an earlier stage of thought rather than as false in the ordinary sense.