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Auguste Comte and the
Religion of Humanity:
The Post-Theistic
Program of French
Social Theory
Andrew Wernick

Cambridge University Press

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity
The Post-Theistic Program of French Social Theory

This book offers an exciting reinterpretation of Auguste Comte, the
founder of French sociology
...
Andrew Wernick provides
the ®rst in-depth critique of Comte's concept of religion and its place
in his thinking on politics, sociology and philosophy of science
...
Wernick relates Comte to Marx and Nietzsche as seminal
®gures of modernity and examines key features of modern and
postmodern French social theory, tracing the inherent ¯aws and
disintegration of Comte's system
...

a n d r e w w e r n i c k is Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at
Trent University, Ontario, Canada
...
His publications include Promotional Culture (1991), Shadow
of Spirit: Religion and Postmodernism (with P
...
Featherstone, 1994)
...
cambridge
...
One can imagine a philosophical
counterpart to this device
...
It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the
services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to
keep out of sight
...
Other friends and colleagues at Trent who
have helped shape and enrich this interest include John Fekete, John
Hillman, Zsuzsa Baross, Constantin Boundas and Peter Kulchyski
...
I thank Gad Horowitz for
his help and encouragement with the manuscript, an earlier version of
which was accepted as a doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto
...
My intellectual, as well as every other
kind of, debt to the latter is incalculable
...
My aim in this inquiry is to interrogate that project,
together with the wider conceptualisation to which it was linked
...
We have
learnt very well to mistrust all systematisers, and we are bored with the
shibboleths of the nineteenth century
...
Another concerns the continuing (or renewed) pertinence of fundamental thinking about the social itself as a topic for
re¯ection
...

This will already make clear that the interrogation I have in mind is
not only the hard questioning of a suspect caught near the scene of a
crime
...
What I propose is an engagement with Comte,
not just against and about him
...
But before elaborating, it
may be useful to set the stage by recalling ®rst, in Comte's own terms,
what he actually meant to establish
...
1 Its full establishment required
Â
a doctrine (dogme), a moral rule (regime) and a system of worship (culte),
all organised and coordinated through a Positivist Church
...
The `objective synthesis' of
the Philosophie positive needed to be complemented by a `subjective
synthesis', for which the Politique positive was to provide the groundwork
...
2 Taken as a whole, the
Positivist System would provide the scienti®c±humanist equivalent to
what systematic theology had been in the high Middle Ages: it would
serve as the intellectually unifying basis of the new industrial order
...

Hence the need for an educational reform, which in turn was part of a
broader pattern of institutional changes designed to provide industrial
Â
society with an entire regime of cooperative purpose and order
...
4 It would begin at home with Mother, continue in the schools with
a revamped curriculum under (male) teacher-priests,5 and persist in the
sermons and ceremonies which Positive Religion would install in a
systematic and pervasive ritual round
...

Â
Its three parts, moving from culte to dogme to regime, are outlined in chapters 2±4
...

In the still fuller version of the doctrine, `First Philosophy' would summarise the
methodological principles of Positivism, `Second Philosophy' would consist of the
Subjective Synthesis, including the theoretical part of la Morale, and `Third Philosophy'
Â
Á
would systematise l'action totale de l'Humanite sur son Planete (x:246±7)
...

Besides the direct inculcation of altruisme, the formula for recalcitrant impulses was that
`in the name of happiness and duty' the instinct nutritif should be restrained, the sexual
instinct severely so, and that envy and vanity should be weakened (x:344)
...

Ã
The last sacrament, incorporation (into le Grand-Etre) would come after death, following
a favourable judgment for those deemed worthy of remembrance (x:130)
...

But it was not only individuals who were to be `rallied' and `reguÂ
lated'
...
Hence a mass of
prescriptions for the harmonious (re)ordering of every major institution
...
The sphere of production: cooperative,
functionally ordered, justly meritocratic (x:338±42)
...
Overarching direction would be provided by a complementary leadership of temporal and spiritual authorities
...
The new `Spirituals', on
the other hand, would be the scientists±philosophers±teachers±pastors
encadred in the Positivist priesthood itself
...
The lay elites who coordinated
production (and distribution) would control the repressive organs of the
state
...
But there
were also differences
...
As well, their spiritual authority
± i
...
their capacity to mobilise public opinion, whether against incorrigible displays of egoism and immorality, or against destructive social
con¯ict over the distribution of social wealth10 ± would be rooted not
only in the prestige of their of®ce as representatives of Humanity and
mediators of its grace, but also in the ties `spontaneously developed'
between themselves and their natural allies
...
e
...

The world, with an estimated population of 140 million, would be divided into 70
republics with 300,000 family households and 1±3 million inhabitants each (x:309±10)
...

For its guiding role within the wider industrial intelligentsia, see x:253±5
...


4

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

class
...
12
The third element of positive religion was its cult: the organised yet
`effusive' worship of Humanity
...

If the doctrine was designed to synthesise the understanding, and the
regime to synergise action, the cult was to mobilise and canalise that
benevolent harmonisation of the instincts Comte called sympathie, as the
proper inspiration for the other two
...
As with Feuerbach (1957), Positivism took
sentiments, especially those of the most elevated forms of love, to be the
essence of religion
...
The worship
of Humanity was to ®x in its adherents a lively impression of such
harmonious coordination of the whole human being
...
To which there was a
corollary
...
From medieval chivalry and Maryolatry, Positive
11
12

13

14

Â
Strictly speaking, les proletaires were not to be considered a `class' at all, but the
`nutritive' function's `moral milieu' (x:332±3)
...
`Le caractere propre au sacerdoce ressort naturellement de sa
 Â
Á
comparaison generale avec celui qui convient a la femme
...

The Festivals are discussed throughout the Politique positive
...

Â
Á
Á
`Destinee surtout a nous apprendre a vivre pour l'autrui, la religion doit essentiellement
Á Â
Â
consister a regulariser la culture direct des instincts sympathetiques
...


Introduction: rethinking Comte

5

Religion would distil guardian angels and subcults of Clotilde (`ma
Á
sainte ange')15 and the Vierge-Mere
...

Looking back over the period of his ®rst synthesis (1826±42) Comte
liked to think of himself as the Aristotle of Positivism
...
Besides congregations, there were literal churches to be
built, surrounded by elaborate cemeteries, and Positivist priests to be
recruited, trained and set to work
...
16 Beyond that, beginning with the most advanced
societies of Western Europe, then spreading from the `white races' to the
`less advanced' regions of Asia and Africa, it was to expand into a global
organisation
...
Not merely St Paul; in fact,
Comte was to be Positivism's St Peter as well, inaugurating the of®ce of
Ã
Â
Grand-pretre de l'Humanite in his own august person
...
18 It was, like Comte himself, an easy-tosatirise victim of its own rigidities, archaisms and in¯ated ambition
...

15

16

17

18

Â
Â
As he called `Mon eternelle amie, Madame Clotilde de Vaux (nee Marie), morte, sous
Ã
Â
Â
mes yeux, au commencement de sa trente-deuxieme annee', in the dedicace which
prefaced the ®rst volume of Politique positive
...
Altogether, there were to be 100,000 fully quali®ed Positivist priests worldÂ
wide
...

Â
Â
Â
`Toute la hierarchie theorie subit immediatement l'impulsion continue du GrandÃ
Â
Ã
Â
Â
Pretre, qui nomme, deplace, suspend, et meme revoque, sous sa seule responsabilite,
ses membres quelconques' (x:325±6)
...

As a curious residue of the Society's Latin American in¯uence, the of®cial state motto
of Brazil, where Positivists were active within the modernising elite at the end of the
nineteenth century, is to this day Ordem e progresso
...
For all its dogmatic and ecclesiastical airs, Comte's positive
faith in Humanity is suspended over the abyss which Nietzsche inscribed
with `the death of God', to which it can be interpreted as both a panic
reaction and a strategic response
...
For Comte, too, the waning of theism in the dawn of
positivity entailed, at the limit, not just the decay of belief in an external
yet ineffable super-being,19 nor indeed just the delegitimising moral and
political consequences of this
...

The rise of a scienti®c world-view spelt the end of all supernaturalist
ontologies, however attenuated, and their displacement by an immanentist materialism, grasped as the primacy of experienced actuality behind
and beyond which we cannot go
...
After Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, the human
species upon whose reason and experience the new science was based,
was discovered not to be the centre of anything
...
it is by virtue of the earth's motion that the
Positive doctrine has come to be directly incompatible with all theological
doctrine by making our largest speculations relative, whereas previously they
had an absolute character
...
Yet the Copernican turn undermined the
naive anthropocentrism on which the old theism had depended
...
However, if we were to be
true to our knowledge, it was a path that could only be taken with the
clear recognition that for the human subject to take itself as a foundation
was a relative standpoint which could only be rati®ed as such
...
If the humanity pitched
into an a-centric universe was to provide itself with a new map and
compass, this could only be done in full awareness of the perspectival
relativity of all human constructions, and with no guarantees concerning
their Truth
...

Macherey (1989:31±3, 121±2) also notes the similarity between Comte's relativism and

Introduction: rethinking Comte

7

The striking af®nities between Comte's and Nietzsche's understandings of the paradoxical implications of the scienti®c break from theism
are not accidental
...
But the relation is two-way
...
That is: his entire reconstructive effort
can be seen as an attempt to grapple with the vertiginous disorientation
± and nihilism ± which Nietzsche was to place at the foreground of
attention
...
Rather than pushing
perspectivalism or nihilism all the way, Comte strenuously reacts, in the
medium of a traumatised ex-Catholic sensibility, against the threat of
`anarchy', both social and interior to the individual subject
...

The stormy passage, from Hegel to Nietzsche via the Young Hegelians, of the immanent critique of religion in nineteenth-century
German thought was examined by Lo
Èwith in a celebrated debate with
Blumenberg about `secularisation'
...
In general terms, the
German development proceeds from the cultural and subjective
grounding of `spirit', an interiorisation of the divine principle that had
already been personalised and desacerdotalised through Protestantism;
Â
whereas the French, in the current that runs through the ideologues,

21

22

Nietzsche's perspectivism, though without reference to the `Copernicanism' that is a
recurrent theme in Comte (e
...
vii:46 and ix:349)
...
I discuss these in chapter 7 below
...
The general framework is laid out in Meaning
in History (1949), and it is this text which Blumenberg addresses in Legitimacy of the
Modern Age (1985:27±9)
...
The real break was Christianity's own turning away from the
cosmos to history as the ground of meaning in the ®rst place
...


8

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

Saint-Simonians and sociologists, generated a civic humanism saturated
with the corporatism and religious externalism of the unreconstructedly
Catholic
...
For Saint-Simon, Comte and
Durkheim, on the other hand, divine predicates were shifted onto a
metaindividual topos constituted by the human collectivity in a strong
and organic sense
...
Indeed, Comte's religion of
Humanity can be regarded as just a stopgap, or detour, in the `selfdevaluating of the highest values hitherto' (Nietzsche, 1968:9) which
Nietzsche, drawing more radical conclusions, wished to push through to
a `transvaluation of all values'
...
It can even be read as not a
real rupture at all
...

It can nevertheless be argued that Comte still belongs to a Nietzschian
problematic because, in his effort to reconstruct subjectivity in light of
the scienti®c transformation of knowledge, he aimed to root out not
only supernaturalism but any absolutely ®xed truth, and even ± notwithÂ
standing any worshipful way La Deesse was to be imagined ± any
essentialist mysticism about Humanity itself
...
As such, its lines of ¯ight intersect with contemporary
discussions which, via Heidegger, Bataille and the postmoderns, have
revived Nietzsche's scenario of dying gods and twilight idols as the
23

24

`Incomplete nihilism does indeed replace the former values with others, but it still
posits the latter always in the old position of authority that is, as it were, gratuitously
maintained and the ideal realm of the supersensory
...
For Heidegger, Nietzsche's own `positivist' enmeshment in a vocabulary of
values and valuation left him still within the modern philosophy of the subject, so that
his own transvaluation was itself only `incompletely nihilist' (ibid
...

Nisbet's emphasis on the in¯uence of conservative religious thought on French
sociology (e
...
1973:238±41) leads him to misread some aspects of the latter
...


Introduction: rethinking Comte

9

groundless ground on which to construct an understanding of our own
discontents and possibilities
...
As an eccentric outrider of the SaintSimonians, Comte belongs to the ideological preformation of modern
socialism
...
What is worth highlighting, though, is precisely what
was entailed by this preformative role
...
Considering that the
deepest presuppositions of the transformist impulse ± for so long
`wizened and out of sight' both in the Marxism that has prevailed on its
radical side and in the moralism (manifest today in identity politics and
the `equity agenda') that has prevailed on its reformist side ± became
fragile and exposed in the unravelling of the socialist project in the last
decades of the twentieth century, we can see here a second order of
contemporary signi®cance
...
Re-examining earlier ®gures like Comte, then,
can become part of a renewed effort to clarify, and soberly rethink, what
most deeply de®nes a progressive, emancipatory or ± to use the maligned word ± communist commitment
...
His political relation
to the socialist tradition is ambiguous, to say the least
...

These measures included: the establishment of a ®xed scale of salaries (x:340±3), the
institution of local salons for mingling and instruction, which would bring patriciens and
Â
proletaires together in the same moral milieu (x:314±15), and a succession process in
which the passage of property to heirs would be vetted, and eventually, through
arti®cial conception (x:278), separated from heredity as such
...
27 His political objective, which never
changed, was to complete the work of 1789 by developing an institutional framework (including a `terrestrial morality') within which
science-based knowledge and production could become systematic,
harmonious and predominant, to the bene®t of society as a whole
...
`It is on the
revolutionary school alone', he noted in Philosophie positive, `that we can
expect that the positive polity can experience a predominant in¯uence,
because this is the only one that is always open to new action on behalf
of progress
...
At the same
time, and increasingly, Comte was a partisan of order as well as progress
...
With the rise of a radical workers' movement in the
watershed decade of the 1840s, he began, accordingly, to seek alliances
on the right
...
29 When that came to nothing, he was again pushed into

27

28

29

into fonctions civiques, and in which all would be cooperating in a collective and, above
all, future-oriented task (ix:491)
...
The master's refusal to acknowledge Comte's authorship of key
articles, and arguments about who was stealing ideas from whom, led to a bitter break
...
For a detailed account of Comte's break with SaintSimon, see Gouhier (1965:95±109) and Pickering (1993:192±244)
...
He always referred to it as `mon opuscule
fondamental'
...

Â
Martineau, 1853, ii:437
...

For Comte's political trajectory, see Pickering, 1993:chs
...
Comte's critique of the Bourbon Restoration for its `retrograde' alliance
Â
with remnants of the ancien regime continued into the Orleanist regime of LouisPhilippe
...
After seeking the support of women and workers in the
Â
Â
Catechisme positiviste of 1852, he sought those of les hommes d'etat in his Appel aux
conservateurs, which appealed for subsidies to support (his own) sacerdoce
...
30
The limitations of nineteenth-century French `socialism', in the nonMarxist stream that runs from the Saint-Simonians to the social democÁ
racy of Jean Jaures and the solidarism (with which Durkheim was brie¯y
Â
associated) of Leon Bourgeois,31 are easy enough to state
...
These contradictions it also de®ned as transitional
rather than inherent, resulting from the incompleteness of industrialism's emancipation from pre-industrial ways of seeing, feeling, thinking
and acting
...
Such phenomena are assimilated instead to
technical realities (production, industry) on the one side, and to social±
moral ones (distribution, coordination) on the other
...
the whole sphere of
production and exchange
...
Enthusiasm for l'industrie was the
watchword for a bad utopia: society as a vast workshop, productivist,
technocratic and held together as a managed harmony of useful functions by a centrally directed state
...

Once such a critique is admitted, however, there remains a residue of

30

31
32

be gathered from the new slogan that appears in its frontispiece: La Famille, la Patrie,
Â
l'Humanite
...
Its last major public involvement was a campaign, in alliance
with the Parisian Catholic hierarchy, to prevent the city authorities from relocating the
Á
main Paris cemetery outside the city limits
...
The cult of the
dead was a central feature of religious Positivism
...
For Durkheim's involvement with solidarisme, see Lukes, 1972:350±4
...


12

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

considerations that have not been entirely dispelled
...

`The standpoint of the old type of materialism', wrote Marx in his
`Theses on Feuerbach', `is civil society
...
The dictum applies to the ideological as well as the theoretical plane
...

This `we' forms both the ground and horizon of progressive political
activity
...
But how is such a
collectivity ± Bloch's `not-yet community'?33 Bernstein's (and HaberÂ
mas's) community-as-regulative-ideal? Blanchot's (1986) communite invouable? ± to be conceived? How is it to be thought with respect to
social, psychological and historical categories? How, with respect to
agency? How, if we are to avoid dogmatism or idealism, can `social
humanity', or a guiding `we', be grounded? What meaning can be
ascribed to it within a critical, demythologised, socio-historical selfunderstanding?
I do not want to suggest that Comte provides a satisfactory answer to
these questions
...
Comte's elaboration of that term, then, including his
attempt to ground it in an analysis of `the social tie', might usefully be
revisited as part of a wider inquiry into the social problematics of
transformist thought
...

Â
The worship of l'Humanite was not just designed to inspire us all
forward
...
Progress
itself, Comte insisted, is `the progress of order'
...
In so far as Comte
confounds, under the technicist rubric of industrial society, the problem
of capitalist order with that of social order as such, we may dismiss both
his analysis and his prescriptions as a misrecognition of the problem
...


Introduction: rethinking Comte

13

the dynamics of capitalist industrialisation, it is no wonder he proposes
Â
such a vast apparatus of regulation and ralliement to hold it all together
...
Colletti, dismissive of determinist
and economistic forms of Marxism, but equally opposed to the in¯ated
role of will and subjectivity in counter-strains, suggested a policy, in
such matters, of constructive engagement
...

That split, between equally one-sided approaches to the relation
between social consciousness and social being, had persisted in
orthodox Marxism's attitude to its `bourgeois' sociological rival
...
in so far as it
takes consciousness (the conscience collective for Durkheim, the intentionality of social action for Weber) to be the key for explaining social
structure
...
34
Colletti implies the possibility of a critical appropriation in which one
form of one-sidedness might correct another
...
Ideology ± as the
sphere in which individuals are `interpellated' as subjects and in which,
as a crucial element of that interpellation and its cognitive consequences, individuals bear an `imaginary relation to their real conditions
of existence' (1971:152±5) ± is irreducible
...
i
...
something including in its scope both
social being and social consciousness, or rather both conditions a parte objecti and
conditions a parte subjecti
...
The superstructure is itself an aspect and articulation of the structure

...
e
...
It may be
noted that Colletti follows Rickert in including Comte (as a small-`p' positivist) among
those who do not recognise this
...

Althusser discusses Marx's treatment of `philosophy', and the status of his own, in For
Marx (1969)
...
2, `On the Young Marx'
...
In
effect, what Comte calls `religion' is what Althusser calls `ideology';
from which angle, the way to understand what the Comte/Durkheim
tradition de®ned as the problem of religion and social order would be to
recast it (and the mechanistic metaphor of the `superstructure') in terms
of the structures and processes through which the prevailing complex of
social relations is reproduced
...
But as the reference
to Althusser implies, there is also another reason
...

Talcott Parsons opened The Social System with the rhetorical question
(from Crane Brinton) `Who now reads Spencer?' (1968:3)
...
Since the early
studies by John Stuart Mill (1961) and Caird (1885), and writings by
Harrison (1975) and other partisans of the Positivist Society, there have
been, until very recently (Pickering, 1993; Scharff, 1995), no serious
full-length studies of his thought in English
...
Comte's reputation in France has fared little better
...
37
36

37

Mary Pickering's intellectual biography of Comte ± the ®rst volume of which (up to
1842) was published in 1993 ± signi®cantly updates Gouhier (1933±41, 1965) and is an
important historiographic resource
...
These books, published since
this study was begun, suggest that an interest in Comte is beginning to revive
...
Particularly noteworthy is the work of
Á
Â
Angele Kremer-Marietti (1980, 1982), which reexamines Comte's notion of representation, language and sentiments, and of Kofman (1978) which (psycho)analyses the
gender dimension
...
However, and leaving aside his British
in¯uence through John Stuart Mill, Comte's in¯uence on French
thought, and so, these days, on Anglophone thought as well, has been
profound
...
39 But
elements of that system entered many discourses, academic and nonacademic,40 some with a powerful posthumous career
...
In the quest for
a positive `science of science', a Comtean imprint is also palpable in the
®eld of historical epistemology: that is, in the project of developing a
theoretical history of knowledge, pursued in different ways by BacheÂ
lard, Koyre, Canguilhem and, more latterly, Foucault
...

Though he cited Montesquieu, Rousseau and Saint-Simon as the main
precursors of his relaunched sociology,43 Durkheim's wider program

38

39
40

41

42

43

Things (1970), even in a work that focuses on the hinge period to which Comte
belonged, is indicative however of the marginalised position Comte more generally
continued to hold
...
Husserl's
diagnosis of the `spiritual crisis', with its attack on the ascendancy of a `negative'
rationality, and its championing of `philosophy-science', differs from Comte in urging a
return to pre-Socratic Greek philosophical roots, but its starting point (and its
language) is almost identical
...
And for
that reason it suffers from the too negligible development and force of philosophy,
which has not yet progressed enough to overcome skeptical negativism (which calls
itself positivism) by means of true positivism' (Husserl, 1965:145)
...

Â
For a ®rst-hand account of splits in the Positivist Society itself, see Littre (1864)
...

Among those in¯uenced by Comte were Charles Maurras, founder of Action Francaise
Ë
(Nolte, 1965:52 et seq
...

For the in¯uence of Positivism on biology in nineteenth-century France, both through
Â
Â
ÂÂ
La Societe de Biologie (founded in 1848 by Robin and Segond) and through Emile Littre,
see Canguilhem (1994:251±60)
...
For him, though, Comte is less central than a more
general contrast between the French and German engagements with the `question of
Enlightenment'
...
In France it is the history of science which has above all served
to support the philosophical question of the Enlightenment: after all, the positivism of
Comte and his successors was one way of taking up again the questioning by
Mendelssohn and Kant on the scale of a general history of societies' (10)
...
With the reception of linguistic theory
and phenomenology, and with the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism, the Positivist matrix which had shadowed, and partly shaped,
the sciences humaines during the ®rst half of this century was certainly
dislocated and displaced
...
44
In France, the background presence of the Comtean inheritance has
been real, but of little mainstream interest
...
Deconstruction, received into American thinking
through literary studies, and taken up by a political interest in `decentring' the (western, white, male, heterosexual etc
...
45 A sideshoot went from Saussure and Peirce to
Barthes, discourse analysis and Foucault
...

The British case was less straightforward
...
46 What came out of that
moment was a reworked neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony (Hall,
1984), a theory of ideology which took critical social and cultural theory
towards a problematisation of subjectivity and discourse,47 and was a

44

45

46

47

Â
cotulerit', written as the Latin thesis requirement for his agregation, and his essay on
Rousseau's Contrat social, posthumously published in 1918, were published together in
English in 1965 (Durkheim, 1965)
...

In part 1, chap
...
Not surprisingly, since Derrida takes writing to be the undoing of any
logos, Derrida's answer is more than negative
...
But this condition of possibility turns into a condition of impossibility
...
Graphematics or grammatology ought
no longer to be presented as sciences; their goal should be exorbitant compared to
grammatological language' (Derrida, 1974:74)
...

Ioan Davies (1995:10±62) has examined this debate, which prominently pitted E
...

Thompson against Perry Anderson and the dominant group in the New Left Review, in
the course of a wider examination of the rise of a British `cultural Marxism'
...


Introduction: rethinking Comte

17

pathway towards the galaxy of Parisian postmoderns
...
When Althusser
recanted the `theoreticist' positions advanced in For Marx and Reading
 Â
Capital, he confessed that `Nous avons ete Spinozistes' (1974:65)
...
The price of ignorance was a missed opportunity
...
It might also have been possible
to see that the Althusserian intervention invited critical re¯ection not
just on socialist science, but on socialist ideology ± using that term
`positively' ± as well
...
But this only holds in the domain of what Horkheimer called
`traditional theory' (1972:188±243) ± that is, where knowledge accumulates in some objecti®able way, and where the results can be conceptually separated from the process of thought which produced it
...
Nor
are these conditions satis®ed where the aim is to develop, not simply the
one best theorisation, but an entire repertoire of modes of thinking, and
thinking about thinking, which might optimally help to generate a
multidimensional understanding of a multiplex world
...
But
neither are they to be forgotten, at least as mnemonic markers for the
themes, concepts and framing devices carried by their thought, together
with the other names that mark its subsequent development and
dissemination
...
In fact it is no exaggeration to say that the
entire project of Althusserianism comes down to the issue of Spinoza versus Hegel, or
the claims of a Marxist theoretical ``science'' as opposed to a subject-centred dialectics
of class-consciousness, alienation, ``expressive causality'' and other such Hegelian
residues' (Norris, 1991:34±5)
...

See especially the title essay in E
...
Thompson's The Poverty of Theory (1978)
...
The very notion has become suspect, implying (in the
medieval manner) pregiven Authorities whose lead we must follow and
to whom we must defer
...
Within such an assemblage, carrying forward the
Â
themes, categories and metatheory of even major thinkers now passe,
Á
can provide both a principle of intelligibility vis-a-vis related, or
opposed, forms of theoretical approach, and an ongoing resource, at
least as a kind of second-order software, if no longer with respect to their
`effects of truth'
...
It is just that we tend to construct our
organon for thinking with the aid of what, and whom, the current canon
foregrounds
...

Comte's posthumous disregard can be blamed on his own idiosyncratic and sectarian de®ciencies
...
In this respect, he belongs to a
larger tradition of re¯ecting and theorising about the grand themes of
society and human nature which, for most of this century, has ®tted
poorly into the established disciplinary grid, and has been marginalised
as a result
...
What
makes it so is the strategic place Comte occupies in modern European
intellectual history
...

A better understanding of Comte can help illuminate, more particularly, two developments in the larger complex of European thought
...
The

Introduction: rethinking Comte

19

guiding aim of this current was to develop a grand synthesis of scienti®c
knowledge through systematically mapping its results and principles
...
In historical terms, the
project presented itself as a correction of Aristotle ± particularly the
Aristotle of the Scholastics ± in light of the rise of the natural sciences
...
Comte's contribution was to apply this
critique to the rationalist political and moral theory of the philosophes so
that, by means of a real `science of Man', the Baconian matrix could be
fully positivised as the subject and object of its own gaze
...
More particularly French, it pertains to the theoretical career of that idea for a
post-theistic religion which, after 1789,50 reconstructive reformers
sought to install as the historically proper replacement for the CatholiÂ
cism of the ancien regime
...
This itself, though, may be regarded as
a (perhaps closing) chapter of a much longer French adventure with
reason and faith ± an adventure which issued from patristic Christianity's attempt to reconcile the mysteries of faith with Greek philosophy,
and whose opening storms go back to medieval theology and controversies over rationalism and natural philosophy at the University of Paris in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Pieper, 1960)
...
The project's
disintegration can be traced through the structuralist, phenomenological
(and Bataillian) break-up of the Society-subject, and thence to all the
`death of
...

50

51

Ã
Ã
Beginning with the Jacobins' culte de la Raison in 1793, and culte de l'Etre supreme in
1794
...
Gouhier suggests
Â
that Comte's religion of Humanity can be understood as `une survivance de l'epoche
Â
revolutionnaire' (Gouhier, 1933±41, i:5±7)
...
The immediate linking ®gure
is Charles Renouvier (Lukes, 1972:54±7)
...
His Positivism was fashioned both as a
scienti®c systematisation of science and as humanistically demysti®ed
religion
...
Bacon's
House of Salomon pre®gured the Positivist priesthood
...
De Tracy's Elemens d'ideologie and SaintSimon's writings before he met Comte ± indicating the need for a science
of Man and, on that basis, a new synthesis of knowledge to complete the
scienti®c revolution as the industrial-age basis for a moral renovation52 ±
show clearly enough that these themes were not original with him
...
Hence, in the intellectual tradition of
modernity, the importance his thought holds both as a strategic reference point and as an event with its own continuing effects
...
I focus on the religious side for two reasons
...

To that end, I propose to explore Comte's religious and theoretical
position ± in his terms, the doctrine of Positive Religion ± at four levels
...
The next (chapter 4), will consider his proto-sociological analysis
of the contemporary `religious crisis' to which that totalisation, and its
associated program of reforms, was conceived as a response
...
This, ®nally
52

The need for a philosophical synthesis of the sciences is laid out in Saint-Simon's 1807
Á
Á
Â
essay, Introduction aux travaux scienti®ques du XIXeme siecle
...
See Pickering, 1993:70±85
...

Comte's thought, I mean to show, was radically ¯awed, not only as
science and as a socio-political program, but at its ®deistic core, that is,
as a religious position that would sublate the old gods
...
In that spirit, the study will
conclude (chapter 8) with a consideration of what might be retrieved
from the ruins
...
Nevertheless, the work of Bataille, Althusser, Baudrillard and
Nancy is adduced to show that drawing the non-catastrophic consequences of this collapse has enabled revised versions of (what I will call)
socio-theology to generate a new (or renewed) ®eld of questions still
pertinent to a politically charged manner of thinking about the social
...
Comte's system of systems, somewhat like Hegel's
`circle of circles', is complexly interrelated, indeed to the point of a
baf¯ing self-referentiality
...
But
for the same reason, at whatever level we enter it, we cannot avoid
encountering the totalising systematicity which characterised every
aspect of his thinking
...
Such a
starting point will also introduce us to that `mania for unity' which John
Stuart Mill (1961) and many others have found indigestible in the
temper and movement of Comte's thought
...
It also self-consciously expressed what he took to be a divine
impulse, l'amour universel ± an impulse which lies at the heart of his
religious project, and whose misrecognition, and implicit violence, can
be diagnosed, religiously as well as conceptually, as its original sin
...
The world religion he aimed to found, and
Ã
whose Grand-pretre he proclaimed himself to be, was never more than a
marginal sect
...
are of interest today only as an example of the kind of ideological
exotica that ¯ourished in the radical period that culminated, politically,
in the upheavals of 1848
...
To take Comte
seriously, then, has always required some strategy for separating what
Durkheim and others called `the absurdities' into which Comte's religious mission led him3 from those aspects of his work (conventionally,
1

2

3

Besides the projects and social experiments associated with Manuel's `prophets of Paris'
± Fourier, Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Enfantin and Comte himself ± the period from the
1830s to the 1860s also saw the rise, throughout Europe and North America, of a
multitude of movements, from Chartism, cooperativism, socialism, neo-Malthusianism,
feminism and abolitionism, to nationalism and folkloric and feudal-aristocratic revivals;
to which must be added, in the New World, an apocalyptic frontier revivalism (Bloom,
1993) and the ¯owering of a host of intentional communities
...
In
its `live' version, the cours was a cadre-training exercise, as well as a way to earn money
...
Note also his comment in the opening pages of Politique positive
Á
Â
that since that `decisive work' in 1826 he had dedicated his life `a fonder une autorite
Â
Â
Á
 Â
theorique vraiment digne de deriger l'entiere regeneration des opinions et des moeurs,
Â
Â
Â
Â
en remplacant de®nitivement le monotheisme epuise' (vii:2)
...


22

The system and its logic (1)

23

his philosophy of science, and the methodological re¯ections underpinning his premature founding of sociology) deemed to have a more
enduring intellectual relevance
...
Comte's gynolatry was combined, moreover, with an
almost parodic puritanism
...

Such motifs are particularly evident in the works of Comte's later
Â
years
...
Chief among the latter, after the
opuscules of Comte's formative but troubled period of employment,
tutelage and collaboration with Saint-Simon (1817±24),7 was his ®rst,
and in his terms `fundamental', synthesis: the six-volume Cours de
philosophie positive, ®rst presented in lecture form during the late 1820s8
and published between 1830 and 1842
...
See however my comment on Levy-Bruhl in chap
...

On primes and the number seven, see ix:130
...
que le premier, symbole de synthese, represente aussi la
Â
sympathie; tandis que le second indique l'ordre, de®ni par l'arrangement, toujours
Á
Â
Á
binaire; et le dernier, propre a tout evolution, exprime naturellement le progres' (x:101)
...
Comte to have been a great thinker, that I regard it
as a duty to balance the strong & deeply felt admiration which I express for what I deem
the fundamental parts of his philosophy by an equally emphatic expression of the
opposite feeling I entertain towards other parts
...
Comte himself, who, in my
judgement, has thrown ridicule on his own philosophy by the extravagance of his later
writings' (letter of Mill to Richard Congreve, 8 Aug
...

 Â
Á
Appended to the fourth volume of Politique positive, in Appendice general du systeme de
Â
 Â
politique positive
...
The Appendice is rounded out with three further essays written after
Â
Â
1824: `Considerations philosophiques sur les sciences et les savants' (1825); `ConsideraÂ
tions sur le pouvoir spirituel' (1826); and `Examen du traite de Broussais sur l'irritation'
(1828)
...
To the later and more dubious
Á
Â
corpus, belong the four volumes of Systeme de politique positive; ou traite
Â
Â
de sociologie instituant la religion de l'Humanite (1851±4), the Catechisme
positiviste; ou sommaire exposition de la religion universelle (1852), and La
Á
Á
Á Â
synthese subjective, ou systeme universel des conceptions propres a l'etat
Â
normal de l'Humanite, of whose projected four volumes Comte was only
Á
able to complete the ®rst, Systeme de logique positive, before his death in
1857
...

There is certainly biographical warrant for positing a break in
Comte's thought following his ®rst major work, and, indeed, for
suspecting what followed to be the ramblings of a ruined mind
...
The
experience converted him to the principle of the primacy of sentiment
over intellect
...
11 Those, including Comte's estranged wife Caroline Massin, who had morally and ®nancially supported him in his losing battles to gain a permanent teaching post at the
Â
Ecole Polytechnique,12 were henceforth no longer seen as friends but
backsliding congregants who had a duty to support le sacerdoce
...
Overall, as Henri
Á
Â
Gouhier pithily remarks (1965:175), `Le systeme avait devore l'homme
...
After his recovery he gave an abridged but public version of the cours at the
Â
Athenee (Pickering, 1993:365±71, 429±30)
...
For an account see Pickering
(1993:380±404) and Gouhier (1965:121±32)
...

In the spring of 1849, according to Gouhier
...

Â
The Preface personnelle to vol
...
The title page of the
Â
volume notes his part-time (and annually renewable) post at the Ecole Polytechnique
 Â
as repetiteur d'analyse and examinateur
...

Â
For his battles with the Ecole, see Pickering, 1993:429±76
...
Comte had been working on his Systeme de politique
positive throughout the period of writing and publishing the Cours
...
The fact that
Comte saw ®t to append his six early `opuscules' ± which already
sketched out most of the major themes of Positive Religion, including its
scienti®c humanist doctrine and its neo-medieval division of spiritual
and temporal powers ± to the ®nal volume of the Politique positive further
indicates his sense of continuity with regard to a project that had been
developing over three decades
...
But the overarching elements of this turn in
Comte's thinking ± the `primacy of sentiment', the re®guring of l'HumaÃ
Â
Â
nite as le Grand-Etre, the `direct institution' of la religion de l'Humanite ±
are not simply reducible to manic symptoms
...

Philosophie positive had culminated in a discussion of the methodological prerequisites for establishing `social physics' (volume iv), and a
general sketch of its ®ndings (volumes v±vi)
...
It was a transformation destined
to affect all the other positivised sciences in their turn
...
Of the latter's projected four
Á
volumes,13 the one he completed, on mathematics (Systeme de logique
positive), was itself conceived as belonging to a larger series dedicated to
the `subjective synthesis' of each of the fundamental branches making
Â
Â
up l'echelle encyclopedique
...
) After his own subjective synthesis of mathematics/logic, that
13

Á
Volume iv of Politique positive, published in 1854, speci®es that Le systeme de logique
Á
positive would appear in 1856, Le systeme de morale positive (two volumes) in 1859, and
Á
Le systeme de l'industrie positive in 1861
...


26

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

of the next four branches of knowledge, devoted to an equivalent
revamping of astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology, would be left
for his successors
...
As for what was now the `®nal science', la morale, which
focussed on the (laws governing the socially inserted) human individual,
this was to be expounded in volumes 2 and 3
...
Moving from the synthesis of the
intellect (in Philosophie positive) and the synthesis of sentiment (in
Politique positive and beyond) to the synthesis of action, its aim would be
to manifest the harmony among the differentiated practices of sciencebased production ± material, political and moral ± which, in the
industrial stage of social development, would `normally' prevail
...
Neither completely continuous,
nor completely discontinuous, with positions previously taken, its main
interpretative, indeed substantive, challenge to the critical reader concerns neither the extravagant self-identi®cation of the author nor the
detail of his cultic prescriptions
...
The deeper problem concerns the necessity it claims for the
project of `subjective synthesis' itself ± including the all-embracing
Â
worship of l'Humanite which underlies it ± in furthering that total
harmonisation of thought, sentiment and action which Comte had
aimed at all along
...
The remainder
of this chapter will be taken up with the initial systematics of Positive
Philosophy, central to which was the notion of completing positivisation
through the establishment of social science
...

Â
Â
For Littre this was the nub of the matter
...
In upholding the
Â
Â
former against the latter, he notes: `Dans la methode subjective, les consequences sont
Â
Â
Á
metaphysiques comme le point de depart, n'ont besoin que de satisfaire a la condition
Ã
Á
d'etre logiques, et ne trouvent ni ne requierent les con®rmations a priori de
Â
l'experience' (532)
...
Littre's intellectual
biography is especially valuable for its ®rst-hand account of the sectarian atmosphere in
which these initial controversies unfolded
...

Positive philosophy and social science
Á
The order in which Comte's ®rst synthesis, the Systeme (or Cours) de
philosophie positive, presents its materials is deceptively linear
...
16 Each is
treated historically, as a process of cumulative development, and arranged in an order which moves through the sciences according to the
decreasing degree of generality, and increasing degrees of complexity
and speci®city, of the range of phenomena with which they deal
(i:47±95)
...
Indeed, its founding as a
science, through the establishment of an appropriate methodology and
de®nition of the ®eld, is the climax of the work, as of the larger cognitive
transformation it recounts and re¯ects
...
There are three steps: (1) from the history of the
preceding sciences (including the histories of how they became sciences)
Â
is distilled a conception of scienti®city (positivite ) which (2) is then
applied to the founding of a new, and in point of fact the only remaining,
branch of science
...
Elaborating the results of this latter operation, Comte concludes
by telling us (iv:842±3), will be the subject of a further opus, Politique
positive, whose purpose will be to detail the program of reforms the
16

17

18

The term sociologie, which replaces physique sociale in later works, is ®rst introduced in lecon
Ë
47 of the Cours, in the course of reviewing the formative contributions to it of Montesquieu
and Condorcet (i:200±1)
...
Mais j'ai ensuite reconnu que cette imperfection grammaÁ
ticale trouve une heureux compensation dans l'aptitude directe d'une telle structure a
rappeler toujours le concours historique des deux sources antiques, l'une sociale, l'autre
mentale, de la civilisation moderne' (vii:403n)
...

`
...

In fact, the positivisation of social science required both the development of the
preceding ®ve positive branches of knowledge and the development of society itself to
the point where the law of social as well as intellectual progress could be empirically
derived
...


28

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

Cours had only sketched out for resolving, de®nitively, the `great social
crisis' by which contemporary Europe is beset
...
But two peculiarities of
the linking argument should be noted
...
In the
opening chapter of the Cours Comte tells us that the construction of
Positivism as an all-embracing philosophy is intended not just as an
intellectual contribution but as directly useful to the establishment of
social order and the furtherance of progress (i:43)
...
Yet by the end of the Cours that assertion is presented as a
practical conclusion validly drawn from a sociological analysis produced
by a new science which issues from the application of principles given by
Positivism itself (vi:376 and 788)
...
If the advocacy of
Positive Philosophy as a cure for the present crisis of post-Revolutionary
French, and European, society is to be consistent with the spirit of that
same philosophy, that advocacy must itself have a positive basis
...
The programmatic necessity for the system is made
to derive from the conclusions to which its crowning moment, the
founding of sociology, leads
...
We may suspect that the
conceptual violence of ensuring this left detectable scars
...
For the
moment I will observe just that the marks left by Comte's operation of
fashioning his science in light of its intended conclusions are well hidden
because of the completeness with which the leaps of faith that constitute
his `science' of the `social' are integrated, seamlessly, into the proliferating systematics of his system
...
Sylvain Perignon, in the introduction
to the edition of Comte's works from which I have been citing, puts it this way: `La
Ã
philosophie positive
...
Autrement dit: la philosophie positive fonde methodologiquement ce qui la fonde
logiquement' (i:xvi; emphasis in original)
...
To clarify the nature of this circle, which such formulations view as
singular, I am suggesting here that it is better regarded as two circles, the one logical
and epistemological, the other practical and historical
...
It is
asserted that the founding of sociology comes about by applying principles of scienti®city established through the system of Positive Philosophy
...
But it is also asserted that this
system depends for its own conceptual existence on that same scienti®c
advance
...

To appreciate the logic that ¯ows the other way ± i
...
the dependence
of Positive Philosophy on positivised knowledge about the social ± we
have only to consider what, for Comte, is the nature of the scienti®c
principles the former establishes, and whence they derive
...
They are induced
from what at least purports to be the actual history of human knowledge
...
21
Together, these generalisations make up what Comte, following Francis
Bacon's `confused attempt' to provide the natural sciences with a
unifying capstone, calls `®rst philosophy', which, `being destined to
serve henceforth as a permanent basis for all human speculations,
should be carefully reduced to the simplest possible expression' (i:61)
...
22
The ®rst, `equally objective and subjective', concerns the search for
natural laws; the second, `mainly subjective and relating to the understanding', gives the `statical' and `dynamical' laws of cognition; the
third, `mainly objective', summarises what the positive sciences have
20

21

22

Â
Á
`En effet, la fondation de la physique sociale completant en®n le systeme de sciences
Ã
Â
Â
naturelles, il devient possible et meme necessaire de resumer les diverses connaissances
Á
Â
Á
acquises, parvenu alors a un etat ®xe et homogene, pour les coordonner en les
Â
Á
presentant comme autant de branches d'un tronc unique, au lieu de continuer a les
Â
concevoir seulement comme autant de corps isoles' (i:19)
...
The same point recurs throughout the Politique
Â
Â
positive: `C'est donc uniquement par l'etude positive de la grand evolution humaine que
Â
Â
l'on peut decouvrir les lois reelles de l'intelligence' (ix:46)
...


30

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

discovered to be the most general laws of motion and order in the
material universe
...
e
...
The project of
fundamental ontology had been relaunched by Descartes and the great
metaphysicians of the seventeenth century (Woolhouse, 1993)
...
Bacon's Novum Organum, on the other hand, had
envisaged a non-metaphysical `®rst philosophy', dedicated rather to
summarising what science induced to be the most general laws of
Nature
...

For Comte, accordingly, at the highest level of abstraction the principles of correct understanding are those developed in the practice of
science, whose own validity hinges on whatever testable knowledge that
practice has produced
...
In the
real world of scienti®c practice the sciences are particular and plural,
and their methods, like the hypothesised phenomenal regularities they
seek to discover, are relative to distinct ®elds of knowledge
...
Astronomy developed the method of observation, the physical±chemical sciences that of experiment, and biology the
method of comparison
...

`Science' is to be understood, then, as a developing ensemble of
theoretical practices, differentiated into phenomenal domains, each with
its own protocols and forms of legitimacy-by-results
...
what we mean is
...

Â
Â
`Isolement d'aucune application effective, les plus justes notions sur la methode se
Â
Â
Á
 Â
Â
Á
reduisent necessairement a quelques generalites incontestables mais tres vague
...


The system and its logic (1)

31

of factuality in itself
...

Comte's empirical and historical approach to the derivation of the
principles of science could hardly be otherwise
...
That is what Philosophie positive means
...
Just as the development of each science is affected by the
development of all the others, so too is the progress of the sciences
interdependent with that of the practical arts, and this entire complex `is
strictly tied to the general development of human society' (i:66)
...
25 These laws dictate not only the `general history of philosophy' and thus of social evolution, but also both the cognitive stages
through which every branch of knowledge is destined to pass (from the
`theological' to the `positive' by way of the `metaphysical') and the
chronological order (e
...
astronomy before physics, chemistry before
biology) in which each successively less general, more complex, and
more dependent science must undergo this process
...
Sociology also enters into the latter as part of its own knowledge
domain
...
And that range is only available for study when the whole
narrative of the positive sciences, with their distinct objects and approaches, can retrospectively be told
...

25

Â
Á
`C'est donc l'appreciation successive du systeme fondamental des opinions humaines
Á
Â
Á
 Â
relatives a l'ensemble des phenomenes quelconques, en un mot, l'histoire generale de la
Á
Â
Â
philosophie, quel que soit d'ailleurs son caractere effectif, theologique, metaphysique, ou
Â
Â
Á
positif, qui devra necessairement presider a la coordination rationelle de notre analyse
historique' (iv:518±20; emphasis in original)
...
Grasping the general principles of
positivity, by way of the synthesised history of knowledge, was also
crucial for the founding of sociology
...
They were also, in the widest sense, practical
...
To be sure, other sciences were able to launch
themselves and develop without any prior need for a wholesale transformation in the prevailing system of knowledge ± albeit, for example in the
controversies surrounding Galileo's defence of Copernicus, that a sometimes furious epistemological resistance had to be overcome
...

What distinguishes sociology from other sciences is that it brings the
subject of knowledge itself, ®nally, into the scienti®c frame
...
A particularly strenuous effort is needed, then, to escape
from the coils of the commonsensical, interest- and affect-laden, in
short prescienti®c, ideas which cling to the sociological object
...
Furthermore, as the Galileo episode attested (v:564), even
sciences which deal with realities remote from the substance of human
reality can ®nd their advance blocked by social investments in the nonscience they must displace
...
To study the patterning of current beliefs and institutions with an
eye to what they have been, could be and are elsewhere, engages political
26

27

Â
Â
In physics, the primary opponent had been the metaphysical `theorie des entites'
...
See vi:240±2
...
a la theologie proprement dite, dont elle tendait
Á
Á
Á
Á
des lors a construire, a son pro®t, l'antique domination, a la fois mentale et sociale'
(vi:240±1)
...
Controversy and con¯ict are inevitable
...

Not only is the shift that positivisation implies in the mode of social
theorising generally indexed to the long-term rise of a positivist outlook,
in contest with the receding grip of the theologico-metaphysical
...
What profoundly complicates
the gestation of sociology is that, with its birth, the whole positivisation
of knowledge moves to completion
...
The human subject itself is taken
...
To found sociology as a
positive science, in other words, would necessarily bring to a head the
crisis in thought that had been brewing since the revival of natural
science in medieval Europe, a crisis that could only be resolved by
positivising, completely and coherently, the prevailing mode of theorising as such
...
Thus, at least, could
Comte console himself during the cold silence that greeted the volumeÂ
by-volume publication of Positive Philosophy until Littre's laudatory
review in 1844
...
The feudal±Catholic
hegemony had been destroyed in the great revolutions of the past two
centuries
...
In the absence of such reorganisation, the terrain of post-1789 social
and political theory had come to be monopolised and fought over by rival
28

29

This was doubtless the truth in Bacon's deadpan remark that `Anticipations are a
ground suf®ciently ®rm for consent, for even if men went mad all after the same
fashion, they might agree with one another well enough
...
cannot suddenly strike the understanding; and therefore
...

Â
Littre, an eminent translator and liberal journalist, wrote six articles on Comte in Le
National at the end of 1844
...
See Gouhier, 1965:177
...
On one side was the
Â
Â
alliance of legistes et litterateurs who had triumphed in the ®rst stages of the
Revolution, and who subscribed to a metaphysical belief that individuals
could spin workable utopias out of their individual brains (v:453 et seq
...
Divided by
a one-sided attachment either to reason and progress, or to faith and
order, both camps were equally doctrinaire and equally incapable of
thinking the reconstruction of the shattered social order in line with its
actual laws and requirements (iv:8±9)
...
`This general revolution of the human spirit is
today entirely accomplished: it only remains
...
When this
double task is suf®ciently advanced, the de®nitive triumph of positive
philosophy
...

To situate the rise of sociology in such terms, of course, is already to
be in its register
...
It issues in a politique positive which prescribes the installation of sociology itself as a scienti®c guide for a self-correcting path of
`normal' social development
...
For, sociology tells
us, only through a shared belief system intellectually based on such a
philosophy will it be possible to achieve social consensus in the emerging
scienti®c±industrial order, and so end the strife
...
It should be added that Comte never considered
that after the `positive state' had been socially achieved sociology would have any
further theoretical development
...

The unifying effects of this philosophy, indeed, will be more complete than ever before
...

ËÂ

The system and its logic (1)

35

We can summarise by saying that if establishing a science of society is,
in theory, essential for establishing a positive synthesis of human knowledge, the latter is also, in practice, essential for the former; while the
conjoint establishment of both is conceived as socio-historically necessary
by sociology itself
...
The complex interdependency of the perspectival shifts involved ± the one launching sociology as
a science, the other placing philosophy, as the uni®ed/unifying theory of
knowledge, on a positive basis ± makes it impossible to completely
separate them out
...
In effect, the theoretical prise de position
which inaugurated Comte's positivisme was understood by him as a
single, if complex, event: an irruption (in the name) of positivity that
occurs simultaneously, and with both theoretical and political effects, on
two interlocking planes
...
32
Â
But what, as a mode of cognition, was positivite?33 And what happens to
it when it is (re)conceived from a sociological standpoint, i
...
when a
Â
positivist approach is taken towards understanding positivite itself ? Pursuing these questions will lead us to see how, in trying to complete the
objective synthesis of knowledge through establishing a science of society,
32

33

`I borrow
...
There is an unequivocal ``epistemological break'' in
Marx's work
...
By founding
the theory of history (historical materialism), Marx simultaneously broke with his
erstwhile ideological philosophy and established a new philosophy (dialectical materialism)' (Althusser, 1969: 32±3)
...
Some of these tendencies were criticised by Comte himself for
Â
Â
Â
their alienated secheresse or disintegrative esprit de detail, or for a materialisme that would
reduce higher-order phenomena to lower-order ones
...
Comte's positivisme shared such features of the (narrowly
scientistic) positivismus periodically debated in Germany as the epistemological
privileging of scienti®c knowledge, the conception of the latter as empirically based and
predictive, and the appropriateness of absorbing the human fully into the realm of the
scienti®cally knowable
...
In
Discours sur l'esprit positif in 1844 Comte distinguishes at least six elements in its
de®nition ± realism, usefulness, certainty, precision, constructiveness and relativity
(xia:41±4)
...


36

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

Comte was led by the very movement of his thought to complete that
completion through the subjective synthesis attempted in his later work
...
Its
second week, on the rise of the scienti®c outlook, ends by honouring
Francis Bacon
...
Through Saint-Simon, and before him the Encyclopedistes, Bacon's in¯uence on the formation of Positivism was immense
...

The same can be said of Comte's basic conception of scienti®c
knowledge
...
36
For both thinkers, science is an observationally based cognitive
activity which links a human subject, suitably purged of illusory preconceptions, and a natural object, commonsensically regarded as being
`out there', in the systematically conducted pursuit of useful knowledge
...

According to Manuel, Condorcet's commentary on The New Atlantis was included in
the 1804 edition of Condorcet's Esquisse and `exerted a profound in¯uence on SaintSimon and Comte' (Manuel, 1962:62)
...
Galileo's contribution was
Á Â
judged to belong `essentiellement a l'evolution scienti®que' (vi:242)
...
qu'ant a l'etude de l'homme et de la societe, Bacon present
Â
Â

...
The latter had been content to
abandon the moral and social domain to the `ancient method', whereas Bacon `a
Â
Â
Á
surtout en vue l'indispensable renovation de cette seconde moitie du systeme
Ã
ÂÁ
 Á
philosophique, qu'il ose meme concevoir comme deja ®nalement destinee a la
  Â
Â
regeneration totale de l'humanite' (vi:243)
...
37 Mastering the human environment depends,
in fact, on recognising and utilising those laws, whose predictive power
is at once the sign of their scienti®city and of their utility as the basis for
rational action
...
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in
contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule' (1960:39)
...
Here, though,
Comte went beyond Bacon
...
Knowledge of the human,
moreover, whether qua individual or `as joined in society', was of a less
certain sort than that which pertained to external nature
...
39 For Comte, on
the other hand, society, including the ends it sets itself, was fully to be
considered a scienti®cally cognisable domain of nature
...
Effective intervention to improve the human lot presupposed a
scienti®c knowledge of the laws in operation
...

37

38

39

Á
`Nous voyons
...

`Civil knowledge has three parts, suitable to the three principal acts of society; viz
...

Conversation; 2
...
Government
...
, 1
...
Assistance in the
affairs of life; 3
...
And thus there are three kinds of prudence

...
, 1
...
Prudence in business; 3
...

Bacon 1901:137±8
...


38

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

The transposition of the scienti®c idea from its home in what had
traditionally been called `natural philosophy' to `moral philosophy' was
not without its dif®culties
...
The social domain was not just given to the
Â
senses de l'exterieur
...
Even more than in other phenomenal domains, then, that of the social has to be conceptually de®ned
before it can become the object of what Comte conceived to be a
science
...
But before coming to this, the provisional
formula I am suggesting ± that Comte equals Bacon plus `sociology' ±
needs to be quali®ed
...

Comte's corrective moves can be summarised under three heads
...

Science and truth
Regarding the ®rst, Comte took as given that any positive science must
rigorously proceed from sense data
...
Thus,
while scienti®c procedures were designed to engender knowledge about
`objective' reality, that reality could not be known or understood in its
essence, but only from without, in the form of its phenomenal appearance
...
The principle that there are
natural laws, i
...
regularities which are immutable, Comte's second rule
of `®rst philosophy', is itself formulated as a hypothesis, albeit one which
is the axiomatic precondition for all scienti®c inquiry
...
Car,
Â
celle-ci resultera toujours d'une induction purement empirique, quoique devenue,
Â
depuis longtemps, irresistible
...


The system and its logic (1)

39

never know, even supposing that the very notion of `cause' was not itself
metaphysical41 ± but observable and predictable regularities
...
Aristotle had distinguished between what
could be known absolutely and what could only be known `to us'
...

Science and non-science
The risk of such a position, which repeated the Kantian distinction
between noumena and phenomena, was that it might undercut the aim to
use scienti®c verity as the basis for a `demonstrable faith'
...
With that principle in
place, he could still hold fast to Bacon's insistence that a qualitative
distinction could be drawn between those forms of knowing which were
scienti®c and those which were not
...
Of these, Hume's
Á
attack on causality was decisive
...
Mais pour devenir decisive, cette substitution exigeait la
Â
Â
Â
Á
decouvert des veritables lois de l'evolution mentale, c'est-a-dire la fondation de la
science sociale, laquelle devait reposer sur la biologie
...

`We must be careful not to overlook the difference that it makes whether we argue from
or to ®rst principles
...
But that is an
ambiguous expression, for things are known in two ways
...
For members of the Lyceum there can be little doubt that
we must start from what is known to us
...
Compare Comte's statement in the ®rst chapter of
Â
Â
the Cours: `En®n, dans l'etat positif, l'esprit humain reconnaissant l'impossibilite
Á
d'obtenir des notions absolues, renonce a chercher l'origine et la destination de
Á
Ã
Â
Á
l'univers, et a connaõtre les causes intimes des phenomenes, pour s'attacher uniqueÁ Â
Â
ment a decouvrir, par l'usage bien combine du raisonnement et de l'observation, leur
Á
lois effectives, c'est-a-dire leurs relations invariables de succession et similitude' (i:4)
...
This is evidently a multiple relativity, a truth-for-ourselves that takes
into account the biological and sociological nature of the human mind, its given stage
of development, and the relation of the human species to the terrestrial world and
beyond on which it depends
...
See x:176
...
Non-scienti®c modes of
knowing were not nullities
...
They had, then, to be actively overthrown, both in the
preliminary ground-clearing needed before any major branch of science
could get going, and continuously thereafter through the discipline of
scienti®c method
...
Comte was happy to take all
of this over, but with two important modi®cations
...
For
Bacon, it was suf®cient to distinguish as sharply as possible between
`anticipations' and `interpretations' of Nature ± i
...
between deducing
the nature of things from truths held a priori, and inducing causal laws a
posteriori on the basis of controlled observation and repeatable experiments (1901:21±2)
...
To be sure, Baconian inductivism was not just
the blind search for correspondences
...
This already implied that induction could not operate
without some prior conception of what it sought to discover, including,
fundamentally, that there were laws, or at least regularities, to ®nd
...
For Comte, this was as it should be
...
There could have
45

It is in just this sense that Heidegger af®rms the essentially `mathematical' character of
modern science
...
`[P]hysical science does not ®rst become research through experiment;
rather, on the contrary, experiment ®rst becomes possible where and only where the
knowledge of nature has become transformed into research
...
This
pre-known includes not only that which is held to obtain universally (mathematics in
the narrow sense) but also what is speci®c to the nature of any given ®eld of research
...
`Every science is, as research, grounded upon the projection of
a circumscribed object-sphere' (123)
...


The system and its logic (1)

41

been no science in any ®eld without a long preliminary period in which
completely imaginary notions guided what empirical inquiry there
was
...
The latter was
straightforward
...
As for its content, the distinction to be drawn at the
most fundamental level was between the kind of preconceptions which
mysti®ed things in advance, and those which pictured the object of
knowledge as, and in the form of, something which could in principle be
scienti®cally known
...
Some `positive' working conception of the knowledge
domain in question was always needed; and in de®ning this we required
criteria for distinguishing, even in the most general terms, between
scienti®c and non-scienti®c modalities of picturing it
...
47 The shadowy categories of metaphysics ±
being, substance, quality, cause etc
...
The
gods of polytheism could themselves be understood as concretely
imagined embodiments of the spirits which our fetishistic ancestors
imagined to inhabit all sensory beings
...
In all branches of knowledge, there is
Â
always the need `d'une theorie quelconque pour lier les faits'
...
Indeed, `si, en contemplant les phenomenes, nous ne les
Â
Á
attachions point immediatement a quelques principes non-seulement il nous serait
Â
Â
impossible de combiner ces observations isolees, et, par consequent, d'en tirer aucun
Ã
Á
fruit, mais nous serions meme entierement incapables de les retenir; et, le plus souvent,
les faits resteraient inapercus sous nos yeux' (i:7)
...
For them, the underlying
program was `patriarchal: the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold
sway over a disenchanted nature'
...
I examine
in chap
...

The notion that metaphysics, de®ned generally as explanation by essences, is an
attenuated form of theism, and that the human mind passes through it on the way to a
fully scienti®c attitude, was already to be found in Turgot's 1750 discourse, Tableau

42

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

was not only, in the metaphysical mode of the scholastics, a priori
conceptions of reality as deducible from an idea of what it essentially
Â
was, but, in all its guises, theologisme
...
To conceive the knowledge project as a search for the real
nature and ultimate causes of being ± which Comte called ontologie
(vii:47) ± could only lead to a mystical quest
...
Such representations were at the core of all metaphysics, whether
explicitly theistic or not
...
49 `When one wants to penetrate the inexplicable mystery of the
essential production of phenomena, nothing more satisfying may ever be
supposed than to attribute them to internal or external wills, since one
then assimilates them to the everyday effects of the feelings which
animate us' (vii:47)
...
Phenomena were only to be explained in
terms of other phenomena
...
A modest procedure
...
Nature is orderly existence
...
Beginning in ignorance, the
sciences were engaged in ®lling in the blanks, proper to each domain, of
what they all projected to be l'ordre universel
...
Indeed, while it was the source of data, concrete

49

Á
philosophique des progres successifs de l'esprit humain
...

Â
Á
Ã
Â
`Car le principe theologique qui consiste a tout expliquer par des volontes, ne peut etre
Â
Â
pleinement ecarte que quand, ayant reconnu inaccessible toute recherche des causes, on
Ã
 Â
Á
se borne a connaõtre les lois
...
Nietzsche shared this understanding but extended it into a consideration of
the metaphysics built, as the deposit of `the oldest and longest lived psychology', into
language itself (1990:59)
...
50 There were of course sciences of the concrete, which were
descriptive and mediated between theory and its real-world application
...
Their boundaries were also quite different
...
) intersect
...
In contrast, what les sciences fondamentales
(mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology)
aimed to produce was a purely theoretical map of each basic order of
phenomenal reality, with its speci®c body of laws and logical place in the
`ladder' of knowledge
...
It was that prospect that for the ®rst
time made a positive classi®cation of the sciences itself ®nally possible
...
The
resulting system might seem a purely specular construct,52 in which the
forms of knowledge and forms of the known endlessly re¯ect one
another
...
In practical terms, besides, the
developing corpus of abstract knowledge was not, for Positivism, any
50

51

52

Á
Â
Á
`Il faut distinguer, par rapport a tous les ordres de phenomenes, deux genres de
 Â
Â
sciences naturelles: les unes abstraites, generales, ont pour objet la decouverte des lois
Â
Â
Á
Â
qui regissent les diverses classes de phenomenes, en considerant tous les cas qu'on peut
Á
concevoir; les autres, particulieres, descriptives
...
Les premieres sont donc
fondamentales
...

As against vain attempts, `comme celles de Bacon et D'Alembert', to classify the
Á
Â
sciences `d'apres une distinction quelconque des diverses facultes de l'esprit humain',
or against others which invent categories a priori, or which confuse theoretical and
practical knowledge, Comte singles out contemporary botanists and zoologists as those
Â
 Â
who have pointed the way to `une theorie generale de classi®cations' (i:47±9)
...
C'est seulement ainsi qu'elle peut devenir la source directe de notre
Â
Á
unite totale, en liant la vie affective et la vie active a leur commune destination'
(viii:382)
...
In relation to the
organised work of modifying nature to meet human needs ± l'industrie ±
the system of fundamental sciences was simply a theoretical instrument,
produced at one remove from the plenum of the real; an instrument
which on the one hand would help humankind to make concrete
interventions into its world, and on the other ± the supreme point of the
exercise ± would provide the synthesising philosophy needed to restore,
and perfect, social order
...
The theologico-metaphysical blockages to scienti®c
understanding (Bacon's `anticipations' and `idols') had not arisen, a
scienti®c mind would presume, arbitrarily
...
Otherwise, why
had it taken two millennia since Thales for a properly scienti®c
astronomy and physics to arise? To pose such a question positively
involved more than maxims about method, more indeed than a science
of individual mind such as Bacon metaphysically and incoherently tried
to sketch out in The Advancement of Learning
...
For
Comte, this pointed across a boundary whose crossing Bacon was not
Â
Â
able to contemplate
...
e
...

Science and practice
A ®nal set of problems Comte had to confront in appropriating the
Baconian notion of positive science concerned its instrumentalism
...
53 Being able to predict the results of a
deliberate manipulation of the tangible world was the mark of scienti®c
knowledge
...
For
fruits and works are as it were sponsors and sureties for the truth of philosophies'
(Bacon, 1960:71)
...
Thus far, again, Comte was with Bacon
...

The ®rst concerned the picture of reality presupposed by a positivity
conceived as the handmaiden of practice
...
Bacon, repeating a line that goes back to the Greek
atomists, asserted that `Towards the effecting of works, all that man can
do is put together or put asunder natural bodies
...
Thus it is bodies and not laws
that are modi®ed
...
But Comte needed a formula wide enough to
embrace the life sciences, including those of Man and society, as well
...
Comte found what he was
looking for in the proto-structuralist principle of what he called `arrangement'
...
'54
The principle of arrangement made it possible to present the issue that
had played out in the absolutist and mechanicist thinking of the eighteenth century as determinism versus free will in more tractable terms,
for it implied a form of lawfulness which contains limited degrees of
what structuralists would call free play
...
Modi®ability, in fact, was a matter of the relation between
orders
...
55
Thus each `successive order in the hierarchy is dependent on the one
beneath it and is modi®ed by the one succeeding' (x:175)
...
By Comte's time, biologists were
beginning to conceptualise the latter through the category of milieu, and
54
55

 Á
Â
`Les modi®cations quelconques de l'ordre universel s'y trouvent bornees a l'intensite
Â
Á
Â
des phenomenes, dont l'arrangement demeure inalterable' (x:176)
...


46

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

for Comte this notion belonged to `the ®rst elementary basis of true
biological philosophy'
...
57 It could equally be
extended outwards: the whole habitable planet as the human milieu
...
If humanity depended on the totality
of material conditions that constituted its biological and physical milieu,
Â
that order, and especially for it, was une fatalite modi®able
...
However, it raised
further questions even more perplexing
...
How, then, are we
to think humanity's capacity for self-conscious self-modi®cation? Such
questions could only be pursued through scienti®c study of precisely
that being
...

The second problem raised by a positivity designed in its very essence
to be practical concerns its axiological grounding
...

For the activity of science could not then be justi®ed even cognitively
with reference to pure values of contemplation, but only in relation to its
56

57

In his treatment of biology in Philosophie positive, Comte offers as an amendment to de
Â
Â
Bainville's philosophical de®nition of life as `composition et decomposition' that `l'etat
vivant' also entails, as `deux conditions fondamentales correlatives
...
For Comte's relation
to contemporary biological theory, see Pickering (1993:588±604) and Canguilhem
(1994:237±60)
...
And his conception of the organism
justi®ed his belief that biology must be an autonomous science
...

Â
For a discussion of Bernard's notion of milieu interieur see Hirst, 1975:63±7
...
But we must then ask: Performativity for the sake of
what? Bacon's answer would seem to be clear
...
The New Atlantis presents an inspiring picture of what
the `great instauration' could do to improve the human condition
...

All around, the application of this program has led to a world where,
helped by all manner of wonderful contrivances, the necessities of life
are abundant, energy supplies are inexhaustible, and citizens are healthier and more comfortable than Bacon's contemporaries could have
imagined
...
The ®rst was an assertion of human entitlement to dominion over nature
...

With the triumph of liberal technological values, these principles would
come to seem commonsensical
...
Particularly damning was the argument that the
advancement of knowledge `has somewhat of the serpent, and puffeth
up'
...
Against those divines who `pretend that knowledge is to be
received with great limitation, as the aspiring to it was the original sin
and the cause of the fall', Bacon insisted that the right to dominion over
nature derived from God's commission to Adam, and the rise of natural
science would put Man ®nally in the way of making it possible
(1901:40)
...
59
58

59

`Only let the human race recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine
bequest, and let power be given it; the exercise thereof will be governed by sound
reason and true religion' (1960:119)
...

Against the theological argument that aspiring to knowledge of the divine powers in
Creation led to Adam's fall, Bacon replies: `It was not the pure knowledge of nature, by
the light whereof man gave names to all the creatures in Paradise, agreeable to their
natures, that occasioned the fall; but the proud knowledge of good and evil, with an
intent in man to give law to himself, and depend no more upon God' (1901:40)
...
67±85
...
Hence, to take the second
principle, Bacon's insistence on an ethic of philanthropy: those with
control over the nature-dominating power were obliged to use that
control not for themselves but for the common bene®t
...
The priests of Atlantis held daily
services thanking `God for his marvellous works
...
`It is', Bacon notes in The Advancement of
Learning, `merely from its quality when taken without the true corrective
that knowledge has somewhat of venom or malignity
...
Baconian science,
then, was to obey the Gospel injunction to `love one another'
...

There is no need to determine whether or not Bacon himself was
pious or prudent `behind' the Christian framework he invokes
...
Without some such mooring, on the other hand, Bacon's
construction would fall apart
...
By the eighteenth century the legitimacy problem
(knowledge for what?) had become open
...
With the declining
credibility of revealed religion, techno-progressive thinking faced a
dilemma
...

To take the ®rst path would let the domination of nature become a
master principle in itself
...
On the other hand, to take the second path,
and address the problem head on, raised questions about what human
ends should direct scienti®c±technological advance, as well as how, if not
somehow scienti®cally, these ends could themselves be justi®ed
...
Suppose,
the thought ran, that we turned a positivist eye towards what the
metaphysical discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
called the problem of `human nature'
...
It might then be possible to locate the instinct for human selfimprovement and, even more important, the uniting, orienting and
disciplining force of what Christianity called love, as law-bound features
of the phenomenal world
...
Reliers on fact
would surely recognise such faits moraux as tantamount to a real
Authority; and beyond this the search for axiological grounds would
have no need to go
...


3

The system and its logic (2): from sociology
to the subjective synthesis

From every direction ± epistemological, ontological, political, moral ±
all roads along the path of securing the scienti®c outlook as an allencompassing system of thought led Comte to what he announced, in
Philosophie positive, as `social physics' or `sociology'
...
It was also needed in order to
positivise our understanding of that, and thus to complete the positivisation of human thought about thought itself
...
Foucault's account of how
`Man' (that `strange being
...
For Foucault there never was, nor could have been, a
single `science of Man'
...
It
effected a decisive break from the `classical' to the `modern episteme', in
the course of which the transparent representationalism which governed
the former gave way to a more complex and would-be self-grounding
discursivity
...
He downplays, at the same time, the line of development which
1

2

The last three volumes of Philosophie positive, which in the last replaces the earlier term
`social physics' with `sociology', are devoted to the new science
...
iv) are followed by a treatise on dynamics (v) and
a ®nal one on the current crisis and its predicted/prescribed resolution (vi)
...

`At ®rst glance, one could say that the domain of the human sciences is covered by three
``sciences'' ± or rather by three epistemological regions, all subdivided among
themselves, and all interlocking with one another; these regions are de®ned by the triple
relation of the human sciences in general to biology, economics, and philology'
(Foucault, 1970:355)
...
Comte appears only as
an exemplar of the attempt to develop a science of Man from the side of
biology
...
It was
Comte himself, however ± and, in this, critical of Kant4 ± who had ®rst
thought through the implications of bringing Man collectively into the
episteme of modern science; and Comte, more particularly, who had
re¯ected from that angle on Man's distinctively dual mode of being, i
...

as the one who is `at the same time the foundation of all positivities and
present, in a way that cannot even be termed privileged, in the element
of empirical things' (Foucault, 1970:344)
...

Sociology and its object
For Comte, the prerequisite for generating scienti®c knowledge about
anything was to determine to what class or classes of natural phenomena
it belongs
...
With regard to human phenomena,
one such pertinent science was biology, and a great deal, Comte
thought, was to be learnt from it
...
5 As opposed to spec3

4

5

In Foucault's tripartite scheme, Comte exempli®es a science of Man conceived from the
side of life, Marx one conceived from that of labour, and Nietzsche ± undermining the
modern episteme from within ± exempli®es what happens when `Man' is studied from
the side of `language' (1970:359±69)
...
2 n
...
Comte's relation to Kant is discussed by Pickering
(1993:292±6)
...
His indebtedness to Kant was no doubt greater than he acknowledges,
Á
embarrassing perhaps, given his wider distaste for things German
...

Â
Â
Á
Cabanis's Les rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme was `le precurseur immediat a
Â
Á
Â
l'heureuse revolution philosophique que nous devons a la genie de Gall' (iii:668)
...

The determinants and determinations of human reality were not,
however, exhausted thereby
...
It consisted of
phenomena like `customs, languages
...
For Comte,
indeed, human beings were doubly associated together: ®rst, through all
the ties of mutual reliance, direct and indirect, which connect them as
living contemporaries; secondly, by being implicated in a temporal
process wherein each generation lives off, works on and transmits to the
next, the fund of wealth, knowledge and institutions it has inherited
from the past
...
6 To that extent, Comte
thought, sociology could and should study the social patterns exhibited
by other animals (iv:350±2)
...
For, in addition
to the richer social forms developed by human primates in virtue of their
capacity for symbolic communication, the human collectivity, uniquely,
had the developmental capacity to transmit and accumulate knowledge
from one generation to the next (vi:612±13)
...
To which there was an evident methodological correlate:
eternal vigilance against all those positions ± economic (iv:210±22),
voluntarist (242±9), psychological (iii:612 et seq
...
7 ± which refused
to accord collective phenomena such recognition
...
Broussais's De l'irritation et de la folie ± which Comte hailed for its attack on
introspectionist psychology in his essay of 1828 (xa:216±28) ± had achieved for the study
Á
of le systeme nutritif what Gall had done for le cerveau
...

Á
C'est principalement par rapport a l'homme que cette distinction est fondamentale'
(i:77)
...


The system and its logic (2)

53

metaphysics as such
...
8 MetaÂ
physics was the philosophy of egoisme
...
Not only,
therefore, would positivising our understanding of the social make it
possible to understand in positive terms the very opposition between
science and non-science which the positive outlook must negotiate if it
was to establish its dominance, but the full emancipation of positivity
from `theology' and `metaphysics' implied a break altogether `from the
individual to the social point of view' (vi:810)
...
It must immediately be said that Comte made no
distinction between the ®rst move and the second
...
For him, the social was always to be
understood in reference to `society' as a kind of uni®ed singularity, just
Â
Á
Â
as the latter, as un phenomene compose, was to be understood as `homogeneous' with the individual organisms treated in biology (iv:340)
...
He also separated rules for observation from explanatory ones (1964:14±46)
...
9
For sociology, whether, and how, the social is to be conceived as a
8

9

For Comte's critique of metaphysics as applied speci®cally to the social (which it refuses
to recognise as such) see the 47th lecon of the Cours (iv:179±228)
...
Against bio-psychological
reductionism he writes: `If we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand
nothing of what takes place in the group
...

ÂÂ
The ontological priority of la societe is assumed from the outset in Durkheim's Rules
...
It is a group condition repeated in the
individual because imposed on him
...
Durkheim's main difference from Comte, in this respect,
is that whereas for Comte the group, at its furthest extension, is the whole human
species, for Durkheim `It is only the individual societies which are born, develop, and
die that can be observed, and therefore have objective existence' (1964:19)
...
10 Weber denied the
premise through a concept of `social action' which was itself interindividual
...
12 All that need be remarked here
is that the existence of such amorphously collective phenomena as
language, and such micronically operative ones as gift exchange and the
rituals of civility, suggest that it might be possible to af®rm the irreducibility of `the social' without having to posit `society' as a distinct and
integral being
...

In developing his own concept of the social, Comte declared himself
indebted to Condorcet (iv:200±9) and de Maistre,13 whose radically
opposed viewpoints ± progress versus order ± he set himself to reconcile
...
14 Whatever the perturbations to which it was
subject, self-equilibrating social mechanisms (e
...
sacri®ce) ensured that
this law continually asserted itself, even in the rebellion of sinful
individuals
...
Giddens does not
take up the question here, though, of `society' as a distinct macro-unit of analysis
...
Societal action, on the other hand, is oriented to a rationally
motivated adjustment of interests' (Gerth and Mills 1958:183)
...
They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon
as they begin to produce their means of subsistence' (Marx and Engels, 1947:7)
...
Praise for de
Maistre's contribution to social statics is emphasised throughout Politique positive
...

Â
Â
Â
Â
Á
Malgre l'intention evidemment retrograde qui anima cette ecole passagere, ses travaux
 Â
Â
Â
®gueront toujours parmi les antecedants necessaires du positivisme systematique'
(vii:64)
...
This, though, is little acknowledged by Comte himself
...

`It cannot be too often repeated that men do not at all guide the Revolution; it is the
Revolution that uses men
...
This phrase shows
that never has the Divinity revealed itself so clearly in any human event
...


The system and its logic (2)

55

of human history so as to derive therefrom a picture of the laws which
drove and regulated its `continuous progress' (iv:201±9)
...
17
Â
What Comte called l'humanite was the totality ± at once solidary and
continuous, cohesive and developmental ± which combined and uni®ed
these two concepts and aspects of our collective being
...
the mass of the human species, whether present, past, or even
future, as increasingly constituting in every respect, whether in the order of
space or time, an immense and eternal social unity, whose various individual or
national organs, ceaselessly united by an intimate and universal solidarity,
inevitably contribute, each according to a determined mode and degree, to the
fundamental evolution of humanity
...
If sociology was a life science, Humanity
could be regarded as a kind of organism
...
19 Thus conceived, sociology would have two departments
...
Here the procedure
would be to classify and compare societies with respect to their institutional constants and variations (institutions being understood as the
16

17

18
19

20

Comte credits Montesquieu with being the ®rst to suppose that there were laws of the
social, and that these connected the polity to the prevailing moral and intellectual ideas;
but criticises him for relying on climate to account for differences between social types
and for having no theory of social development
...

Â
Â
Â
`Pour ®xer plus convenablement les idees, il importe d'etablir prealablement, par une
Â
indispensable abstraction scienti®que, suivant l'heureux arti®ce judicieusement institue
Á
Â
Â
par Condorcet, l'hypothese necessaire d'un peuple unique auquel seraient idealement
Â
Â
Â
rapportees toutes les modi®cations sociales consecutives effectivement observees chez
les populations distinctes' (iv:291)
...

Ã
`
...

 Â
Â
Comte credits Blainville, in his introduction to Principes generaux d'anatomie comparee,
for having `systematised' the distinction between statics and dynamics for biology
(i:27)
...
) in order to derive the `laws of
solidarity'
...
Such study was again
classi®catory±comparative, but with the difference that it involved a
time dimension
...
), sociology would extrapolate from
biology the comparative search for co-variance, and, with regard to the
developmentalism that was peculiar to the human, would add the
`historical' method of ®liation, a step that would positivise (the study of )
knowledge itself
...
Given his understanding of the social as that which pertains
to `society', and his integral conception of the latter, it could hardly have
been otherwise
...
Following
Condorcet, as modi®ed by Leibniz's dictum that `the present is big with
the future' (iv:292), the ®nal scienti®c aim, abstracting from the myriad
messy complexities of concrete history, would be to induce from both
operations the laws of orderly progress as if they unfolded within one
single society
...
To be sure,
ÂÂ
it was always some kind of societe, a strongly de®ned human group
characterised by its boundedness and bondedness as a uni®ed and
ÂÂ
unifying association
...
22
ÂÂ
But what of the latter as sub-societes within the former? And what, more
21

22

Â
Â
Â
`La comparaison historique des divers etats consecutifs de l'humanite ne constitute pas
seulement le principe arti®ce scienti®que de la nouvelle philosophie politique: son
Â
Ã
developpement rationnel formera directement aussi le fond meme de la science'
(iv:360)
...
The series runs
Ë
Â
Â
from the family, regarded as `le veritable germe necessaire des diverses dispositions
Â
 Â
essentielles qui caracterisent l'organisme social' (iv:448), to `la societe proprement dite,
Á
Á
Á
Â
dont la notion, parvenu a son entiere extension scienti®que, tend a embrasser la totalite
Á
de l'espece humaine, et principalement l'ensemble de la race blanche' (iv:431)
...
But then is the sociological object a
multiplicity (a comparative science of societies) or a singularity (the
science of humanity as a whole)? And what in any case `is' the latter? On
Â
Á
the one hand, l'humanite was to be conceived as la masse de l'espece
humaine regarded in its entire geographical and historical extension,
including into the future
...
Humanity in the second
sense was the self-realisation of Humanity in the ®rst
...
As we shall see, the fuzziness
Â
ÂÂ
surrounding Comte's concepts of humanite and societe was important to
the working, and unworking, of his whole system, including at the
religious level
...
Given the conceptual shape imparted to the sociological object, the
step was made to seem obviousness itself
...
`Positive politics', then, could follow a medical model of diagnosis and cure, modi®ed by the relativity introduced into the criterion of
healthy normality by the social organism's phase-shift path of growth
and development
...
23 For Comte, the pressing issue was how to
move the polity forward at a time of transitional crisis between one
social stage and another
...
It was just here that discovering the
laws of dynamics was crucial
...


58

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

the present phase-shift ± to industrial society ± on the basis of tendential
laws extrapolated from the `encyclopedic series' of human history
(iv:249±50)
...
Voila a scienti®c
way to diagnose and, at least projectively, resolve health crises that arise
in the social organism before they become disabling or worse
...
But even under less turbulent
conditions, social science would serve continually to clarify the necessary path of normal (because integrative and socially self-sustaining)
progress
...
Natural disasters were outside the scope of the
sociological ®eld
...
25 Such
potential was clearly at its maximum in the ¯ux and con¯ict which
accompanied changes from one form of society to another
...

What is clear, in the practical role Comte accords sociology, is the
difference between its instrumentalism and that obtaining in the physical
sciences
...
Nor, indeed, with
its holistic focus, was it ®ne-tuned enough to be of much service to the
multiplicity of particular interests which might bene®t from a knowledge
which promised them, over others, enhanced mastery of the social
...
This was
hardly incidental, of course, to Comte's purposes
...
This was just the
beauty of the bio-medical model
...
26
24

25

26

Â
The `previsions' concerning humanity's ®nal etat normal are destined, Comte says in
Á
Â
Politique positive (x:6) `a fonder une politique capable de systematiser la marche
Â
Â
spontanee de chaque population vers l'etat normal'
...
que dans l'organisme individuel'
(iv:325)
...
That is true
...
But obviously the supposition, man wishes

The system and its logic (2)

59

The paradox of Comte's socio-historical relativisation of moral and
political values was that it created a shifting reality principle in terms of
which they could still, in context, be `objectively' judged
...
This prediction
provided a scienti®c basis for evaluating current tendencies and strategically intervening in the process
...
Even if we accept the scienti®c credentials of Comte's bio-social
schematics, why should we actually care about social health, or, for that
matter, about the future of `Humanity'? An answer in terms of the
merely factual interconnectedness of individual and collective survival
would take no account of the existential remoteness of the latter from
the former
...
The human collectivity,
ÂÂ
Â
apprehended as societe and humanite, confronts the knowing subject as
that which is always, already and inescapably the origin and terminus of
his/her highest ends
...

That the transcendence of the social has the character, in Comte's
sociology, not only of a fact but also of a moral fact, i
...
one that imposes
a duty which can be wilfully disregarded,27 arises from the relation
between his superorganismic concept of society/humanity and his
theory of the social tie
...
This foundation, indeed, makes
it the peculiar kind of being it is
...

Â
Ã
Â
`Cet immense et eternel organisme se distingue surtout des autres etres comme etant
  Â
Â
Â
forme d'elements separables, dont chacun peut sentir sa propre cooperation, et par
Ã
suite la vouloir, ou meme la refuser, du moins tant qu'elle demeure directe'
(viii:599±6o0)
...
The converse,
however, is not necessarily so
...
28 Thus the unity of the
social has none of the automaticity to be found among lower life forms
...

Unlike in the symbiotic relation between cell and organism, then,
Comte's `social organism' has the contradictory character of being both
a unity in itself and what Aristotelians would call a unity per accidens
...
In
Â
the ®nally realised stage of l'etat positif, the whole human collectivity
comes to present itself, in the self-conscious altruism of its members, as
a transcendent Other with claims on obedience, loyalty and affection
...

For society to be experienced as transcendent to the individual in the
®rst place presupposes, of course, that it already exists; and in a strong
sense, not just as an easily disassembled aggregate of self-interested
egos
...
This force rested ± physiologically, according
to contemporary phrenology ± on an instinctual base; though within the
individual topography of the human brain, egoistic instincts were
stronger than altruistic ones
...
The wider and depersonalised extension of altruisme also involved a transfer, and refocussing, of
affect
...
vous devez de®nir
...
Ce mot
Á
ensemble vous indique assez qu'il n'y faut pas comprendre tous les hommes, ceux-la qui
Â
Á
Â
Á
sont reellement assimilables, d'apres une vraie cooperation a l'existence commune'
(xi:66; emphasis in original)
...
In the theatre of Comtean
sociology, then, it is love ± expressed in the supreme principle of Vivre
pour autrui ± which ®nally has the starring role
...
Without it there would be no properly social existence
...

The sacral quality that inhered in human society by virtue of both its
immanent/transcendent relation to each of us and the loving sentiments it incarnates, was reinforced by a further feature on its dynamic
side
...
Comte's matter-of-fact presumption that the mental/moral development of the individual provides
a model for that of the `collective individual' comprising Humanity as
a whole, enabled him to smuggle in a telos of self-realisation which
further enhanced its transcending majesty
...
It also brings the subordination of egoistic to social instincts
Â
(iv:502±3, 532±5)
...
Completion of the
long revolution which was bringing science and industry to power in
the most advanced regions would break down national borders, establish international peace, and usher in a (confederally) uni®ed world
society
...
The
coming into being of Humanity as a social, cultural and political fact
would enable it to be recognised, universally, as the ®nally unveiled
Ã
Grand-Etre, the truth behind the ®ction of all the false divinities that
came before
...
30 In Comte's case, however, the
29

30

Ã
Â
Á
`Si l'existence du Grand-Etre restait serieusement contestable son regne ne serait
Â
Â
 Â
Â
prochain
...
For the objective and subjective formation of l'Humanite as Grand-Etre, see
x:24±33
...
The

62

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

combination of this with an ostensibly inductive scientism is so strikingly
inconsistent that the suturing manoeuvre needs to be highlighted
...
In Comte's re®ned conception, the phenomenal
object-world confronting the knowing subject merely provided data
from which, in the synthetic space of the `fundamental' sciences, the
laws that constitute scienti®c theory proper are derived
...
Comte's approach ± which might be described
as a theoreticist instrumentalism ± had the intended merit of avoiding
empiricisme on the one side and mysticisme on the other
...
By switching back and forth between l'humanite as the highest
level of rule-bound order within l'ordre universel and the particular
societies confronting the sociological observer, he confounded the
distinction he otherwise insisted upon in fundamental sciences between
their abstract knowledge-object and its `real' referent
...
The abstract uniÂ
versal that resulted ± l'humanite ± served to designate at once an
unfolding actuality, a higher reality to be served, and the conceptual
object of his new science
...
g
...
In recent years, however, Christopher Lasch
has joined Blumenberg in querying the importance of the eschatological element in
Enlightenment progressivism, a tradition Lasch wishes to resuscitate: `Once we
recognize the profound difference between the Christian view of history, prophetic or
millenarian, and the modern conception of progress, we can understand what was so
original about the latter: not the promise of a secular utopia that would bring history to
a happy ending but the promise of steady improvement with no foreseeable ending at
all' (Lasch, 1991:47)
...
Althusser was to make great
play with Comte's distinction between the theoretical object of knowledge and its `real'
referent in his own critique of the twin errors of `idealism' and `empiricism'
...

In Politique positive (x:30), the distinctions are blurred in a further way
...
Mais l'unite collective ne peut se realiser, sur chaque planete, que chez la
Â
Â
race preponderante'
...
In the case of sociology, the dif®culty of
pinning down phenomena was radical, and not only for the reasons of
complexity Comte advanced (iv:335±6)
...
Such an object exceeded presence,
and could only ever be captured abstractly, through being imagined,
reconstructed and conceptually condensed
...
No
wonder, then, that Comte's discussion of sociological method insists
that in this domain more than in all others `one is obliged
...
But even this formulation did
not recognise the independent role of conceptualisation in constructing
macro-sociological facts
...
34 All along the line, Comte
could square the idea of Humanity's transcendence with that of its actual
transcendence only in a ®gure which systematically blurred the difference between the abstract and concrete totalities it purported, `scienti®cally', to grasp
...
Sociology could not
have positivised sooner, Comte argued, because it would have lacked
the requisite historical data (x:139)
...
To assume, even in principle, that the relevant facts of
sociology were now all before us was precisely an assumption
...
That being so, both the `laws of statics', based on
such forms of society as had existed hitherto, and the `laws of dynamics',
induced from time-series data, could only ever be regarded as provisional
...
The blank of the
unknowable future is ®lled in by deducing industrial society's perfected
Â
etat normal, a feat which takes up the entire six hundred pages of Politique
33

34

Â
See especially the successive appreciations of the fetishistic/familial, polytheistic/civic,
monotheistic/theological/military, and metaphysical/transitional stages that make up
the four chapters of book v of the Cours
...


64

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

positive's fourth volume
...
The `normal future' which Comte constructs for
industrial society is projected, a lifetime forward, into the year 1927
...
Not only, moreover, was
this incorporation illicit, it had the added convenience of positing a
developmental limit
...
And after that? Perfect
tranquillity and no more story
...
On the side of the concrete, the predicted future
merged with the program being urgently advanced
...
37 Just as with Marx's `Theses on Feuerbach', in fact, practice is
what closes the gap
...
The shakiness (for a positivism that wants empirical
certitude) of this whole manoeuvre ± whose truth depends on bringing it
about ± is presumably why Comte ensconced himself safely in the
future
...

As Comte recognised, however, construing the sociological object as
transcendent to the individual did not automatically convert the care for
35

36

37
38

Â
Á
Â
`L'impossibilite d'y recourir a l'observation directe se trouve compensee par la
Â
Â
Á
Â
preponderance plus complete des conceptions statiques et la succession plus etendue
Â
des appreciations dynamiques' (x:4±5)
...
l'arti®ce general qui preside [in this treatise]
...
By writing as if in the future, Comte also writes
as if already dead, citing the testament he had written the year before (1855): `Habitant
Â
Â
une tombe anticipee, je dois desormais tenir aux vivants un langage posthume, qui sera
 Â
Â
mieux affranchi des divers prejuges, surtout theoriques, dont nos descendants se
Â
Â
trouveront preservees' (xii:ix)
...
cette
Â
Â
Á
ÂÁ Â
Â
determination decisif
...

Â
Â
Ã
`
...


The system and its logic (2)

65

its welfare into an overriding moral imperative
...
Yet to be
regarded as a principle, indeed as the ®nally grounding principle, for
human theory and practice, something more was required
...
Such an af®rmation is made emotionally
possible by the individual altruism that linkage in society presupposes
and elicits
...
To ®x ends so as to
discipline practice it was necessary that love for the higher organism that
englobes us, together with the very positing of such a category, be
completed, and hardened, by an act of will
...

In Philosophie positive, the assumption is that such a faith, together
with le pouvoir spirituel which fosters it (vi:483 et seq
...
With `the direct institution of Positive religion', however,
it ceases to be so taken for granted and its propagation becomes an
urgent concern
...
39
In the works of the 1850s, in fact, faith in and towards Humanity
becomes the indispensable attitudinal decision at the centre of the
system
...
It was especially a rule for
that thinking which was Positivism itself
...
40 Only
thus could thought be directed to complete the positivisation of knowledge by linking that process, through the re¯exive diagnostics of
sociology, to the social reconstruction which it both provoked and made
possible
...

Yet this would be too simple
...
The sacred being with which Positivist faith
39
40

The dictum is ®rst introduced in book iii of Politique positive (ix:439)
...


66

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

aligned the individual was not, from a sociological perspective, immaterial, but a real dehors
...
The fact that Humanity was elevated above us not just objectively,
for the intellect, but subjectively, for our `highest' sentiments, was itself
scienti®cally graspable in terms of the `normal' individual/group relation
Á
posited by social statics, and perfected according to les lois du progres
...
41
There was, in addition, an equally consequential difference between
the faiths of Christianity and Positivism on the side of the believing
subject
...
42 In historical terms, while the innovative labour
of synthesising the scienti®c±industrial episteme was inevitably accomplished in an individual brain, the Positivist embrace of Humanity with
which it was bound up could be scienti®cally comprehended as a
determinate moment in a larger social shift
...

And so to the ®nal step
...
est assurement d'une
Á
 Á
Â
Â
tout autre espece que la foi positive, toujours subordonee a une veritable demonstraÁ
Â
Â
tion, dont l'examen est permis a chaqu'un sous des conditions determinees
...

Â
The `Preface personnelle' to the last volume of Philosophie positive (vi:vi±xl) was at pains
Â
 Á
to show `la correlation necessaire qui lie aujourd'hui ma position privee a la situation
fondamentale du monde intellectuel'
...
It was the `spontaneous resistance' of an intellectual milieu still
suffering the effects of `the arti®cially prolonged interregnum' of the metaphysical spirit
(vi:xxxiv)
...
It was also the last straw in Comte's
relationship with Caroline Massin (Pickering, 1993:547±51)
...
Alors surgit, au centre de l'anarchie occidentale, le type systematique de
Â
Á
l'existence normale, personni®ee chez le penseur que son initiation dispose le plus a
Â
Â
Â
 Â
l'essor revolutionnaire, dont sa jeunesse ne fut preservee que par la veneration'
(xii:44±5)
...
Therewith, Comte's
synthesising ardor, speaking through a positivism become sociological,
is at last able to ®nd a stable home
...
The basis and necessity for such an ecclesiastical and ritual
institution is a discovery of sociology itself
...
Just as
`theocracy and theolatry rested on theology, sociology constitutes the
systematic basis of sociocracy and sociolatry' (vii:403)
...
Sociology's
double register, as science and socio-theology, at the top of the encyclopedic scale of abstract knowledge, introduced a crucial complication
into the system
...
associated with the shift `from an
individual to a social point of view' ± had been precipitated from within
the science dealing with the highest object
...
By asserting the
(practically necessary) `primacy of feeling over intellect' within theory
itself, then, Comte's religious turn could not but reverberate back down
the system of sciences that sociology capped
...
45
44

45

Some milestones: in 1828 Comte begins to train cadres for the new Spiritual Power; in
1838 he begins his regimen of `cerebral hygiene'; in 1846 he begins the cult of Clotilde;
Ã
Â
in 1850, by now self-proclaimed as Grand-pretre de l'Humanite, he initiates the three
most important of his seven sacraments, regarding birth, marriage and death (vii:19)
...

The basic idea was already outlined in the concluding chapter of Philosophie positive
...

To be emphasised ®rst is its appellation as `subjective'
...
On the one hand, what was to be systematically uni®ed was human subjectivity itself
...
On the other hand, `subjective' also quali®ed the
mode of synthesis
...
47 Overall, by
adopting the standpoint of `subjective synthesis' Comte repudiated the
thought, still lingering in Philosophie positive, that for society as well as
for the individual, subjective harmony depended primarily on systematising the intellect, and that in the epoch of science and industry the
intellect could be systematised solely on the basis of `objective' knowledge (vii:3±4)
...
That aim was given renewed
impetus by post-Newtonian advances in mathematical physics, and in
more primitive form was seized on by Saint-Simon in his postulation of
gravity itself as the `sole cause of all physical and moral phenomena'
(cited in Pickering, 1993:72)
...
By
displaying the linkage among the sciences from the vantage point of
sociology (with its law of three stages, and deduction of the sciences'
`normal' coordination), Comte had been able to disavow any `metaphysical' pretensions to epistemological absolutism, while retaining an
anchor in scienti®c objectivity
...
en y etablissant
Ã
Ã
aussitot l'ascendant normal de l'esprit d'ensemble, qui, d'une telle source, doit bientot
Â
Â
se repandre sur toutes les parties anterieures de la philosophie abstraite' (vi:783)
...

Á
Â
`Devenant a la fois plus sympathetique, plus synergique, et plus sympathique, la nature
Â
Â
Â
humaine tend ainsi vers la systematisation resulte de l'ascendant croissant de l'altruise
 È
sur l'egoõsme' (x:177)
...
Once over this brink, Comte was
brought to recognise that scienti®city alone, even at the one-removed
level of method, could not provide a unifying principle for consciousness
unless complemented by that same commitment
...
Subjectively appreciated, this complement
suits the speculative life as much as the active life, given the common
insuf®ciency of legal motives
...
Commandment must assist
arrangement for order to be complete
...

Such coordination engaged the whole person, including the sentiments
...
From this angle, Comte concluded,
the `objective' synthesis attempted in Philosophie positive had been
necessary but insuf®cient (vii:443±4)
...

The explicit introduction of sentiments into the Positivist totalisation,
together with the importance of thematising these in terms of individual
moral psychology, was linked to a second distinguishing feature of the
Á
synthese subjective
...
Unlike sociology, this new science
®nale was not, strictly, a branch of science in its own right
...
Moreover, as the domain
`where we study our nature in order to rule our existence' (x:181), it
combined theory and practice
...
As both practical and concrete, then, la Morale had no place
in the initial scienti®c series
...

La Morale treated the constitution of the human being whose subjective
condition was to be actually, and `healthily', synthesised
...

According to the outline we have (x:230±8),49 la Morale was to consist
of two parts
...
50 As with sociology and social
unity, functional integration at the individual level was made normative
by its linkage to an ideal of health ± an ideal rendered complex at both
levels by their inextricable interrelation (x:233±6)
...
If the ®rst was a sociological law, the second was biological, and
followed from Gall and Bastiat's mapping of the brain and its functions
(x:222)
...
This could only be provided by an `external' mental
force capable of disciplining the lower drives and rallying the weaker but
nobler ones to an orienting Good outside the organism
...
The more
Humanity developed its forms and powers, the more the social tie was
paci®c, voluntary and founded on the socialised preponderance of
altruisme; and the more, correspondingly, was the inner harmony of the
individual itself perfected
...
In that happy condition, love would provide the motive for activity, while the intellect ±
48

49
50

51

Â
Á
Â
`Il ne peut, en effet, exister aucun phenomene appreciable qui ne soit vraiment humain,
Á Á
non-seulement d'apres son examen subjectif, mais aussi dans sa nature objective; car
Â
l'homme resume en lui toutes les lois du monde, comme les anciens l'avaient
dignement senti' (x:181)
...

Â
The theoretical ®rst part was to be the seventh and culminating part of the Encyclopedie
abstraite
...
The ®rst and second parts of la Morale were intended to be
Á
volumes three and four of the work Synthese subjective, described in the last pages of
Politique positive (x:532)
...


The system and its logic (2)

71

highly developed but knowing its proper station ± would supply knowledge for its means (x:525)
...

For besides resting on the proper relation among sentiment, intellect and
action, each of these general faculties was itself the site of a special
Á
coordination, respectively termed synthese, sympathie and synergie
...
Its intent was to provide a
`universal system of conceptions proper to the normal (i
...
perfected)
state of Humanity'
...

Â
The resulting encyclopedie, organised into courses, was to provide the
basis for the school curriculum for all 14±21-year-olds (x:251)
...

To ful®l this of®ce, and with the grandly synthetic addition of la
Morale, each branch of scienti®c knowledge was to be systematically
summarised so as to show its inner coherence, its integration within the
ascending scienti®c series, and its role in building up an attitude of
service and worship towards the Great Being of Humanity
...
First, love of Humanity would orient and valorise the practices
which the sciences make possible
...
54 This was partly because an auto-affected humanity would be
serving itself in the practical results; but also because, when freed of les
instincts grossiers, the impulse to join things together in perfect harmony
Â
is precisely what love is
...
See also x:162±4
...

Â
Â
Â
Á
A religion `fondee sur l'amour de l'Humanite
...

Â
Á Â
`Moralement envisagee
...
Toutes les speculations y tendent a consolider l'amour universel,

72

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

scienti®c culture, ®nally, the love which courses through subjectively
synthesised knowledge would be encouraged to ¯ow towards the object
to be known
...
56
Within a positivised self-understanding, the subjective synthesis
would thus draw together worship and knowledge, and so replicate the
affect-laden register of Christian theology itself
...
The medieval `God', already an
abstraction from the nature spirits which preceded it, had become ever
more hidden behind, and beyond, the world investigated by secular
knowledge
...
Radiating with
 Â
the altruisme, bienveillance and veneration which it receives from, and
Â
directs towards, a positively apprehended Humanite, the subjectively
synthesised knowledge would reinvest the exterior human milieu with
love
...

Á
Â
Comte's treatise on mathematics ± Systeme de logique positive ou traite
Â
de philosophie mathematique ± meant to exemplify this subjective makeover of knowledge, as well as to set it on its way
...
So conceived,
mathematical laws are rooted in a comprehension of le dehors, focussing
on the laws that traverse all orders of being
...
The logic
in which mathematical philosophy expressed itself, therefore, had to be

56

57
58

Â
seul capable de les systematiser, de les consacrer, et de les discipliner
...

Â
Â
In the subjective synthesis, `l'idee relative du monde' would substitute for `l'idee absolue
de l'univers' (vii:438; emphasis in original)
...

Comte often comments that Paul, regarded as Christianity's real founder, `opposed
grace to nature'
...

These two were considered to have laid the basis for a positive philosophy of
mathematics through establishing a general geometry translatable into algebraic terms:
Á
Â
Â
Â
Â
 Â
`Apres que le principe cartesien eut institue la geometrie generale, la conception
à Â
leibnitzienne devint bientot necessaire pour la constituer' (xii:417)
...
Hence,
not only is the progression from number, to spatiality, to movement
narrated as the general logic of the complexi®cation of substance; this
abstract cosmogenesis also serves as a mirror in which to re¯ect the
human progression, through higher and higher states of order, towards
the self-perfection of its own `total equilibrium'
...
59 Put in such terms, Comte's philosophy of mathematics can be described as an attempt to combine, at the most abstract
level of thought and most sublimated level of feeling, a cognitively driven
logic of the object with an affectively driven logic of the subject
...
This ®rst volume, with its subtitle's promise to
furnish the `normal' principles of human understanding, would provide
the mental principles for all the rest
...
It is offered, in the usual
Comtean manner, as a scienti®c prescription
...
Much as in Romantic language philosophy,60 Comte was troubled by the abstract quality of (conventional)
signs
...
As the subjective basis for the theory of general
Â
mechanics, the principle is propounded that: `Graduellement neutralises sous les
Â
conditions convenables de direction et intensite, les divers moteurs peuvent se
Á Á
Â
Á
combiner de maniere a ne produire qu'un equilibre total, ou leurs efforts respectifs ne
Á
sont directement jugeables que d'apres leurs pressions mutuelles' (xii:601)
...
Hence the close
relation between Comte's conception of the aesthetic arts and the need to reemphasise
Â
and reintegrate them into the positive state
...
La biologie explique aisement cette loi, en
Â
Á Â
rappelant que la reaction musculaire, vocale ou mimique, d'ou resulte l'expression, est
Â
surtout commande par la partie affective du cerveau' (vii:290)
...
40 of Politique
positive
...


74

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

Â
under the aegis of fetichisme and the (poetic) language of images developed by polytheism, the rise of signs (and `prosaic' discursivity), attributed to the monotheistic phase, permitted ideas to be directly attached
to signi®ers without the intermediary of sentiments (viii:233±4)
...
As valuable as
this was, however, the `healthy' and `normal' integration of the human
soul required that the head not be severed from the heart
...
Hence the great mental ± and
religious ± importance of images, a category which we can take to
include the entire class of iconic and indexical signs
...
Images are the stuff
both of dreams and fantasy, and of storable experience from le dehors
...
They were also
suf®ciently objecti®able and repeatable that they could become conventionally coded with associated ideas
...
`Just as the image, recalled
under the sign, will strengthen thought through the awakening of
sentiment, so, conversely, an outpouring of sentiment will give rise to
the image in order to clarify the notion
...
From that vantage point, Positive
Logic would adduce the principles of mental unity, both internally and
with regard to the `healthy' interchange between `movement and sensaÂ
Â
tion', of l'image interieure and l'image exterieure
...

Vigorously defending himself against the charge that Positivism is `anti-aesthetic' ±
which was a vice only of the sciences during their dispersively overspecialised period ±
Â
Comte notes in Politique positive: `Parvenu jusqu'aux speculations sociales, qui
 Â
Â
constituent sa vraie destination ®nale, sa realite caracteristique l'oblige d'embrasser les
Â
Â
Â
conceptions esthetiques, comme les considerations affectives, a®n de representer le
Â
Â
Á
Ã
veritable ensemble des phenomenes humains, meme individuels, et surtout collectifs'
(vii:275)
...

The privileged role of language in Comte's overall synthesis came
from its providing the subjective condition for the human organism's
linkage to le dehors
...
In its presently
disorganised condition, Comte argued, order was continually threatened
Â
by rival imperialising claims, especially by those of the algebristes
(vii:471)
...
The key bridging role (which it must
modestly learn to see itself as having) was played by geometry (xii:72)
...
It did so, moreover, not only in geometry proper, where physical
extension provided a material point of reference, but everywhere a
metaphorics of quanti®able space could be employed
...
65
Hence, indeed, a further aspect of Positive Logic's foundational role
in inducting trainee priests into Positivist doctrine
...
In so doing, it was able to awaken a form of fetichisme
that would strengthen Positive Religion itself
...
We are to imagine as the source of everything, as
that which makes both thought and reality possible, the blank ground
64

65

For a detailed analysis of Comte's theory of language, and its relation to Logique positive,
Â
Â
see Kremer-Marietti, 1982: 210±51
...

The subjective appreciation of mathematics would convert all of its signifying materials
into images, including number
...
This symbolic logic of numbers
provided the organising frame for all Comte's writing and planned cours, including the
organisation of paragraphs
...
66
L'Espace differs from the object of primitive fetishism in not being a
Á
material thing, but a way to represent `la siege' of phenomenal reality as
such
...
A further difference is that l'Espace is not imagined to have the full attributes of life
...
67 The attitude towards l'Espace
Â
which Positive Logic proposes is fetichiste, nonetheless, by virtue of the
way in which it lives out a directly emotive and identi®catory relation
between subject and object; a relation that is enjoined not only religiously but cognitively in that it allows us to ®ll the inevitable gap
between the concrete plenitude of phenomenal reality and our capacity
to apply even a complete body of abstract science to the complete and
previsionary understanding of any speci®c case (xii:7)
...
Primitive fetishism confounded the
orders of the living and the dead; but at least it did not retire agency
from the phenomenal world entirely, to the greater glory of God
...
As he was at pains to point out, it pre-empted the
older, and anarchic, `consecration of chaos' (xii:51)
...
By this means, in effect, we are
emotionally drawn to submit voluntarily to the most general laws of
Ã
Â
existence, la supreme fatalite, because these laws are imagined to be
identical with both the source and destination of our highest impulses
...
68
66

67

68

Comte realised of course that the `space' of Cartesian geometry and Newtonian
astrophysics had a long history, antecedent indeed to all science
...
Faute d'un tel milieu, des signes sans images deviendraient notre unique
Â
Â
Â
Â
ressource envers l'essor abstrait des speculations geometriques et mecaniques extension' (x:53±4)
...

Á
`Faute d'un tel joug, le probleme humain resterait insoluble, parce que l'altruisme ne

The system and its logic (2)

77

Comte intended that a similar fetishism would envelop the middle
Á
portions of the synthese subjective devoted to the physical sciences
...
To the
Earth we could impute not just sentiments, but activity; and we could
imagine it as being driven along a path of self-perfection by something
akin to a good will (xii:50)
...
With
such an orientation, a practical eye would be kept turned toward what it
was useful to know about our terrestrial milieu; not just to satisfy
material needs, but the better to perfect ourselves as its noblest product
...
It is following this movement that the seven sciences of the
subjective synthesis are arranged in their ascending scale (xii:63±4)
...

In the middle ranges, astronomy, physics, chemistry and non-human
biology prepare worship of the Earth
...

Ã
Here, ®nally, le Grand-Etre, through its scienti®cally educated agents,
comes worshipfully and caringly to study itself69
...
That such grounding could not be apodictic,
or absolute, was acknowledged from the start
...
e
...

Such a vantage point, by being rooted in a pervasive sense of each

69

Â
Â
Ã
Â
pourrait jamais surmonter l'egoisme
...

Á
Â
`Tant que le culte positif s'adresse directement a l'Humanite, nul arti®ce n'y devient
Â
Á
Â
oblige, puisque le sujet y coõncide avec l'obect, d'apres une saine appreciation de
È
Ã
l'homme comme serviteur actuel et futur organe du Grand-Etre' (xii:18)
...
But only relatively
...
The positive philosophy of science could only be
systematised through the invention of sociology
...
The whole system required and presupposed resocialisation through educational reform and the establishment of a
religion
...
Whatever the motive, the
results were bound to remain unsatisfactory
...

Against this background, the history of Comte's systematising efforts,
Á
from the Philosophie positive and Politique positive to the Synthese subjective
and the further systems of la Morale and L'industrie which he never lived
to write, can be read as the history of his system's attempted closures
...

The last two, by frankly placing the issue of validation outside the realm
of scienti®c reason, are less objectionable, perhaps, than the others
...
The same
problem of grounding the ungroundable is thus reproduced at every
stage of his unfolding totalisation, and in an ever more elaborate
fashion
...


The system and its logic (2)

79

There is, though, a more sympathetic way to understand Comte's
dilemma
...
Not, that is, as a
scienti®c, or metascienti®c, discourse whose necessary open-endedness
is thwarted and foreclosed by the specious effort to demonstrate what is
already fervently believed; but as a ®des quaerens intellectum, i
...
as a faith
seeking (the term to be emphasised) an understanding
...
It reaches instead to the
more supple and dialectical formulation of the faith±reason problem
given in a less brittle and defensive stage of medieval theology
...
e
...
70 To be sure, went the argument, faith
is primary
...
At the
same time, my efforts at understanding are guided by the desire, at the
end of the journey, to have rationally illuminated the mysteries of faith
...
I
have faith that reason can grasp the grounds of what I believe, just as I
also believe that believing will illuminate the understanding so that the
world as it really is can be lucidly grasped
...
It gives the intellectual project the strength to proceed; and to do so
without the stress of having to imagine that the faith±reason gap is
already closed, or that the religious mysterium is yet ± or ever could be ±
fully cleared up
...
72 The point of such a
70

71

72

Boethius' principle was enunciated as the last line of a letter from him to Pope John I
...

As Anselm put it: `I do not attempt, O Lord, to penetrate Thy profundity, for I deem
my intellect in no way suf®cient thereto, but I desire to understand in some degree Thy
truth, which my heart believes and loves
...
For I believe this too, that unless I
believed, I could not understand' (cited in Coppleston, 1962:177)
...
This corresponded `a la
Â
 Á Â
Â
 Â
maturite de la raison humaine, destinee a developper les consequences sans deliberer

80

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

procedure ± the opposite approach to that taken by those like Simpson
(1969) who primarily stress Comte's role in the ancestry of academic
sociology ± is not only, it should be made clear, to save Comte, as a
religious thinker, from a reduced, i
...
non-religious, interpretation
...
To the contrary,
by taking his faith seriously as the basis, impulse and horizon of his
thought, it can be subjected to critical scrutiny in its own terms, together
with his related construction of the modern `religious crisis' and its
Positive resolution
...
Comte's phrase opens the intellectum of his faith only
immediately to close it, hiding the faith that sustains the demonstrability of that faith
in a morally pragmatist aversion to idle speculation
...
It was driven, indeed, by a pressing
sense of urgency ± an urgency proportional to the scale and gravity of the
historical problem he took himself to have been called upon to address
...
But for two centuries the old order had shielded
society from a growing spiritual anarchy which threatened `modern
societies' with `universal dismemberment' (v:485)
...

Of course, for the correct solution to be prescribed, and for the
Positivist system to legitimise itself as intrinsic to that solution, it was
necessary that the problem itself be properly diagnosed
...
It is
not hard to show, at the least, that this `science' is prematurely deployed
...
Nevertheless Comte's
analysis of (early) industrialism's travails need not be dismissed out of
hand
...
The hundred years of
industrialism in Europe after Comte were even more turbulent, sanguinary and, at times, disintegrative than the century before
...
At ®rst sight, its
scientistic insistence exhibits the one-sidedness of that objectivising
rationalism which Hegel criticised in the (non-Protestant) Enlightenment
...
This is not to deny that
Comte has a host of classi®catory categories on which he conceptually
re¯ects
...
3 Indeed, he was averse to
the very notion of re¯exivity, not only because of his phenomenalism ±
thought could only be known through its exterior manifestations in the
body or in its social objecti®cations ± but also in principle
...
Thus if the self could come to know
itself at all, it certainly could not do so directly, in the form of observation
Â
interieure
...

The arrival of sociological thinking, particularly of a holistic and historicising kind, in any case forced the issue
...

It does so not only by relating the subject of knowledge to his/her sociohistorical circumstances, themselves understood as socio-historically
conditioned, but also by inviting re¯ection on this viewpoint as itself
determined by a form of understanding which needs to be socio-

2

3

issues are now largely exterior to western societies in the form of intercivilisational
con¯icts (Huntington, 1996), it may be salutary to recall the `convergence theory' and
`end of ideology' thinking that were prevalent in the late ®fties and early sixties
...
`Instead of making its way into the inherent content of
the matter at hand, understanding always takes a survey of the whole, and assumes a
position above the particular existence where it is speaking, i
...
it does not see it at all'
(Hegel, 1967: 112)
...
Pickering's archival research turned up
references to lost translations of extracts from Kant, Fichte and Hegel that Comte
apparently kept in his private ®les
...
It also suggests an at least competitive
awareness that his was not the only serious current attempt to develop a `subjective
synthesis'
...

Ë

Religion and the crisis of industrialism

83

historically explained
...

One sociological feature of this complexity should be underlined
straight away
...
To
grasp the social as belonging to the order of the dehors is to grasp it as
ÂÂ
having an irreducibly subjective dimension
...
That
same duality, moreover, of inside and outside, of subjective and objective, applies to that element of social reality which is sociology itself
...

If we follow Comte in taking the intrusion of the subjective into the
objective in the social domain to be one of its de®ning characteristics,
we may well, and for precisely that reason, deny his claim that `the
collective development of the human species' can become, in theory or
in practice, the object of a science at all
...
It points, indeed, to what might be a
more appropriate way to conceive a (humanly useful) sociology: not as a
`positive science', but as a critically re¯exive discourse that at every level
combines, and oscillates between, the viewpoints of subject and object,
in all the ways in which this dichotomy might be conceived
...

One arises from the temptation of socio-historical reduction
...
Late Enlightenment
tendencies in that direction were denounced by Husserl not only for
4

`There is
...
Comte, we may note, would disagree with
this statement in only one respect
...
Horkheimer's `critical theory' is more straightforward in acknowledging the
non-apodictic nature of its founding socio-political assumptions
...

Nietzsche's critique of the `mania for history' and Benjamin's
(1969:261±3) critique of social democracy's `historicism' made similar
points with regard to action
...
Both the subjective and objective sides of analysis
then become absorbed into a vast rationalisation, and the attempt at
re¯exive socio-historical understanding relapses, misrecognised, into
ideologising pure and simple
...
He imagined himself to be just a functionary of Humanity
whom accidents of birth and biography had uniquely ®tted for an
already prepared world-historical task
...

The self-con®rming character of an ideological circle may certainly be
suspected in the relation Comte draws among his faith, his religious
program and his sociological diagnosis
...
However, the organic±functional categories of the
latter, which naturalise Comte's own subjectivity as paradigmatic of
what was besetting (and could save) industrial society at large, themselves arise through what is given to us as a merely analogical intuition ±
that the social crisis is like an individual one, and that both are to be
Â
understood as the desorganisation of an organism
...
In which case, and if the pain came
®rst, could we not say that Comte's solution, and the entire philanthropic will to unity it incarnates, is to be read symptomatically, indeed
as a reactive response?
To entertain this possibility would seem to negate Comte's analysis
5

Â
For Comte's discussion of la manie as an example of Broussais's principle that `l'etat
Â
Á
pathologique' must always be considered as `un simple prolongement des phenomenes
Â
 Â
 Â
Á
de l'etat normal, exageres ou attenues au dela leurs limites ordinaires de variations', see
iii:658±9
...
Such a ¯aw would not be fatal, though, to its
interest value
...
If the
Positivist program simply presents in reverse image what Comte already
apprehended as a crisis (his own, generalised as our own), then examining his sociological account of that crisis would provide an illuminating point of entry for critically exploring his faith
...
6 He continued to be a rebel at the elite Ecole Polytechnique, a
hotbed of Republicanism, where, in 1815±16, he was prominently
involved in protests against an `insolent' teacher which led to the
Restoration authorities delicensing the school
...
This began a
pattern of self-righteous quarrelsomeness which was always to block his
never-abandoned ambitions for an academic career in that same institution
...
8 It no doubt exacerbated the psychosomatic
6

7

8

Â
He was already a Republican anticlerical in lycee
...
For a detailed account of Comte's family in Montpellier,
and his relations with them, see Gouhier, 1933, i:32±61
...
Comte was, though, one of the ®fteen in his
class to be formally expelled
...
It seems that Comte, the eldest
son, despised his father, disliked but was emotionally dependent on his religiously
devout mother (older by 12 years and effectively head of the household), and had
quarrelsome relations with Alix, his devotedly self-sacri®cing stay-at-home sister
...
All suffered chronic ill health, and all (except the
devotedly indolent Adolphe, but perhaps him too) oriented their lives through forms of
faith and duty that involved personal sacri®ce
...
Comte's 20-year relationship with Caroline Massin, by all

86

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

ailments that were to af¯ict him all his life
...

It was from this crucible of contradictions that Comte's life-project
took shape
...
Here might be the basis for a healing regeneration and a
post-Revolutionary new order
...
Drawing at once from
Condorcet's progressivist vision in L'Esquisse, and from de Maistre's
denunciatory critique of the negative forces unleashed in the Revolution,
it was ®rst sketched out in the opuscule fondamental of 1822 (xa:47±81)13
and elaborated in the last two volumes of Philosophie positive
...


9

10

11

12

13

accounts a free spirit with a mind of her own, was always beset by the problem that he
thought he was `saving' her, and that this mission and its social cost to him were
unappreciated
...
Ses crises nerveuses coõncident
È
Â
Ã
toujours avec les troubles digestifs et l'unite de sa vie physiologique paraõt aussi
Â
remarquable que l'unite de sa vie intellectuelle
...
The school was
`vitalist' in outlook
...

Comte's notion that the scienti®c intelligentsia could be forged into a new pouvoir
spirituel was already well formed before he began work on the Cours in 1826
...

Â
Â
For Comte's political perspective during his lycee and Ecole Polytechnique period, see
Pickering, 1993:20±30
...
He supported Napoleon (in the streets)
during 1815, but this was in the context of a struggle against the threat of a Bourbon
restoration
...
c'est de determiner
 Á
Á
les nations civilisees a quitter la direction critique pour la direction organique, a porter
Á
tous leurs efforts vers la formation du nouveau systeme social' (xa:48)
...
For
Comte, what all this turmoil manifested, at root, was the failure of a
newly emergent form of civilisation to establish, as yet, the requisite
social framework for its stable development, particularly in the ideational sphere
...
Thus the crisis had a two-fold
character:
Two, naturally different, movements disturb contemporary society: one is a
movement of disorganisation, the other one of reorganisation
...
By the second it is led to the
de®nitive social state of the species, the most suited to its nature
...
(xa:46)

The crisis pitted against one another particular social interests
...
Champions of
liberty and reason, for their part, were drawn from rising social forces
which had bene®ted from destroying the old regime
...
Here, over the whole range of issues from property law and
state form, to education, the principles of morality, and the true nature
of Man, raged a war between incompatible philosophies,15 one basing
14

15

Â
However, the two key forces in the `critical' movement of struggle, the legistes and
Â
metaphysiciens scolastiques (succeeded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the
Â
philosophes and litterateurs), were of transitional importance only, since scientists and
industrialists, not they, were destined to build and direct the ruling `organs' of the new
industrial order (v:446±52)
...
Whence, despite all the rebuffs, his obsessive pursuit
Â
of a professorship at l'Ecole Polytechnique
...

Comte clari®es his use of the term philosophy in the opening preface of Philosophie
 Â
Â
Á Â
positive: `Je regrette
...
Je ne bornerai donc, dans cet avertissement, a declarer que j'emploie
Á
le mot philosophie, dans l'acceptation que lui donnaient les Anciens, et particulierement
Â
Á
 Â
Aristote, comme designant le systeme general des conceptions humaines' (i:xii)
...

Besides the immediate dif®culty this presented for establishing any
stable political regime, the continued dissensus symptomatised, in
something like a medical sense, a deep disorder in the social organism
...
is the ®rst condition for real
social order'
...

Neither of the two main warring theoretico-ideological camps,
however, held the key to how the problem might be overcome
...
The chronic con¯ict between `theological' partisans of the
Â
ancien regime and `metaphysical' partisans of liberty, fraternity, equality
and progress16 could only be resolved through the triumph of a synthesising third camp
...

Both the possibility, and the necessity, of a `really organic new
doctrine' ¯owed from the very conditions that had undermined feudalism and begun to shape the emergence of something new
...
What had rendered it obsolete
and displaced its leading classes and institutions, was the rise, and
increasing productivity, of organised work: l'industrie
...
Industry, in turn, provided
stimulus and support for scienti®c research
...


Religion and the crisis of industrialism

89

whose development out of the medieval state was the political complement of the Reformation (vi:117)
...
The rise of the
monarchical state absorbed a decadent feudal nobility, undermined the
headship of the papacy, and paved the way for the Reformation
...

The tension generated a rogue rationalism from out of theology itself
(v:454±62)
...
A key disagreement in nineteenthcentury progressivism would come to be between those, like Marx and
Engels, for whom industrial society, the free market and the liberal state
were susceptible to the same dialectical treatment as feudalism, and
those, like Comte and Hegel, who saw the great transformation to
modernity out of post-feudal absolutism as now essentially accomplished (save for stabilisation), so that no further radical upheavals need
be contemplated
...
17 In the former, a
`dictatorship of the nobility' had preserved retrograde elements from the
feudal polity which the French monarchy had overwhelmed (v:487)
...
In France uniquely (v:583±4), the historical way was open, after
six centuries of turmoil, for the new order ®nally and fully to emerge
...
In this reform, with parasites and agitators pushed aside,
l'industrie would ®nally move from the political margins to the centre,
while on the spiritual±intellectual side the same revamped knowledge
which had transformed productive practice would become the consen17

The picture of England as the vanguard of modernity was of long standing among
French reformers and went back at least to Montesquieu
...


90

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

sual basis for social, moral and philosophical thinking as well
...

Thus far and in broad outline, we may say, Comte was still with SaintSimon
...
Hence the
need to establish, and not just call for, `social physics'
...

Up to a point, the schema for the new science which Comte sketches
out in his 1822 `Plan des Travaux scienti®ques' and elaborates in the last
three volumes of Philosophie positive just ®lls in the Saint-Simonian
blanks
...
But Comte was driven to go deeper
...

His analysis of industrialism's incomplete transition was sketchy, and he
was more interested in immediate schemes and solutions
...
Gouhier (1941, III:393±4)
argues that Comte initially absorbed from Saint-Simon the importance of political
economy to forming a real science of man
...
First, that les retrogrades were right to denounce `the ravages of
egoism in modern society' (ibid
...
:395 et seq
...
These were combined in Comte's conception of social physics
as a life science, and of society as the perfection of the organism
...


Religion and the crisis of industrialism

91

of a different generation
...
For him, the unfolding situation was more akin to Greek stasis
...
20 Bazard and Enfantin, rival carriers of
the Saint-Simonian torch, carried forward Saint-Simon's notion of
social development as an ascending spiral, alternating on the way up
between `critical' and `organic' periods
...
Besides, not only did the
necessity for this latter have to be explained
...

Comte's explanation was ingenious
...
22 The co-presence of contradictory philosophical schools, which had similarly marked the transition to feudalism
a millennium and a half before, re¯ected not only the clash of emerging
and obsolete social forces, as tied to the visions animating the successive
forms of society to which, structurally, they belonged
...
Each domain of knowledge, starting with astronomy,
had to undergo the shift from the theological to the positive (i:14±15)
...
The
chronological order in which they had positivised ± from astronomy to
physics, chemistry, biology and now sociology ± followed their logical
order in `the encyclopedic scale' (i:68±9)
...
Against those who considered the sixteenth century to mark
Ë
the beginnings of modernity, Comte insisted that it began at the end of the thirteenth
Â
century, for by then `la constitution catholique et feodale avait suf®samment rempli
...
' (v:407)
...

Â
The motto of Saint-Simon's projected nouvelle encyclopedie had been `The philosophy of
the eighteenth century was critical and revolutionary, that of the nineteenth century
will be inventive and organisational' (Manuel, 1962:118)
...
For Comte, in this light, `the progress of
civilisation does not march in one straight line' but through `a series of oscillations, not
unlike the oscillations we see in the mechanism of locomotion' (249)
...

This same line of reasoning could also account for the particular
virulence which such con¯ict had assumed in Comte's own day
...
In fact, the ®nal transition involved the deepest
con¯icts, particularly at the intellectual level
...
For that
same reason it could not occur in one sudden leap
...
23
In late-medieval Europe, the hybrid `metaphysical stage' had restored
the Aristotelian division between moral and natural philosophy, with the
former ruled by theology and the latter (the world of `the inert')
incubating the sciences, themselves still invested with a largely metaphysical spirit (v:281±3)
...
But as the
sciences advanced and as reason extended its claims in the moral and
political realm, open con¯ict broke out
...
On the other, beginning with the controversies over dialectic
and natural philosophy, rationalism became rebellious
...
But this was just the problem
...


Religion and the crisis of industrialism

93

spirit ± incarnate in the `purely negative' Enlightenment principle of free
individual inquiry (v:515) ± increasingly became a blockage in the
development of both constructive reform and a fully scienti®c understanding of the world
...
This meant that theological and metaphysical modes of
thought continued to dominate the social ®eld even after the positivisation of every other
...
And the
contradictions could condense
...

The historical results were revealing
...
For Comte, as for de Maistre whose critique of the philosophes
he took over, Rousseau's Social Contract typi®ed the worst of the
genre
...
In the disastrous results that followed,25 the only bene®t of the
endless constitution-making was the instructive value of a discon®rming
experiment
...
De Maistre had seen in the Jacobin uprising a
satanic force which had issued, through the inscrutable workings of
Providence, in the punishment of the wicked in a Terror of their own
24

25

26

For Comte's critique of Rousseau's reductive solution to the social question through
Â
Ã
Á
Á
`mesures purement politiques, d'ou une aveugle imitation de l'antiquite l'entraõnait a
Â
Á
faire violemment dependre jusqu'a la discipline morale', see v:617 et seq
...
This alone provided
Â
a suitable governmental model, because, `entre l'expulsion necessaire des discuteurs et
le sanguinaire triomphe des fanatiques', it had wisely transferred responsibility for `la
Â
Â
defense nationale
...

This was, though, an important bene®t
...
The observation of pathology gave sociology, like biology, a
methodological equivalent to laboratory experiment (iii:260±3)
...
In that vein, and since he took God to be working through, not
against, the laws of nature, he sketched a whole social theory of sacri®ce
to account for both the scandal of the Cross and the sanguinary
dynamics of the revolutionary episode (de Maistre, 1971:292±4)
...
In so far, indeed,
as the Revolution and its aftershocks were objectively making the
transition to the new regime more dif®cult, and, at the least, slowing it
down, it appeared that in-built tendencies towards order could be
thwarted and that the progress of progress itself had an in-built margin of
indeterminacy
...
The regularities of succession and concomitance speci®ed in
laws were to be understood only as the limits within which variance was
possible
...
Sociological laws were
the most malleable of all (iv:314)
...
The political
implications were evident
...
The
social forces actually in play were determined by the developmental
conjuncture, not by political actors, who could affect only their relative
Â
intensite (iv:316)
...
It was
inconceivable that industrial society could establish order and harmony
on the basis of a restored Catholicism and idle land-owning aristocracy
...
On the one hand, then, even more than in the case of a lower
Â
biological organism, the developmental process of l'humanite was vulnerable to disturbance
...
The twentieth-century adventures of that idea can be traced through
Hubert and Mauss (1964) to Bataille (1985) and Girard (1972, 1987)
...
28
That same consideration, moreover, gave Comte a more englobing
way to de®ne the whole problem
...
Such differentiation, including `the wise
separation of temporal and spiritual powers', was itself a developmental
law of life
...
31 And so to the contemporary issue: as tasks had become more
specialised, and as experience-based knowledge and re¯ective intelligence had supplanted the ®xity of false (but useful) beliefs, both
behaviour and consensus had become less instinctual, and society had
become less automatic and military in its functioning
...
From slavery to serfdom to free
labour, growing individual liberty had been essential for the emergence
of a higher, more ¯exible form of social unity
...

At the climax of the process, then, a fully positivised will was required
both to complete the metamorphosis and, once instituted, to sustain
industrialism's `normal' form of social organisation
...
From Broussais, Comte took both the general principle that diseases are
disturbances of vital functions and the speci®c principle that diseases were to be
understood as the `excess of lack of excitation in the various tissues above or below the
degree established as the norm' (47±8)
...

Comte follows the Scottish economists Robertson and Smith in tracing the rise of
l'industrie back to the growth of towns and the rise of `free' labour in the Middle Ages in
Europe from the eleventh century onwards
...

Already in the 1822 Travaux scienti®ques, the economists' division of labour is identi®ed
with a more general tendency of organic life towards complexity through functional
specialisation (xa:198)
...

For Comte, this principle had been discovered by Aristotle, in his principle that the
Â
essential nature of collective organisation consisted in `la separation des of®ces et la
combinaison des efforts' (viii:281)
...

For Comte, this implied the need for a revolutionary government, which (like the
Convention under Danton) would exercise a temporary dictatorship in order to

96

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

the sociology and philosophy which provided intelligence for that will
was itself a `normal' development (x:518)
...
For the same consideration raised the troubling thought that
without a supreme effort to develop that will, the con¯ict-laden impasse
of unresolved transition might persist, or even ± the greatest danger ±
that the whole locomotive of progress might go off the rails
...
The more Comte elaborated his theory of the `crisis', the
deeper and more dangerous it seemed to be
...
Thus a
`normal intermediary crisis' had become abnormally `prolonged'
...
Whence, in fact, a tension that marked Comte's whole
account
...
On the other hand, it
seemed that the current problems of transition risked becoming so
severe that they jeopardised both order and progress as such
...
Not just in Marxist terms but in
Comte's, this would be to de®ne the crisis as merely transitional
...
The call for a revolutionary triumvirate to direct the
®nal transition was part of the political program of the Positivist Society from its
founding in February 1848
...

Â
Ã
Á
Â
`Il serait assurement super¯u de s'arreter ici a caracteriser expressement les ravages
Â
Â
Â
Ã
qu'a du une metaphysique qui, detruisant toutes les bases anterieurs de la morale
Ã
Â
Â
Á
Á
publique et meme privee
...
Comte's
Á
Â
subsequent reference to `aberrations morales fort analogues a celles de l'ecole
Â
d'Epicure' (v:620) makes clear that this ®nal unravelling entails the unbridled
resurgence of ¯eshly desires, made worse by `aberrant' calls (e
...
of the SaintSimonians) for sexual freedom
...


Religion and the crisis of industrialism

97

for two crucial riders: ®rst, one element of that superstructure ± human
knowledge, its development and applications ± was taken to be also part
of the base; secondly, because of the importance of vital `consensus' to
the maintenance of (social) life, the contradictions provoked by ideational con¯ict across the whole range of social relations were taken as
having the capacity, at the limit, to menace society as such
...
If the autonomising
power of capital were introduced into Comte's picture of industrialism,
we would have to say that he both underestimated the structural
intractability of the social problems he was seeking to understand and
overestimated the place of consciousness in them
...
At the same time, if Comte
had been able to de®ne the latter as not the end of the civilisational line,
and as contradictory in itself, there might have been a better balance
between his explanans (a problem of consciousness) and his explanandum
(incipient social breakdown)
...

That the task, nonetheless, was not wholly chimerical was indicated
to Comte by the fact that the twin pillars of the new order were already,
almost, in place
...
On the temporal side, an accumulation of
developments from the emancipation of les communes, the dissolution of
serfdom and hereditary castes, and the spread of meritocratic values in a
culture of thrift and work, to the rise of workshops, machine production
and banks, had created the practical and experiential basis for an
Ã
industrial form of organisation to prevail
...
However,
such a spirit could be secured, and the morphological development of
industrialism completed, by pushing the division of labour one last step
...
The latter would executively manage the (minimal)
state, while the former, as coordinators of knowledge, would be responsible for education as well as for the overall supervision of industrial
society's moral wellbeing
...

Ë

98

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

ical completion of the division of labour in theoretical practice
...

But why priests? Why, after ®rst advancing this program, did Comte
feel the need to supplement the `normal' institutional framework of
industrialism with a full-scale religion?
The question of religion
The abstract answer we already know
...
This occurs through the introduction of
les sentiments, objectively grasped through a physiological science of
individual needs and instincts, as an irreducible third category
...
`The continuous preponderance of the sentiments over the intellect and activity becomes thus the fundamental law
of human harmony' (x:45)
...
Besides
the biological basis claimed in the Cours for the innateness of altruisme
(iii:634±41), for the ef®cacy of moral habit (644), and for the `everyday
36

37

In conceptual terms, he tells us in Politique positive, the change came through making a
Â
Ã
distinction with respect to the category of le coeur
...

Á
This distinction was manifest `surtout dans la comparaison moral des deux sexes ou le
Â
Â
Â
mot coeur designe alternativement tendresse et l'energie'
...
nous offre maintentant la succession normale du coeur
Á
proprement dit, de l'esprit et du caractere'
...
Mais elle devient ternaire quand on veut s'y representer la marche generale
d'un tel ensemble' (vii:684; my emphasis)
...

It does not hide, at the same time, that it involves the admission of a `female' principle,
la tendresse
...
This is because `la region affective du cerveau n'a pas de relation
Â
directe avec le monde exterieur
...
Elle ne les affecte que
Â
par suite des changements qu'elle apporte dans nos pensees et nos actes' (ix:11)
...
This point is
pursued further in chap
...


Religion and the crisis of industrialism

99

experience' that `the affections, inclinations, passions, constitute the
Â
principal motives in human life' (618), Comte's analysis of l'evolution
Â
esthetique (vi:123±79) highlighted the coordination of affective life as a
prominent element of the emerging `positive state'
...
First he
would establish the `last domain of positive rationality'; then, `on this
unshakable base', he would `build the new occidental faith, and institute
its priesthood'
...
Be that as it may, there is no suggestion of cult or liturgy attached
to the pouvoir spirituelle outlined in his 1828 essay or in the last volume of
Philosophie positive
...

What marks the caesura is that it was then, under the deeply affecting
auspices of ma sainte ange,39 that le fondateur du philosophie positive
personally, and in the sublimest sense, discovered love
...
But their expressive role
 Á
Â
Â
Â
± `destinees a l'ideal representation sympathique des divers sentiments qui caracterisent
la nature humaine' (vi:124) ± made the arts a crucial intermediary between la vie active
and la vie contemplative (vi:142)
...
In the second
synthesis, where new usages religieux are proposed, the independent religious role of the
arts is reduced, but their general importance as moral educator of the senses remains,
Â
and is even enhanced
...
Too simply regarded as having
a merely propagandist view of the arts, Comte's aesthetic theory deserves much more
attention than I am able to give it here
...
It records a moment of religious conversion
and gives universal signi®cance ± with explanations ± to a publicly confessed `private
cult' in her memory
...
Adieu, ma sainte Clotilde, toi qui me tenais
Á
Â
 Á
Â
lieu a la fois d'epouse, de soeur, et de ®lle! Adieu, mon eleve cherie, et ma digne
Á
Â
collegue! Ton angelique inspiration dominera tout le reste de ma vie, tant publique que
Â
Â
Â
Â
privee, pour presider encore a mon epuisable perfectionnement, en epurant mes
Â
sentiments, agrandissant mes pensees, et ennoblissant ma conduite
...

Gouhier emphasises the experiential side of this discovery
...
`This love did not add a single idea to a system of ideas that was selfsuf®cient, but a living reality without which this system of ideas would have been a dead
letter' (1933:29)
...
For le dehors to anchor the mental and active life
of each individual, and to supply the motive force for the subordination
of each to a common purpose, that dehors had to be loved and not just
cognitively known
...

However, love could not just grow out of belief
...
Hence, for Comte, both `the dif®culty and
the importance of combining' these `two religious conditions', `whether
naturally or arti®cially' (viii:47)
...
By
`arti®cially' he meant the establishment of a wider institution, to harmonise society as a whole
...
Recognising the need to `incorporate
the sentiments into the positivist synthesis' had as its practical counterpart, then, Positivism's transformation into a fully articulated religion
...
Concomitant with intellectual disorder (the
unresolved and unresolvable war of opinion between theological and
metaphysical viewpoints) and with institutional disorder (dysfunctions
associated with an incomplete division of labour), there had come to be
disorder as well at the level of sentiments
...
In the absence of
an authoritative, because consensual, centre around which to rally the

41

religious continuity of Comte's `grande mission' before and after Clotilde
...

The argument is developed in the ®rst chapter of the second volume of Politique positive
Â
 Â
Â
Â
(viii), `Theorie generale de religion, ou theorie positive de l'unite humaine'
...
42 This both produced chronic interindividual con¯ict (the
Hobbesian problem) and, at the intra-individual level, by permitting the
egoistic instincts to dominate the altruistic ones, undermined the indispensable psychological basis for social cooperation
...
And, indeed, in a double
sense
...
43 On the other hand, it was a crisis for human being as such, a
crisis in which l'organisme social, as a reality transcending the aggregation
of self-interested individuals composing it, was itself ultimately at stake
...

The ®rst is to note that, in the course of elaborating it, Comte's
understanding of `religion' undergoes a change
...
44 If used at all (e
...
to designate Christianity), it is just a descriptive label, understood with reference to belief
in some form of the supernatural, and applied only to the various forms
of `theology', from fetishism to monotheism
...
As
for the differentiation in the governmental function between le pouvoir
spirituel and le pouvoir temporel, this is explained primarily with reference
Â
to the theory of the repartition des travaux (iv:481±4)
...
`Quoique toujours lies de plus en plus, ces deux modes
ne seront jamais confondus, et chacun d'eux suscite une attribution correspondante de
Â
Â
à Á Â
la religion
...

The full extent of the dissolvent trend seen under this triple perspective is neatly
Á
summarised in Politique positive: `A mesure que la foi se dissout, les esprits s'isolent et se
 Â
Â
Â
Ã
retrecissent, les notions de detail prevalent sur les vues d'ensemble
...
Un egoõsme croissant tend a detruire les meilleurs traditions du moyen age,
Â
Â
Â
en surmontant de plus en plus la resistance feminine, sous les impulsions avouees de
Â
Â
l'orgueil et de la vanite, qui laissent souvent apercevoir celles de la cupidite
...

Â
In lecon 50 of the Cours, devoted to the general principles of social statics `ou theorie
Ë
 Â
Â
 Â
generale de l'ordre spontane des societes humaines' (iv:430), there is no discussion of
religion as such, and, so far as I can see, the word religion does not even occur
...
e
...

Against this background, the category of `religion' makes its sociological appearance in the Politique positive as a kind of missing ingredient,
an x factor, to supplement the conceptual lack in the social statics
presented in the earlier system of Positive Philosophy
...
Through it, a being is `bound from within to
without by the complete convergence of sentiments and thoughts
towards the superior power which determines its acts' (viii:18)
...
It is
related instead to a special social function, and to the organs instituted
to carry it out
...
Empirically, Comte's `religion' would consist
of all the organised practices and representations which pertain to the
cultivation of the highest instincts and their harmonious integration into
collective life
...
`In this treatise', Comte intones at the beginning
of volume two of Politique positive,
religion will always be characterised by the state of complete harmony proper to
human existence, whether collective or individual, when all its parts whatever
are properly coordinated
...
concerns equally the heart and the
mind whose concourse is indispensable to such a unity
...
(viii:8)

A little further on, and again in the Catechism of Positive Religion,
Comte's enlarged characterisation is given an etymological justi®cation
...
is suf®cient to summarise the whole abstract
theory of our unity
...
7
...
See chap
...


Religion and the crisis of industrialism

103

bind it again [relier] to the without by faith' (xi:46)
...

For, in keeping with the slide from religion as an instance of the social
totality to religion as that which constitutes it as such, there is a
con¯ation between social unity and the maintenance of that unity, or, to
put it in Durkheimian and Althusserian terms, between the social tie
and its reproduction
...
It is, then, both the ®rst-order unity
of the social, and also its second-order, or reduplicative, unity
...
For example:
is the `community' that we might posit as underlying all social relations
the same as a communing that takes place with respect to some unifying
Other? If not, might there be a contradiction between the (patternmaintaining and integrative) requirements of reproducing institutionalised social relations and the letting be of such `community'? (Nancy,
1991:141)
...
Comte's de®nition of religion,
which ultimately assimilates society and religion to one another, rests on
a particular theory of social being
...
And it assumes that the integrity of such entities ± particularly
as we ascend from the `direct unity' of the family to the `indirect' and
`associational' character of society in the extended sense (iv:448±9) ± is
a problematic, disturbable function of the cognitive/emotional binding
of individuals together into groups
...
What
needs to be highlighted here is the import of this social ontology for
what, in Comte's formulation of the religion question, was practically at
stake
...
Life depends
on a balance between `absorption and exhalation'
...
In the
`positive theory of death', death is a contingent consequence of disturbed harmony whose constant active renewal constitutes life (viii:586

104

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

et seq
...
In securing the spiritual and institutional unity of the social, religion obviated not just (individual and
collective) disorders in the plural, but disorder as such
...

Thirdly, Comte's determination of religion as the health, qua `normal
harmony' and unity, of the social rests on an absolute dichotomy
between order and disorder, without any sustainable possibilities in
between
...
Order itself, this implies, is necessarily repressive
...
46 Its achievement in any complex organism, correspondingly, requires a functional
subordination of the parts to the whole, which itself can only be secured
through their subordination to a common centre
...
47 That same doctrine had provided a conceptual basis for de Bonald and de Maistre's defence of centred unity ±
sovereignty ± as represented, in the church, by the headship of God,
Christ and pope, and in the polity by theocratic monarchy
...
Hence, in the schema of Positive Religion,
the singular and supreme focus for love, belief and action represented by
the Great Being of Humanity
...

Unless embedded in an interpsychic structure which directs the ego
towards, and organises its whole psychological apparatus around, a ®xed
point in le dehors (in Christianity, a purely imaginary Big Other), the
individual psyche would lack an organising centre and dissolve into an
internal chaos of warring impulses
...

 Â
Â
Â
Â
Â
`[T]oute societe
...
For the indissociability of
ÂÂ
gouvernement from societe, see viii:226
...
Christianity
...
Comte's dictum
 Â
that `il n'existe pas davantage de societe sans gouvernement que de gouvernement sans
 Â
societe' (viii:267) derives from de Maistre in its very intonation
...

Comte's tenacious assumption concerning the natural necessity of
centred and hierarchical unity for the existence and persistence of
complex being determined ideals of social and individual life that were
as opposed to the heterogeneous and the carnivalesque as to egalitarian
utopias of communitas
...
Freedom from order ± whether social, psychological,
aesthetic or philosophical ± could only mean the destruction of being,
and to champion it was wickedness itself
...

We could only burn in the Heraclitan ®re
...
In every dimension of his systematising construct he was trapped in an unre¯ected schema of hierarchical
binaries
...
But in his case it was also held in place by a psychobiographical factor which, indeed, he explicitly attempted to rationalise
as an empirical reference point for his whole religious and sociological
system
...
That which he most feared he
49

50

51

For Derrida, decentring was an inevitable effect of a relativising self-consciousness that
came about when `language invaded the universal problematic
...
This revealed `a system where the central signi®ed, the
original or transcendental signi®er is never absolutely present outside a system of
differences
...
The linguistic
turn was preceded, he tells us, by a phase of contradictory thinking about language ±
roughly from Rousseau to Hegel ± in which the dissolvent effects of language on `the
universal problematic' were, with detectable theoretical strain, contained
...

Comte justi®ed his constant appeal to the principle of `one into two' by way of his
theory of the universality of binariness as a feature of the `combination' inherent in all
Ã
Ã
arrangement
...
Cette regle s'etend necessaireÂ
ment aux decompositions quelconques' (xi:74)
...

Comte's ®rst serious attacks of manie ± sleepless exultation for days on end ± were in
early 1826, and he had a full breakdown in April, which halted for three years his ability
to publicly conduct his Cours
...
He never trusted doctors to help him, and evolved an elaborate
dietary and mental regimen which aimed, whether through vegetarianism, sexual

106

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

externalised through the horri®c names of chaos and anarchy
...

The subjective dimension
Put bluntly, Comte's embrace of a Humanist religious conviction is
haunted by madness
...
e
...
52 The obsessive regularity of the ritual
round he imposed on himself following the traumatic death of Clotilde,
Â
his ¯ight into the future `habitant une tombe anticipee',53 are easily
diagnosed in such terms
...
We may only marvel at the
thoroughness with which Comte sought to reorganise the whole world
round him, from the private cocoon of his house on the rue Monsieurle-Prince to France, Europe and beyond, so as to buttress his neurotic
solution by providing it, in a fantasy-seeking realisation, with universal
social support
...
It would bypass his effort to re¯ect on his own crise cerebrale as

52

53

abstinence or not reading newspapers, to reduce stressful stimuli
...

`One might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart of the
formation of a religion and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis
...
Comte, in the
year following the trauma of Clotilde's death, would appear to have exempli®ed both
mechanisms at once
...
The priesttype black clothing that he adopted in the mid 1820s paved the way for his now
Ã
Â
adopting the public persona of Grand-pretre de l'Humanite
...
His abandoned wife Caroline had no hesitation in declaring that he had gone
mad (again) and that he should seek medical help (Gouhier, 1965:207±8)
...
Sans cesser de vivre avec nos meilleurs ancetres, je
Á
vais surtout vivre avec nos descendants, jusqu'a ce que je revive dans eux et par eux
Á
Â
apres avoir vecu pour eux
...
30 to 6
...
m
...


Religion and the crisis of industrialism

107

source material for a scienti®c theory of human nature
...
To be sure, in approaching interiority, he dismissed theories of
the psyche based solely on introspection, favouring instead the `cerebral
physiology' of Broussais and Gall, whence Positivism was to draw the
proper, because objective, basis for its own psychology
...

In any case, the social crisis of industrialism ± pathologies of con¯ict
and disorder stemming from the persistence of archaisms, the unsettling
effects of a transitional `negative philosophy', and the failure of the
newly con®gured `normality' to fully emerge ± had its counterpart at the
level of individual subjectivity, to which it was intimately and reciprocally linked
...
Conjured in the spectre of social dissolution,
both presented threats to what a later discourse would call the `ontological security'55 of the individual
...
In
Politique positive, Comte describes himself as having regressed during his
illness in a way which recapitulated, backwards and forwards, the
`normal' course of cognitive development (ix:75±6)
...

`A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and in a
temporal sense, continuous person
...

Such a basically ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life
...

Ã
Â
Â
`En me procurant aussitot une con®rmation decisive de ma loi des trois etats, et me

108

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

mental balance
...
The subordination of `subjective constructions to
objective materials' is `the fundamental static law of human underÂ
standing'; it is therefore necessary that `les images interieurs' be `less
clear and active than les impressions externelles' (x:176)
...
Converted into a
maxim for la morale, the rider is advanced as a necessary condition for
both social order and mental health, a condition that could only be
secured, at either level, to the extent that the individual was ®rmly
drawn outwards, and held there, by an emotionally cathected place
outside
...

Fetishism, as the most archaic form of religion and of psycho-mental
development, provided a paradigm for the working of that mechanism
...
But it ®rmly externalised the drives of the psyche by ®xing the
latter in an attitude `bordering on adoration' towards the imaginatively
projected-upon dehors (ix:92)
...
All, likewise, had
been able to do so because of their socially established dominance in the
developmental epochs to which they belong
...
Waning theistic belief,
however, had weakened this mechanism, and the shattering of the
church without replacement had weakened it further
...
58
In Comte's understanding of the impact of social disintegration on

57

58

 Â
faisant mieux sentir la relativite necessaire de toutes nos conceptions, ce terrible
Â
episode me permit ensuite de m'identi®er davantage avec l'une quelconque des phases
Á
Â
humaines, d'apres ma propre experience' (ix:75±6)
...

It need hardly be said that Comte offers no empirical evidence whatever to substantiate
his claim that the crisis was becoming worse, or that complete breakdown was
imminent
...
59 Comte's `rallying' and
`regulating' dimensions of the internalised Big Real are recapitulated in
Durkheim's distinction between `ideals' and `norms'
...
However, and leaving aside Durkheim's
liberal±individualist modi®cation of Comte's normative depiction of
industrialism (and his added pathologies of altruisme and fatalisme),
Comte collapses the distinction Durkheim also made between the
 È
disorders of egoõsme and anomie, i
...
between de®ciencies of rallying
(ideals) and of regulation (norms)
...
This
con¯ation is itself occluded by the theory of internal and external
impressions, the former driven by the affects, through which they are
both, as con®rmed by Comte's own manic episode, explained
...
However, it did not cross his mind that, in balancing internal
and external impressions, there can also be too much mental unity; nor
indeed that overuni®cation was itself a problem for any program that
attempted to transpose on to the necessarily more individuated, and
cyclonic, terrain of `industrial society', the architectonics of an idealised
medieval harmonie
...
Classical French sociology, in freeing itself from Comte's theory

59

between 1841 and 1878 as the index of a similarly de®ned problem of social integration
(1951:46±53)
...

Under modern conditions, he says, these are the most important
...
5 notes that `there is a type of suicide the opposite of anomic suicide, just
as egoistic and altruistic suicides are opposites
...
So, for completeness' sake, we should set up a fourth suicidal
type
...
We might call it fatalistic
suicide' (1951:276n)
...
60 In
so doing, it abandoned re¯ection on the second aspect of Comte's
thematisation of the subjective aspect of the `current crisis'
...
Not the least of these
concerned the need, in an unsettled post-Christian universe, to rethink
the meaning of death
...
61 In the old religion, each believer was encouraged, as a
motivator for moral action, to focus on his/her own judged fate in the
afterlife
...
By the same
token, however, a positivised world-view would remove the hope of
personal immortality, together with the existentially orienting framework given by what was promised, or threatened, beyond the grave
...
Without belief in heaven, hell and an
immortal soul, how could individual life ± let alone one dedicated to
sel¯ess abnegation ± be subjectively harmonised in the face of its
apprehended ®nitude?
As with other dimensions of Positive Religion, Comte's response to
the mortality question draws its form from the Catholicism it aims to
supersede
...
But the
60

61

62

Â
A decisive break was made by Levi-Strauss in declaring that history was the domain of
contingency, synchronic social structures alone were scienti®cally knowable, and
attempts like Comte's to provide a model for history were themselves analysable as
myth (1967:1±26)
...
a la philosophie metaphysique, y emana surtout de la
Â
Ã
Á
Â
theologie elle-meme, qui
...
a la preoccupation du salut personnel' (v:577)
...
Its ®rst form is Theology±Metaphysics±Positivism, the middle as
a hybridic bridge between the others
...
This, in
Á
the Synthese subjective, becomes the dominant historical schema
...
63 Individual existence is
conceived of as having two stages, ®rst `objective' and then `subjective'
...

To achieve that blessed state ± at best to be venerated in prayer, in the
manner of the saints64 ± is to have a kind of perpetual life
...
Like the ascent of the soul into heaven, the passage from
`objective' to `subjective' being entails a puri®cation ± not just in the
sense that, upon dying, gross matter is transcended, but in the sublimer
sense that the subjective being of one who persists in the mode of
memory is idealised as the residue of a socially valued life (viii:61
et seq
...
`The noble existence which perpetuates us in others
becomes
...
Nor, ®nally, is the `subjective existence' of the
deceased wholly inert
...
But

63

64

65

Â
 Â
Á
perish in Catholicism `etait la doctrine, et non l'organisation, qui n'a ete passagerement
Â
Â
 Â
Á
Â
ruinee que par son adherence elementaire a la philosophie theologique
...
Catholicism, on this reading,
was beset by a contradiction between its (egoistic and abstract) theory and its (loveengendering) cultic practice and organisational structure
...
With such an af®rmation, Mill
and others should not have been so surprised by the religious innovations of 1847
onwards
...
A proprement
Â
parler, chaque homme ne peut presque jamais devenir un organe de l'Humanite que
dans cette seconde vie' (viii:60)
...
une solennelle incorporation au Grand-Etre' (x:130)
...
Comte's anticipatory variant was to give
it a socially ontological status
...
In medieval form, as Aries has shown (1981:143±5), the eulogy was
associated with public demonstrations of grief and mourning, and not at all with
making assertions about the salvation of the departed soul
...
The sweet
exchange of feelings and ideas that passed between us and them, during their
objective life, becomes at once closer and more continuous when they are
detached from bodily existence
...
As for the `damned', i
...
those whose bad deeds
at the end of the day outweigh the good, the ennobled prolongation of
subjective existence in Humanist heaven is justly denied
...
The most wicked, besides
being capitally punished by the Temporal Power, will be blotted out
from public memory
...

Comte's secular transposition of Catholicism's snakes-and-ladders
schema of personal immortality rested, however, on a crucial assumption
...
But ± and here was the deeper problem ± this could
not be at all guaranteed
...
Care for the collective memory could certainly no longer be
left to Christianity
...
Also, as displayed by unattended church graveyards, the
church's attitude to the more ordinary dead was affected by a mystical
notion of resurrection that used fear of death to orient believers towards
a wholly otherworldly salvation
...
With its blind trust in Reason, it had been as
unthinking about the prerequisites of social unity through time as it had
of those in space
...
The deists had
no sense of ®liation at all
...


Religion and the crisis of industrialism

113

socially rami®ed scaffolding of deep personal incentives to induce an
altruistic commitment to the human good
...

Nor was this just in the metonymic sense that, in the cult, each person
remembered symbolises the whole
...
No more than `society' does `Humanity' consist only of
the synchronously interconnected body of the living
...
It is intergenerational
...
It also includes those not
yet born, who constitute a future horizon for our furthest aims
...
So the
ratio between `objectively' and `subjectively' existent members (i
...

between the living and the dead) has tilted decisively towards the
latter
...
Without memorialisation, then, not only would society lack the unifying ties of
`continuity' which help give it, in the Aristotelian sense, an identity as
Â
perduring
...

Â
Overall, then, the disruption of continuite posed a further, and profound, problem of moral order
...
Without a shared sense of historical participation,
without the moral incentive of being at least well remembered, how
could altruism prevail? But in posing the issue this way, Comte highlights only that aspect of it which concerns moral integration and social
order
...
If not directly
mentioned, this spectre is implicit in his diagnosis and, subjectively
speaking, is more fundamental still
...
According to this paradigm, it is the worthiness of the life lived in a shared
and ongoing life-world that sustains the mortal subject
...


114

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

work, if the everyday or world-historical continuity of time cannot be
taken for granted
...
e
...
What Comte was confronting was a lesser problem, perhaps
...
What this threatened was the subjective continuity
of social time
...
Such a
breakdown, if it ever became complete, would just as surely annihilate
Hegel's Absolute Spirit as it would Comte's Humanity, and would just
as surely invalidate, therefore, what his desupernaturalised salvation
scheme at once presupposes and aims to maintain: the classical moral
response to the meaning of a transient life
...
The Church of Humanity was to be, indeed,
one vast exercise in memorialisation: from its celebratory calendar of
benefactors, culminating in a `festival for all the dead' (vii:344), to its
funeral shrines and parks, to the private prayers through which the
faithful thrice daily rekindle their ardour for the Goddess by recalling
the ®nest features of the ®nest dear departed they can effusively bring to
mind
...
Unlike Burke, however, Comte can place no trust in the slowly
baking cake of custom, nor in the healthy accretion of popular `prejudices'
...
The spontaneous operations of collective memory, and the ability of these operations to adapt to new
68

69

For the Positivist manner of prayer in le culte personnel, see Gouhier, 1965:221±2
...

While Comte railed against the insensitivity of contemporary `metaphysicians' to `the
best of the medieval traditions' (ix:533), his own appropriation of them was more of an
abduction, and allows Hayek, for example, to include Comte in his devil's gallery of
totalitarian social engineers (1953:191±206)
...


Religion and the crisis of industrialism

115

scienti®c±technical conditions, has atrophied
...

What made the situation increasingly urgent was that if the unravelling went too far, just as with the dissolving of solidarity, it might
undermine the subjective capacity for society to overcome it
...
In face of
this, the sheer arti®ce of Comte's proffered antidote ± which he instituted not least for himself ± is striking
...


5

Love and the social body

The notion that the darkest night is just before dawn is a commonplace
of western eschatology
...
For Hegel, the Jacobin terror was itself the darkest
moment
...
Whence, via both
Saint-Simonian and left±Hegelian translations, the ®gure made its way
into the imaginary of all variants of modern socialism, framing a sense of
time that has been, and remains, intrinsic to the very formation of the
left as an ideological and political force
...
3 When Jean-Francois Lyotard, who had
Ë
1

2

3

Norman Cohn's classic study The Pursuit of the Millennium (1971) argues the importance
to this of medieval millenarianism
...
Whatever the
import of this for Hegel, Comte's own historical model, for all its three stages, was more
binary than trinitarian
...
g
...

In the Hegelian narrative, the Terror and the death of God intertwine
...
`The remote beyond that lies beyond this its
actual reality, hovers over the corpse of the vanished independence of what is real or
Ã
believed to be, and hovers there merely as an exhalation of stale gas, of the empty etre
Ã
supreme' (602)
...
For
Lyotard's relations with it, which he left in 1964, see Smart, 1993: 35±6
...
4
In all these cases, from the Book of Revelation to the contestative±
utopian gestures and happenings of May 1968, we see the same ®gure ±
disaster turning to triumph, misery to bliss ± being used, above all, to
provide a de®nition of the present
...
It has echoes, too, in the traditions of the radical
right, as for example in Heidegger's play with Holderlin's line `But
È
where danger grows / The saving power is also
...
The present, then, is endowed with a transcendental meaning
...

Comte, in these terms, is clearly a `penultimatist'
...

Hence the pressing need for the emergency repair job of a new,
revitalising religious institution
...
If the old society was at an end, `a
new one was on the point of being constituted' (xa:47)
...
The dreadful totalitarianisms of
modernism coexist, in the present, with the promise of a new (unpresentable) sublime:
`We have paid dearly for our nostalgia for the all and the one, for a reconciliation of the
concept and the sensible, for a transparent and communicable experience
...
The answer is:
war on totality
...

`The self-same danger is
...
in as much as it brings the saving
power out of its
...
And so it is with
`modern technology': `Will insight into that which is disclosingly near bring itself into
being
...
:
29)
...
All that was needed to bring the disorderly epoch of metaphysics, individualism and social anarchy to an end was the synthesising,
synergising and sympathising reforms that Comte's own efforts were
designed to bring in train
...

As with many such philosophies of history, Comte's telos ± the good
horizon beyond the bad present ± is derivatively Christian
...
At the
summit of that development is an apprehension that we really are, in St
Paul's phrase, `every one members of one another';6 as if the human
collectivity had itself become the deus communis which the Incarnationist
doctrine of Christianity had foregrounded over the deus absconditus of an
older monotheism
...
Such images today are banalised in Coke and
Benetton commercials
...
Some such notion of future community,
founded on the saving power of human love, continues to subtend
progressive impulses, whether liberal and meliorist or socialist and
revolutionary
...
7
The scienti®c basis on which Comte tried to provide for the axial
place of love in his scheme of things is now obsolete
...
It did so moreover not only with respect to the
relation between love and (a physicalist) psychology, but also with
6

7
8

ÂÁ
`On voit deja l'admirable saint Paul devancer, par le sentiment, la conception de
Â
l'Humanite, dans cette image touchante mais contradictoire: nous sommes tous les
 Â
membres les uns des autres
...

For a powerful analysis of the `logics of failed revolt' at work in the writings of the
French post-structuralists, see Starr, 1995:15±34
...
iii of Gouhier's La jeunesse d'Auguste Comte, especially 385±407
...
Indeed, Comte's account of the
affective element in social relations represents a seminal effort to
delineate, at both the individual and social levels, the determinants of
what a Freudian tradition calls the libidinal economy
...
On one hand, the very fullness of Comte's
conceptualisation can aid in the development of a framework for assessing the logic and categories employed in all such thematisations
...
His combined championing of
social love and rejection of radical egalitarianism oppose him both to
Marx and to Nietzsche
...
11
Whatever we make, then, of Comte's `cerebral physiology' and his
grand narrative of progress, his characterisation of love in relation to
individual and social being is still, in certain respects, worth pondering
...

9

10

11

But of course without any concept of the unconscious, and with les penchants and les
Â
Â
sentiments instead of desire
...

For Innis, a declining concern for time and a chronic `presentism' had resulted from
the techno-economic movement of industrialism itself
...
Comte's point about l'esprit de detail is similar, except
that he considers its dissolvent effect mainly with regard to social space (solidarity),
Â
while the modern rupture with continuite is taken, most proximately, to have religioideological causes
...
For a broad-ranging discussion of the revised place
of tradition in post-Cold War `realignment' of left and right, see Giddens, 1994
...

And who are the attackers, the radicals who wish to dismantle existing structures? Why,
quite often they are none other than the conservatives ± who it seems wish to conserve
no longer' (22)
...
12 In delineating his
conception of love in relation to the constitution of human society, then,
we must ®rst disentangle its sociological and individual±psychological
elements
...
That will enable us to
see how Comte conceived of love as a growing force ± a force destined,
at once, to replace violence as the affective foundation of social unity,
and to universalise itself into a generalised benevolence that would
embrace not only the perfect wholeness achieved by the human species
as it became at last pervasively religious and aimant, but even the planet
and the `universal order' beyond
...
Progress is its
perfecting
...
14 In positivist terms, though, there could be no ®nal causes
...
Comte's accounting unfolded within a wider effort to square
a conception of the biological organism ± the phenomenal entities of the
new life sciences of botany, biology and physiology ± with the mechanistic principles which had proved so effective in scienti®cally mastering
the non-life domains of astronomy and physics
...
irrationel
...
Toutefois, la similitude
Â
essentielle des deux cas statiques doit determiner un certain correspondance
...

Á
Á
`L'ordre devient alors la condition permanente du progres, tandis que le progres
Â
constitue le but continu de l'ordre
...

For the importance of this notion for Spinoza and Leibniz, see Woolhouse, 1993:9±12
...
The latter can
change without affecting the ongoing and de®ning essence of an entity, while the
former de®ne an entity's `essential unity'
...
For Comte, organicity is the
`substantial form' of organisms as such
...

See lecon 38 of the Cours, especially iii:323±42
...
Whence the importance he ascribed to
advances since the seventeenth century which had led mathematics,
through Cartesian geometry and differential calculus, to a general
theory of mechanics
...

From the three laws of motion, identi®ed with Kepler (inertia),
Galileo (co-variance of all elements in a system) and Newton (equivalence of action and reaction), and developed into a general theory by
Lagrange and others, Comte derived a general equilibrium theory
applicable to complex systems
...
In this abstract but universally applicable sense, order dominates progress, and an entity's manner of
organisation, and reorganisation, dominates its course of development
...

But what about the order, and orderly progress through all the
metamorphoses of its life cycle, of that life-form Comte called `society'?
If it was a life-form ± and certainly, like other organisms, it actively
maintained itself by modifying the milieu on which it was physically
dependent (iii:226±7) ± then it should at least obey the general laws of
life
...
However, as witnessed by the
very crisis Comte was seeking to address, order in the social sphere

16

that the biological domain is calculable in the same way as lower domains, Comte
Â
Â
Ã
Á Â
excoriates `l'absurde principale de la pretendue independance des etres vivants a l'egard
Â
Á
des lois universelles du monde materiel'
...

Summarised in the `mainly objective' laws, numbers 10±12, of ®rst philosophy (xi:388)
...


122

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

could hardly be regarded as automatic
...
This was indeed just the point
...

What distinguished human society from all the other organisms
studied by the life sciences was not just its unparalleled size and
complexity, but the problematic manner in which the individual organisms of which it was composed combined into a vital system
(viii:288±30)
...
Each individual has its own conditions and imperatives of
life; independently of social requirements, it has a mind and will of its
own
...
To be sure, for Comte it was not
individuals but `organs' and `tissues' that formed the irreducible elements of l'organisme universel
...
Thus the achievement of
order in society involved not only a harmony of `organs and functions'
corresponding to the equilibrium conditions proper to its stage of
development, it also required the successful combining of individual
human organisms into a group that was suf®ciently uni®ed, in the ®rst
place, to have functions and organs capable of operating at a social level
...

Comte conceded that the collective existence would be destroyed `if
agreement was ever able to extinguish independence
...
' But
this was not the main problem
...
So the question
arises about the nature of cooperation itself
...
He also considered that the idea harboured a metaphysical search for the
essential substance of `life', as opposed to his own approach, which emphasised its
overall mode of `organisation' (iii:228 et seq
...

 Â
Â
Â
Á
`Il faut surtout distinguer entre les elements, immediats ou mediats, propres a
Â
Â
l'organisme universel, et les agents ou representants qu'il exige
...


Love and the social body

123

occurring implies the willingness of individuals to forgo individual
interests in favour of collective ones, an attitude of unsel®sh sociality
which Comte called altruisme
...
This would not be an
issue if, as with ants and bees, the requisite cooperative spirit (l'esprit
d'ensemble) was instinctually dominant, and thus biologically guaranteed
...
This, though, could hardly
be thought of as a real bonding between individuals, and would leave
the social as such unexplained
...
19 Between
these positions Comte, in effect, steered a midway course, one not far
indeed, in its dynamic and dialectical understanding of the human
faculties, from that of Rousseau
...
21
But two things distinguished Comte's version of this position
...
22 Affective and intellectual functions were to be conceived as
19
20

21

22

The relation of these positions to the `idea of progress' is discussed in Bury, 1960:177 et
seq
...
Among metaphysical thinkers, he
judged this midway position to have been best developed by Hume, Smith and
Â
Â
Ã
 È
Ferguson, `l'ecole ecossaise, qui admettait la sympathie en meme temps que l'egoõsme'
(iii:630)
...

In discussing this distinction in chap
...
i, chap
...
In his later revision of Gall, however, he reserves
the former term for `the instincts when active' and the latter for `the instincts when
passive' (vii:680)
...
It
Â
Â
Â
Â
included `toute impulsion spontanee vers une direction determinee, independamment
Â
Á
d'aucune in¯uence etrangere' (vii:622)
...
The
second, closely related, was that the two sets of instincts, altruistic and
egoistic, were set into a larger natural hierarchy ± a double one, in fact ±
in which the affective re®nement and moral worth of an instinct was
inversely proportional to its natural force (iv:440±2)
...

In the case of the individual psyche, the `coarsest' instincts ± which
comprised the egoistic impulses of the body (hunger and sex) and its
activity (the `instinct for self-improvement') and of the soul (vanity and
ambition) ± were more energetic and powerful than the `worthier' ones
of social sympathy (iii:619)
...
Hence the
perennial moral problem of ensuring, through some form of social
intervention, that the biologically natural hierarchy of impulses in the
individual was corrected, and indeed reversed (vii:692)
...
The objection that a situation in which individuals consciously
combine, by a founding and implicitly repeated act of will, already
presupposes the social state it would explain, had been formulated by
many thinkers before Comte, including both Rousseau and de
Maistre
...
For him, indeed,
contract-based theories of the social were not just incorrect
...
Only a mind already impelled
by needs welling up from benevolent, altruistic, instincts could think, in
the ®rst place, from the perspective of the social interest
...
Even,
then, for the achievement of the philosophical consensus which Comte
envisaged as the precondition for a restored social unity, a more
23

Â
functions of the brain'
...

Of course, while Rousseau and de Maistre both rejected the idea of an original
compact, they differed sharply over whether the procedure of deriving society from a
prior state of nature was itself admissible
...
For de Maistre, `to talk of a state of nature in opposition to the
social state is to talk nonsense voluntarily' (1971:95)
...
to be
what he is today and what he has always been, that is to say, sociable' (98; emphasis in
original)
...
That
it was possible at all, despite the spontaneous and driven sel®shness of
individuals, depended on the existence of an actual impulse for sociability
...
24
Love and the social tie
`Love', it will be noted, is for Comte a plural force: les sentiments sociaux
...
25 But it
also accorded with what he took to be the complexity of the social tie
...
The overall result, in that
case, is that the group so formed is intensively bound together so that it
assumes the form of a `veritable union'
...
This made
Ã
bienveillance alone wholly disinterested
...

Â
Â
Á
`Ces penchants superieurs sont peu nombreux: mais on ne pourrait les reduire a un
Ã
Â
Á
Â
Á
seul, sans retomber aussitot dans la confusion metaphysique d'ou Gall nous a retires'
(vii:701)
...
A raison
Â
de sa profonde intimite, la liaison domestique est donc d'une tout autre nature que la
Á
Â
liaison sociale
...
Fondee sur l'attache Á
ment et la reconnaisance, l'union domestique est surtout destinee a satisfaire
directement, par sa seule existence, l'ensemble de nos instincts sympathiques,
Â
Â
Â
Á
independamment de toute pensee de cooperation active et continue a un but
quelconque' (iv:472; emphasis in original)
...
Hence, of
course, the importance of a consensus over ends
...
The `voluntary' character of societes
proprement dites is sustained in Politique positive, but not the characterisation of a society
as `an association'
...

For Comte there were in fact (at least) two distinct modalities in
which living individuals could, and did, bond with other living individuals in order to constitute, in the strong sense of the term, a social
group
...
This was exempli®ed for Comte by the
sentiments that bound together a family
...
The bonds of affection between husband and
wife, parents and children, and indeed between siblings, had each their
own speci®c character
...
Whatever its historical vicissitudes, it was always taken to
be sharply age-graded and sexually differentiated
...
A profound consequence was that the matrix of
affective bonds that Comte regarded as paradigmatic for an analysis of
primary group attachments was always already hierarchically inscribed
...
The love felt for parents, not only as Origin but as household rulers, providers and protectors, is mingled with awe and respect
...
The ®rst is the case of what Comte calls veneration;29 the second,
where affection is mingled with protective magnanimity, is bienveillance
Â
or bonte
...
), and in chap
...
ii of Politique positive ou theorie positive de la famille humaine
(viii:177±215)
...

Â
Ã
Â
Á
`
...

 Â
What distinguishes the two `special' social instincts of attachement and veneration is that
Â
the ®rst `indique les instincts les plus circonstrites
...
Quant a la veneration
...
C'est pourquoi elle s'applique toujours aux chefs, tandis que le
 Â
 Á
Â
Â
penchant precedent prefere l'egalite' (vii:702; emphasis in original)
...
La bonte
proprement dite suppose toujours une sorte de protection' (viii:189)
...
For him, in fact, there are four forms
 Â
Â
of love: attachement (towards an equal), veneration (towards a superior), bonte (towards

Love and the social body

127

children, as generally between superiors and inferiors, entails the reciprocity of different, but similarly hierarchised, forms of love
...
However, the sexual
division of labour ± he deals with the world, she with household and
children ± which Comte took to be both socially necessary and biologically given (women were le sexe affective, men le sexe intellectuel et actif
(vii:246)) complicated the picture
...
The husband had material power and was head
of the household
...
31 Thus even marital affection turns out to be less an attachement in Comte's sense than a double
hybrid of the two unequal sorts of love
...
They are mentioned,
only to be dismissed as `of too little political importance to be specially
dwelt on in this study' and, in any case, as attaching themselves, when
they acquire any scope, `to a notable inequality of age' (iv:466±7)
...
One cannot doubt, consequently, that
absolute fraternal equality is transitory
...
(iv:467)33

31

32
33

an inferior), and bienveillance (general and diffuse)
...

The affective superiority of women, and the natural superiority of men in every other
respect, was both physiologically given and accentuated by social evolution
...
comme necessairement
Â
Â
Â
constitue
...
Lest it be thought that he
has mistaken the cause (infantilisation) for the effect, Comte adds that no one today
Â
Â
Â
can seriously contest `l'evident inferiorite relative de la femme
...

Â
 Â
`Plus tendre que l'amitie fraternelle, l'union conjugale inspire une veneration plus pure
Â
Â
et plus vive que le respect ®lial, et plus devouee que la protection paternelle' (viii:187)
...
Fraternite gets short shrift, sororite (at
least as a solidary relation)34 gets no attention at all
...

The complex of emotional bonds uniting Comte's famille provided
him with a model for thinking about social unity in a broader sense
...
However, the mode of direct interindividual ties
which the familial model exempli®es could only obtain within the
restricted range of a primary group, at most the family extended into a
tribe
...
This
was a form of attachment mediated by common attachment to that
transpersonal Other represented by the group itself
...
But the
mechanism was indirect, and the resulting interindividual ties `more
extended' and `less intense' (ix:190)
...
36 It was that entity constituted by all persons

34

35

36

Â
among living contemporaries, `fournit partout le type spontane de l'amour universel'
(186)
...
Likewise his reference
à Â
to the guiding role of les aõnes, which recalls not only his literal place in the birth order
Â
but also his leadership role in the student movement at the Ecole Polytechnique in
1815±16
...
For the (subordinate) place of sisterly adoration within le
culte intime, see x:111
...
`Ce noble instinct avait dignement surgi sous le fetichisme, avec les deux
Â
Á
autres affections sympathiques
...
The particularity of `attachment' is
its limit
...

In the Philosophie positive the shift from the family to a wider form of association is
presented as reversing the relation between `special' and `general' forms of sociability:
Â
 Â
Â
`Dans les combinaisons sociales proprement dites, l'economie elementaire presente
Â
Á
Â
inevitablement un caractere inverse: le sentiment de cooperation, jusqu'alors accesÁ
Â
Â
Â
soire, devient, a son tour, preponderant, et l'instinct sympathique, malgre son

Love and the social body

129

in so far as they are similarly connected with one another through their
common but separate love for this connecting Third
...
But it was necessarily weaker than the
kind obtaining within a family, while the primary ingredient of the
extended social tie was what tied each to the Other composed of them
all
...
The solidarity that ¯owed from its members'
common love for their particular family was symbolised in the name of
the family `house'
...
The symÂ
bolic focus of the cite, and of the national societies that came later, was
the collectively occupied territory, la patrie
...
Whence its crucial intermediary
role between the family and humanity as a whole, `where activity
combines with veneration around a ®xed hearth' (ix:363)
...
38 With an
extension of scale, moreover, a remarkable property of this form of
social tie came to the fore: its capacity to transcend the always potentially con¯ictual particularities of smaller-scale but more personally
 È
intense attachments, including the egoõsme collectif engendered by the
family itself (viii:212)
...
The argument in Politique positive (ix:443 et seq
...
This is now included among the
`special' social sentiments, because its object can be a particular collectivity as well as a
particular person
...

Â
ÂÂ
For the crucial role played by the city-state in Comte's theorie positive de la propriete, see
ix:362 et seq
...


130

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

selves con¯ictually differential and limited by particularisms of people
and place
...
This impulse had been nurtured
contradictorily (both because of its `intellectual egoism' and because of
the persistent militarism of the countervailing system of states) by the
now shattered Christian church
...
For Comte, as for liberals and
socialists, industrialism was creating the real conditions, both material
and moral, for a worldwide order to be ®nally established
...
A world
Â
federation was ready to come into being
...

Each successively more inclusive affective community ± la famille, la
 Â
Â
Â
cite, l'Eglise, l'Humanite ± had its `appreciated' place in la serie sociale
(viii:304), a scale which simultaneously provided a historical, sociological and moral framework for grasping the signi®cance of the ®nal
emergence of society's ®nal term in Comte's own day
...
It also
framed a synchronic account of the circles of sociality in which contemporary members of the most advanced national societies were
affectively embedded
...
As we move from love of family to love of
country and ultimately to love of humanity, that love becomes ever more
universal because ever less mired in the contradictions and imperfections of particularity
...
la patrie reellement
Â
merite des reproches analogues' (viii:212)
...
The
Â
latter divides the social ®eld into 81 aspects (grouped into liens fondamentaux, etats
Â
Ã
preparatoires and fonctions normales), and gives each one its own fete
...


Love and the social body

131

The ascending scale of sociality also mirrored what Comte considered, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, to be the logical and
actual path of individual moral ascent
...
At the same time, in the path
from familial to patriotic to ecumenical±humanist attachments, progressively higher and purer modes of the social instinct are brought into
play, distancing the embodied and situated individual more and more
from its immediate egoistic interests and drives
...
I have
mentioned that for Comte there were two modes of group attachment,
immediate and mediate, and that each had its own distinctly structured
instinctual base
...
But what is the kind of `love' mobilised in
the individual's affective attachment to the social group as a whole?
Comte's answer is by no means straightforward
...
But such ties as form
horizontally between group members are distinct from the affective
relations which connect individuals to the group itself
...
It is a veneration,
moreover, that is bound to heighten (but also etherealise) the further up
the scale of social love-objects we go
...
The feelings of the patriot, however, were more elevated and
could even transcend intense personal attachments
...
42 Such a love had for
its object Humanity as a whole ± an entity whose majestic distance from,
and eminence over, the individual properly called forth the kind of
adoration which adherents of a ®ctive theism had become accustomed
to pour out towards their God
...
Seulement, il s'affaiblit et s'ennoblit a mesure qu'il s'etend' (vii:703)
...
`On voit
 Â
ainsi que, parmis les trois organes cerebraux des instincts altruistes, le sentiment
Â
 Á
 Â
religieux depend principalement de l'organe moyen, consacre a la veneration'
(viii:15±16)
...
For it does not yet take into
account the complication introduced by Comte's insistence that a fully
ÂÂ
positivised understanding of la societe should take into account (as
rationalist theorists of the social had not) that it exists in time as well as
space
...

Here, again, the paradigm was provided by the family with its three
types of love and three types of social tie
...
One relates to gender and is centred on marriage
...
As
with gender, the exchange of honour/respect and magnanimity between
the generations elicits from each the asymmetrical form of love it is due
...
As with love
and solidarity, but this time diachronically, particular bonds help unify
the whole
...
In such relations, the family relates its present,
affectively, to its future and its past
...
There are ancestors, and children's children not yet
born (x:32)
...
It depends also on how strongly
its members can cherish and draw strength from remembered predecessors while bountifully providing for those still to come
...
The objects of patriotic and
Humanist love are multigenerational
...
The latter is criticised as a kind of servile ¯attery
...

Â
Á
`La constitution domestique fournit spontanement la premiere manifestation de cet
Â
Â
attribut fondamental de toute existence composee; car les enfants representent l'avenir,
Â
Â
Â
Â
Ã
Ã
et les vieillards le passe, sous l'immediate preponderance de l'age mur' (x:35)
...
In `the healthy
case', collective activity derives its inspiration from those who went
before and its goal from those ahead: `We always work for our descendants, but under the impulsion of our ancestors, whence derive both the
elements and the procedures of all our operations' (x:34)
...
In addition to (1) the
immediate emotional attachment felt, with varying degrees of intensity,
between current social members, there are also (2) the venerative love
which keeps alive the ®nest works and personages in the national, or
global, human tradition45 and (3) the benevolent regard for future
generations which keeps us pointed towards social progress and perfection
...
The combination of
loves directed by individuals towards the big Other of the social not only
makes possible a `healthy' and harmonious integration of feeling,
thought and action
...
This, on the face of it, would imply an essential symmetry between
solidarity and continuity as indispensable dimensions of social unity
...

First, the mode of presence of society's past and future is clearly not
the same as the mode of presence of its present, which has implications
for the variant affective ties individuals form with it
...
The present society, though present only in its
`events', is apprehended objectively, as a phenomenal dehors, albeit as
one we are also inside
...
Love for la societe, then, is one part `objective' and
two parts `subjective'
...

`[L]a vraie population humaine se compose
...
Si l'action et le resultat depend surtout
ÂÂ
Á
Â
ÂÂ
de l'element objectif, l'impulsion et la regle emanent principalement de l'element
Â
Â
 Â
Á
subjectif
...
We can see here why Comte placed
Á
such stress at the outset of his Synthese subjective on developing a logic of
sentiments which would display the `normal' harmony obtaining
between the logics of sense, image and sign
...
This was also, Comte
explained, why Positivists pray with their eyes closed
...
Indeed, Positivism
would have us believe that the consecration of tradition is destined to
become a more prominent feature of social organisation than ever
before
...

This points, though, to a second difference in Comte's treatment
between solidarity and continuity, a difference which he did not re¯ect
on, and which amounts, in fact, to an inconsistency in his overall design
...
But no
similar or accompanying change in modality is projected with regard to
Â
continuite
...
48 Far from its
heralding, for example, a more permanent shift in orientation towards
the present and future, and away from the past, it contravenes the
`normal' path
...
To be
sure, Comte justi®es such an apparently retrogade effort (embodied in

47

48

nos successeurs l'ensemble du domaine humain, avec une extension de plus en plus
faible en proportion de ce que nous recumes' (xi:69)
...
Un signe
Ã
Â
familier indiquera bientot cette distinction envers la majeure partie du culte prive
...

For the pervasive signi®cance of this term for Comte, which had the same general sense
as the inversion metaphor mobilised by Marx in his concept of `ideology', see Kofman,
1978:86±101
...
Appreciating the past facilitates the incorporation into
the Positivist Church of peoples who currently represent the whole range
of achieved developmental stages (vii:379±81)
...

The picture of Comte's conception of the social tie would now seem
complete
...
If the ®rst form of social tie is that of direct interindividual
mutual attachment, and the second that of a mediate attachment of
individuals to one another through a transcendent Third, this ®nal
mode of attachment is a cooperativeness that operates immediately as a
kind of second nature
...

Saint-Simon's New Christian injunction to `love one another as
brothers' had arisen as a religious supplement to the main moral
principle of industrialism, namely that all are to consider themselves
workers in the common enterprise of improving life for all
...
51 But
49

50

51

 Â
Â
`Tel est donc le vrai sens general de la progression humaine: rendre la vie feminine de
Â
Â
plus en plus domestique, et la degager davantage de tout travail exterieur, a®n de mieux
assurer sa destination affective' (vii:249)
...
This rule would
extend to all women, including those without the direct support of a husband or family
(249)
...
`Les cretiens d'aujourd'hui sont appeles par Dieu a tirer les grandes
Â
 Â
   Â
Â
consequences politiques du principe general qui a ete reves aux cretiens primitifs
...

  Â
Â
Á
Â
`Toute la regeneration pratique peut se reduire a systematiser dignement les tendances
Â
Á
Á
spontanees de l'industrie moderne vers le caractere collectif
...


136

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

Comte took the argument one step further
...
52
In the end, therefore, in order to obviate the socially fragmenting effects
of an intricate division of labour, what was needed was not so much a
countervailing moral±affective unison as the achievement of a polyphonic harmony
...

Of course the religion of Humanity had homogenising elements
...
But the regime
was designed to moralise each particular serviteur with attention to the
speci®c subjective requirements of serving the appointed of®ce, given its
particular place in the technical division of labour and the social chain of
coordination and command
...

We may concur with Mill that the pervasively intrusive and obsessively
systematised religious apparatus that Comte envisaged was at variance
with the cultivation of independent thinking and action necessary for
the perfectly voluntary cooperation that was its stated goal
...
Toujours fondee sur l'ensemble de
Â
notre constitution, la discipline positive doit egalement seconder l'extension et
l'harmonie de nos attributs quelconques' (x:46)
...

Â
Besides ignoring the need for la continuite historique (vii:160), it stressed a homogenising
Â
solidarity that would suppress individuality altogether
...
Outre qu'on oublie ainsi la preponderance naturelle de
Â
Á
l'instinct personnel, on meconnait l'un des deux caracteres fondamentaux de
Â
Â
Á
l'organisme collectif, ou la separation des fonctions n'est pas moins necessaire que leur
Á
Á
concours
...
Une preoccupation
Á
Á Â
 Â
Ã
exclusive de cette derniere condition tendrait a detruire toute activite reelle, et meme
Â
Â
toute vraie dignite, en supprimant toute responsabilite' (vii:158)
...
`It never seems to enter into his conceptions that any one could object, ab
initio, and ask, why this universal systematizing, systematizing, systematizing? Why is it
necessary that all human life should point to one object, and be cultivated into a system
of means to a single end?' (Mill, 1961:141)
...
To which extent, there is indeed a contradiction in Comte's thinking
...
It is a limit case of sociality
which, as an ideal for thought and practice, would be hard to exceed
...
Marx's conception of the reconciliation of
individual and society within `human society or social humanity' (Marx
and Engels, 1947:199), in which all will regard themselves immediately
as social individuals (`the complete return of man to himself as a social
(i
...
human) being' (1964:135)) and in which the `free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all' (Feuer, 1959:29), is
echoed in the ®nally triumphant Humanity which Comte himself aimed
to help make come to pass
...
He placed greater emphasis on the many-sided ¯owering of
the individual
...
Marx (but not Stalin or Mao)
saw no need for a Kulturkampf against `bourgeois individualism', still
less for the vast moralising and propagandistic apparatus represented by
Comte's new pouvoir spirituel
...
In The German
Ideology, the revolution itself serves as a once-and-for-all cleansing of
`the muck of ages' (Marx and Engels, 1947:69), and he has nothing to
say about the reproduction, and vitalisation, of the moral culture that
might be required for the `free cooperation of free individuals' thereafter
...

Without arguing the need to abolish capitalism (the new order, in
embryo, is already here), Durkheim's concern for `moral education' and
the restoration of `professional associations' is preoccupied with just this
issue
...
Durkheim's disentanglement of organic from mechanical

138

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

solidarity, and his assignment of them to historically successive social
types, introduced a powerful corrective into the Comtean model
...

Love and the psyche
Comte's `treatise on theoretic morals', which he never lived to complete,
Á
was to be the second volume of the Synthese subjective, `instituant la
connaissance de la nature humaine' (x:542)
...
Just as his social theory was couched as a story of society's
necessary progress towards perfect unity, his `positive theory of the soul'
(vii:731) unfolds a vision of its ideal but realisable perfection, with each
perfection being assumed necessary for the achievement of the other
...
But to grasp more fully the character, and limitations,
of Compte's conception of love and the social body, we must also
scrutinise its psychological presuppositions
...
While that chapter remained unwritten, its intended
material, under the rubric of `cerebral physiology', is already introduced
Á
in the Systeme du politique positive (vii:694±703) and summarised in
Â
Catechisme positiviste (xi:231±41)
...

In the nascent neuro-physiology of his day, three hypotheses, whose
factuality he assumed to be demonstrated, caught Comte's attention
...
The ®rst was that the brain
housed not only the mental faculties, but also those governing motor
activity and, more signi®cantly, the receptors and control switches for
passions and impulses as well (vii:680)
...
The second

Love and the social body

139

was that these three sets of faculties were lodged in speci®cally locatable
regions of the cerebral apparatus, and that this determined the commerce they had both with one another and with the organism's internal
and external milieu (vii:682)
...
Each corresponded to a distinct
feature or capacity of the `moral personality' as classically understood,
and each was similarly locatable, with its own neural sub-system and
`cerebral ganglion', in a speci®c region of the brain (vii:684)
...

From the second hypothesis (localisation of the three principal faculties), Comte derived an overall thesis about the relation between
`cerebral physiology' and the healthy, because harmonious, functioning
of the psyche
...
In contrast, the affective
region, which forms the principal mass, has no direct links at all with the
outside, and only connects with it indirectly through its relations with
(the faculties of ) intelligence and activity' (xi:228)
...
Unlike the faculties of sensation/
cognition and action/motion, then, which are `intermittent' in their
function, those pertaining to feelings and impulses are active all the time
(vii:690)
...

The import of this topography in the context of the Comtean
narrative about positivisation is dramatic
...
In Comte's new picture ± which effectively put Hume's
anti-Cartesian scepticism on a `scienti®c' basis ± reason is not so much a
slave to the passions as replaced by them at the directing (and literal)
centre of the brain
...
Not that passions alone would suf®ce
...
It receives its impulses not through the senses,

140

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

from the outside world, but from the body-world under the skin
...
For
the human organism, then, to survive and thrive in its active relations
with the world, the impulses that drive thought and action have continual need for the `counsel' of the one and the externalising capacity of
the other
...
`Act from feeling,
think to act' (ibid
...

However, given the asymmetry of the three principal regions of the
brain, and of their respective relations with le dedans and le dehors, how is
such harmony to be conceived? Neither thought nor will ± those two
shibboleths of radical Enlightenment reason ± could serve as pivots
around which an integrated subjectivity might form
...
The achievement of harmony, therefore, among
feeling, thinking and acting must depend on the disposition of the
affects themselves
...
This was that each of the three
main regions of the brain interrelated more speci®c capacities each of
which had its own independently locatable cerebral basis
...
Three of
Â
Â
Á
these, Activite, subdivided into Courage and Prudence, and Firmete, d'ou
Â
Â
prudence, were classi®ed as qualites pratiques or resultats
...
These included four for
Conception, subdivided into modes of thinking described as concrete±
synthetic, abstract±analytic, inductive±generalising and deductive±systematising, plus one for Expression, which incorporated all forms of
communication from the mimetic and oral to the written
...
Gathered
together under the abstract category of Principe, they composed what
Comte called `the affective motors: propensities when active; feelings
when passive' (vii:726)
...
It
is reproduced at the end of the ®rst volume of Politique positive (vii:facing 726) and
Â
again as an appendix to the Catechisme
...
`C'est pourqoui le nombre et le site des organes intellectuels et moraux
Â
Â
Ã
s'y trouvent seuls indiques, sans rien preciser meme sur leur forme ou leur grandeur
...


Love and the social body

141

As with every other aspect of Comte's taxonomies, the ten affects are
arranged in a series with the logical property that each succeeding
member of the series is dependent upon, but higher than, and therefore
capable of modifying (within set limits), the one that comes before
(vii:694±704)
...
The instincts
of Interest were divided into those of Preservation, which comprised the
nutritive, sexual and maternal impulses (these last two distinguished as
interests of the `race' rather than of the individual), and those of
Improvement
...
The moteur of Ambition, ®nally, was subdivided into the Temporal and the Spiritual, whence Pride, or `the need for power', and
Vanity, or `the need for approbation'
...
e
...
First are the `special' altruistic instincts
of Attachment and Veneration
...

The ®rst two forms of love are `special' because the immediate object of
affection is particular individuals ± companions and contemporaries in
 Â
the case of attachement, the great and the dead in the case of veneration
(vii:702±4)
...
56 Christianity, of course,
rendered the seven egoistic instincts as the seven deadly sins
...
For believers, the disinterested love ± agape,
Â
charite ± that had the power to redeem fallen nature could only be
conceived as coming into the soul from without
...
For Comte, on the other hand, while an external
factor was still needed ± society, in its march to perfection from family to
56

57

This implied that bienveillance could not extend to the living
...
The contradiction (already noted) arising from his reluctance to think
Â
out fully the distinction between bonte and bienveillance runs right through his account
...
For
Comte the egoistic impulses were not evil per se, but only if in unbridled control of
action and intelligence (vii:691±2)
...
58
Comte's series of propensities and sentiments is morally qualitative,
running from the lowest and most vegetative of the base instincts to the
highest and most angelic of the `social' ones
...
While the intellectual
faculties are in the frontal lobe, and the active ones immediately behind
(vii:684), the `affective motors' are located in a kind of sphere that runs
from the centre to the back of the cerebellum
...
The effect of this
arrangement is that the outer and lower motors are closest to the direct
(`vegetative') impulses ¯owing from the rest of the body
...

Hence, Comte believed, without any recourse to a doctrine of original
sin, a physiological rationale could be given for what he took to be the
principal practical problem of human community: the perennial con¯ict
Â
between personnalite (the egoistic instincts which `alone motivate lower
Â
beings') and sociabilite (which `in higher animals is joined with it'
(vii:691))
...
However, the contiguity of the highest affects with
the mental faculties gave it the greater power, when roused, to `direct
and stimulate the intelligence', just as, conversely, egoism had less need
of intelligence to de®ne the object of its own desire (vii:693)
...
For Positivism, it is `replaced by the real
opposition between the posterior mass of the brain, the seat of the
personal instincts, and its interior region, where there are distinct organs
for the sympathetic impulses and the intellectual functions' (xi:237)
...

In complex beings, `general harmony depends only on spontaneous
impulses being subordinated to some single motor' (vii:700)
...
Car, cette precieuse ®ction compensait
Â
Â
provisoirement l'incompatibilite radicale du monotheisme avec l'existence naturelle des
Â
Á
penchants bienveillants, qui poussent toutes les creatures a s'unir mutuellement au lieu
Â
Á
Â
de se vouer isolement a son createur' (xi:225)
...
This indeed, argues Comte, is the typical condition of
`lower beings' (vii:691), just as it also characterised the situation of
Â
Â
humanity during its long etat preparatoire
...
when
everyone is living for others
...
Two considerations suggested,
however, that a psychological order organised around a pervasive
 È
egoõsme could not be perfectly harmonious
...
One psychological interest can clash with another
...
The instinct for improvement implies
deferral of immediate consumption, while the latter may be at variance
with the `maternal instinct' and with species interest in successful
biological reproduction
...
In satisfying its appetites in relation to le dedans, it has an
ongoing need for prudent psychological self-management
...
59 Its stability and performative success depend on the
growth of a self-disciplining force that is constantly at variance with the
immediate promptings of impulse and that must nevertheless ®nd some
principle (but on what ®xed basis?) in terms of which to regulate their
¯uctuating play
...
The assumption that the
moral, spiritual or psychological nature of even the egoistic individual
can be comprehended as if it were an asocial monad is impossible to
sustain ± not only in principle (Comte's human being, even qua biological organism, is always already socially implicated) but as soon as we
take note of the fact that all three cerebral regions must be developed for
there to be any organised personality at all
...
, and therefore (at the least) language,
which is evidently a social product
...


144

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

kind in which these instincts are deployed
...
60 The instinct for species survival
follows that of individual survival
...
Beyond these, ®nally, the instincts of
ambition ± de®ned as crucial intermediaries in the ego's ascent to
sociability (vii:698) ± concern the articulation of individuals to the social
orderings of power and status
...
Which in turn, on Comte's assumptions about the social
tie, presupposes that the social instincts (in a similarly ascending scale of
sociability) are themselves already actively in play
...
For, as the guiding principle for thought and action, it is placed in
contradiction to these same social instincts (vii:692)
...
That, indeed, is how Christian moralists from
St Augustine to Kant had always seen the matter
...
Once on the road to sociability, real
harmony (`harder to realise than egoistic unity, but far superior in
plenitude and stability' (viii:9)) can only come into being when the
altruistic instincts themselves become dominant within the affective
apparatus; at which point it would be these, rather than self-interest,
that would drive thought and action, and regulate the expression of all
the other affects
...
The higher instincts can only dominate the lower
ones if they are strengthened through exercise (vii:92)
...
61 But the exercise of altruistic instincts, and
Á
their enhanced power vis-a-vis the egoistic ones, and indeed the pre60

61

Â
Á
Â
Â
`
...
[E]ntre l'egoõsme complet et le pur altruisme, il
Â
Â
faut intercaller les diverses affections intermediaires, en procedant toujours dans la
Â
decomposition binaire' (vii:692±3)
...


Love and the social body

145

dominance of benevolence itself within the altruistic, could never be
suf®ciently guaranteed by the mere existence of society in its highest
form ± i
...
that formed by individuals out of their generous, sel¯ess and
voluntary cooperation
...
Without `habitual exercise',
they fade
...
Hence, once again,
the supplementary need, implicit in the sociological ideal of perfection
itself, for the organised social intervention of religion with all its
strenuously demanding practices
...
How, in practice, could the
Â
spontaneous relation of instinctual forces ± l'economie individuelle ± be
harmoniously reversed? What happens to the lower instincts, and their
force, when they are subordinated to higher ones? Even granted the
muscular analogy according to which exercise can increase strength,
where is the enhanced energy of the higher instincts to come from?
One possible answer to this last question is: from a common source
...
Comte seems to be working with such a notion in
his emphasis on the `vegetative' as a basis for higher-order mental and
affective functions (vii:594 et seq
...
Developing this further might
have permitted him to formulate a theory of sublimation
...
There is no theory of a
larger Desire ± nor for that matter of Lack ± whose vicissitudes
component instincts would all express
...
Shutting down the
valve on, let us say, the sexual instinct has no direct implication for the
rise to power of `benevolence'
...
If deprived of stimulus and
opportunity, greed and lust simply atrophy, while the increasingly
regular exercise of loving instincts can steadily enhance their own
motivating power
...


146

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

self-regulation of individuals in the `normal' state of advanced industrial
civilisation can in principle be perfectly harmonious, without any troubling rise of aggression or inner discontent
...
In the positive reinforcement of the best, private prayer would consume at least two hours a day
in the schedule of each Humanist faithful,63 and this is not to count the
weekly, monthly and annual rituals of the `public cult', nor the round of
domestic `consecrations' which were to accompany the sacraments of
the life-course
...
64 Priests, to be
sure, in almost Lutheran fashion were commanded to marry
...
65 But this was not just to prevent immorality by
channelling sexual desire within the restraining responsibilities of marriage and parenthood
...

Marriage was solely to bring a man under the uplifting in¯uence of his
wife
...
66
Á
As Comte proudly confesses in the dedicatory preface to the Systeme,
this was precisely the height to which he had been led in his own
relationship with the saintly Clotilde
...
68 An argument that Comte considered con63

64

65
66

67
68

Regular prayers would take up one hour in the morning, half an hour at midday and
®fteen minutes in bed while falling asleep (to be repeated in the event of waking up in
Â
the middle of the night) (xi:111)
...

Â
`Outre que l'education positive fera partout sentir les vices d'un tel instinct et suscitera
 Â
Â
l'espoir continu de sa desuetude, l'ensemble du regime ®nal doit naturellement
Á
Â
Â
 Â
instituer, a son egard, un traitement revulsif plus ef®cace que les austerites catholiques'
(x:286)
...

Ã
The `superior perfection of a chaste relation' was to be celebrated in a special fete
during each second month of the year, itself dedicated to le lien conjugal dans tous ses
modes (x:138)
...
It is
 Á
summarily characterised as `une sainte intimite, a la fois fraternelle et paternelle' (vii:iii)
...
Massin had complained in a letter to Blainville in 1839 of

Love and the social body

147

®rmed by personal experience we might prefer to decode as a rationalised hysteria
...

When we look at his scale of instincts we can see that the question of
gender surfaces at just one small point
...
All the
other instincts are common to both sexes, but here the instinct divides
into a male form, dominated by l'instinct sexuel, and a female form,
dominated by l'instinct maternel
...
In procreation, then, there is a
fundamental, and innate, asymmetry with respect to the instincts drawn
into play; which in turn provides a biological basis for asserting that men
and women have an inherently different moral formation
...
This pattern, moreover,
is disjunctive
...
When Clotilde, the abandoned wife, insisted on a `pure love'
and a `chaste union', she may have been restraining Comte, but she was
not being self-restrained
...

Comte's dichotomy of male and female psychological character is
hardly original
...
In historical context we may only marvel at the extravagance,
and revived medievalism, of his version
...
Comte claimed to have conquered his strong sexual impulses at the age of
thirty, as an act of moral will
...

Kofman's thesis is that Comte was defending himself against a female self-identi®cation, and that the episode with Clotilde enabled him to switch from a `male' scienti®c
voice (that nonetheless masked a `female' religious one) to the openly `female' one
Â
assumed in his post-1847 priestly persona as serviteur de l'Humanite
...
`Ce
Â
Ã
Ã
qu'il craint (desire) ce n'est pas seulement d'etre pris pour une femme, c'est d'etre
 Á
Á
assimile a une de ces femmes qui ne peuvent se montrer au grand jour, a une putain,
Â
comme l'etait sa propre femme' (1978:29)
...
It accorded with `l'aptitude naturelle de chaque digne

148

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

Saint-Simonians were journeying east to make contact with the ancient
cult of Isis and proclaiming `the rehabilitation of the ¯esh' (Manuel
1862:151±7), and a decade after the founding of the American women's
movement at Seneca Falls, Comte's contribution to thinking through
Â
what he, like others, called l'emancipation de la Femme,71 was a retrograde attempt to synthesise the profane tradition of chivalry72 with the
sacred one of Maryolatry, improbably grasped through the twin lenses
of contemporary science and the Imitatio Christi
...
Woman appears in the story as a
dea ex machina
...
What permits Her to play this role is that for women
the maternal instinct is, precisely, after hunger, the lowest and strongest
...

That is, for bienveillance, which is the highest instinct of all
...
In the case of men,

71

72

73

Á
Â
Â
Â
femme a representer l'Humanite
...
The `normal' private female embodiments of l'Humanite were
les anges gardiennes of mother, wife and sister
...
They alone (but only as particular men) were suitable to represent the
march of intellectual, political and techno-economic progress (xi:143)
...
The crucial development in this regard had been the lateÃ
Â
medieval rise of chivalry and courtly love
...

Positivism would establish a new chivalric order, recruited from the patriciate
...
De meme qu'au
Ã
Â
moyen age, cet of®ce volontaire s'exercera surtout envers les classes specialement
Â
Â
Á
exposees aux persecutions temporelles, c'est-a-dire les femmes, les philosophes, et les
Â
proletaires' (vii:256±7)
...
The gender
coding is consistent throughout
...

The maternal instinct for Comte is nonetheless not to be confused with altruism itself
...
In the least morally developed
women motherhood can be entirely sel®sh
...

This can be read, perhaps, as a verdict on his own mother
...

Nor, setting his face ®rmly against Plato's view, can eros sublimate into
desire for transcarnal unity
...
Men, then, are
morally inferior
...
74
It follows that men learn to love (in the exalted sense) through women
...
Hence the
crucial mediating in¯uence accorded to women in Comte's vision of a
perfected social body ± not only in the Humanist cult that pervades
Positive Polity's ®nal state, but also in day-to-day practice
...
the affective
sex is naturally its most perfect representative, and at the same time its
principal ministry' (xi:105)
...
75
Love and the other
Comte's model of the instincts leads him to identify as a supremely
felicitous trend in industrialism the ever more sublimated, but also
unhappy, course of Kultur depicted by Freud in Civilisation and Its
Discontents (1949:121±2)
...
But the former has no direct ties
with sexuality, and the latter is a matter of affective training which can
Â
reduce les penchants inferieurs without remainder
...
76
74

75

76

Â
Â
As Comte explains in the Catechism: `La superiorite de votre sexe le dispense souvent
Â
Á
Ã
d'une telle preparation, en le disposant a aimer aussitot qu'il trouve des objets de
Á Â
l'amour, sans y cherchant aucune satisfaction personnelle
...

The regenerative role of women is discussed in chap
...
Its twin pillars are marriage, where they are to play privately a morally
moderating role, and the culte de la Femme, primarily private but also celebrated in leap
à  Â
years through a fete generale des saintes Femmes
...
Besides its neuroses, a Freudian would say, the psycho-social ideal
Comte imagined as the apotheosis of Love would be disturbed in
practice by undischarged aggression and the devitalising effects of
hyper-repressively diverting libidinal energy from Love to Death
...

But this is not the only problem with Comte's conceptualisation of
love and the social tie
...
This is that the three species of
love, like all the instincts, are ®gured, purely and exclusively, as forces
which emanate outwards from psyche to world
...
Neither the
direction nor the strength of the light is the slightest bit affected by the
object it illuminates
...
Curiously, then, Comtean love is not social in its substance but
only in its effects
...

The mere liking of individuals for one another is conceived as the least
altruistic social affect, and the weakest basis for the social tie
...
In his conception of the
direct affection of one individual for another there is no taking the place
of the other, no identi®cation, no sympathy
...

The Other for whom we live may always be represented (normally in
memory) by an individual face; but it does not presence as `face'
...


77

Â
(vii:353)
...

This is to say, in Levinasian terms, that there is no (absolute) alterity in Comte's autrui
...
In this sense it cannot be
comprehended, that is encompassed
...
[T]he ethical relationship which subtends discourse is not a
species of consciousness whose ray emanates from the I; it puts the I in question
...
Comte's autrui is
a thematised totality; Levinas's is an unthematisable in®nity
...
There is no dialectic of recognition
...
If de Maistre's theory of sacri®ce and substitution
(1971:291±8) pointed the way to an analysis of gifts and counter-gifts,
Comte's instinctualist conception of love and the social tie displaces any
lead he might have followed
...
There is no symbolic exchange, no bonding
through (or con¯ictual politics of ) reciprocity
...
It has deep bonding power only in so far as it provides a
framework within which the two higher forms of love, veneration and
benevolence, might ¯ourish
...
It is as if a
hydraulic principle is at work
...
The altruism
Comte exalts is not only unilateral but thrives on the difference in
magnitude between the terms it connects
...
First,
Comte's normative ideal of a perfected social±individual harmony
downplays both the instinctual basis for, and the strategic signi®cance
of, direct individual ties with the living in favour of anonymous ties with
a general Other which projects into the future and gathers up the
memories of the dead
...
78 The gratitude for gifts received, which suffuses the sentiment
of benevolence, connects one generation with another, rather than this
generation with itself
...
We can never repay Humanity for the
bene®ts of life, self and social milieu
...
`Thus
conceived, service to Humanity is essentially free
...


152

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

before' (viii:71)
...
The highest form of love is expressed as an ethic and
ethos of sel¯ess service
...
79
For all these reasons ± the relatively weak instinctual basis for
solidarity as against continuity, the privileging of the non-living Other,
and the sel¯essness without reserve implied by the social debt ± Comte's
normative ideal of social±instinctual perfection is full of moral coercion
...
The perfected social order which positive
religion had to rebind, then, was not quite as perfect, even in Comtean
terms, as he supposed
...

Comte was not wrong in imagining that industrialisation implied a
deep transformation in the character of social relationships, that it
rendered problematic pre-existing modes of group integration, and that
thinking the good and bad possibilities of this required an understanding
both of what Althusser called `ideological reproduction' and of what
Freudians call `libidinal economy'
...
His intellectual
madness, however, consisted in his attempt to rationalise as perfectly,
and constitutively, `social' an abstract benevolence which was split off
both from desire and from any engagement with concrete±historical
human beings
...
l'idee de droit disparaõt irrevocablement
...

Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation de®nes surplus repression as follows: `[W]hile any form
of the reality principle demands a considerable degree and scope of repressive control
over the instincts, the speci®c historical institutions of the reality principle and the
speci®c interests of domination introduce additional controls over and above those
indispensable for civilised human association
...
Gad Horowitz (1977) has considerably re®ned and developed this
notion
...


6

The path to perfection

For Comte, the coincidence of individual and collective perfection in
the formation of a social body harmonised by love occurs only at the end
of a long history
...
Positivist principles, however, eschewed
explanation in terms of ®nal causes, and indeed explanation through
causes at all
...
It was a matter of
`instituting a true liaison between the historical facts' (v:8), together with
the structural regularities by which these were always mediated
...

Â
At ®rst sight, Comte's story about how l'homme becomes l'Humanite is
metaphysical in an almost classic sense
...
In his ®rst version, in
volume ®ve of Philosophie positive, pride of place is given to the Law of
Three Stages
...
In the second version, elaborated in
Á
the third volume of Systeme de politique positive, the logic of intellectual
development is complemented by one of moral development
...
If the ®rst version tells the human story as essentially
1

The new scheme is summarised in three `fundamental laws' of social dynamics: `nous
devenons toujours plus intelligents, plus actifs, et plus aimants' (ix:72)
...
But in both cases the evolution dwelt on is inner
...

No doubt this is a metaphorics from which Comte never completely
freed himself
...
Intelligence may be constrained by its own static and dynamic laws to develop
along a particular path, but the growth of knowledge was itself stimulated by, and always tended to harmonise with, the panoply of `effective
needs' (vi:634)
...
They
were generated in the interplay between physiological impulse and the
external milieu
...
The
prevailing mode of knowledge and related level of technical capacity
shaped the prevailing institutional order, which provided a social
medium (of advancing scale and complexity) for the moral/instinctual
formation of individuals
...
The prime mover of social and moral progress,
in fact, was neither affect nor intellect, however crucial their conjoint
transformation was to the ®nal harmonic result
...
From
this angle, the key factor in the narrative of human perfection is the
steady rise of organised, knowledge-based production ± l'industrie ± with
its cumulating power to modify the physical milieu
...
2
Comte's ascent of Humanity, in sum, not only unfolds against the
background of the limits and possibilities of a subjectivity shaped by the
human brain
...
3 It is to these mediations, then,
2

3

Ã
Á
Â
Or, in socio-theological terms: `Voila comment le Grand-Etre, dans sa pleine maturite,
Â
Â
Â
prendra possession de son domaine planetaire, en y developpant toutes les ameliorations
compatibles avec l'ordre universel' (x:61)
...
Or, cette derniere resterait, a
Â
Â
Â
Â
son tour, sans fondement systematique, si elle etait concue isolement du milieu special
Ë

The path to perfection

155

that we must turn if we wish to probe the a priorisms that de¯ect
Comte's `scienti®c' account of social development towards the good end
he devoutly wished history to consummate
...
A centring of world history on its `western' genealogy
(Egypt, Greece, Rome, feudal and industrial Europe), with France at
the pinnacle of that development and Paris as the spiritual capital of the
perfected civilisation to come (x:373), will seem hopelessly parochial
today
...
5 However, the
Â
dubiousness of Comte's claim of universality for the western serie sociale
is not, here, my main concern
...
In this respect, three linked features of his schema are
especially worth examining
...
The second concerns the implications of Humanity's
growing puissance modi®catrice for its destined place in the cosmos
...
As we shall see, if Comte's analysis surrounding these
points is enclosed within its guiding religious idea, that idea nonetheless
goes through a remarkable mutation in his effort to bring it into
consistency with what he took to be the reality principle actually at
work
...
Destinee surtout a le modi®er continuellement pour satisfaire nos
Â
Â
Â
exigences vegitatifs, elle doit d'abord s'y subordonne assez
...

In his treatment of social dynamics in vol
...
toute vaine et irrationelle
ËÂ
Â
Â
digression sur les divers autres centres de civilisation independante, dont l'evolution a
 Â
à Â
Á
Â
ete, par des causes quelconques, arretee jusqu'ici a un etat plus imparfait
...
aux peuples de l'Europe occidentale' (iv:3)
...


156

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

The question of violence
Recorded history, as Comte well knew, has resounded with the clash of
Á
arms
...
From the very outset, the expansion of society from
families to tribes, cities and empires, right through to the protoEcumene of Christendom and the modern system of nation-states, had
been a military process
...

This expansion was not just a quantitative matter
...
It was
thus an indispensable historical preparation for a mode of industry that
could ®nally be motivated from within
...
`Even in a
rudimentary state, reduced to simple brigandage
...
That same movement also transmuted the
terms of conquest, which for Comte was the normal aim of war (ix:59)
...
With la vie industrielle now ®rmly established, all that
remained was the `civic incorporation' of the proletariat (ix:82±4), since
the `private morality proper to voluntary exchange tends to efface itself
completely when the contrast between work and conquest seems
reduced to the replacement of violence by fraud' (ix:58±9)
...
The period of fetishism, which culminated in an
organised `astrolatry' (viii:88), saw intertribal warfare overtaken by that
of the city-states, and then, as these extended their own range of
conquest, by that of military empires
...
6 Monotheism, as the logical culmination of the abstractive operation that had led from fetishism to polytheism, was associated with the
full development of the latter's sacerdoce into an intellectual and moral
power independent of the military state (viii:89)
...
e
...
It was this
regime, ®nally, which had come into crisis with the rebellion of the
urban `communes', the disintegration of the monotheistic synthesis and
the decisive rise of industry and science
...
7 With the
onset of the latter, the conditions had been ®nally prepared for society to
take the path of improvement through production rather than through
plunder, so that the energy hitherto invested in conquering other
peoples could be redirected into conquering the planet
...

Every animal species tends towards exclusive dominion on earth, just as each
human population aims to dominate all the others
...
When the true Great Being is
suf®ciently constituted, according to the mental and moral harmony of all its
essential organs, its universal preponderance brings to an end the particular
conquests of every other race
...

(vii:617)

One thing should already be clear
...
At the same
time, that history is propelled by war and subjugation, so that its own
character is (at best) morally mixed
...
But in preliminary stages of social development altruism was severely restricted in range, subordinated to an egoism and
6

7

Â
Â
Â
Ã
`En effet, l'existence inaccessible des astres, leur regularite speciale, et meme
Â
l'universalite de leur spectacle, constituent autant de motifs d'y rattacher tous les
Â
Á
phenomenes terrestres qui ne s'adaptent pas facilement aux personni®cations polyÂ
Á
Ã
Á
theiques
...

Ã
`L'existence humaine commence, en effet, par etre essentiellement militaire, pour
Á
Â
Á
devenir en®n completement industrielle, en passant par une situation intermediaire ou
Ã
Â
Â
Á
la conquete se transforme en defense
...


158

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

aggression it could only partially rein in
...
But how is this shaking off to be understood?
What happens ± has happened ± to the violence through which
Humanity, in all its emergent perfection, had been born and grown up?
In part this is a sociological question, a matter of comprehending the
real process in which a society based on force evolves into one based on
positive social attachment and cooperation
...
If the
Great Being of Humanity is to replace God as the true subject of divine
predicates, as the real fount of our `interior moral perfecting' (x:39), it
must be wholly and sublimely good
...
But if so, how? And what in any case
was, and is, its ontological status in l'ordre humain?
At stake is the question of evil and the related one of original sin
...
8 At the same time, however, Comte could not recuperate
the cruel history of warfare and oppression simply through a privative
concept of evil ± violence as deprival or frustration ± since this would
have been at variance with his instinct theory and forced him to
reconsider the coercion and repression hidden in his own (`systematic')
idea of the Good
...

One kind of answer is given by the reconciliationism implicit in
Comte's historical method itself
...
Under

8

Comte does not discuss the doctrine of original sin directly, but only as conveyed by the
formula of grace versus nature, a doctrine whose chief error for him is its denial of the
innateness of altruistic sentiments (viii:115±16)
...
Nature redeems itself
through the self-perfection of Man
...


The path to perfection

159

the Religion of Humanity, history becomes the sacred science, as devoted
directly to the study of the Great Being's destiny
...

Unlike in Condorcet's Esquisse, then, the barbarities of the past are
not simply to be condemned from the moral heights of a later progress
...
Except for the fact that
Comte treats as actual the historical path he can only predict ± Minerva's owl ¯ies in 1927 ± his `appreciative' account of the preparatory
stages of history, and of the indispensable role played by conquest and
coercion, is similar in spirit to Hegel's `true theodicy'
...
To be sure, in the industrial present,
he excoriates such evils as colonial slavery
...
11 In venerating the Great Being
that unfolds its potential through human history, the past, in all its
salient moments, is simply to be celebrated in acts of grateful worship
...

While Comte `appreciated' ancient slavery `toujours normale tant que la production
Â
 Á
Ã
resta necessairement subordonee a la conquete', modern slavery ± l'esclavage coloniale ±
Á
Â
Â
was worse than retrograde
...
Il ne put jamais constituer qu'une monstruosite sociale, emanee de
Ã
l'infame oppression que la race intelligente exerce sur la race aimante, en abusant une
 Â
Á
puissance que l'humanite developpa pour leur commun bonheur d'apres leur digne
concours' (ix:576)
...
250±5
...
We can endure it and strengthen ourselves against it only by thinking
that this is the way it had to be ± it is fate; nothing can be done
...
In a quite different sense
Macherey (1989:122) argues that Comte's thought can nonetheless be regarded as
`dans l'horizon d'une philosophie tragique'
...


160

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

and is dedicated to the commemoration of `military civilisation'
(xi:335)
...
Comte's re®guring of the past is not
Â
merely a collapse of history into veneration
...
It is also sacred because Humanity exists in time as well
as space, and the affective ties that bind the present to the past ± its
Â
continuite ± are an essential constituent of what it is
...
This
recuperation is itself, moreover, a purifying process
...

Comte is thus able to sidestep the traditional issues of sin and evil by
shifting their consideration to the subjective mode of being in which his
Â
`Humanity' largely exists
...
However, the
Â
`subjective existence' of l'Humanite does not exhaust what it is
...
So what ± returning
to the `sociological' question ± happens to evil on the plane of the socius
itself ?
Comte's account interweaves three logics
...
Secondly, there is a dialectic
Á
of war and production in which la vie guerriere helps prepare the
conditions for its supersession by la vie industrielle, so that the common
goal of planetary modi®cation comes to replace the divisive one of
conquest as the self-consciously collective path of material self-improvement
...
In the scale of
egoistic instincts, affective motor number ®ve (`improvement through
construction, or industrial instinct') rises in exercised intensity at the

The path to perfection

161

expense of affective motor number four (`improvement through destruction, or military instinct')
...
For through it violence, at ®rst sight
given a leading role, is summoned on to the stage only to be conjured
away and rede®ned as something else
...
On the other hand, both instinctually and functionally, destructiveness is never for its own sake
...
Thus Comte can equate the social violence of warfare,
plunder, conquest and enslavement with the destructiveness involved,
`even for herbivores', in the universal impulse to remove `obstacles'
without which no animal `would know how to subsist'
...
In that context, whether industrial or military in
form, l'instinct du perfectionnement was linked to greed, and bound to
produce a struggle for dominance
...
As well,
even at a higher stage of development, the balance between the constructive and destructive components of `improvement' always had to be
watched, given the instinctually greater energy and universality of the
latter
...
However,
Â
l'instinct destructeur, precisely by being assimilated to a wider instinct du
perfectionnement (vii:727), is not subtended by any irreducible aggression
or will to dominance as such
...

12

13

The closest Comte comes to the thought that destructiveness can, in principle, become
psychologically detached from its natural aim of perfectionnement is in a remark he
makes while surveying the positive contribution of the various instincts to the perfecting
Â
of l'existence active (in chap
...
`Neanmoins, cet
Â
instinct exigera toujours une surveillance speciale, parce qu'il ne cessera point de
Á
Â
Ã
participer a nos operations quelconques, meme mentales, qui supposent la destruction
Â
continue des obstacles qu'eprouve la construction graduelle des moyens
...

A similar denial entered into Comte's `positive theory of (material) property', which
treated violent forms of `material transmission' as imperfect means to attain
Á
Â
 Â
constructive social ends
...
L'industrie is
touted as the basis for social peace
...

The externalised violence of such a project had been foreshadowed in
food production from earliest times
...
Thus the
Â
difference between l'instinct destructif and l'instinct conservateur is not as
great as it would seem
...
Not only do
both aim at material betterment; both entail also the forceful subjugation (and where necessary, annihilation) of their object
...
In moving from divisive
military warfare to the unifying scienti®c±industrial domination of the
earth, the Baconian formula about obeying nature in order to command
her is retained without comment, so self-evident does the necessity of
such commanding seem
...
In the march of progress, violence is ®nally superseded in a
transformation that leaves no trace
...
Accordingly, while Comte's model
resembles Hegel's in its desire to reconcile liberal and conservative
viewpoints within an immanentist master framework that owes a great
deal to Aristotle and Leibnitz, its logic is more dogmatic than dialectical
...
He goes on to explain that private inheritance is a form of gift,
and that conquest is effectively a `forced' mode of exchange, in which the one party
receives life and the other the property
...


The path to perfection

163

persists into the Humanist heaven of industrialism is exnominated
...
Indeed, since violence is never
taken to have any blindly inhuman side, there is no negation to negate
...
The negative pole is characterised by
such terms as dispersif, pertabateur, anarchiste
...
And how is this to be
done? Not just by centrally applied force, since the perfection of order
entails its becoming cooperative and voluntary
...
Thus, as la vie militaire gives way to la vie industrielle, state
power becomes softened, legal sanctions become less brutal, and, in the
fully Positive state, civic and domestic order are primarily maintained
not by the coercive force of law but by moral pressure
...
A penal code (with capital punishment
for murder, duelling and suicide (vii:491)) will also be retained for the
most obdurate and antisocial elements
...
It will be
rooted, like Positive Religion itself, in the revamped `moral order of
domestic life'
...

It is there that the fundamental maxim: Live for others (vivre pour l'autrui)
receives its practical complement: live openly (vivre au grand jour), without
which it would soon become insuf®cient, and often even illusory
...
All who would refuse to live openly [au grand jour]
would justly be suspected of not really wanting to live for others
...
Mais envers les choses comme pour les personnes,
Á
Â
quoiqu'a un moindre degre, le sacerdoce conseillera toujours au gouvernement de
Â
Â
Â
Ã
preferer les moyens positifs aux voies negatives, en recompensant les uns plutot que
Á
Â
punir les autres; ce qu'ignore entierement notre brutale legislation' (viii:419)
...
`In all these instances', Bentham notes, `the more constantly the
persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the
more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been attained
...
In which respect, Horkheimer and Adorno's stricture against
Durkheimian sociology applies in full force to Comte
...
The same mysti®cation has a psychoanalytic
dimension, too
...
He therefore split it off from possible consideration as such, and blinded himself to its operation in his own mental
activity
...
In fact, there are two
...
The latter
symptomatises an irremediable weakness in his social thought, particularly in its effort to think human collectivity in the image of the
divine
...
More important, perhaps, he does not even suspect the possibility
of the question
...
For it touches both on the aptness of l'Humanite to ®ll the vacated
place of the Judeo-Christian God, and on the character of the divinity at
issue in the transfer
...
The ®rst
occlusion, however, i
...
of l'industrie's external violence, is less clearcut
...
Yet his elaboration of the Man/Nature relation,
and of its positive±industrial trans®guration, stretches the Baconian
paradigm to the limit
...
Love
culminates not in love for Humanity but for the `universal order' to
which Humanity must always submit and of which it is a dependent part
(x:64)
...
This being impossible, the next best thing to
be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being
able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so' (from a
letter of 1787, in Bentham, 1995:34)
...


The path to perfection

165

fetishism in the regression of his manie ± if not to a complete revision of
the Adamic mandate as Lord of Creation, at least towards the Humanist
incorporation of more ancient deities than `God'
...
`Despite the
abstract independence dreamed by the pride of theoreticians, all our
mental revolutions emanate
...
The activity which our instincts inspire, according to
our needs, always rules the general exercise of our intelligence' (ibid
...
Its object is always the
modi®cation of the milieu in line with experienced needs (xi:211)
...
Moreover, as the whole symphony of affective motors is
successively brought into play, the needs which `inspire activity' themselves change in line with socio-historical conditions
...
16
Again, there are striking parallels with Marx
...
They are situated in
different problematisations of the social
...
This is related, as well, to a profound
difference in their conception of what Marx calls the social relations of
production
...
In Politique positive, the idea is
considerably developed with regard both to the impact of the material order on
individual and society, and to the human capacity to modify `the modi®ers'
...
7 in vol
...


166

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

reorganisation of industry itself
...
Marx, at least in his early
works, would break it down
...
He is anti-puritanical and emphasises,
rather, the rich manifold of capacities and satisfactions which history
reveals once the basic ones are served
...

Nevertheless, in their valorisation of `modern industry', Comte and
Marx equally subscribe to the Enlightenment program of dominating
nature through the application of science to serve human needs
...
Both regard the rise of the productive
forces as the prime cause of other forms of progress
...
In The Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts Marx wrote:
This communism [`as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for
man'], as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed
humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the con¯ict between
man and nature and between man and man ± the true resolution of the strife
between man and man, between existence and essence, between objecti®cation
and self-con®rmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual
and the species
...
(1964:135)

Substitute positivism for communism, and l'ordre universel for nature,
and we have a credo not inconsistent with that of Comte
...
All forms of life
carve out a niche and so modify (at the level of `secondary phenomena')
the immutable order around them
...
Freedom in this ®eld cannot consist of anything else but the fact
that socialized mankind, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with
Nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as
by some blind power
...
Beyond
it begins that development of human potentiality for its own sake, the true realm of
freedom, which however can only ¯ourish on the basis of the realm of necessity as its
basis' (from vol
...
in Bottomore and Rubel, 1963:260)
...


The path to perfection

167

essential difference between l'ordre vital and the rest of the cosmos
(vii:586)
...
Linguistic capacity, in turn, enables know-how to be transmitted, and, through abstract reasoning, to accumulate from generation
to generation
...

The ®rst stage of terrestrial domination involved establishing the
ascendancy of humankind as a life-form
...
Edible
prey are hunted down, before they and usable by-products are more
systematically farmed
...
As farming replaces hunter-gathering, we move from simple
appropriation to cumulative modi®cation (ix:104)
...
The horizons thereafter unceasingly
expand
...
Comte has his own list of
techno-dreams
...
, he envisages two other developments of
breathtaking scope
...
Here, beyond continuing measures `to gradually diminish the in¯uences accessible to our
intervention' as well as to preserve us `from those which remain inalterable' (viii:461), he conceives ± though just as an inspiring ®ction ± the
fantastical project of `correcting' the earth's elliptical orbit
...
`Sous
Ã
 Á
cet aspect social, l'institution du langage doit etre ®nalement comparee a celle de la
 Â
Á
Â
propriete
...
Apres
Â
avoir essentiellement facilite l'acquisition de toutes les connaissances humaines,
Â
Â
Â
theoriques ou pratiques, et diriges par notre essor esthetique, le langage consacre cette
Á
Â
double richesse, et la transmet a de nouveaux cooperateurs' (viii:254)
...
Their general rationale and place in the system is discussed in x:274±6
...
With such technical advances, we may note, a further line would
have been crossed
...

Even in the earliest days of the industrial revolution, the Baconian
program ± `increase human knowledge to the achievement of all things
possible' ± had its detractors
...
Over the next European
century, the aesthetic pain evinced, in the souls of the sensitive, by
Manchester-style urbanisation, the fouling of rivers and the industrialisation of green sites, is recorded in the cult of the pastoral, the folkloric,
the medieval and the picturesque, as well as in the romanticism that
reaches its musical heights in Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn and
Mahler
...
One strand of thinking
runs from German Kultur-kritik to the interwar preoccupation with
mechanisation and `technics', and enters classical sociology by way of
Weber's analysis of the irrationality of rationalisation (Gerth and Mills,
1958:281 et seq
...
For Lukacs and the
Frankfurt thinkers, such arguments, which resonated powerfully in the
antimodernist right, were in¯ected towards the left
...
It also left a vacuum in transcending social
aims which ideologically delivered science and technology over to the
established (capitalist) order
...
In the `totally administered' societies
et les tentatives propres au perfectionnement continu de nos triple nature
...
The setting and
realisation of `limit-ideals', which involves the interplay of poetic imagination and
scienti®c±industrial advance, would make progress continue even beyond the attainment of the `®nal state'
...


The path to perfection

169

of the 1930s and 40s, `the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster
triumphant' (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1989:3)
...
In that
context the focus has moved away from rationalisation, mechanisation
and the `disenchantment of the world' towards concerns about limits to
growth and the gathering environmental crisis
...
This
proposes to moderate the industrial project by counselling attention to
reproduction and time
...
Heidegger, whose
postmodern revival has hardly been dented by political exposure,
bridges this latter tendency and the anti-instrumentalist critique
...
The demonic essence of modernische Teknik is to enframe thinking
in a technological Gestell which makes such revealing inaccessible by
turning all that is into mere raw materials, or `standing reserve'
(1977a:23)
...
Moderate environmentalism, which insists on interconnectedness, correcting `external
effects', and the importance of material reproducibility through time,
aims to enhance the prudential intelligence with which the technical
exploitation of the planet is pursued
...
On the other hand,
Comte's forthright insistence on a phenomenally based and instrumentalist practice of science, as well as on the legitimacy of extending such
an approach to the human domain, leaves him vulnerable to the more
fundamental challenges that can be generated from the side of Critical
Theory
...
An excursus on Comte would not have been out of
place
...

However, as with so much of Comte's thinking, matters are less

170

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

simple than they appear
...
He condemns as
`idiotisme' an empiricism pursued in abstraction from sentiment and
subjectivity (ix:20)
...
As with Bacon himself, the techno-industrial project
would be empty without a philanthropic spirit and `the spice of religion'
...

From the vantage point of what he takes to be social science itself,
most important, the predicted and advocated rise to ascendancy of the
puissance modifactrice was inconceivable except in the context of a wider,
socially perfecting, evolutionary step
...

Its very occurrence, then, was inextricably bound up with an institutionalised revolution in sentiments
...
There is a providential magic to this
...
In hindsight, nothing of
the sort has occurred
...
This is not simply the utilitarian domination of nature, but
that project as Positively ± and therefore morally ± transformed
...
In contrast to the egoõsme which had
deformed industrialism in its initial stages, the `normal' form destined
to emerge would be completely collective in spirit
...
Pursuing that common
good, moreover, would entail the improvement of the species not just
materially, but in the highest moral sense
...
La socratie doit, a cet egard,
Â
Â
Â
completer la theocratie, en faisant sagement cesser une separation provisoire, non
moins irrationelle qu'immorale, entre les fonctions publiques et les of®ces publiques
...


The path to perfection

171

as driven by market forces
...
The good of all
for whose sake human power is to be deployed, for example, includes
obligations to the dead and the unborn
...
Which is not to say that
the will of each is destined always to con¯ict with the general will, since
in the `®nal state' individuals come to desire this higher good as an
expression of their own (religiously cultivated) need
...
To which extent, Positivism with a capital
`p' may be objectionable as a totalising utopia, but it would be a drastic
simpli®cation to understand it as just an early, and extreme, manifestation of one-dimensional, technicist thinking
...
Does not Comte's
glori®cation of scienti®c±industrial development pro causa Humana
manifest hubris on behalf of the human species itself ? Does it not
uncritically arrogate to Humanity a kind of planetary right of the
strongest? Worse: is it not idolatrous, revealing in the religious
apotheosis of Humanity an absolutism that is utterly careless of particularity ± whether of trees or people ± and thus as oblivious to the call of
beings as to that of Being? The questions would seem rhetorical, but we
should not be too quick to respond
...
`It is to ameliorate our situation or our nature, not to vainly show
off our power, that we ceaselessly tend to modify the universal economy'
(viii:465)
...
But what, for Comte, is this highest interest itself ? Not
happiness, certainly; although if moral wellbeing is the answer, happi21

22

Â
`En ecartant les parasites de plus en plus exceptionnels, tous les praticiens deviennent,
Ã
Â
Â
Â
dans l'etat positif, des serviteurs directs du Grand-Etre envers le tresor materiel que sa
Á
 Â
providence transmet a chaque generation pour la suivante' (ix:58)
...
Mais cette source
commune du bonheur humain se modi®e suivant les aptitudes et les situations, sous
Â
 Â
une sage application de l'education universelle
...
22 At the same time, this interest also exceeds that
of present individuals and of the collective they temporarily make up
...

Humanity's highest interest lies, then, in the process of anthropological
improvement itself
...

Improvement, of course, was always for Comte the improvement of
order
...
But the moral
signi®cance of rising human power over nature is not exhausted by the
merely social transformation with which it is bound up
...
What we must now add is that, for Comte, the
increasing acquisition of such power brings Humanity to the point of a
further moral advance ± an advance which universalises the project of
collective self-perfection itself
...
Through an active, and not just resigned,
submission to this order, `humanity tends towards its normal attitude,
as the supreme moderator of the natural economy, whose wise improvement becomes the continuous goal of its providential efforts, suitably
helped by all the agents, organic and inorganic, which can cooperate'
(viii:42±3)
...
The ®rst is an archaic development that initiated, and
foreshadowed, the trans®gured relation between humankind and nature
which Comte envisages
...

Through it, humanity enters into a limitedly free, rather than hunting/
hunted, relationship with those of its fellow-creatures (horses, oxen,
dogs, cats etc
...
The practical

23

richesse et le nombre' (x:61)
...

Â
Â
`Une meilleure appreciation de l'ordre fondamental ennoblit donc notre resignation
Â
Â
necessaire, en la convertant en une soumission active
...


The path to perfection

173

result has been a gain in human power
...
Dogs, horses etc
...

They become emotionally incorporated into the human milieu, both
immediately and in a social sense
...

The relation Comte sees as having been installed between humankind
and domesticated animals, and thus more generally between it and the
rest of the `vital order', is founded on attachement, and brings into play
the polyphonies of love
...
One effect is that Humanity
expands
...
25 The
domestication of animals entails new forms of symbiosis, and introduces
harmony into relations that would otherwise be indifferent or even
antagonistic
...

Two further examples which belong to Comte's extravagant technological aspirations for the future, I have already mentioned
...
By separating propagation from the `delirium and irresponsi24

25

26

Á
`Relativement a nos auxiliaires, la sympathie humaine peut et doit suivre un meilleur
cours, en perfectionnant, non-seulement leur situation, mais surtout leur nature,
Á
Â
physique, intellectuelle, et morale, d'apres le developpement habituel de la vraie
Â
  Â
fraternite
...

Ã
`On ne peut assez concevoir la constitution du Grand-Etre qu'en combinant notre
Á
Ã
espece avec toutes les races susceptibles d'adopter la commune devise des ames
Â
Â
superieures: Vivre pour l'autrui
...
By this de®nition, the
household pet is a part of Humanity, but not the incorrigible petty thief
...
He implies both arti®cial insemination, on which he is silent, and the arti®cial production of le ¯uide vivi®ant
...


174

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

bility' of the current method, a `systematic' approach could be taken to
this `most important of productions'
...
But again,
as with the domestication of animals, there is a dimension of moral
improvement
...
By eliminating the need
for sexual activity in human reproduction, we could create the biological
conditions for universal celibacy
...
For women,
whose desire for maternity was in any case greater than their purely
sexual desire, this would be no effort
...
27 As for men, `education and opinion would
easily make prevail the need to conserve le ¯uide vivi®ant for its normal
destination' (x:277±8); this being to `stimulate the blood' so as to
`strengthen all the vital operations' (x:276)
...

(They have been deliciously explored in Vonnegut's short story
`Welcome to the Monkey House' (1968)
...
28 The emphasis was on purifying the means of biological
production at least as much as on enhancing the quality of results
...
The idea is alluded to in a passage of the
Â
Catechisme positiviste where he is explaining his conception of `modi®able
fatality', and the mental attitude (resigned but active) which it implies
...
At present this idea
extends even to the order of the heavens, its greater simplicity allowing us more
easily to conceive improvements, with a view to correcting a spirit of blind
27

28

Ã
Á
Besides the inevitable fete with which the `utopia' of la Vierge-Mere was associated, it
Â
Â
Â
was to hold a symbolically central place in Positive Religion, `un resume synthetique
Â
Á
equivalent a celui que l'institution de l'Euchariste fournit au catholicisme' (x:279)
...
paraissent dues a des in¯uences locales, lentement
Â
  Â
Á
accumulees par l'heredite, jusqu'a produire le maximum correspondant de variation
organique' (viii:49)
...
tant que les faits
Â
certains et nombreux ne le dementiront pas' (ibid
...
(xi:54)

Á
The idea is more speci®cally sketched out in the introduction to Synthese
subjective
...
We are to imagine this occurring through a series of
`explosions like those that gave rise to the comets'
...

Once more, what is striking is less the actual technology envisaged
than its moral intent
...
But why do it? Convenience and comfort are only part of the
answer
...

Climate belongs to a larger list of `sources of social modi®cation'
(viii:443)
...
Each
represents an altering, but also alterable, aspect of the human milieu
...
29 What diminishes the effect of
`dynamic' modi®ers is both the global convergence towards industriÂ
alism and the growing importance of continuite in the `normal' unity of
the human ensemble
...
Material advances which have enabled the species to
spread out over the earth have increasingly smoothed out environmentally conditioned differences between group cultures
...

Â
Â
`Il ne faut pas croire que cette source de croissante de regularite tienne seulement, ni
Ã
Á
Â
meme principalement, a l'heureuse transformation de notre activite collective,
Â
Á
desormais industrielle au lieu de rester guerriere
...
Devant cette preponderance des morts, toutes les perturbations des vivants
se dissipent de plus en plus' (viii:463)
...
The overall effect of humanity's growing capacity to modify the `involuntary' modi®ers was to
reverse, at the very summit of its social expression, the tendency of
complex orders of reality to become ever more differentiated
...
The correctives made possible by the growth of
Humanity's modifying power were therefore crucial
...
The phrase is striking
...

The ideal of an objectively perfected cosmos which Positivism subjectively installs at the heart of production is no doubt still human-centred
...
Beyond that, the ideal also transfers
on to non-human reality, criteria of value ± harmony, benevolence, unity
± which ®rst arose as ideals for humanity with regard to itself
...
Nor, indeed, would it serve only to
perfect the condition of the human species itself as a whole
...
That love ± which Comte calls
l'amour universel (vii:91) ± is one that has become altruistic in the fullest
possible sense
...
It extends to the non-human Other
...

It moves outward to embrace, and benignly improve, not only everything in the range of the human senses, but the order of things as such
...
Le Grand-Etre inaugure irrevocablement sa providence universelle en
Á
Â
 Â
appliquant l'ensemble des lois
...
Toutes les speculations s'y tendent a consolider l'amour
Â
universel, seul capable de les systematiser, de les consacrer, et de les discipliner'
(x:524±5)
...
Cognitive humility was Bacon's ®rst principle for a
new science
...
That recognition, however, clashed not only with the metaphysical in¯ation of individual reason, but also with the collective egoism
that lordship over nature through positive science itself implied
...
For it would entail not just grudgingly
accepting, but cherishing and revering, the unsurpassable limitations
which subordinate the Great Being of Humanity to the whole natural
order ± an order on which not just brute existence but even its
`modifying power' totally depend
...

Systematic fetishism and l'amour universel
The amor fati which crowns Comte's logico-historical account of the
triumph of love in a curious way ful®lls Saint-Simon's earlier gropings
for a moral principle which would connect a scienti®c understanding of
cosmic order to St Paul's dictum that God is love
...
32 In similar fashion, the
`destiny' which Positive Religion enjoins and prepares us to love is
conceived not just as a sobering corrective to human pride, but as Love
itself writ large
...

However, Comte's conception of `universal sympathy' departs from
Saint-Simon's in two important respects
...
For Comte, the law of gravity had an exemplary simplicity and
Â
Â
Á
Â
generality, since it had `radicalement liee toutes les notions celestes, a un degre dont la
Â
sociologie offre seule l'equivalent' (vii:512); but it otherwise held no special place in his
system
...
Secondly, its scienti®c status in Comte's system is
crucially different from the place it held in Saint-Simon's
...
The Positivist synthesis was `relative', and that meant relative
to the standpoint, impulses and requirements of the evolving human
observer
...
The sociolatric belief that universal sympathy
without mirrored universal sympathy within was not given directly by
reason, nor could it be justi®ed by the strict operations of a phenomenal
science
...

It is in just this context that Comte undertakes his most startling
manoeuvre: the proposed resuscitation of that elemental religious mode
Â
he called fetichisme
...
The effect on his attempt to
think the religious requirements of industrial society was to push the
Â
search for une foi demontrable to the point of complete contradiction
...
On the
other hand, by expanding the Positivist cult to include adoration of the
whole `universal order', he risked diminishing or even dethroning the
divinised Humanity that was its focal object
...
34 The
33

34

Hence the order to be pursued by Positivist education, which would only initiate its
pupils into the sciences by way of the subjectively synthesised seven sciences, and then
only when preceded by a course in la morale
...
ne caracterisent pleinement que les lois morales, sans pouvoir assez
manifester les lois intellectuelles, et surtout les lois physiques
...
To proceed directly into scienti®c education risked
Â
Â
Â
Â
`dessecher le coeur en detournant du but synthetique par des preoccupations
analytiques' (x:192)
...


The path to perfection

179

`evidence' for this supposition was provided by imperial European
contact with aboriginal cultures in North America, Africa and Polynesia
...

Comte's re-evaluation of fetishism proceeds through a series of
increasingly sympathetic re®nements to the initial assessment he made
of it in Philosophie positive
...
On the ®rst score, fetishism's
hypothesis that entities were inhabited by spirits whose wilful activity
(which we might in¯uence through ritual or prayer) ruled the phenomenal world35 was taken to be the matrix for every kind of `theological'
belief, up to and including the abstract essentialism of `metaphysics'
itself
...
Both for individuals and for society as a whole, starting
hypotheses, however fantastic, were essential if knowledge was to
advance at all (v:50±1)
...

But already this still somewhat condescending quali®cation was
reinforced by an additional consideration
...
Besides providing a `provisional' system of socially unifying belief, the speci®c hallmark of
fetishism was that it combined a general preponderance of `passions
over reason' with a projection of such feelings into its personi®cations of
Â
the external world
...
This made impossible that freedom from
dogma necessary for a ®eld of phenomena to be investigable in a factoriented manner
...


180

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

illusion of human power, and so stimulated `the ®rst rise of human
activity', the fetishisation of `most external bodies' interdicted `all
serious environmental modi®cation', so that the development of that
activity was extremely slow (v:56±7)
...
In its
mimetic and imagistic forms of communication, fetishism had also
developed a mode of representation that combined concept, percept
and feeling (v:38)
...
36 This
foreshadowed a subjective harmony of humanity and world which
positivism alone would be able to recover and place on a scienti®c basis
...
The fetishist
peopling of sensuous reality with living beings evinced a venerative love
towards le dehors which was essential for the rise of both knowledge and
social life
...
This was not to deny their
own contributions
...
However, the theological apotheosis of the divine absolute had alienated humankind from
its most elevated sentiments in dealing with its own milieu
...
The
Greek and Roman pantheons were still full of nature gods, though
36

37

38

Â
Â
Â
Â
`Tous les corps observables etant ainsi immediatement personni®es, et doues de
Á
Â
Â
Á
passions ordinairement tres puissantes, selon l'energie de leur phenomenes, le monde
Â
Â
Â
exterieur se presente spontanement, envers le spectateur, dans une parfaite harmonie,
Ã
Â
qui n'a pu jamais retrouver ensuite au meme degre, et qui doit produire en lui un
Â
Á
sentiment special de pleine satisfaction, qui nous ne pouvons guere quali®er
Â
Ã
aujourd'hui convenablement, faute de pouvoir suf®sament l'eprouver, meme en nous
Â
Â
Á
reportant, par la meditation plus intense et la mieux dirigee, a ce berceau de
Â
l'humanite' (v:36±7)
...
Or cette soumission fondamentale de
Â
Â
l'homme au monde se trouve instituee autant que possible par le fetichisme, puisqu'il la
Á
Á
Á
Â
pousse jusqu'a l'adoration de la matiere, d'apres les affections et les volontes qu'il
Â
attribue au corps exterieurs' (ix:91±2)
...
`En renoncant ensuite a rien connaõtre
Ë
Á
Â
Â
au dela des lois reelles
...
Mais la division
fondamentale de la science physique en cosmologie et biologie maintient partout

The path to perfection

181

limited in scope and power by a pitiless Ananke
...
38 All wilful activity was reserved
for a hidden God who sat outside phenomena and intervened (whether
miraculously or as a continuing ®rst cause of natural law) from a netherworld beyond the merely actual one given by our senses
...

The fetishist imaginary offered a corrective to the withdrawal of affect
from the natural world, a withdrawal which had become chronic even
before the transitional epoch of metaphysics when an overweening
intellect had rebelled against all ®deistic restraint
...
The monotheistic synthesis had
to be intellectually overthrown for a better, science-based, one to arise
...

To achieve the requisite restoration of balance between intellect and
sentiment it was immediately necessary to institute the religion of
Â
Humanity
...
Happily, the subjective and altruistic
turn effected by the culmination of the scienti®c revolution in the moral
science of man did not terminate there
...
The domains of positive science, as reconceived
from the vantage point of la science ®nale, become objects of affection,

39

Â
Â
Á
Â
Â
l'activite spontanee, apres l'elimination des attributs humains que le fetichisme y
Â
Â
Ã
joignait
...

An error compounded, for Comte, by a metaphysical theory of language which
exaggerated the arbitrary character of conventional signs
...
Needless to say, Comte's positive theory of language ±
which emphasised the function of language in `®xing habitual links between the inside
and the outside' ± not only insisted on its socially produced character but also privileged
Â
the spoken over the written
...
One notes, though, that this is
connected to a historical thesis according to which human language began through
gestural imitation, and thus ± unlike in romantic versions of phonocentrism (which
stress the authenticity and originality of the voice) ± was more visual than phonic in the
`primitive state'
...
With the establishment of such a doctrine, Positivism
directly combines the notion of the human order with that of the universal
order, in representing the one as the necessary summary of the other
...
(viii:368)

But what was this `better form'? And how could a renewal of `fetishist
affections' be achieved at all without violating scienti®c reason? The
Politique positive had only posed these questions
...

Comtean sociology, as outlined in the Politique positive, had already
indicated that the need to break from anthropomorphism and animist
magic in scienti®c practice by no means eliminated the irreducible
functions which these might play at another level ± for example in the
social production and reproduction of solidarity
...
The `fundamental sciences' produced only formal,
nomothetic, knowledge
...
`In considering that each group of phenomena cannot ever be
entirely ®xed, one recognises that the immutability of natural laws
cannot be squared with composite events, and remains limited to their
irreducible elements' (xii:7)
...

Nevertheless, archaic forms of fetishism could not just be wrenched
from their socio-historical context and imported holus-bolus
...
In the most general terms, and following a schema in which the highest order of existence possessed not
just `life' but the attributes of thinking, acting and feeling, the universe
could be imagined to consist of three orders of being
...
In a second category was
Á
the physical order of external reality, centred on la planete humaine
...
However, `[in] dissipating the theological prejudices which would represent matter as entirely inert, science tends to
lend it the character of activity, which fetishism had spontaneously
consecrated' (9)
...
It thus `conceives the world as aspiring to support man'
± both in an everyday sense, but also through such ®ctions as orbital
self-correction ± `in order to ameliorate the universal order under the
impulsion of the Great Being' (x:12)
...
The ®rst category included the
domains of la morale and sociology; the second, that of physics (further
divided into terrestrial and celestial)
...
But there remained a third
category consisting of the `abstract' or `fundamental' order in which
were assembled those universal laws which pertained to `the forms of
existence common to all things'
...

It dealt with the most general laws of nature
...
This most abstract yet most fundamental dimension of being
was to be conceived as pure sentiment
...

The practical point of Comte's trichotomy was to bring within the
orbit of an altruistic affection the entirety of the cosmos in which
Humanity is placed
...
They needed to be rendered
40

See Table B, `Theoretical Hierarchy of Human Conceptions: or Synthetical View of the
Universal Order', reproduced in the appendix to the English translation of the
Â
Catechisme positiviste (Comte, 1973)
...
And, indeed, not just casually, but
systematically, so that they could serve, and be affectively reinforced, as
objects of worship
...

The iconic representation of Humanity itself presented no problem
...
In its greater amorphousness, the second term of the Positivist trinity was more dif®cult
...
In the days before space photography, however, this
Â
Grand Fetiche could hardly be pictured, so Comte urged recourse to the
poetic and artistic imagery that surrounded the idea of le Monde (xii:18)
...
It
was wholly abstract and lacked a physical site
...
The latter provided the signifying materials through which
the purely ideational reality of the former could be symbolically invested
with the spiritual force of l'amour universel
...
`In order
that sympathy can be suf®ciently developed, it is necessary to idealise
not just the objective world, but also the subjective milieu in which we
place all external phenomena' (x:23)
...

Not the least striking aspect of this third member of the trinity is that
it brings Comte close to suggesting that nothingness is the ground of all
being
...

Unlike Nietzsche and Heidegger, however, through whom the negatively
theological, or in the case of Mark Taylor (1984) the a/theological,
implications of this thought have entered into contemporary postmo-

The path to perfection

185

dern discourse, Comte's rendition of it was ®rmly inscribed within a
realism of the social
...
Thus his encounter with nothingness is never abyssal
...
Immediately following his enthusiastic proposal for the
worship of Space, indeed, he further softens its potentially disturbing
negativity
...
`Abridging the
interval which the World, that is to say the Earth, ®lls between Space
and Humanity, we can directly connect the two furthest elements of the
 Â
supreme trinity, in attributing to le ¯uide generale the objectivity of the
most abstract laws' (xii:25)
...
From the beginning,
indeed, Comte's synthesis had intended to provide the basis not only for
harmonising individual minds
...
Completing the `Catholicism minus
Christianity' of his scienti®c Humanism with the cultus of le Grand
Â
Fetiche and le Grand Milieu was conceived, inter alia, as a cross-cultural
syncretism which would bring such unifying efforts to a climactic
ful®lment
...

Such arguments, however, in all the chimerical, not to say imperialising, guise in which they now appear, should not divert us from
critically scrutinising the evolving socio-theology that remains at their
core
...
I will turn to these questions in the
next chapter
...
41 This is not to
say, however, that Comte's ®nal position is completely unassailable in
such terms
...
To worship le Grand Fetiche, while directing aggression
away from warfare towards its useful exploitation, implies an aesthetic
desecration at odds with sacralising the Earth
...

Thus in the end Positivism only avoids an idolatry of Humanity by
idolising order as such
...
In making this move, moreover, the divine
Á
principle that begins to migrate in the Synthese subjective from Humanity
as such to a certain human idea of the cosmos becomes doctrinally
lodged within subjectivity itself
...
In loving the universal order
which the positivised soul projects into the universe, that faith remains
wrapped up in its own subjectivity
...
Indeed, if we question what Comte takes for granted ± the
identi®cation of moral and physical perfection with one another in the
idea of a perfectly harmonious formal system ± the whole System
dissolves into the arbitrary
...
the thinking in Being and Time is against humanism
...
Humanism is
opposed because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough
...
Man is rather `thrown'
from Being itself into the truth of Being, so that ek-sisting in this fashion he might
appear in the light of Being as the beings they are
...
Man is the shepherd of Being' (Heidegger,
1977b:210)
...
A this-worldly,
and antimetaphysical, demythologisation of the kind attempted more
maximally by Nietzsche coexists with a remythologisation designed to
buttress a new, and this time unassailable, foundation for reestablishing
subjective unity in the face of the anarchy he feared was terminal
...
The `suf®cient incorporation of fetishism into positivism'
(xi:7) leads neither to perspectivalism, nor to an unsettling in®nitude,
nor to a real plurality of gods
...
1 If
they are themselves to be regarded as sacred, it is only as a projective
Â
extension of l'Humanite or, more precisely, of the `universal sympathy'
engendered in and through us as its constituent agents and organs
...

1

It should be cautioned that Comte's ideas on the Positivist godhead evolved considerably
Ã
after he ®rst introduced the worship of le Grand-Etre, and were not fully worked out by
the time he died
...
To
Â
supplement its scienti®c side he proposes the establishment of une poesie positiviste,
Â
employing `un nouvel ordre de moyens poetiques, que suscite la fusion normale de la
Â
Â
Â
Â
fetichite dans la positivite
...
En developpant ce domaine initial, la poesie positive
Â
Â
Á
Á
devra l'etendre autant aux phenomenes qu'aux substances, d'apres l'essor abstrait
Â
partout accompli depuis le fetichisme
...
[L]'espace offre le premier exemple, et jusqu'ici le
Á
plus complet, d'un tel arti®ce logique' (x:53)
...
This discussion is
con®ned, though, to matters of theory and doctrine
...
Given an already crowded, and multiply
systematised, calendar of festivals, it is here, perhaps, that Comte might have been led to
address the potential contradiction between his Sociolatry and a growing inclination to
worship l'ordre universel as a whole
...
I have tried to show
how shaky the scaffolding was on which this whole edi®ce is built
...
The divinisation of humankind, whether
explicit or not, goes to the heart of progressive, post-theistic attempts to
rethink modernity's ideological situation, and the very contradictions by
which Comte's positivist theology of the human are beset belong to what
has long been problematic in that situation
...

Faith after `God'
Nietzsche wrote little directly about Comte
...
In Twilight of the Idols, the rise of phenomenalism makes its appearance, after the long night of Greek and Christian
metaphysical idealism, as `day break ± the ®rst yawnings of reason'
(1990:50)
...
He is `that great honest
Frenchman beside whom, as embracer and conqueror of the strict
sciences, the German and English of this century can place no rival'
(1982:215)
...
Like others who found something to admire in the
Ã
Â
early Comte, Nietzsche thought that the Grand-pretre de l'Humanite,
with that self-identi®cation, had gone off the rails
...
With the weariness of approaching old age, Comte, like Plato,
had just stopped thinking
...
Comte's
decline into a rigid and lachrymose religiosity was in any case a

Ã
Humanity as `le vrai Grand-Etre'

189

secondary matter
...

Only in its exaggerations, moreover, was Comte's apotheosis of the
social sentiments particularly idiosyncratic
...
2 Such teachings
`have shot up with a mighty impetus everywhere', Nietzsche notes, and
`every socialist system has placed itself as if involuntarily' on their
common ground
...
(1982:83)

Comte, then, was a Janus ®gure, his thought an arrow pointing backwards towards `declining' values as well as forwards towards transvaluation
...

Both Nietzsche and Comte claimed that their radically divergent
positions were not only in tune with a scienti®c approach to human
realities, but ¯owed directly from the rupture in thought which the
adoption of such an approach entailed
...

Pragmatically, perhaps, he felt no need to
...
With these he pro2

`Today it seems to do everyone good when they hear that society is on the way to adapting
the individual to general requirements, and that happiness and at the same time the sacri®ce
of the individual lies in feeling himself to be a useful member and instrument of the
whole; except that one is at present very uncertain as to where this whole is to be sought,
whether in an existing state or one still to be created, or in the nation, or in a
brotherhood of peoples, or in new little economic communalities
...


190

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

ceeded to his own `scienti®c' reading of the contemporary European
`moral' situation
...
3 Thus, we might say, a Nietzschean engagement with the
`anthropologism' underpinning Comte's moralism was (philosophically)
possible, but (social-scienti®cally) postponed
...
It is not just that he rejected a
hypostasised collective subject, as for example in the `new idol' of the
state (1961:75±8)
...
There
was no speci®cally social reality to know
...
5
3

4

5

`To imagine for an instant what the world and thought would be if man did not exist, is
considered to be merely engaging in paradox
...
It is
easy to see why Nietzsche's thought should have had, and still has for us, such a
disturbing power when it is introduced in the form of an imminent event, the Promise±
Threat, the notion that man would soon be no more ± but would be replaced by the
superman; in a philosophy of the Return, this meant that man had long since
disappeared and would continue to disappear, and that our modern thought about man,
our concern for him, our humanism, were all sleeping serenely over the threatening
rumble of his non-existence' (Foucault, 1970:322)
...

Conway does not challenge the view, though, that Nietzsche's thought was more
generally assimilated to a paradigm which combines a voluntarist understanding of
`institutions' with a biologically framed understanding of `peoples'
...
`Our institutions are no longer ®t for anything: everyone is
unanimous about that
...
Having lost all the
instincts out of which institutions grow, we are losing the institutions themselves,
because we are no longer ®t for them' (Nietzsche, 1990:104)
...
Its content: not its weary tone of
`poetic mists and mystic lights', nor its punctilious prescriptions, but its
precipitation, out of a sociologically transformed moralism, of a new
deity
...
But if the Christian God was
dead, was not the Cruci®ed also? To which extent, as Nietzsche himself
argued, the crucial fault line in the modern ideological ®eld was no
longer between Christianity (Reformed or Counter-Reformed) and
everything he meant by Dionysus, but between the latter and Christianity's enlightened secular afterlife, including socialism in all its (not
necessarily left-wing or even anticapitalist) forms
...

Society was to be worshipped ± not only because of the functional
requirements of establishing industrial order, but because it is the
genuine source of all that is sacred
...
It would have been more accurate, then, for
Nietzsche's challenge to have been written: Dionysus vs Humanity
...
When radical humanists lament that `God is not yet dead
because Man is not yet alive' (Gardavsky, 1973) latter-day Nietzscheans
can only reply with a shrug
...

Even among those nineteenth-century thinkers who were sympathetic
to the religio-moral dimension of Comte's project, there was a tendency
to ignore, or explain away, the full force of what he came to af®rm
...
Positivism had always
been a `faith', and it remained one that was distinctive in being `demonstrable'
...

The number of men with suf®cient leisure and enough culture to examine the
conclusions and go into their proofs will always be small
...
as
the norm of sociological value-judgment' (Nietzsche, 1990:103)
...
But, differing on this point from
the religious dogmas which humanity has known till now, the new faith will be
`demonstrated'
...
(Levy-Bruhl, 1973:26±7)
Faith therefore signi®es here not indeed a voluntary abdication of the intellect
in the presence of a mystery which surpasses its power of comprehension, but a
submission to fact, which in no way encroaches upon the rights of reason
...
In supernatural religion we have dogma and
 Â
Â
foi revelatoire, in Positivism une foi demontrable
...
In effect, however, this
is to confuse two distinctions
...
The second ± less self-evidently absolute than Levy-Bruhl
assumed ± contrasts `revelation' and `demonstration' (based on `fact') as
alternative bases for religious faith
...

Quite aside from all the dif®culties surrounding the identi®cation
(and construction) of factuality (if facts are always `relative', how can
they elicit `submission'?), this understanding of Comte's credo relies on
a reduced notion of religious faith: faith is just a species of strongly held
opinion
...
It
equally ignores the presence, at least after 1847, of a directly experienced
quality in Comte's own religiosity, glossing over such things as his
emphasis on (private) prayer
...
See chap
...


Ã
Humanity as `le vrai Grand-Etre'

193

the whole Positivist priesthood
...

To be sure, this `faith' accorded with what Comte took to be scienti®c
certitude (concerning, for example, the necessary moral and material
dependence of the individual on Humanity as a whole)
...
Nor could the objective and subjective dimensions of such a
faith wholly coincide
...
The subjective
apprehension of Humanity was necessary as a complement to objective
knowledge about it
...

To insist that Comte's dei®catory construal of Humanity be taken
seriously, both as an idea and as an experience, is, in the ®rst instance,
an interpretative point
...
If it is historically correct to say that we still live
`amidst the dereliction of Nietzsche's idols',7 it is also true that secularised moralism about the human, the social, the collective etc
...
To this extent, even though Comte's particular
theoretico-ideological assemblage may be irretrievably obsolete, critically re¯ecting on it may help to clarify some features of what such a
commitment entails, at least in the thinking of those who would
embrace what can be salvaged from the Enlightenment but are radically
dissatis®ed with the current historical drift
...
How, and how coherently, was it conceptualised? In what sense
did Humanity have a divine character? And what ± along the continuum,
let us say, from the real to the ®ctive ± was its status as an existent?
7

The phrase is Philippa Berry's, from the preface to Berry and Wernick, 1993:ii
...
In part because of this same multiplicity, however, it
is a good deal less so than Comte himself imagined
...

And as in this fullest sense it is incompatible with any feeling of hatred towards
other races, there is little inconvenience in using the term as the expression of
the largest and most universal form of sympathy
...
to the best type of vital unity, which, as the foregoing remarks will have
shown, tends more and more towards dependence upon this instinct
...
For it permits a conceptual slide from the
human species considered generically as a type of higher primate, to the
same considered collectively as a (developing) life-form in itself; and a
further slide from this to `the best type of vital unity', itself secured
through the harmonising force of the highest form of (instinctual)
sympathy which that totality comes to manifest the more it develops
...
Already we can identify at least four
different senses of `Humanity'
...

For Comte, the key move in constituting this apparatus was to
positivise the study of l'homme (a term which, to confuse things further,
Â
he replaced in later works with that of l'humanite (lower case) in referring
generically to the species)
...
As Durkheim remarked, rather than begin with the patient
assembly and careful comparison of social facts, as his method required,
Comte proceeded straightaway to practical conclusions as though `he
8

Á
After 1847 `la vague et irrationnelle notion de l'Homme', while continuing `a servir
Â
Â
l'unite zoologique' (vii:658), is generally dropped in favour of l'humanite (lower case)
Â
where its referent is biologically generic; l'humanite's upper-casing (which had not
appeared before 1847) denotes its explicitly religious usage as a term for le vrai GrandÃ
Etre
...

Comte's premature leap towards a completed knowledge of the
social gave itself an elaborate justi®cation
...
Its consideration of `relations
of resemblance and succession' always unfolded in the light of preexisting theory concerning both method and the nature of the object
®eld
...
But this operation belonged, in crucial part,
not to the science in question but to what the positive study of the
history of knowledge tells us about the relations between one basic
®eld of science and another
...
The taken-for-granted starting knowledge of sociology itself
could accordingly be deduced from its place in the scale, on the basis
of what could be induced from (1) the interrelation between the other
sciences combined with (2) what was (already) known about the
lower (and chronologically prior) branch of knowledge on which it
immediately rested
...
As such, he further assumed, it not
merely complemented (human) biology by adding the social dimension
to our knowledge of the individual species member, but this social
dimension was itself to be understood as a form of life
...
Prime
among these, at least according to contemporary biologists, and
particularly the Montpellier school from whose understanding of the
very distinction between life and non-life Comte took his cues (Canguilhem, 1994:237±9), was the axiom that the life of any organism
whatever depended on a `vital consensus' between elements and functions
...

To this there was an important corollary
...
9 Without a prior consideration of the living organism
to which they belonged, organs and tissues would be unintelligible from
a biological point of view; and it was just the same for sociology
...
What needs
to be emphasised, though, is not simply the self-justifying circularity of
Comte's importation of the bio-organismic metaphor into sociology, but
that for Comte it was not metaphorical at all
...
By way of the notion of `vital
consensus', it enabled him to conjoin a scienti®c understanding of the
social±historical totality taken to comprise human life on the planet with
a spiritual apprehension that Humanity ± actually as well as ideally ±
subsists in love
...

In two respects however this bio-social construct still leaves the
religiously elevated meaning of Humanity ambiguous
...
The
universal benevolence which provides l'esprit de l'ensemble in the specialised scienti®c±industrial order that represents Humanity's ®nal stage of
self-development may be crucial to its harmonious wellbeing
...
At both the
individual and social level, the `vital consensus' which `normally' prevails in that perfected state entails not only harmony of sentiment
(`sympathy') but harmony of intellect (`synthesis') and harmony of
action (`synergy') as well (xii:9)
...

Lyotard, implicitly setting Comte against Comte, insists that if there
are natural forces making for `complexi®cation, negative entropy, or
more generally, development' in the dynamic equilibration of growing
9

Not only did the general `vital organisation' of an organism have to be theorised prior to
that of its forms and functions, the whole `series' of organic life needed to be established
before scienti®c knowledge of particular life-forms was possible
...
), elaborates this point
...


Ã
Humanity as `le vrai Grand-Etre'

197

systems, social or otherwise, these forces belong to the category of `the
inhuman' (1991:5±6)
...
He broadened the positivist godhead so as to include
Â
the inhuman under the forms of le Grand-Fetiche and (still more) le
Grand Milieu
...
This allowed him to eat his cake and have it
too
...

If the ®rst ambiguity surrounding the meaning of `Humanity' concerns the (non)-identity between `the largest and most universal form of
sympathy' and `the best type of vital unity' it helps constitute, the
second concerns the social organism whose unity it is
...
There it is the generic essence of
each individual human being ± the in®nite impulses to love, knowledge
etc
...
the question I am raising here is simply this:
what else remains as politics except resistance to this ``inhuman''? And what else is left
to resist with but the debt which each soul has contracted with the miserable and
admirable indetermination from which it was born and does not cease to be born? ±
which is to say with the other inhuman' (Lyotard, 1991:7)
...
But a humanism that holds that in®nitude to be not just shared
but a product of sharing, an emergent property of association as such, is
confronted with more than one social totality, with regard to space±time
and degree of virtuality, which might properly be sacralised in this way
...

Comte did not, and could not, avoid the issue, though he was
hampered (certainly in expression) by an insuf®ciency of terms for the
various wholes in play
...
Humanity, as the name of that Being,
is the becoming-Humanity of Man ± it being understood that, even in
the Positive polity where the Great Being is ®nally acknowledged as the
real and only god, Humanity, as the self-perfection of the human, is a
limit condition asymptotically approached, but never fully reached
...
Comte did not, however,
think it through, still less try to validate it, by recourse to an explicit
metaphysics of essence and realised potential
...
We are
already familiar with the story
...
In so doing, it ratchets
up both the level and modality of knowledge and the affective±instinctual base, all of which prepares the way for the next developmental leap
...
11 From that angle, it transpires as a kind of (incipient)
substance of which the social qua social consists
...
`Chacune d'elles, apres avoir
Â
Â
Á
fourni le noyau, reel ou virtuel, de l'Humanite, restera toujours propre a faciliter sa
Â
notion spontanee
...
Voila comment la Famille et la Patrie
Á
Â
Â
ne cesseront jamais d'offrir, a l'esprit autant qu'au coeur, les preambules necessaires de
Â
l'Humanite
...

Ã
Á
Â
Â
`Toute espece animale constitue reellement un Grand-Etre plus ou moins avorte, par
Ã
Â
Á
Â
Â
Ã
un arret de developpement du, surtout, a la preponderance humaine' (viii:229)
...
Thus, underneath the ®rst duality, between Humanity as actual
and as potential totality, we discover a second (local/global) which itself
articulates with a further difference between the `physiology' (i
...
vital
functioning) and `morphology' (i
...
techno-institutional structure) of the
ÂÂ
particular societes of which the Great Being is composed
...
e
...
) form is re¯ected in the calendric organisation
of Positivist worship
...
Another sequence does the same for the overall march of
civilisation from tribalism to modern industry
...

Ã
Three features of le Grand-Etre, as Comte thus conceived it, are
immediately apparent
...

Â
Until the positivisation process is complete, l'Humanite really is an
ambiguous reality: instantiated both in the substance of affective association and in the structure and movement of the wider social totality
within which that substance is embedded
...
What is sacralised as Humanity is not the (always imperfect)
form assumed by the human collectivity at any developmental conjuncture, but the convergent movement towards Humanity (in both senses)
to which it belongs
...
As such it is a
process as much as a result
...
13 However, if Humanity's being in12
13

Ã
As supplemented by the round of special festivals prescribed in the Tableau sociolatrique
(x:159)
...
Il s'etend et se compose
 Â
de plus en plus par la succession continue des generations humaines
...


200

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

cludes its becoming (and in this sense exists prior to its actual arrival as
cooperative world society etc
...

It is just here that the religion of Humanity steps in to supplement
what would otherwise be an ontic lack
...
Comte's sociological
analysis told him that religion, which secured the unity of group orientation and strengthened the altruistic impulses, was essential to the unity
of every kind and level of society
...
e
...
14 In the Positivist
epoch, then, sustaining the representation of Humanity, through symbolism, ritual and the cultivation of collective memory, was indispensable,
functionally, to the continuing existence of Humanity itself
...
What was represented in the Great Being was itself,
I have stressed, a becoming being
...
To grasp the entire process of Humanity's becoming, then, is to grasp all its moments in their mutual connectivity
...
Before the scienti®c±industrial revolution, when Humanity (in the various senses of social totality identi®ed
above) does not coincide with itself, establishing the subjective, as
Â
opposed to objective, continuite of Humanity is both impossible and
unnecessary
...
For at this point, because of the theoreticoideological exigencies of the situation (which necessitated a new coordinating synthesis), the objective continuity of Humanity and thus its `vital
unity' as a living being come to depend on the self-conscious maintenance of its continuity at the subjective level
...
The
extrapolation into industrial society of this linearly regarded institutional development
Â
was already elaborated in Comte's 1826 essay `Considerations sur le pouvoir spirituel'
(x:176±215)
...

But there is an implication for the self-consciousness that this implies
which should be drawn out too
...

The collective subject
We are almost at the point where we can examine what it might mean to
manoeuvre this construct into `the God-shaped hole' (Fuentes) left by
the departed (Christian) divinity
...

In his study of modern social theory, John Milbank distinguishes
between two broadly de®ned strategies for attempting to secure the (for
him, crypto-theological) foundations of `secular reason'
...
The ®rst ®nds it in a providence
recon®gured as scienti®cally knowable, and identi®ed, in theories of
progress, with the innate potential of natural materiality
...
In the
general movement of thought from early-modern political science (Machiavelli, Hobbes) to nineteenth-century sociology, Milbank argues, it is
the ®rst path which came to prevail
...

Â
Â
So far, and in line with Comte's own echelle encyclopedique, I have been
approaching his concept of Humanity from just that angle ± that is, as a
15

Milbank examines the `secular reason' exhibited by political economy and sociology as
a species of the `secular theology' (of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Hobbes and Leibniz)
explored by Amos Funkenstein in Theology and the Scienti®c Imagination (1986)
...
`The theme of the human construction of
culture is
...
Where this moment is privileged, secular reason produces a
privileged discourse about providence, which, unlike in medieval theology, violates the
distinction between primary and secondary causes and invokes a ®nal cause ± ``God'' or
``Nature'' ± to plug some supposed gap in immanent understanding
...

However, he sees it as terminating with Kant
...


202

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

crowning reality that caps a cosmic movement of progress in order
...
Put this way,
however, it is clear that Comte's thematisation of Humanity participated
at once in both strategies identi®ed by Milbank
...
But in
this very replacement its destiny is to double over as a (re¯exively
knowing) subject, to take charge of itself and its world, and thence to
humanise, actively, everything on which it depends
...
On this side,
Humanity is identi®ed with the thinking, willing and, ®nally, selfautonomizing human subject ± which, at least in left and liberal thought,
and until the last few decades, has been secular reason's main line of
march
...
Where German philosophy developed an
ever more abstruse philosophy of the individual subject (as thought
re¯ecting both on itself and on the ego it presupposed), Comte,
following Condorcet, insisted on a historical sociology of human
thought which regarded it, and its expressions, as the collective result of
a collective process
...

The epistemological implications of rethinking what was attributed to
the individual subject of knowledge in terms of collective mentalities
whose determinate development is traced out by the empirical history of
the sciences were a centrepiece of Philosophie positive
...
All this, for Milbank, served to import into
French sociology a conception of social being which systematically confounded the
difference between the transcendent and the ®nite
...


Ã
Humanity as `le vrai Grand-Etre'

203

cols of the specialised sciences on the one side, and to the felt/understood pressures of human needs on the other
...
He was content, without getting caught
in the coils of critical metare¯ection, to have subsumed traditional
epistemology into the terms of a sociology of knowledge, with its law of
three stages, encyclopedic scale and theory of uneven development
...
This compromise saw
Comte's socio-historical relativisation of the practical a priori as a crucial
improvement over Kant; and it saw Kant's liberal preoccupation with
the autonomous rational individual as an equally crucial corrective
which needed to be introduced into some better sociological account of
the reconstructive requirements of post-Revolutionary France
...
If Humanity as a
whole is to be conceived not only as a kind of organism but as a
(self-)productive, and increasingly self-aware, agent of thought feeling,
and action, how are we to understand its nature and functioning as
Á
such? How is this collective subject constituted vis-a-vis the individual
subject? In what sense can it be conceived, in its collective manner of
being, as a (singular) subject at all? Comte's answer is forthright, though
easy to misread
...

On the one hand, the individual human beings that make it up are only
ever, whatever their achievements and self-understandings, organs of
that larger being
...
17 Thus the collective subject only exists as such, i
...
as
Á
a consciously acting agent vis-a-vis its milieu, to the extent that it
functions as a coordinated network of individuals
...
In early
phases of social development this bond is restricted by particularisms,
and is coercive in the face of egoistically dominated thought and
conduct
...


204

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

is, correspondingly, only virtual
...

Such cooperation could not be just the product of isolated individuals
...
But if we
then ask what primordially constitutes this group, and especially in a
sociological sense, i
...
as something more than the sum of individual
inclinations, the puzzle only deepens
...
For Comte, once we are beyond
the intimate `union' of the family, the affective basis of intra-individual
cooperation ± altruisme ± bonds the human group only indirectly; that is,
by virtue of the way in which it connects each individual member to a
connecting Third
...
In Politique positive, it is
Â
l'Humanite apprehended subjectively
...
If we
employ the typology developed by Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason,
ÂÂ
then we can say that Comte's societe, even in its most collective form,
never surpasses seriality
...

At most, i
...
as uni®ed by religious adherence, it takes the form of a
pledge group18 whose self-representation as an organism is itself designed ± consciously ± to `conciliate' its contradictory and inessential
Ã
Â
unity as un etre compose
...
The latter is constituted as a group only
incidentally, through the mediation of an external `common object' (1960:385)
...
While Sartre extends
the notion of a pledge group to the kind of instituted organicity Comte wishes to
restore and perfect, he particularly emphasises, at the limit of group survival, the
Â
mobilisation of fear
...
Et
Â
cette peur comme libre produit du groupe et comme action corrective de la liberte
Â
contre la dissolution serielle
...


Ã
Humanity as `le vrai Grand-Etre'

205

becomes sociologically transparent, and the mediating Other through
Ã
which this unity is achieved comes to be rede®ned as le vrai Grand-Etre,
i
...
as the Positively apprehended idea of the ensemble thus constituted
...
This accords, no doubt, with Comte's own
formative religious experience ± the post-mortem extrapolation of his
  Â
amour desinteresse for Clotilde19 ± and thus, too, with his deepest sense of
what it would mean to become pervasively social
...
In contrast with Durkheim's theory of `collective effervescence'
(1968b:226) as the (ritually repeated) founding experience of modern±
rational civisme, as of every other kind of socially established ideal,20 the
divine reality unveiled as Humanity is encountered not as the ego's
emptying out into a `we' but as a transcending symbol conjured up in
the imagination of each adherent
...
21
This is not necessarily to Comte's discredit
...
L'experience a une valeur universelle:
Â
Á
Á
Â
elle present le parfait modele du don que tout homme doit faire a l'Humanite'
(Gouhier, 1965:210)
...
Aimer l'Humanite, c'est sentir cette unite et participer
Á
joyeusement a cette communion' (ibid
...

`It is in fact at such moments of collective ferment that are born the ideals upon which
civilisation rests
...
Such was the movement of collective enthusiasm which
...
the Reformation and Renaissance, the revolutionary epoch,
and the socialist upheavals of the nineteenth century
...
At such times the ideal
tends to become one with the real, and for this reason men have the impression that the
time is close when the ideal will in fact be realized and the kingdom of God expressed
on earth
...
All that was said, done and thought in this period of fecund upheaval
survives only as a memory
...

Compare Durkheim: `Of course it is only natural that the moral forces (that religious
images) express should be unable to affect the human mind powerfully without pulling
it outside itself and without plunging it into a state that may be called ecstatic, provided
that the word be taken in its etymological sense (ek-stasy)' (1968b:227)
...
But
there is a highly consequential rider
...
It is ®rst and
foremost a representation which, if it is to be felt and regarded as
transcendent to the individual at all, has ®rst to be subjectively produced
...

The divine status of Humanity
What does it mean, though, for Comte to speak of Humanity as `a new
Ã
god' (vii:342) and, indeed, as le vrai Grand-Etre? What attributes read
into the category I have been seeking to elucidate could justify its
designation as divine? It must be said at once that Comte's use of godlanguage re¯ects a linguistic exigency
...
How else than by appealing
Ã
to such terms as le Grand-Etre (capitalised) could he have designated a
reality which, while `having nothing mystical about it', was destined to
occupy (as he saw it) the same place in the psychic and social life of
industrial society as `God' did before?
Yet the theistic designation was also precisely intended
...
`Humanity' inspired and incarnated the highest form of sel¯ess love
...
If not omniscient, it was both the subject and the
limiting horizon of all knowledge about the world (as of ourselves)
...
It
was also a `jealous god' and would brook `no other masters among its
servants' (vii:397)
...
The
wondrous and majestic secret of that being similarly revealed itself to us
in the fullness of time, both objectively as an essence made apparent in
its existence, and subjectively as a matter of inner individual experience
...
The biblical deity may make itself manifest
here below, but its throne was in®nitely distant in the above and beyond
...

However virtual before the positivist transformation, and however
imbricated in subjectivity after it, it was wholly in the world
...

At his most extravagant Comte speaks of the Great Being as the head of
the terrestrial biosphere, the `chief' of an `immense league, with animals
as voluntary agents and plants as material instruments', to which even
`inorganic forces join themselves as blind auxiliaries, to the extent that
they have been conquered' (vii:617)
...
It is Lord
Â
of the Earth perhaps, but not King of the Universe
...
In
Â
effect, l'Humanite lacked all traditional attributes of divinity except those
related to morality and the setting of human ends
...

By the same token, if the Great Being was mighty, it was not
omnipotent
...
Unlike the old god, its existence was
`subordinated to immutable laws' and `carried no absolute satisfaction,
nor even security' (vii:354)
...
Its immanence
and transcendence to the individual, ®nally, had nothing ineffable about
it, but were just an effect of the individual's location in society as a
condition of its own material and psychological existence
...
Leur Dieu est devenu le chef nominal
Â
d'une conspiration hypocritique, desormais ridicule d'odieuse
...

For a straightforward discussion of Anselm's ontological proof, see Coppleston,
1962:183 et seq
...

So far, we might say, with all secular, i
...
`this-sided', forms of
humanism
...
Ideological balance here is
not easy to maintain
...
At the limit of such forgetfulness it would shade into lack
of faith, and cease to be a humanism at all
...
In Heidegger's terms: for nihilism (i
...
the
Destruktion of the metaphysical idols) to complete itself through a
transvaluation, the place of God must remain empty
...
It would also restrict what counts for human
value by imprisoning consciousness within the walls of a new Absolute
wherein questions not grounded in its (assumed) facticity and functional
demands are ruled out of court
...
Precisely because
of his sociological decoding of all gods as anthropomorphic, and of all
religion as intrinsic to society's `vital unity', he took it for granted that
the place held by God in prepositivist thought was not only fraudulently
occupied but misconceived
...
That place of God can remain
empty
...
e
...

Á
Â
`Cette complete autocratie rendait la conception de Dieu profondement contradictoire,
et par suite temporaire
...

Á
Si nous pouvions toujours nous placer dans les circonstances les plus favorables a nos
recherches, nous n'aurions aucun besoin d'intelligence
...
Son incompatibilite avec une parfaite bonte est encore plus evidente
...
The primary error of theology ± an unavoidable, and
even in its time useful effect of limited scienti®c and technical knowledge
± had been to confuse God as that which names our highest value with
God as ultimate cause
...
26 To this
extent Comte falls under the Heideggerian stricture
...

Such a critique, however, has its own limits
...
Not to see this might lead us to overlook what
was in fact the most striking aspect of the new deity whose worship
Â
Comte sought to establish
...
Unlike the eternal God of monotheistic religion, l'HumaÂ
nite was ®nite not just in space but in time
...
Nor, more important, was the
`security' of its existence guaranteed (vii:354)
...
It was that very prospect, the threat of social dissolution,
which propelled Comte into action in the ®rst place
...
The

26

27

Â
Ã
Â
Á
Les volontes d'un etre qui serait vraiment tout-puissant se reduiraient donc a de purs
caprices' (vii:408±9)
As religious `aberrations' typical of monotheism, quietism and mysticism are often
coupled together
...

Wyschogrod's argument is developed in the last two chapters of Spirit in Ashes (1983)
...

The latter, she argues, in its mass-death-producing form, undermines the `everydayness' presupposed in Heidegger's account of `authenticity' in the face of individual
dying
...

The persistence of this belief required, in turn, a vast social effort
...
Prescribing the study and celebration of Humanity is not just for the
sake of the sweet satisfactions this would inherently bring
...
(vii:362; my emphasis)

From religion to politics
The point is vital
...
The substitution
simultaneously reorganised the space into which the new term was
inserted
...
e
...

This amounted to the claim that under modern conditions the sphere
of religion comes into a new relation with the practice of politics
...
That is: a body of practices which on the
one hand maintains social unity (the objective being of Humanity), and
on the other inspires progress (the realisation of Humanity as a global
condition)
...
And the converse is also the case
...
e
...
This was not just because
`religion' provides the ethical foundation for praxis, gives it ends; but
because with the socio-historically re¯exive demysti®cation of `God' the
realisation dawns that such a Transcendent, even if brought down to
earth, is only ever real, or real in its effects, as the outcome of a work
...

That theogeny was indeed indispensable
...
e
...

A comparable perspective is outlined by Marx in the `Theses on
Feuerbach'
...
`Man must prove the
truth, i
...
the reality and power, the ``this-sidedness'' of his thinking in
practice' (Marx and Engels, 1947:197)
...
Its validity is demonstrated ± or
not ± entirely at the level of practice, i
...
to the extent it is actualised in
the course of political action driven (and striving) to bring it about
...
In this
respect, however, Comte goes one step further
...
Nor, once in existence, and leaving
aside Comte's different understanding of what these fetters consist in,
can the maintenance of Humanity as such be left to chance
...
And this, above all, because it rests on an (unnatural)
preponderance of `sociability over personality' and on a subjective consensus of mind, heart and body which likewise requires a reproductive ±
in Comte's terminology, `rebinding', i
...
religious ± practice
...
Regardless of whether we accept these propositions, in Comte's
very insistence on the need for a religious ± and therefore pan-political ±
humanism, his representation of Humanity as divine, or quasi-divine,
sharply illuminates some of the dif®culties that arise when we try to
think through the implications of founding secular political thought on
any such basis
...
e
...
At its
most joyous and af®rmative it appeared to those who ®rst proclaimed it
± in the century between the French Revolution and the Victorians ± as
a mental home-coming, an end to exile
...
`Criticism', noted Marx approvingly in
1843, `has plucked the imaginary ¯owers from the chain not so that man
will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will
shake off the chain and cull the living ¯ower
...
Whence a ®rst dilemma
...
On the other hand, if Humanity is elevated
not as what it happens currently to be, but as an essence behind the
appearance, or as an ideal to be realised, then we risk worshipping an
abstraction
...

Comte's developmental ontology aimed to resolve the contradiction
...
That involvement was immense, not
to say heroic
...
For Comte, the Great Being had always existed in an
objective (if immaturely developed) sense
...
This itself was unthinkable
without a long historical preparation ± for Comte, one that had taken
half a millennium
...

Through the installation of a Positive Polity, Comte envisaged the
systematic institution of a new form of practice: politique positive
...

In the positive state, politics would at last be systematically subordinated
to la morale
...
28 Thus conceived, the religion of Humanity becomes identical
with the politics of social reproduction, itself regarded as the ongoing
Â
maintenance of socialite as such
...
Care for the social must become, now and forever, the
paramount and overriding human concern
...
Humanism, whether
Comte's or Feuerbach's, begins with a postulate of human self-af®rmation
...

However, if we escape the ®rst dilemma (the actual versus the ideal we)
by casting that commitment in essentially political terms, and if we
further assert, with Comte, that the sustenance of Humanity (objectively
or subjectively) cannot be spontaneously guaranteed, then this af®rmation turns against those who make it
...
This is not just, as in John
Stuart Mill's principles of utilitarianism, a moral constraint on the latter
wherever my rights to satisfaction collide with those of others
...
Collective self-af®rmation thus turns into individual selfsacri®ce, whose unhappy implications Comte is only able to cover up by
a theory of instincts according to which altruism corresponds to an
organismic need that can, with suitable education and moral training,
subordinate all other needs to it
...
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, he
28

Â
Á
`C'est uniquement ainsi que la politique peut en®n se subordonner reellement a la
Ã
morale, suivant l'admirable programme du moyen age
...
Pour y parvenir, il fait consister la
Á
Â
Á
Á
politique a servir l'Humanite, c'est-a-dire a seconder arti®ciellement les diverses
Ã
Á
fonctions, d'ordre ou de progres, que le Grand-Etre accomplit naturellement'
(vii:361±2)
...
With the
negation (of the conditions for human self-actualisation) negated, the
collective would cease to be hypostasised in the form of an objecti®ed
and coercive state
...

We may grant Marx's deeper understanding of what, in industrial
capitalism, stood in the way of achieving a real community of interests
...
If it is correct to argue that,
from the most intimate sphere of association to the widest and most
public, both a collectivist ethic and the community sustained by it
require a continual practice of symbolic, ritual, intellectual and political
maintenance, then it is hard to see how, even with the reduction in the
working day, there could be the leisure (Pieper, 1952) for refounding
human culture, beyond the `realm of necessity', on the freedom of each
and all
...
If it frees us from one set of heteronomous commitments, it draws us to take up others which promise to
be even more onerous
...

Sociolatry and the death of the social
Comte's faith in Humanity, I have been suggesting, has the peculiar
structure of a belief in which the existence of that to which loyalty is
given depends not simply on the belief itself (this was the cultural
circularity of the old gods) but also on the activity of Humanity-making
which that belief inspires and underwrites
...

Politics, of the socially reproductive yet historically developmental kind
which Comte encapsulated as `order and progress', was necessary to
close his system
...

Its closure was not only `outside the text' but also in the future and thus
outside any presentable reality to which evidential appeal might be
made
...
Furthermore, while Comte's `scienti®c' stress on the requirements of order in the transformed dispensation is certainly more in
tune with what Ernst Bloch called the `cold current' of socialist thinking
than with the `warm one',29 the politics which, for Comte, is not only
necessary to reach the historical summit from which the speculative gap
between theory and reality is ®nally closed, but continues to be necessary, more than ever, once it is attained, is not incompatible with a
certain (Gramscian) politics of the left
...

Yet in the frantically organised and supervised `circle of rights and
duties' surrounding the individual in the Positive Polity there is still
something symptomatically excessive
...

On one point Comte is explicit
...
But there is
also a corollary, discussed earlier, which is both unstated and more
startling
...
and a disenchantment of metaphysics belongs to the
most useful cold stream of Marxism
...

Pre-eminently Daniel Bell
...


216

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

existence, and persistence, of those social ties, what is to be installed, in
the ®rst instance, is a drastically impoverished mode of association
...
Of course this limited
sociality is not seen as complete in itself
...
It is that cooperation itself which
Comte identi®es ± under the rubric of l'esprit d'ensemble ± with the vital
unity proper to industrialism
...

Durkheim, who detected a contradiction within Comte's thesis concerning the need to complete the differentiating process while at the
same time enlarging and homogenising the institutional sphere of
morality and religion, suspected here a fundamental defect in Comte's
understanding of the affective dimension of the social tie
...
One kind of friendship is the bonding that occurs between those who are alike; another
(Durkheim had just married) is the bonding between those who are
complementarily different
...
Thus the
`mechanical solidarity' held up by Comte as more crucial than ever in
modern times was actually much less so than he had thought
...
For it makes an illicit jump from the zone of the
face-to-face to that of the more impersonal solidarity that binds the
social across distances of space and time
...
His
overall argument is that `the sexual division of labour is the source of conjugal
solidarity' (56), that `the state of marriage in societies where the two sexes are only
weakly differentiated thus evinces conjugal solidarity which is itself very weak' (59), and
that sexual differentiation has advanced considerably in industrial society, so that `one
of the sexes takes care of the affective functions and the other of intellectual functions'
(60), with the overall result that `today conjugal solidarity makes its action felt at each
moment and in all the details of life' (61)
...
Thus it was quite irrelevant to a theory of
solidarity at the societal, let alone global, level whether the poles
between which such particularistic affect ¯owed were `like with like' or
`like with unlike'
...
It connected individuals with one another (as Durkheim's more consistent
theory about the `cult of the individual' qua moral personality recognised (1968a:407))32 only indirectly and morally
...

If this is so, however, then the paradox of Comte's asocial conception
of the solution to early industrialism's `social crisis' extends all the way
into his conception, in principle, of the social tie
...
In his speculative
sociological analysis of this entity in its `®nal state', the inner unity
which makes Humanity `vital' resolves into un concours of individual
states of mind and soul
...
Or rather, to put it as strongly as I dare: it is
motivated by a devotion which has already and from the start abandoned the ground on which it claims to stand
...
The ®rst is the blurred
relation, within Comte's conception of the praxis requisite for establishment and maintenance of social order, between what, following
32

Durkheim's analysis of moral individualism as the cultic centre of the contemporary
conscience collective is further developed in his essay `L'individualisme et les intellectuels'
(Reveue Bleue, vol
...
The
contemporary form assumed by religion, he asserts, `is precisely this religion of
humanity whose rational expression is the individualist morality
...
This is why man has become a god for man and why he can no longer turn
to other gods without becoming untrue to himself' (cited in Giddens, 1972:23)
...


218

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

Althusser (1971:121 et seq
...
There is a parallel here with the loose use of the
term `socialisation' in popularised sociological discussion, for example
when enduring patterns of gender or ethno-cultural difference and
hierarchy are accounted for in such terms
...
Comte's recurrent notion of
`order' raises the same question
...
But this `naturally' requires its `arti®cial' supplement
...
One way of glossing this would be to say that the
religious rebinding of society into a unity is not distinct from its binding
...

This brings us to a second feature: the element of arti®ciality (his own
term) in the form of association which Comte's program was intended to
establish
...
The deeper
arti®ciality lies in what that design aims to bring about
...
This bonding is also social in
only the most super®cial of senses, that is, by virtue of the simultaneity of
individual attachments to a similar idea of the whole
...
For that redeemed totality only replicates
an idea of the social which itself purports to be induced from scienti®c
study
...

In terms of the immediate lines of intellectual in¯uence, we may say
ÂÂ
that Comte's organic±holistic concept of societe passed into Comte's
thinking from the ritualised Catholicism of his youth, from the Christian
idea of the `mystical body of Christ', from the Imitatio, above all from the
justi®catory proto-sociology of the Catholic conservatives (de Bonald, de
Maistre and Chateaubriand) whose ontology he sought to combine with

Ã
Humanity as `le vrai Grand-Etre'

219

the progressivist historicism of the philosophes
...

But either way, his model of the social was only that
...
Even in the
ÂÂ
societe depicted in Politique positive, it does not exist either, except as an
assemblage of suitably motivated individuals institutionally decked out
and arranged so as to resemble it
...
Its elements should thus arrange themselves according to their
aptness for representing Humanity, that is according to their more or less
sympathetic nature' (x:62)
...
Like the audio-visual studio products discussed by
Benjamin in the context of art (1969:218±20), Comte's `positive state of
society' was a copy for which there was no original ± a simulacrum which,
with its realist rhetoric, obscured the extent of the absence for which its
own implementation was designed to compensate
...
Of course that pre-occupation cannot be denied
...
In analysing these tendencies, what he foregrounded
was the crisis of transition, and the intellectual and affective anarchy he
thought was being exacerbated by the failure (before Positivism) to go
beyond a purely negative and critical orientation towards the ideology and
institutions of the old regime
...
In addition to transitional con¯icts among theological, metaphysical and positive world-views, he also detected (though these were
early days) an inherent dif®culty facing the task of establishing the vital
unity of the new industrial, work-based and above all increasingly taskspecialised form of society towards which reconstructive efforts needed to
be directed
...
The price of failure,
moreover, would be dire
...
L'esprit de
Â
detail, with its narrowed horizons and emphasis on individual achievement, militated precisely in that direction unless checked by countervailing measures, perspectives, sentiments and institutions
...

If we put all this together, we can see the multitude of threats to the
continuing integrity and vitality of the social with which Comte imagined himself as having to deal
...
It
would be tempting to leave the matter at that
...
What he sought, in effect, was a
phantasmatic restoration, mutatis mutandis, of medieval socio-cultural
forms in an industrial techno-scienti®c context
...
But if so, he also
crosses the line from that problematic ± with its echoes of the hankering
after Gemeinschaft that became a ¯oodtide in similar social theorising in
Germany ± to another that was more drastic
...
But it secretes at its contradictory
core a theory of the impossibility of the social
...
Far from aiming to realise the most harmonious and
developed form of human association conceivable, it advocates the
institutionalisation of a simulated social body to mitigate the effects of
modernising forces which render such a body in any more authentic sense
impossible to sustain
...
Its worship as supreme reality is a desperate attempt
to fabricate the effects of sociality in the face of actual desocialisation, just
as the sociolatric religion surrounding the moral absolutisation of this
imagined totality substitutes an alienated and self-sacri®cial regime for
any less minimal sense of the social that we might be able to imagine and
hope for (for example: a community of passional mortals held together,
across the web of an always fractured, con¯ictual and opaque interactivity, by ¯ows of authentic mutual sympathy and support)
...
Unwittingly, then, the founder of sociology, and
Â
the founder of it as a science sacree, is also the ®rst thinker of what
contemporary theory, via Baudrillard (1983b), has come to call `the end
of the social'
...
`Humanity', as the reconstructed foundation of knowledge,
sentiments and action in industrial society, and taken to be such because
it is identi®ed with the integral vitality of that society's very being, as
indeed of every other, is dead on arrival
...
Whether considered in terms of continuity,
Â
memory and l'Humanite's diachronic dimension, or of solidarity and the
synchronic dimension of its `vital consensus', Comte's fashioning of the
Positivist intellectum led him to adopt a contradictory social ontology
such that the transcendent and integral being with which he wanted to
couple the actuality of the social not only did not, but could not, exist in
the sense desired
...

Â
Thus Comte's foi demontrable undermines itself
...
However, suppose it had not
...

Then the absence of a focalising centre for thought, feeling and action
would present itself (at least for a mind `seeking God') more sharply than
ever
...
We can even
imagine a further stage in which faith in faith itself collapsed ± leading,
through all the phases of mourning, to an acceptance that the intellectual
and cultural situation had irrevocably changed so that no centring and
foundational orientation, modo theologico, could ever again be restored;
and that this, henceforth, was the place from which thinking had to begin
...
Only this time
it is Society, History, Humanity etc
...

We might say that this second death still belongs to the ®rst
...
2 If Comte ditched the
®rst it was only by elevating the second
...
Behind the
abstractions of Humanity and Society, especially when endowed with
the capacity to think, feel and act, lies an anthropomorphism no less
projective because projected on to human material
...

Its manoeuvring into the vacated place of God falls apart with the
movement of critique,3 including (in his multi-impulse notion of subÂÂ
jectivity, and implicitly serialised conception of societe) Comte's
...
If there is no `real world' beyond the actual one, then the actual
one is not (in the Parmenidean sense) `real' either
...

Nietzsche's embrace of becoming, which pushed him towards `transvaluation' and his `most abyssal thought' of the Eternal Return, set
itself up as a `noble' and `free-spirited' alternative to all ontologising
...
5 Comte's formulation of the `God question', no less than
1

2

3
4

5

Â
 Â
Â
Â
  Â
Â
`La superiorite necessaire de la morale demontree sur la morale revelee se resume donc
ÂÁ
par la substitution ®nale de l'amour de l'Humanite a l'amour de Dieu' (vii:356)
...

`Christianity has had only two dimensions, antithetical to one another: that of the deus
absconditus, in which the Western disappearance of the divine is still engulfed, and that of
the god-man, deus communis, brother of mankind, invention of a familial immanence of
humanity, then of history as the immanence of salvation' (1991:10)
...

`We have abolished the real world: what world is left? ± the apparent world perhaps?
...
See also Lefebvre's critique of `le nouvel eleatisme', which he
particularly identi®es with the rise of structuralism (Lefebvre, 1971:262±78)
...

For the way ± does not exist!' (1961:213)
...
In that regard
we can make an obvious historical point
...
Comte's was Catholic, and the product of the CounterReformation
...

In France after the Revolution, the transposition of these elements
into this-wordly sociological terms was also politically induced
...
In the Third Republic, established after the disastrous defeat
by Prussia in 1870±1, and following the bloody suppression of the Paris
Commune, this need became pressing
...
This was vigorously followed up, after the menacing rise of a
racist and revanchist right during the Boulangist agitation and Dreyfus
Affair in the 1890s, by attempts to introduce a Republican version of
civic and moral education into the school curriculum
...
With an
admixture of Kant (revived in France during the Second Empire by
Renouvier and Boutroux), it was precisely this which Durkheim and his
school were able to provide
...
After mentioning the ascendant administrative role, particularly in
professorial hiring, that Durkheim came to play in Paris after the education minister,
Liard, had rescued him from provincial obscurity at the University of Bordeaux, Nizan
Â
adds: `The introduction of Sociology into the curriculum of the ecoles normales sealed the
of®cial triumph of this of®cial morality
...
In the name of this science, our schoolteachers now
teach French pupils to respect the French Fatherland, to justify collaboration between
the classes, to accept everything they see, and to commune in the cult of the Flag and
Bourgeois Democracy' (Nizan, 1971:109)
...
7 Nor that it should take a simultaneously political, religiomoral and sociological form
...
It explains why modern French thought, having
been the privileged site for the rise of the social as a `scienti®c' category,
has also been the site for that category's most thorough dismantling
...

It would require another study to show how, in the wake of attempts
®rst to salvage Comte's system, then to face the void at its centre, this
disturbing thematic came to assert itself in French social theory ± to the
point, indeed, where it became, in the third quarter of the twentieth
century, not just a proclaimed but an af®rmed intellectual event
...
8 The far-reaching consequences of the humanism controversy, whose deconstructive noise has scarcely yet died down, can be
understood against the background of several accompanying features of
the postwar intellectual landscape
...
9 And through it all have been
the successive receptions and reinterpretations of Nietzsche, ®rst
7

8

9

This pursuit went across the political spectrum
...
For the in¯uence of Comte on Maurras,
Â
see Nolte, 1965:52
...
:143
...
For a commentary on it as a strategic (self-rehabilitating) intervention, see
Bordieu, 1991:90 et seq
...

For the confrontation between Marxism and structuralism, see Sebag (1964); and for
the interrelation among Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, see Behler, 1991 (esp
...


Socio-theology after Comte

225

Á
through Kojeve and Bataille, then in the context of existentialism, then ±
spurred by the French publication of Heidegger's pre-war commentaries
± through those for whom Nietzsche was the forerunner of antifoundationalism in its various contemporary forms (Allison, 1985)
...
A fuller
understanding of what underlies and frames all those poststructuralist
`deaths' (of the subject, Man, history, the author, referentiality etc
...
These would include
the way in which Durkheimian sociology critically appropriated and
relaunched Comte's larger social and religious project,11 its falling apart
Â
and disillusionment after 1914,12 the emergence, with Levi-Strauss, of a
desubjecti®ed and dehistoricised structural anthropology,13 and the way
in which, through Bataille's appropriation of Mauss's essay on gift
exchange (Mauss, 1967) and (with Hubert) sacri®ce (1964), a revised
conception of the social, in¯uenced by re¯ections on the `primitive',
broke from the integralist model of society, reconceived the truth of
religion, and provided a new bridge to Nietzsche and Marx (Bataille,
1985:69±70, 120 et seq
...
14 But it also responded
to the shocks of real history
...
Nizan (1971) has
chronicled the subsequent revolt by a new generation at the Sorbonne
against the lingering in¯uence of Durkheim and the other pre-war
watchdogs of bourgeois morale
...
The horrors of the
10
11

12

13
14

In literary theory the death of Man takes the form of the `death of the author' (the key
essay is included in Barthes, 1977)
...

I have discussed Durkheim in these terms in Fekete, 1984:139±43
...
Durkheim
had good reason, at this stage, to stress the Comtean provenance of his sociology, since
Deploige accused him of being an intellectual agent of German philosophy and social
theory, a most damaging charge in the period leading up to the First World War, and
one no doubt with anti-Semitic undertones
...

Â
See especially Levi-Strauss's introduction to Mauss's Essai sur le don, published in
English as the ®rst chapter of Structural Anthropology (1967)
...


226

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

thirties and forties completed the work of the Great War in discrediting
the grand narratives of reason and progress
...
15 This was
spurred on by the Algerian war, the nuclear arms race, anticolonial
struggles in South-East Asia, and the crystallisation of a dissident
bohemianism as the alienated ¯ip-side of the candy-¯oss corporatism
which accompanied the long postwar economic boom
...

Finally, in the disillusioned aftermath of 1968, and with the total
discrediting of the `socialist' camp (inter alia through the writings of
Solzhenitzyn on the Gulag), the detotalising animus that had ®rst been
directed against the residues of Catholicism and sociologism was increasingly directed ± despite the (mostly continuing) gauchisme of the
deconstructionist cohort16 ± against Marxism itself
...
Whatever
the ideological ambiguities in which French socio-theology was born,
and however we interpret the postmodern swerve, the dissolution of its
sacred categories has been, in the widest sense,17 a left-wing occurrence
...
It also gives rise to a new, and radical,
challenge: how, if at all, and without any foundationalist metaphysics of
the subject, History, or Society, to conceive forms of sociality that point
beyond capitalism altogether
...
For a discussion of this edition and its French translation,
see Althusser, 1969:50±3
...

Derrida, who was a friend of Althusser's, has always identi®ed himself as sympathetic
to the left; Lyotard was a member of the Socialisme ou Barbarisme tendency till the mid
sixties; Foucault and Deleuze worked together on the prison reform project in the
Â
1970s, which was close to Gauche Proletarienne; and Barthes's early work is openly
Marxist
...


Socio-theology after Comte

227

metaphysic of collective being which was at variance with the intended
positivity of the project
...
The same point can be made, then, about the
`second death of God' as about the ®rst
...
It is possible to endorse ± even push to
the limit ± the demise of Comte's and Durkheim's hypostasised concept
of `Society' while still seeking, through a fundamental re¯ection on the
social element of human being, to give an account of what can, or does,
draw us forward and beyond our ®nite selves
...

To illustrate how this might be done, I want to conclude by examining
three contrasting responses that have been made in recent decades to
questions still resonating in French social theory from amidst the ruins
of the Comtean project
...
The second is Jean Baudrillard's proclaimed `end of the social'
...
At ®rst sight the differences of
approach among these thinkers are so stark as to obscure the thematics
they all engage
...
Baudrillard, bespeaking a capitalism gone viral and hyper-real, pronounces an end to any conceivable
version of sociology or its object
...
Besides their ideological differences ± Althusser an avowed
Leninist, Baudrillard ironically disengaged, Nancy a non-theistic nonMarxist love-oriented communitarian ± their positions crystallised in
three different decades, the 1960s, 70s and 80s, by whose moods and
horizons they are also marked
...
Of the interlocutors, Mark Taylor's
position is the most open to Nietzsche, welcoming him indeed with almost open arms:
`The end of theology is apocalyptic ± inevitably apocalyptic
...
This end is simultaneously the consummation and the dissolution of
the history of the Christian West
...


228

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

(as opposed to, if also in relation with, individual) being
...

All three, ®nally, differ from classical French sociology in that they
accept both the Marxist critique of its elided socio-economic categories
and the poststructuralist critique of philosophical anthropology, absolute
historicism and self-realising theories of the human subject (including
the expression of these in Marxist form)
...
Nevertheless we might think of
them as pointing towards complementary sites of inquiry regarding the
locus of a transcending social principle ± a principle which, in their
different ways, they are all concerned to uncover, even as they exorcise
the social±ontological ghosts of Comte and Durkheim
...
19
At several points in this study I have suggested that, at a deeper level,
Althusser's `intervention for Marx' was in fact in¯uenced by Comte
...
Just as Comte
insisted that positivising knowledge in the social±human domain facilitated and necessitated a wider epistemic change, so Althusser insisted
that Marx's departure from left-Hegelianism, and the humanist idealisms of his youth, entailed a double `epistemological break'
...
20
19

20

The title of Glucksmann's contribution to New Left Review 72, a special issue on
Althusser
...

None of the signi®cant commentaries on Althusser in English (e
...
Resch, 1992;
Benton, 1984; M
...

`This ``epistemological break'' concerns conjointly two distinct theoretical disciplines
...
I am deliberately[!] using the traditionally accepted terminology
...
For an
elaboration, see especially the introduction and the essays `Contradiction and Overdetermination' and `On the Materialist Dialectic' in For Marx (Althusser, 1969)
...

The container of what Comte called positive sociology is ®lled, in
Althusser's Marxist replacement, with concepts which are incompatible
not only with the Hegelian and `economist' problematics which are their
stated target, but with any version, even `inverted', of Comte's holistic
ÂÂ
theory of socio-history
...

Althusser's `social formation' is an `overdetermined' structure of structures
...
21
History is the heterogeneous site of multiple temporalities (1970:132±5)
...
Nevertheless,
in For Marx and Reading Capital, the `Marxist philosophy' that Althusser
claims is buried but `active' in Marx's `mature' work (1969:14), and
which Althusser sets himself to disengage through a `symptomatic
reading' of Marx's texts (1970:32±3), is formulated in strikingly
Comtean terms
...
Althusser was forced, on pain of
losing his Marxist credentials, to disavow this conception of Marxist
theory as `theoreticist'
...
, are never seen to step
respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure
phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal
road of the dialectic
...

One single footnote in Reading Capital acknowledges the provenance
...
With his double articulation of the sciences and the law of the three
states, Comte is the most rigorous thinker so far of this general theoretical problem:
how the distinct practices which constitute a ``division of labour'' are articulated
together, and how this articulation varies with the mutation in these practices'
(1970:205±6n4)
...
`[O]ne of the theses I advanced as to
the nature of philosophy did express a certain ``theoreticist'' tendency
...
24 But it is the early Althusser (1959±68)
which concerns me here, and especially the less-visible reworking of
Comte which Althusser appears to be engaged upon, in this same
period, with respect to a neighbouring problem: the implications of `the
general preponderance of the positive state' (1970:205) for the Marxist
theory of ideology
...

This `break' between the old religions, or ideologies, even the `organic' ones,
and Marxism, which is a science, and which must become the `organic' ideology
of human history by producing a new form of ideology in the masses (an
ideology which will depend on a science this time ± which has never been the case
before) ± this break was not really re¯ected by Gramsci, and, absorbed as he was
by the necessity and the practical conditions for the penetration of the
`philosophy of praxis' into real history, he neglected the theoretical signi®cance
of this break and its theoretical and practical consequences
...
On the one hand it is an epistemological category, on the
other hand an irreducible social reality
...

As the latter, ideology consists of all the actively embedded `systems of
representations' through which individuals live their relation to the
social relations in which they are implicated, and in terms of which they
identify, as functioning `subjects', with what and where they are
...
e
...
This enabled him, correctly, to understand
Marxism as having the capacity, even the mission, of becoming, in its
historical turn, an `organic' ideology
...
But, since Gramsci collapsed
historical and dialectical materialism together ± failing to appreciate the
transformed `Theoretical' represented by Marxist philosophy ± he
ignored the epistemological sense of `ideology'
...

See also the title essay of Lenin and Philosophy, especially 49 et seq
...
from
some texts of Lenin's, Althusser concludes by noting that `what is new in Marxism's
contribution to philosophy is a new practice of philosophy
...


Socio-theology after Comte

231

break between all preceding `organic' ideologies and this one
...
which will depend on a
science this time'
...
If Althusser's formula ± an
ideology that depends on a science ± seems more paradoxical, this was
because of his (marxisant) use of the term ideology itself
...

But the Comtean echo in Althusser is not con®ned to that of Comte's
®rst synthesis
...
Now, this ®eld Marxism has transformed in a
scienti®c direction too
...
For that same reason however
(here Althusser is following Gramsci) the politics of class struggle
should not be understood in too narrow a sense
...
Theory has a politics, and so does ideology
itself
...
It also
implies, as illustrated (we infer) by Althusser's own `intervention', a
scienti®cally informed politics of that same philosophico-ideological
break
...
As a social reality,
ideology is de®ned as the set of instituted practices within and through
which individuals are `interpellated' as subjects (1971:162)
...

For Althusser's application of this formula to his own `intervention' (`for Marx'), see
1969:21±31
...
On its objective side, ideology operates through
`ritual practices' directed by `state ideological apparatuses'
...
But,
®nally, state ideological apparatuses also operate alongside the state's
repressive ones in the process wherein the dominant nexus of social
relations is reproduced
...

Althusser presents these theses in a highly schematic way
...
This, he argues,
has replaced the church in capitalist society as `the dominant state
ideological apparatus', both through its transmission of bourgeois myth
and through its sorting and socialisation of individuals into the differentiated pyramid of `social posts' (1971:146±9)
...
31 But as Althusser's remarks on Gramsci
27
28

29

30

31

Althusser presents as his `central thesis' that `Ideology is a ``representation'' of the
imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence' (1971:152)
...
g
...

Â
One of the post-Revolutionary elite Grandes Ecoles and specialising in the humanities,
its graduates ®lled university posts throughout France (Bourdieu, 1988:252±5)
...
Durkheim, like
Althusser, had been a graduate (normalien)
...

Althusser's thesis about the dominance of the school (or `the School±Family couple'
(1971:49)) might be sustainable for earlier phases of capitalist development
...
The case, moreover, of
an ideological institution like advertising, which is economically determined and which
functions as an internal element of the accumulation process, implies the need for a

Socio-theology after Comte

233

suggest, it is not the currently dominant ideological institutions which
really interest him
...
What,
though, does establishing this `new ideology' entail? What rituals and
`state-ideological apparatuses' are to be deployed for the task? What,
indeed, at the level of `systems of representations', is to be its ideological
(as opposed to scienti®c) content?
Althusser rarely addresses these questions directly, but in one of the
essays in For Marx, `Marxism and Humanism', we get at least the
inkling of an answer
...
' Why? Because `as it enters the period which will lead it
from socialism (to each according to his labour) to communism (to each
according to his needs), the Soviet Union has proclaimed the slogan: All
for Man, and introduced new themes: the freedom of the individual,
respect for legality, the dignity of the person' (1969:221)
...
He meditates on `the
signi®cance of this historical event' along two tracks
...
The
term humanism, unlike the term socialism, has `no scienti®c value'
...
It would misunderstand, above all, the
`scienti®c' character of the break Marx made from any such perspective:
a break indicated, in the `Theses on Feuerbach', by Marx's insistence
that to grasp human history in its `practical-sensuous' actuality we must
stop contemplating the human essence and study instead `the ensemble
of social relations' (1969:242±3)
...
Ideology,
he insists, is irreducible, even in a classless society
...
, and
on this level the capital-`h' Humanist language of the Soviet party
program is to be endorsed
...
Humanism is a labile `ideologeme'
...
Above
all, we must distinguish between socialist and bourgeois humanism
...
For a structural account of a
hypothesised `post-Fordist' shift in `the regime of signi®cation', see Lash, 1990:4±5
...
32 Socialist humanism
avoids the error by eschewing such universalism
...
This continues right into the period of socialist
transition, when classes, residually, still exist, and the threat of capitalist
restoration is still present
...
Class antagonisms in the leading socialist society have been overcome
...
), and (socialist) personal humanism, where it has
been superseded (the U
...
S
...
These correspond to `two necessary
phases
...

Admittedly, adds Althusser, there is something situationally speci®c
about all this
...
are the slogans of destalinisation
...
Holding out the
prospect of a `peaceful road' to socialism, they aid in the formation of a
united front
...
Today', Althusser
opines, `even the high road of Humanism seems to lead to socialism'
(221)
...
During the long period of transition,
`socialist humanism [in `personal' form]
...
Across
that entire epoch, it points to a form of human community from which
market relations have been expunged
...
Ceasing to have any connection
with class hegemony (even working-class), it becomes, instead, `the
relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men [sic]
and their conditions of existence is lived to the pro®t of all men'
(1969:236)
...
, nationalism, moralism and
economism' (1971:146)
...
Controlled destalinisation at home, the parliamentary road abroad, `peaceful
competition' with the capitalist West internationally, the litany is (or
was) familiar
...
He writes as a faithful,
if intellectually embattled, militant of the French Communist Party,33 a
party whose loyalty, indeed subservience, to Moscow was, and remained, notorious
...
His adhesion to the pcf coexisted uneasily with
his stated aim of demolishing the Stalinist deformation of Marxism and
Leninism from the left
...
But that partisanship also had a deeper signi®cance in relation to his project
...
In his work of theoretical `clari®cation'
and `correction', he was reworking that church's of®cial doctrine, above
all to provide a ground for its (would-be) scienti®cally based faith
...
And like Comte's, too, it is not just theoretically Positivist
...
It is so, moreover, not only as an
instrumentalism, through Marxism's `scienti®cally' based strategy and
tactics, but in Althusser's insistence that such a faith (any faith) can only
be subjectively sustained through a set of `mainly ritual practices'
(1971:158±62); practices which, in the ®nal stage of human development, have likewise to be deliberately set up and maintained
...
This leads him,
correlatively, to think Lenin's `vanguard party' ± the locus of fusion
between intellectuals and militants, theory and practice, science and
politics ± into the space of Comte's revamped pouvoir spirituel
...
Whatever its
strategy-determining functions, the Party (linked to the (capital letters)
World Communist Movement) is also an `ideological apparatus'
...
For Althusser's re¯ections on his
experience with the pcf, see 1993:227±54
...


236

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

such it has the same functions as were ascribed to organised religion by
Comte: as a centre for doctrinal development and dissemination, as an
organiser of ritual practices (rallies, demonstrations, memorials, May
Day, etc
...
To be sure, Althusser's (and the post-Stalin cpsu's) version of Positive religiosity is far less
strenuous and totalistic than Comte's
...
Its ethical content ± a
collectivism quali®ed by respect for the human person, individual rights
etc
...
In
short, the Party, as Althusser sees it, supervises le dogme and le culte but
Â
not le regime
...
He
also reverts to Comte in advancing `Humanism' itself as the largest
ideological envelope within which Communism as a `system of representations' is to be expressed
...
Except for
one small detail
...
The social formation which replaces the non-scienti®c
ÂÂ
category of societe is a `complex and over-determined' structure of
structures (210±11)
...
For that same reason ± the decentring displacement that, for Althusser, made Marx a Marxist (1969:24±7) ±
humanism, as a system of belief in, and worship of, `Humanity', is
scienti®cally empty
...
Humanity may be a supreme value, but it is
not a something which can be known, narrated, intervened in or
strategised on behalf of
...
Given the repression that ®ssures the oedipal
subject inscribed within the order of the symbolic (1971:189±90), what
is benign, even mandatory, as a progressive civic totem is also (in theory
as well as in fact) an ideological construct that must be dismantled
before knowledge of `the human' can begin
...

Now, on one level, as against Comte's own Positivism, this is a real
gain
...
If positivised faith does not have to be organised

Socio-theology after Comte

237

around a single transcending point, if that point does not have to be
Â
phenomenally `real', if the referent of l'Humanite is itself declared `®ctif '
± while still serving as a (necessary) symbol through which to express
`our noblest aspirations' ± then Positivism's false, and forced, closure
does not have to be made
...
35
Furthermore, Althusser's Marxist distinction between the social relations to be reproduced (internal to the `mode of production') and the
politico-ideological process wherein this occurs (the `order of reproduction') also releases Comte's analysis from the catastrophist sense of
terminal crisis that comes from their con¯ation
...

However, Althusser's emendation of Comte raises problems of its
own
...

For Comte, as for Counter-Reformation Catholicism, this was not itself
an objection
...
36 For his Christian or
Positivist predecessors, in any case, the disjuncture between lay and
expert levels of doctrinal understanding was not absolute
...
So the split in subjectivity between doctrinal leaders
and ideological followers was mitigated by the shared indubitability of
both what is deemed to be sacred and the deeming itself
...

35

36

For Althusser's discussion of the `openness' of scienti®c discourse, and his deployment
of the circle and the mirror as ®gures for the `ideological' formulation of the `classical
problem of knowledge', see 1970:52±6
...
'
`In the strict sense, an egalitarian conception of practice ± and I say this with the deep
respect every Marxist owes to the experience and sacri®ces of the men whose labour,
sufferings, and struggles still nourish and sustain our whole present and future, all our
arguments and hope ± an egalitarian conception of practice is to dialectical materialism
what egalitarian communism is to scienti®c communism: a conception to be criticized
and superseded in order to establish a scienti®c conception of practice exactly in its
place' (1970:58; emphasis in original)
...
The `humanity' of socialist
humanism is neither thematised nor thematisable
...
Whence a serious dif®culty
...

This raises a frontal dif®culty for Althusser's justi®catory theory of the
Party
...
Various escapes are
possible
...

Â
We might take nothingness, or differance, as the `groundless ground' of
both democratic community and the engagement it inspires
...
However, unless that
notion (on which there is an entire literature) is examined further, and if
the thirst for justice is taken to be its own justi®cation, the motives
associated with it may relax into a self-convinced moralism that is
vulnerable to the soundings of Nietzsche's hammer
...
38
There is need, in any case, for a deeper ideological re¯exivity than
Althusser offers
...
As a clari®cation in substance,
however, Althusser only provides the most tentative of starting points
...
This would be a
37

38

`It [the `®nite being' `shared' in `community'] is a groundless ``ground'', less in the
sense that it opens up the gaping chasm of an abyss than that it is made up only of the
network, the inter-weaving, and the sharing of singularities' (Nancy, 1991:27)
...

`Voici la formule chimique du militant: le ressentiment de l'ouvrier, plus la mauvaise
Â
conscience de l'intellectuel: quel horrible melange!' (Recherches, 1974:22; emphasis in
original)
...
Against all doctrinalism, it would imply
that the tension between `communist', or left-humanist, faith and its
`scienti®c' (self-)understanding should be acknowledged, even deliberately maintained
...

Althusser's unremitting effort to justify that idea in the tough-minded
terms of an anti-humanist humanism is unconvincing
...
(The
fantasy element did not escape him
...
) Regardless, the key questions to
which his position might lead if we pushed it to give a better account of
its underpinnings and presuppositions are simply unasked
...
For all
of Althusser's efforts, then, to clarify the ideological element of the
movement from and for which he speaks, that element remains ®nally
opaque
...

Baudrillard: the end of the social
By Marxifying Comte and then applying an anti-essentialist correction,
Althusser would re®gure Leninist orthodoxy
...
It opens the way for us to imagine ourselves within an
invisible Church of the Left (for example Derrida's `New International'
(1994)) grappling with the mysteries of a faith that has neither a `real'

240

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

subject nor a `real' object, and whose cultural reproduction is as
necessary for sustaining it as its ideological forms of expression are
inadequate for that faith's `scienti®c' self-comprehension
...

The position developed by Jean Baudrillard ± an ex-Nanterre exsociologist who became, `after the orgy' of the 1960s, `France's leading
philosopher of postmodernism' and `the lone ranger of the postmarxist
left' (to cite the hype)39 ± could hardly present a sharper contrast
...
40 Baudrillard's pronouncements about the `end of the social' (1983b) pronounce an end
not only to any treatment of that category as divine, but to any project of
transforming, improving or reviving the social at all
...
It bespeaks, as the ultimate disillusioning
of both radical and liberal teleology, `the end of the end'
...
With his insistence that the
movement of history, or rather the movement of capital, has rendered
`the social' unthinkable, the socio-theological project, whether in Positivist or Marxist form, is de®nitively brought to a close
...

The phrase `after the orgy' is Baudrillard's own (1993:3±13)
...

Citing Canetti on `the dead point' (Baudrillard, 1990:14±15) and Virillio on the
paradoxes of speed-up and lived time, Baudrillard advances a particularly sweeping
(and chronologically speci®c!) version of the idea that history has ended
...
Once the apogee of
time, the summit of the curve of evolution, the solstice of history has been passed, the
downward slope of events began and things began to run in reverse
...
This is the problem: is the course
of modernity reversible, and is that reversibility itself reversible? How far can this
retrospective form go, this end-of-millennium dream? Is there not a ``history barrier'',
analogous to the sound or speed barrier, beyond which, in its palinodical movement, it
could not pass?' (1995:10, 13)
...


Socio-theology after Comte

241

tion' (1985), and on its sociological side, where the `social' is given a
`sociological' death
...
As for that, it is a
question of taking Baudrillard at his word
...

Indeed, that work is `sociological' (in the French manner) in two
respects
...
To be sure, unlike those who used to worry about the `moral crisis'
of industrialism, or who worry today about capitalist restructuring and
the `tearing of the social fabric', Baudrillard's response is one of neither
panic nor regret
...
Later in the same interview he goes on to remark that his
deepest aim is to `bring theory into a state of grace'
...
All of which would suggest not only that ending the social is
a religiously tinged event, but that Baudrillard's obsequies are another,
and not just the ®nal, chapter in the thought adventure which opens
with Comte
...
44 His abandonment of
discursive theory after For a Critique of The Political Economy of the Sign
(®rst published in 1972) creates further hazards
...
Thematically, he tells us (1988:11), he had always
focussed on the fate of `the object', understanding by that the object in
43

44

Among Anglophone commentators, Mike Gane is notable in his stress on Baudrillard's
relation with French sociology, and especially its concept of religion and the sacred
(1991:9)
...

Besides Gane, 1991, good recent commentaries include Levin, 1996, and Genosko,
1994
...
In these terms, what characterises the
movement of Baudrillard's thought is the way in which a Frankfurtian
pessimism about the prospects of resistance by the human subject gives
way to a perverse championing of the object itself
...

Baudrillard's earlier work46 can be read as an extension of Adorno's
and Marcuse's analysis of advanced capitalism as a one-dimensional and
totally administered society
...
From there the analysis
takes off, highlighting, in its admitted extremism, the direst tendencies
in the mediatised ultra-capitalism it seeks to describe
...
With this
same shift, moreover, the Promethean and `revolutionary' epoch of
production is itself over
...
Not only, with
the rise of mass production, mass marketing, and the culture industry,
has the industrial capitalist primacy of production over circulation and
exchange been reversed
...
e
...

The panoptical gaze and display of mass media ampli®es the effect
...
47 Baudrillard adds that where every45

46

47

`The only strategy possible is that of the object
...

Á
ÂÂ
Le systeme des objets (1968) and La societe de consommation (1970)
...
Extracts from the latter can be found in Poster, 1988,
chap
...

1989:126
...
The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an
extension of the ®lm he has just left (because the latter is intent on reproducing the

Socio-theology after Comte

243

thing is a `scene' (Greek: stage) there is no backstage, a condition which,
following the same etymology, is precisely `ob-scene' (Foster, 1983:130)
...
In the `third order of simulation',
it has become objectively impossible to distinguish between concept and
referent, map and territory, the real and its model (1983a:1±2)
...
Thus,
at the peak of the transformation descried by the Frankfurt thinkers,
and announced, in different tones, by McLuhan,49 capitalism has both
imploded and gone into hyperspace
...

It follows, of course, that sociology in the old `scienti®c' sense has
become impossible
...
To see
this we must look more closely at the terms in which his argument about
the `end of the social' is actually couched
...
The social has basically never existed
...

Nothing has ever functioned socially
...
(1983b:70±1)
2
...
Far from being volatilised it is the social which triumphs; the reality
of the social is imposed everywhere
...
The more intensely
and ¯awlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the
illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that
presented on the screen' (ibid
...
The studio-modelling of the built
environment (cities as theme parks) erases the line between real and hyper-real, and
inaugurates Baudrillard's world of `third-order' simulation
...
But today it is the very space of
habitation that is conceived as both receiver and distributor, as the space of both
reception and operations, the control screen and terminal which as such may be
endowed with telematic power' (Foster, 1983:128)
...

The paradigm shift to the `electric age' is proclaimed in Understanding Media (1965) in
such phrases as `®eld awareness', `the reversal of the overheated medium' and the rise
of the `audio-tactile'
...


244

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

makes the social into an objective progress of mankind, it is possible to envisage
that the social itself is only residue
...
(72)
3
...
It has existed as
coherent space, as reality principle
...
But precisely it has
only had an end in view, a meaning as power, as work, as capital, from the
perspective space of an ideal convergence, which is also that of production ± in
short, in the narrow gap of second-order simulacra, and, absorbed into thirdorder simulacra, it is dying
...
(1) and (2) contradict one
another, and the `middle' view advanced in (3) is at variance with the
two preceding
...
When was
`the social'? When was it not? The argument begins to come into focus
when we realise that Baudrillard is not only conducting a Frankfurtian,
Situationist and McLuhanite rampage through Marx
...

From this vantage point, Baudrillard draws a trenchant conclusion
...
As Sahlins (1972) and Clastres
(1987) had shown, `there were societies without the social' (1983b:67)
...
Perhaps, then ±
Baudrillard's ®rst hypothesis ± the social was only ever a mirage, a
changing agglomeration of visible rules, customs and ceremonies, which
was all along operated by a symbolic process it futilely sought to master,
and to conjure away
...
In a
spiralling movement, the social, as the remainder of the remainder it
continually excretes, ®nally consumes its own corpse
...
However,
with the onset of industrial modernity, collective life acquires the energy

Socio-theology after Comte

245

and cognitive perspective for project and intent
...
Here, at least, and in conceptualising as `objective' a
simulation model which it was itself actively recycling back into the
world, French sociology may have been illusory, but it had `effects of
truth'
...
)
However, continues hypothesis (3), it has these no longer
...
And gone too, Baudrillard suggests ± in a
footnoted hypothesis (4) ± is the very dynamism of the social: i
...
that
clash of forces, and energy to act and plan, which derived ultimately
from a vast deterritorialisation, and from which sociology itself drew
strength
...
Where it was,
if it was at all, is now le masse ± a black hole of densely networked
communication which resists meaning, cannot be worked on, and, as
the object of no possible knowledge, can be neither encountered nor
rigorously conceived
...
As a phantom, it was never alive
...
And ®nally, as a vampire, it has given up the
ghost, a dead death, an abyss of indifference, sucking the life out of the
symbolic itself
...

The ®rst is that Baudrillard posits his farewell to the social, and the
necessity of its disappearance, on the basis of a change taken to have
occurred, for what are ultimately technological and socio-economic
reasons, in the character of social existence
...
The simulated social projected by sociology turns out
to have been merely an episode (conceptual, but also real) in the history
of a more inclusive `social' that cannot any longer be thought of under
that name
...
Benjamin: `The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behaviour towards
works of art issues today in a new form
...

The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of
participation' (1969:239)
...

This is not to say that Baudrillard ontologises the social in the same
manner as classical French sociology
...
It is an assemblage without essence, and not
to be conceived as either entity or substance
...
If he is to be criticised in this respect, indeed, it is for not being
sociological enough
...
This simpli®cation, in turn,
authorises him to overstate the extremity of the late-capitalist situation
in line with the `metaphysical' concerns which, all along, underlie his
account
...

The second noteworthy feature of Baudrillard's `hypotheses' concerns
the transformed meaning he gives to their central motif
...
For
them, however, it had been linked to anxiety about a primal social
dissolution
...
The paradox of Baudrillard's
formulation is that it enables him to say, on the one hand, that the
nihilism feared by classical sociology has triumphed
...
On the other hand, since the social was nothing in the
®rst place, precisely nothing has dissolved
...

To which extent, the `end of the social' is not a cause for lamentation
...


Socio-theology after Comte

247

Nothing, perhaps, has given Baudrillard's critics greater dif®culty
than this embrace
...
Here, though, we must be careful
...
The
translation is startling
...
(`What? There is no real world? Then
there is no apparent one either
...
in
postmodern French theory has amounted (and self-consciously) to a
second deicide
...
His sociological reformatting, in light of late-capitalist development, of Nietzsche's story
about the rise and fall of the (ultimately) `real' inverts the meaning not
only of classical sociology's anxiety about social disintegration, but also
the meaning which Nietzsche gave to that story's outcome
...
Through the reifying effects of commodi®cation and semiosis, the social itself has become object
...
Under the
circumstances, the Nietzschean daybreak ± the emergence of a selfaf®rmative will-to-power ± has become impossible, even unthinkable
...
It is the `end of the end', the deadening of power, the declension
of the will
...
If the social passes over to the object,
and if the object has a metastatically excessive `will' of its own, then an
51

Baudrillard summarises the `three orders of simulacra' as follows: `Counterfeit is the
dominant scheme of the ``classical'' period, from the Renaissance to the industrial
revolution; Production is the dominant scheme of the industrial era; Simulation is the
reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by the code
...
The third order combines two features, whose relation he assumes to be
intrinsic: (a) the universalisation of `economic' exchange (beyond even the zone of
commodities and the money economy) and (b) a mode of representation ± the hyperreal ± in which sign objects are simulacra without original (1995:72±4)
...
In the Baudrillardian theatre, all works as if the social ± the
objectal social, the social that ®nally makes the social as simulacrum
dissolve ± is possessed by an evil genie
...
So what, then, is Baudrillard's faith?
We may suspect a diabolism, or at least a heretical version of Benjamin's
chess automaton: an anti-God that is programmed to `win every time'
...
53 Just as in any Manichean construct, then, there is also, but
elsewhere, and not for Baudrillard lodged in any kind of `subject', a
counterprinciple to the `God' who rules appearances and would reconcile (and ®nalise) the world
...

It is just here, in fact, that Baudrillard takes up his position
...
What is called for ± at ®rst
apocalyptically, but then more mysteriously ± is a change of terrain:
We will not destroy the system by a direct, dialectical revolution of the economic
or political infrastructure
...
We must therefore displace everything onto the sphere of the symbolic
where challenge, reversal, and overbidding are the law
...
But how can the symbolic be brought back to
life? How can it topple its rival? The answer is given by the question
...
`There is no reality principle, nor one of
pleasure
...
' Hence `beyond the ecstasy of the social, of sex, of the body, of information',
there are three `ironic' strategies
...

`There are in fact two principles at stake: on the one hand
...

adopted by the ``heretics'' all the way throughout the history of Christianity
...
What the heretics posited was that the very creation of the world,
hence the reality of the world, was the result of the existence of the evil demon
...
It is once again the principle of seduction that
needs to be involved in this situation: according to Manichaeism, the reality of the
world is a total illusion; it is something which has been tainted from the very beginning

...
In this case, what one
has to invoke is precisely this power of illusion' (Gane, 1993:139)
...


Socio-theology after Comte

249

What would be required is a challenge beyond the limit, a reverse
extermination, in short a countergift which capital cannot top
...
defying the system with a gift to
which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death' (ibid
...

Â
This challenge can be conceived in various ways, as de®, gaming,
countergift, fatal strategy
...
The social (but what can this now
mean?) is to be seduced ± magicalised into being ± rather than produced
yet again
...
It proceeds
from the object, from the `sacred horizon of appearances' (1979:75), and
it returns back to the object only as an elicited response
...
Capital itself `challenges' the social: both by turning
everything into use-value and sign±economic exchange and, in the form
of wage labour, by offering a `gift without the possibility of counter-gift'
(1995:37)
...
The companion essay to `the
death of the social' ®nds similar reasons to approve of electoral apathy
and of mass trends towards a refusal of meaning (1983b:48)
...
This too, through a
provocatively abject and excessive miming of the object, can offer a
challenge
...
That is where true
depressive thought is to be found, among those who speak only of the
transcending and transforming of the world, when they are incapable of
transforming their own language' (1996:103)
...
Never less, always more
...
And if possible to render it a little more unintelligible'
(105)
...
But it does so
only on condition that Humanity is dismantled as an ontological
category, and that its moral force as the end of ends is replaced by that

250

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

of a `communist commitment' which is itself only negatively de®ned
...
At the same time, the rise and fall of the `social' ushers in
a world whose hyper-real excesses paradoxically secrete, in the irrepressible destructive/creative dynamics of the `symbolic', something more
primal than the social, and more apt to be described as an immanent
force for the divine
...
But it still leaves us with a question he does
not ask: what the reawakened symbolic might itself engender
...

Whatever might lie beyond `the vanishing point' (1986:5 et seq
...
For Comte, this horizon was the
object of a master science, and the ground of reality itself
...
Its ideal element ± which Blanchot called the `exigency of
community' (1986:3±4) ± was a purely ideological ®gure, and so neither
the object nor the basis of any knowledge
...
In the end, then, if Althusser
has only banalities to offer about the form of sociality which might lie on
the other side of `the river' (1993:224), Baudrillard, by ensconcing
theory itself in his own other of the symbolic, has nothing to say about it
at all
...
that can do
without shadows or tragedies' (Althusser, 1969:238)
...
`I believe the only possible de®nition of
communism ± if one day it were to exist in the world ± is the absence of relationships based
on the market, that is to say of exploitative class relations and the domination of the
State' (ibid
...
Such negative de®nition is consistent, of course, both with a
`materialist' refusal to engage in utopian speculation and with a form of negative
theology
...
How: both with regard to
what it is, as a fundamental trait of social being (if we eschew the model
of a fusional social superimposed on a Hobbesian egoism, how might
the in common of social life be conceived?); but also ideologically, as the
touchstone of political value, and as the desirable itself
...
It would mean af®rming, welcoming, giving
maximal (or at least optimal) play to a feature of our collective life which
is already, and always, however precariously, present
...

It should be said at once that Nancy's engagement with the shaping
themes of French sociology is nothing like as direct as in the two
previous cases
...
He writes rather as a philosopher; and more particularly as
that kind of philosopher for whom western philosophy as traditionally
developed (from Plato to Hegel) has exhausted its possibilities
...
For Nancy, as for Derrida, as for Heidegger who
provided a prototype for both, philosophy is left with the task of
meditating on its own closure, with the aim thereby of reopening
thought to that phenomenological inquiry into the Being of beings that
Heidegger called `thinking' (1977b:341 et seq
...
His Experience of
Freedom (1993) is concerned with resuscitating a category ± freedom ±
which is indispensable in the formulation of any kind of emancipatory
politics, and which had been central to German philosophy before
Heidegger
...
It is a similar gesture, with but also against
Heidegger, that guides Nancy's meditation on the meaning of `community'; a meditation which he undertakes by thinking through, to places
Heidegger would or could not go, the meaning of that associative aspect
of Dasein Heidegger termed Mitsein, `being with'
...

For Nancy, this rationale55 was not just an aberration
...

radically implicated in its being-with ± in Mitsein' (ibid
...

First is the question itself, of `community'
...
Acknowledging both
the `history of betrayals' and the collapse of existing socialisms before
the triumphal march of capital, Nancy accepts, but only in `a sense quite
foreign to Sartre's intentions', that `communism is the unsurpassable
horizon of our time'
...
`Communism' expressed (past tense, because `this
emblem is no longer in circulation except in a belated way for a few')
two desires
...
The problem for Nancy is that the idea of
community has generally been confounded with that of communion
...
The confusion has
been abetted, moreover, by an insistence that community be thought of
as `a community of human beings', understood as a mode of collectivity
that would accomplish, integrally and in the manner of a produced
work, `the essence of humanness' (3)
...
For a detailed account of the address and its context, see Farias,
1989:96±112
...
It is post±`death of God' and preoccupied with the
implications for social theory of the antimetaphysical Nietzschean aftershock
...
It
amounts to an imperative: even in the midst of what might be conceived
as a redemptive project, `God' must in no wise be smuggled back in
...
A `sickening traf®c', he notes, `has grown up
around a so-called return of the spiritual and of the religious'
...

Nancy aims to dislodge not only whatever derivatively theistic associations still hover around an essentialism of the `human', but also any
negative theology that might be coaxed out of the divine disappearance
itself
...
At
these extremes, over these abysses or amid this drifting no god could possibly
return
...
(ibid
...

But if reviving the deity through the idea of its (unrecoverable) absence
is illusory, ®lling the vacuum with a sacralised idea of the social is worse
...
To see this we must avoid a misrecognition
...
is what it is only before the face of the gods' (1991:142)
...
All of its members face what they each experience as `my
God', and do not ®nd `within the community itself the presence of what
binds it together'
...

Then the integrally uni®ed community `is capable of becoming horrifying, massive, destructive of its members and itself, a society burned at
the stake by its Church, its Myth, or its Spirit'
...

A third feature of Nancy's account of community relates him to
modern French social theory more directly
...
Nancy's

254

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

essay proceeds principally, in fact, as a commentary on Bataille's own
(re)thinking of community, examined as the history of a groundbreaking, but ®nally unsuccessful, attempt
...
, had its ratiocinative side
...
) ± in the ®rst instance a
political experience, ignited, in the age of Hitler and Stalin, by a fervid
activism; but at the same time too, a literary, artistic and even `personal'
one
...
56
Bataille's quest took him through a variety of experimental groups ±
from the Surrealist `community of artists' and the street-®ghting
Â
Contre-Attaque, to Acephale, whose secret face was turned to ®nding
within itself an exemplary human sacri®ce ± just as it also took him,
during the isolation of the war years, into the private intensity of friendships and `the community of lovers'
...
In opposition to the `fascist
orgy', the ecstatic quality of its being together would come, not from the
extinction, but from the heightening to the limit of `clear consciousness'
...
It came, rather, from the
interruption of any such identi®catory desire
...
The ®rst requirement barred the door to fascism,
which, with respect to the second, held a certain fascination (Nancy,
1991:16±17)
...

In a sympathetic counterpoint to Nancy's re¯ection, written and published between the
Â
®rst and second essays of Nancy's book, Blanchot's La communaute inavouable ampli®ed
the meaning of these successive moments (1986)
...

For a more-or-less systematic account of the distinction between `restricted' and
`general economy', see Bataille 1988
...

Suspended, as Nancy puts it, `between the two poles of ecstasy and
community' (1991:20), and stimulated by his encounter with the work
of Mauss and Hubert, Bataille's guiding insight was that the secret of a
community which took the form of communion was `the operative and
resurrectional truth of death' (1991:17)
...
Hence his growing fascination
with blood sacri®ce, both among archaic societies and as a renewed
historical possibility in his own
...
Rushing
`headlong into immanence', it points towards the `horror' and `total
absurdity
...
And the same was true even of the inauthentic version, in
which the sacri®cial production of `immanent being' was only `simulated'
...
It was not only the Sun King who mixed the
enslavement of the State with radiant bursts of sacred glory; this is true of all
royalty that has always already distorted the sovereignty it exhibits into a means
of domination and extortion
...
This nostalgia was aberrant not just
because it was impossible to go back, or even because the desideratum
was a community without class domination
...
59
Hence, eventually, Bataille's complete turning away from community as
a political project (he seeks his model in the isolated community of
artists or lovers)
...

In retracing Bataille's adventure, Nancy's main concern is to address,
59
60

Á
Bataille, Oeuvres completes, 8:275, cited in Nancy, 1991:18
...


256

Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity

or at least formulate, the problems that, in his view, Bataille's attempts
to think the relation between ecstasy and community on some model
other than that of communion were never able to surmount
...
The furthest that Bataille had been able to go
was in conceiving community as connecting ecstatic beings through the
sharing of an ego-nihilating desire ± his capitalised nothing
...
61
For Nancy, Bataille's crucial insight had been that community,
regarded as something other than the `night of immanence', was not a
being, still less a super-being, but an experience of being in common
that occurs when we each, in `clear consciousness' (and not therefore in
the effusions of an ego that would lose itself in the experience of being
fused into a communal self ), exist outside ourselves, ec-statically
...
This
in turn might make it possible to better understand the relation not only
between community and ecstasy, but between both of these and death,
which for Nancy as for Bataille is their linking term
...
The anticipated
death which is each our `ownmost' always has an outside wherein it (and
I) appears in the world as the ®nitude of the other for an other
...
My singularity as a mortal being is not
something self-enclosed, to be cultivated, suffered or asserted
...
62 In the `community of
lovers' ± which for Nancy as for Bataille served as a paradigm
61

62

Â
`[I]n his writings from the period of la Souverainte
...

Ã
`Finitude co-appears or compears (com-paraõt) and can only compear: in this formulation
we would need to hear that ®nite being always presents itself ``together'', hence
severally: for ®nitude always presents itself at a hearing and before the judgment of the

Socio-theology after Comte

257

(1991:24±6) ± it is in this sharing/dividing (partager) of ®nitude, rather
than in the lovers' suicide pact (which only exempli®es communion as a
death work), that the unbreakable link between love and death is to be
found
...
Community, then, is not that to which we `belong', but simply the `spacing of this
dislocation'
...
And likewise for any communing practice we
might think of as making community `happen'
...

Thus, `community' in the sense which Nancy strives to identify is not
something to be built, produced or brought into being
...
In fact it is
manifest in, and as, the unworking of all the instrumentalities which
make organised social life ± ever more intensively ± what it has become
...

 Â
Â
Still less, at the same time, is la communaute desúuvree some kind of
prelapsarian condition ± oral culture, the intimacy of the face-to-face
etc
...
The `inoperative community' is
the originary `being-with' that is the precondition for any sociation
whatever
...
63 ) Community,
then, as `that which communicates in community, and [as] what
community communicates', always exists (ibid
...

`In [Rousseau's] thinking, society comes about as the bond and as the separation
between those who, in ``the state of nature'', being without any bond, are nonetheless
not separated or isolated
...
Rousseau
is indeed in every sense the thinker par excellence of compearance' (Nancy,
1991:29±30)
...

At this point, however, we may wonder if Nancy's answer is strictly in
line with Bataille's question
...
At the same time, the rethinking of ecstasy in
relation to death and community which Nancy's move entails, converts
community into an eternally recurrent feature of existence
...

Yet the fruit has not fallen so far from the tree as it might seem
...
After noting that even in the extermination camp, which is `in essence, the will to destroy community',
`community never entirely ceases to resist this will', Nancy adds:
Community is, in a sense, resistance itself: namely, resistance to immanence
...
(1991:35)

This is not the transcendence of a deity, either with respect to a
commanding will or majesty, or with respect to an immortality, in whose
perfection and in®nitude we might lose and save ourselves
...
Nevertheless,
something of the divine is still manifest in it
...

Nor, by the same token, is the `inoperative community' an entirely
apolitical notion
...
It points, then, to an `in®nite task' (`a task and a
struggle that Marx grasped and Bataille understood') `at the heart of
®nitude' (1991:35)
...
Instead,
`[i]f the political is not dissolved in the socio-technical element of forces
and needs (in which
...
Thus ```political'' would mean
a community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication
...
And the
de®ning feature of such a politics would be communication itself ± `as
when Lyotard, for example, speaks of the ``absolute wrong'' done
...

Several objections may be lodged against this view
...
By moving from the terrain of struggle against the
conditions which produce the `wrong' to that of its (mere) representation, do we not leave these conditions unchallenged? By insisting on the
absolute opposition between community and communion, warrant may
also be given for an even more adaptive move
...
64 It may be said that the Communist Manifesto's modernist paean for the cultural dynamic of capitalism, in which
`all that is solid melts into air' (Feuer, 1959:10), points in a similar
direction
...
Where no such
dialectic can be presumed, such a position, for all its benign intention, is
hard to distinguish from mere complacency towards the culturally
dissolvent force of the market
...
It would
not be unfair to say, indeed, that it is the very purism of Nancy's position
± his disinclination to consider as the proper site of the political that
messy middle ground between community and communion, between
making happen and letting be, between task and work ± which accounts
for the liberal gloss it can be given
...
Nancy is operating ± in however altered and
attenuated a form ± within the same implicitly `socio-theological' pro64

For a forthright adoption of this position, see Agamben, 1993
...
No doubt, in
continuing to posit a transcendental dimension to the social, Nancy
goes as far as possible to deny both divinity and substantiality to that
dimension
...
We might
say, however, that it is this which also limits him politically
...
In such terms, the second-order practices indispensable to any transformist horizon ± i
...
those which would work on the
mediating structures of social life ± become unthinkable
...

Politically, such thinking relates itself to a practice of human improvement, however conceived
...
And its
transcendent dimension lies in the commitment to, and effort to secure,
an ideological reference point that calls or commands such practice from
in®nitely beyond what is immediately given in the mundane play of
prevailing interests and needs
...
It is this idea which gives (what I will
term, for short) the `French' tradition of modern social theory both its
paradoxical character and, in combination with its derivatively Catholic
ontological approach to the social, its distinctiveness
...
For him, however, the (left Hegelian) project of
realising the Absolute was assimilated without remainder into the always
incipiently transformist politics of the class struggle
...
Operating on consciousness at all, as
for example in Feuerbach's critique of religious self-alienation, was an
idealist diversion that could lead to class collaborationist politics
...

If Marxism, and the tradition of revolutionary socialism, continued
nonetheless to harbour a theology of the social (`communism as the
riddle of history solved'), that theology remained, as Benjamin put it,
`wizened and out of sight'
...
In that context, where the spirit of
an unreconstructed Christianity was cornered by reaction, and political
discourse was haunted by nihilism (at the limit, de Sade's `republic of
crime'), constructing a new principle of transcendence could plausibly
present itself as an essential component of social reform
...
This totality, l'Humanite,
Ã
was at once le Grand-Etre and the proper object of a science
...
It would also transform all the other
sciences by linking them up in a philosophical system endowed with a
worshipful attitude towards this eminent object, an object whose inner
development was represented by the rise of those same sciences
...
Within the system, sociology (capping the `objective'
synthesis) and la morale (capping the `subjective' synthesis) would
provide a positive knowledge of what a scienti®c understanding revealed
to be le vrai Dieu
...
These relied on an organicist and developmental metaphorics vulnerable to the scepticism of a phenomenally
based conception of science which Positivism itself methodologically
endorsed
...
The practical impossibility of the Positivist
solution ¯owed from the same gap, which could only be closed on the
plane of the real by actually instituting Humanity as a transcendent
force within individual subjectivity
...

Durkheim's amendment of the Comtean program to some degree
addressed these weaknesses
...
With regard to the new morale required by industrialism he
privileged ritual over belief, and insisted that the conscience collective, as a
homogenising force for social unity, was necessarily reduced in role and
scope
...
He further amended the Comtean
ÂÂ
program by identifying la societe with Kant's kingdom of ends, but shorn
of its formalism by the way in which these ends themselves evolved
ÂÂ
together with the structure of la societe
...
This civic religion was itself expressed, given the highly differentiated structure of industrial society, in
a socially and morally responsible individualism which respected the
sanctity and autonomy of the person
...
However,
the semi-of®cial status that Durkheimian sociology and sociolatry subse-

Socio-theology after Comte

263

quently achieved also indicated a slackening of Positivism's transcendent
element
...
He had also reduced the distance
Â
and tension between l'Humanite and present conditions, such that, in
the Durkheimian translation, the contemporary form of the transcendent element of the social, the liberal±conservative logos articulated by
the conscience collective, was all too readily identi®able with the ideal
which actually existing industrial capitalist society gave itself
...

Not only was this to retain a suspect bio-organismic model of the social,
it also continued in the Comtean track of ®guring the transcendent call
of the social in the mirror of a God which had itself been ®gured in the
mirror of a perfectly harmonious and uni®ed community
...

Comte's inadequate account of the relation between social being and
the `social tie', his con¯ation of the social with its reproduction, and his
failure to produce an idea of Humanity's actualisation other than as
reliant on a vast and self-abnegating effort to create and keep it going
Ã
as an idea, already pointed to this collapse
...
The same anxieties about the fragility of Society as a socially
constructed transcendent haunted Durkheim's revised espousal of a
morally individualist civic religion; and these similarly pushed to the
background questions about that category's conceptual underpinnings
(Marxist or Rousseauian ones, for example, about the alienated constitution of the conscience collective) which it would have been dissolvent to
pursue
...
It
required more indeed than radicalising the analysis so as to disentangle
questions concerning the destiny of society under the techno-economic
conditions of capitalism from that of society as such, though this was a
necessary step
...
It would require, in effect, the sociological equivalent of
Nietzsche's `transvaluation'
...
Bataille's critique of `sovereignty', and his corresponding quest for an acephalic community (1985:178±81), pointed
trenchantly in this direction
...
Not to mention nationalisms of
every stripe, and all nostalgia for pre-industrial Gemeinschaft (the paradise that never existed) as well
...
His general model of
ideology ± a `specular' structure in which the small-`s' subject is `interpellated' by the projective big-`s' Subject ± is illustrated by simultaneous
reference to the Catholic mass and to the swelling themes of a universalist bourgeois humanism propounded in French state schools
...

Indeed, it was so not only in class societies, but in all social formations
whatsoever
...

Althusser adopted, in effect, a compromise position
...
There was no such
compromise for Bataille
...
This was the
suspicion it brought towards the `community' of commun-ism itself,
whether as a feasible or even desirable emancipatory goal
...
One, building on gift, sacri®ce and
`general economy', would be a sociologically in¯ected Dionysianism
Â
which ± in Baudrillard's de® ± places its chips on the potential for
`reversibility' of `symbolic exchange'
...
For Bataille no doubt

Socio-theology after Comte

265

these ways were not distinct
...

Regardless of their relations and differences, what is noteworthy
about these two pathways is the similarity of their lines of ¯ight
...
This is not as contradictory as it
sounds
...
Yet against any such closure, they exercise
a force, of a resistance and of an attraction, from within the very nature
of social life itself
...

On the other hand, both are nonetheless immanentist with respect to
their own, drastically revised, understandings of what inextricably
belongs to the nature of social being
...
If, for Baudrillard and Nancy, adopting the perspective of `general economy' and/or `the between' shifts the social site
of immanence, it also changes the meaning of the transcendent which
might be represented as `being' there
...

Nor, at the same time, can it be regarded as just another name for God
...
In both
cases, if such metaphors can be used this way at all, we have divinity of
process rather than divinity of being
...
Thus neither Baudrillard's re¯ections on the
altered social being of advanced (post-Fordist) capitalism, nor Nancy's
rethinking of Bataille's `community', nor Althusser's re¯ections on
(socialist) humanism are suf®cient in themselves
...
Nevertheless, each of these thinkers puts in play
a set of considerations which are as absent from one another's thinking
as they were from the pre-postmodern socio-theology of Comte and
Durkheim
...
Taken as a whole, I would simply say, their thought gives us a
®eld of questions, issues and dimensions that cannot be avoided by
those who might wish, from a resolutely `this-worldly' perspective, to
clarify the transcending ideological element within the project of an
emancipatory social transformation, such as it might be conceived
today
...
I am inclined to
argue yes to the ®rst and no to the second, in order to highlight the
radical nature of the breach with any form of otherworldliness which
classical sociology attempted but was not able to make complete
...
But it runs
the risk of a reduction in which the religious preoccupations of secular
reason are seen only as ¯awed, aberrant or shamefaced versions of the
real (theological) thing
...
This would make it easier to engage substantive religiopolitical issues across the theistic divide
...


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and fetishism 184
and industrialism 170±1, 176±7
Nietzche on 190
and social development 157±8
see also love
ambition, instincts of 141, 144
America and new French thought 16
Anselm 79, 207
anthropocentrism 6, 169
anthropomorphism 41, 42, 222
Aristotle 19, 39, 95n
...
38
astronomy 27, 30, 77
attachment 124±5, 126±32
direct attachement 127, 128, 129, 131,
132, 133, 141, 150±1
see also love; social ties
Bacon, F
...
225, 264
on community 253±6, 258
Baudrillard, J
...
163n
...
46
bio-engineering 167±8, 173±4
biology 15, 27, 30, 51±2, 77, 183
and morals 69, 70
and sociology 195
Blumenberg, H
...
5, 95n
...
54, 56, 86
conjecture 40±1
consciousness 13, 69, 257
continuity
and death 110±15
of Humanity 200
and social ties 132±4
and solidarity 134±5
Copernicus 6, 6n
...
54, 86, 93±4, 124
de Vaux, Clotilde 5, 24, 99n
...
242
dedans, see subjective, the
dehors, see objective, the
Derrida, J
...
30, 36
domestication of animals 172±3
Durkheim, E
...
15, 50±1
France 89
modern French thought 224, 226
post-revolutionary 87±8, 89±90, 223
Third Republic 223, 225
twentieth-century sociology 225±6
French Communist Party 235
French Revolution 93±4, 96
friendship 128, 216
`fundamental' sciences 27, 42±3, 44, 62,
182
Gall, F
...
51n
...
21,22, 125
gender 147±9
see also men; women
geometry 75
God 72, 181, 208±9, 248
death of 221±2, 227, 247, 253, 263
and Humanity 188, 206±7
Nancy on 253
see also Great Being
grammatology 16
Gramsci, A
...
15, 82, 116, 159n
...
169, 208, 209, 251±2
`Letter on Humanism' 186, 224
Hirst, P
...
15n
...
119
inside, see subjective, the

278

Index

instincts 60, 61, 123±4, 160±1
of ambition 141, 144
and gender 147±8
hierarchy of 140±2
interchange between 142±6
of interest 141, 144
reinforcement of best 146
sexual 149±52
and social ties 124±5, 144
see also sentiments
intellect 154, 165
and action 70±1, 98
cerebral function 139, 140, 141
development and militarism 156
and fetishism 184
and sentiment 181±2
and social unity 196
interest, instincts of 141, 144
Kant, I
...
39
Law of Three Stages 31, 61, 91, 153±4
laws, scienti®c and natural 38±9, 40
Â
Levi-Strauss, C
...
60, 225
Â
Levy-Bruhl, L
...
23, 33
logique positive, see Positive logic
love 4, 61, 70, 98, 99±100, 118±19, 177±8
and faith 65
and gender 147, 148, 149
as a growing force 120
and Humanity 71±2
and industrialism 170, 176
loving instincts 141±2, 144±5, 145±6,
146
and secularisation 7
and sexuality 149±50
and social ties 125±6, 150±2
and continuity 132±4
family 126±8, 132
groups 128±32
as second nature 135±7

Lowith, K
...
168
Lyotard, J
...
116±17, 196±7
Manichaeism 248
marriage 100, 127, 132, 146, 174, 217n
...
261
Althusser on 13, 17, 35, 228±30
on ideology 13±14
on individual and society 54, 137,
213±14
on materialism 12
on religion 212
on social humanity 210±11
on social relations of production 165±6
Marxism 9, 13, 226, 230, 231, 261
Massin, Caroline 24, 146±7n
...
225
memory, collective 112, 112±13, 114±15,
134
men 127, 147, 148±9, 174
metaphysics 8, 19, 30, 34, 41±2, 52±3
Comte and 153
and continuity 112
and ideology 231
metaphysical stage of development 31,
92, 93
and theology 87±8
Milbank, John 201, 202
milieu 45±6, 165, 184, 203
and fetishism 181, 182
Great Being and 207
modi®cation 172±6
militarism 88, 156, 157, 162, 163
military instinct 141
Mill, J
...
23
modi®ability 45±6
milieu-modi®cation 172±6
monotheism 41, 102, 110n
...
-L
...
222±3, 224±5, 227
and Comte 6, 7, 8, 188±91
nihilism 7, 8, 208, 246
nothingness 184±5
numerology 23
objective, the (dehors, outside) 51, 66, 108,
247±8
Baudillard on the object 241±2
and the brain 140
and Humanity 193, 200, 201, 209
and ideology 232
and individuals 100
and industrialism 176
and language 75
and mathematics 72
and the subjective 39, 62, 83, 186, 247
ontology 30, 42
order 12, 14, 34, 163, 217±18
Comte's preoccupation with 219
and disorder 104±6
improvement of 172
and progress 120±2
original sin 158
outside, see objective, the
parents and children 126±7, 132
passions and reason 139
pataphysics 240
patriotism 131
personality 142, 143
see also ego
phenomena 38, 42, 63
philanthropy, ethic of 48
philosophy 19, 36, 37, 38, 101
Nancy on 251
positive philosophy 23±4, 25, 69, 231
and social science 27±36
post-theistic 223±4
physics 27, 30, 77, 183
physiology 51±2, 138
cerebral 138±9
and gender 147±9
hierarchy of brain functions 140±2
interchange between functions 142±7
relation with psyche 139±40
`Plan des Travaux scienti®ques' (Comte)
90
Plato 19
pledge-groups 204n
...
18, 11n
...
39
prayer 146, 192±3
preservation instincts 141
production (l'industrie) 95, 154, 160, 162,
217, 242
progress 34, 47±8, 56, 154
and order 120±2
psyche 104, 142±3
see also ego; instincts
psychology 52, 107
rationalism 19, 82, 88, 89, 92, 168
reason 34, 92, 201
and faith 19, 79, 88, 221
and passions 139
re¯ection 18, 82±4
Reformation 89
religion 12, 19, 20, 98, 200
Comte's understanding of 101±6
faith 65±6, 192±3
and ideology 14
and love 119
and politics 210±14
and science 261
secularisation 7
and social ties 136±7
and social unity 218
and sociology 191±2
subjective dimension 106±7
continuity and death 110±15
ego and solidarity 107±10
see also fetishism; Humanity;
monotheism; theology
repression 145±6

280

Index

reproduction, human 167±8, 173±4
Rousseau, J
...
93, 123, 124, 257
sacraments 2±3
Saint-Simon, Henri 10, 68, 90, 91, 118,
177
and Comte 10, 23
Sartre, J
...
204
science 27, 29±31, 32, 36±7, 51±2, 68, 261
and fetishism 182±3
and industrial revolution 88±9
and non-science 39±44
Positivism and 20
and practice 44±9
of society, see sociology
and sociology 27, 31, 33, 34, 68
and truth 38±9
see also knowledge
self-af®rmation 212, 213
self-interest 144
sentiments 4, 69, 98±9, 100, 134, 189
and cerebral function 139
and family 126
fetishism and 179±80, 184
hierarchy of 140±2
and images 74
and intellect 181±2
interchange between 142±7
and social unity 196
see also instincts; love
sexual instincts 145, 146, 149±50, 152
siblings 127, 132
simulation 247
sin 141, 158, 160
social, the 19, 32, 38, 130, 218±19, 222
Baudrillard on the end of 240±9
and human collectivity 205
impossibility of 220
and religion 103, 104
and society 53±4, 56
threats to 219±20
transcendence of 59±67
and transcendence and politics 260±6
see also Humanity; society
`social action' concept 54
social being 9, 13, 251, 263
Baudillard on 244, 250
see also social, the
social development 34, 118, 155, 160
and improvement instincts 161
three stages 91, 157
see also industrialism
social humanity 210±11
social instincts 141, 144
see also love
social order 14, 217±18

social physics 25, 27, 90
see also sociology
social ties 59±60, 70, 125, 217, 263
and continuity 132±3
Durkheim on 216
family 126±8, 132
group 128±32, 216±17
and instincts interchange 144±5
and love 124, 150±1
and religion 215±16
as second nature 135±7
socialisation 217
socialism 9, 11, 12, 14, 233, 234
socialist humanism 233±9, 264
society 9, 37, 38, 54, 218±19, 262, 263
collectivity of 12, 203±4
evolution of 158
and humanity 56±7, 118, 198±9
and individuals 60, 122±5, 213±14
and industrialism 95
and order 121±2
and religion 103±4, 200, 218
Rousseau on 257
science of, see sociology
and the social 53, 56, 244
and social ties 59±61, 133±4
worship of 191
sociology 13, 19, 25, 26, 57, 77, 183, 262
Baudrillard on 243, 245
before Comte 37±8
biological model 195±6
Comte's development of 27, 28±9, 30,
31±5, 50
French twentieth century 225±6
and knowledge 90, 195
and moral science 69
Nietzche on 190
object of 51±9
objective and subjective duality 83±4
and politics 27
and science 78, 261
and the social 244±5
and theology and metaphysics 93
the transcendence of the social 59±67
solidarity 56, 128, 134, 216±17
and continuity 134±5
Durkheim on 137±8, 216
and ego 107±10
see also social ties
soul 138
see also ego; psyche
Soviet Union 233, 234
space (Espace) 76, 184±5, 186, 187, 197
Spinoza, B
...
54, 168
women 23, 148
and Humanity 3, 4±5
and love 127, 147, 149
and reproduction 174
worship of Humanity 4±5, 12, 72
Wyschogrod, E

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