Auguste Comte and Positivism (John Stuart Mill)

Auguste Comte and Positivism

By John Stuart Mill

Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte was a French philosopher who founded the discipline of praxeology and the doctrine of positivism. He is sometimes regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.

Influenced by the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French Revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology presented by Emile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.

John Stuart Mill