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Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: The Post-theistic Program of French Social Theory
Andrew Wernick
2001
Acknowledgments page viii 1 Introduction: rethinking Comte 1 2 The system and its logic (1): from positive philosophy to social science 22 3 The system and its logic (2): from sociology to the subjective synthesis 50 4 Religion and the crisis of industrialism 81 5 Love and the social body 116 6 The path to perfection 153 7 Humanity as`le vrai Grand-E à tre' 187 8 Socio-theology after Comte References Index vii 1 1 Introduction: rethinking Comte At the heart of Auguste Comte's program for resolving the`crisis' of (early) industrial society ± and explicitly so with the publication, in 1851, of Syste Áme de politique positive ou Traite  de sociologie ± was a project for positivising' religion by instituting (as its subtitle announced) la religion de l'Humanite Â. My aim in this inquiry is to interrogate that project, together with the wider conceptualisation to which it was linked. Today, no doubt, to suggest that Comte's labyrinthine synthesis of philosophy, science, sociology, politics and religion is worth reexamining, let alone from its religious side, will meet with scepticism. We have learnt very well to mistrust all systematisers, and we are bored with the shibboleths of the nineteenth century. Who cares, any more, about Comte's totalising scientism, or about the organised idolatry of la socie Âte  which it underwrote? Why dig up Positivism, only (presumably) to bury it again? One answer, I mean to show, stems from Comte's crucial but underrecognised place in the formation of modern, and postmodern, French thought. Another concerns the continuing (or renewed) pertinence of fundamental thinking about the social itself as a topic for re¯ection. Yet another would argue the value of grappling with Comte as a way to clarify problems in the vantage point (political, re¯exive, emancipatory) from which, in the ®rst place, these considerations press into view. 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. Even those, I will suggest, for whom Comte is the intellectual progenitor of an odiously self-enclosed corporatism may learn something from his thinking. What I propose is an engagement with Comte, not just against and about him. The themes of such an engagement, and its angle of approach, require more comment. 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. What was, or was to be,`positive' religion?
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Critique of Auguste Comte’s ideology on the death of religion
Peace Ngo Ngwoke
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 2018
Secularism dealt with the known, whereas religion dealt with the unknown. The rise of secularism threatened the survival of religion. This was the thesis of Auguste Comte. He said there would be a time when the irrelevant nature and death of religion would be recorded. At this point, man would have been able to unravel most of the unknown around him, hence no need for religion. The article has as its aim to examine the flaws in Auguste Comte’s ideology on the existence of religion and secularism together. Using the descriptive phenomenological method of research, which allows for an objective analysis of the problem, it was discovered that, notwithstanding Comte’s theory, religion and secularism have continued to exist side by side since the 20th century to the contemporary 21st century because they are complementary. It was also discovered that religion exerts a force that cannot be silenced by an industrial revolution of the world. Religion provides the solution to man’s innermost...
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RELIGION of HUMANITY REVISITED
Kemal Ataman
Auguste Comte is lawwn not only as the founder of sociology, positivism, and histoıy of science, he is also responsibi e for founding of a new religion: Religion of Humanity. Some scholars have argued that the Religion of Humanity was but a biographical accident resulting from Comte 's platonic lovefor Clotilde de Vaux. Against these assertions, this article hopes to show that it is misleading to reduce the emergence of a new mavement to a single cause. The Religion of Humanity, therefore, is closely related to histoıy, culture, and socio-political backgroımd of Europe in general but of French society in particular.
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Comte and Social Science
Vincent Guillin
Love, Order & Progress. The Science, Philosophy, & Politics of Auguste Comte, 2018
Published in M. Bourdeau, M. Pickering & W. Schmaus (eds.), Love, Order & Progress. The Science, Philosophy, & Politics of Auguste Comte, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018, p. 128-160.
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"The Facets of “Universal Religion”: Religion in Nineteenth-Century French Utopian Thought" [in:] More After More. Essays Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, (red.) K. Olkusz, M. Kłosiński, K. Maj, Ośrodek Badawczy Facta Ficta, Kraków 2016, pp. 44-55.
Tomasz Szymański
The article aims to deepen the understanding of the relationship between religion and utopian thought considering the example of nineteenth-century France. The text focuses on a number of representatives of utopian socialism, positivism and lay humanitarianism, paying particular attention to how religious reflection present in their works takes the form of a universal religion, and how philosophical assumptions and principles of social organization are reflected in sacred space (based on the theme of the temple). Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon founds his New Christianity (1825) on the joint work of scientists, industrialists and artists, and this concept will find many supporters and religiously exalted followers who will develop, among other things, a project of total reconstruction of Paris, containing a huge temple in the shape of a Woman. Pierre Leroux makes Humanity the object of a universal worship, similarly to Auguste Comte, but in a different way. Comte becomes the founder and the priest of the positivist universal religion, finding a companion and an inspirer in Clotilde de Vaux. He designs a Church of Humanity, whose structure is based on his doctrine as reflected in the positivist calendar. It is interesting to compare these concepts with the romantic vision of Victor Hugo's poem “Le Temple” (1873), in which mankind is called by the prophet to build at the top of a mountain, beyond space and time, a mysterious, utopian temple, where it has to worship the Unknown.
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Louis de Bonald's Univocity of Being: The Mythos of the Fait Sociale and the Rise of French Sociology
Nathan Carson
homepages.baylor.edu
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The Counter-Revolutionary Comte: Theorist of the Two Powers and Enthusiastic Medievalist
Carolina Armenteros
The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte, 2017
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Auguste Comte’s Concept of Systematic Obsolescence, by Which All Truly Unarguable Views Must Spontaneously Fade Away
Jan Marsalek
Philosophia Scientae, 2022
The usual account of Auguste Comte, thinker of the “positive” science, overshadows his attention to the “spectacle of destruction” (and of obsolescence), to which the metaphysical state of human knowledge and humanity offers the stage. I first illustrate the understanding of this Comtian metaphysical state as both a progressive and self-destructive transformation of “theology”, using an example drawn from the history of astronomy (Longomontanus). The broader relevance of this conception is then assessed in the field of social philosophy, so that the realm of natural sciences is finally re-examined with the analysis of Comte’s criticisms of the theory of chemical affinity (Berthollet).
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Man and Society: Five-Hundred Years of French Philosophy
Ricardo J . Peña
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"Sociology." Chapter. In The Cambridge History of French Thought, edited by Michael Moriarty and Jeremy Jennings, 477-87.
Daniela S Barberis
The Cambridge History of French Thought, 2019
French thinkers have revolutionized European thought about knowledge, religion, politics, and society. Delivering a comprehensive history of thought in France from the Middle Ages to the present, this book follows themes and developments of thought across the centuries. It provides readers with studies of both systematic thinkers and those who operate less systematically, through essays or fragments, and places them all in their many contexts. Informed by up-to-date research, these accessible chapters are written by prominent experts in their fields who investigate key concepts in non-technical language. Chapters feature treatments of specific thinkers as individuals including Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes and Derrida, but also more general movements and schools of thought from humanism to liberalism, via the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Marxism, and feminism. Furthermore, the influence of gender, race, empire and slavery are investigated to offer a broad and fulfilling account of French thought throughout the ages.
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