The Gnostic is a Believer - a podcast by TWE

Did you take a sociology class in high school or college?

Did you know sociology’s founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren’t bad enough, other biographers say he was a megalomaniac, cruel, and downright nuts.

Comte, on the other hand, considered himself a relevant man, to put it modestly. He was born at the end of the Enlightenment and fully embraced its ideals,[1]which Isaiah Berlin summarized as:

1.            Every genuine question can be answered. If it can’t be answered, it’s not a genuine question.

2.            The answers to the questions can be discovered, learned, and taught.

3.            All the answers are compatible with one another.

Those ideals are captured perfectly by science. Science is the discipline of power: it answers questions and puts them into neat boxes. Physics is especially good at this.

Comte concluded that the principles of physics could be applied to society: “social physics” is what he initially called it before calling it “sociology.”

By applying scientific findings and mathematical truths to social interactions, the government and its intellectual advisers could greatly improve society.

He was positive it would work. He was so positive, in fact, that he popularized the term “Positivism” to describe his and other contemporary academics’ extremely positive expectations of science

Comte was hailed as an academic hero. The French erected statues and monuments in his honor and named streets after him. He had replaced the hidebound restrictions of tradition, king, and pope with the only thing that could be trusted: science, bolstered by math. No more religion, just facts.

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