Positivism, an empiricist philosophy that emerged in early nineteenth-century Europe, and whose chief exponent was Auguste Comte, the French philosopher of science. Once the secretary of utopian socialist Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Comte articulated his own grand system in a series of lectures subsequently published as the Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842). Extending the insights of Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and others, this philosophical tour de force laid out the component parts of positivism: an empiricist epistemology, an inductive method, a hierarchical classification of the sciences, and an elaborate philosophy of history. Like other empiricists, Comte restricted knowledge to data gained only through sensory perception and rejected any consideration of first or ultimate causes. In the "law of the three stages," Comte claimed to have discovered the law of historical development that revealed human society progressing from the primitive theological stage (where deities were invoked to explain natural phenomenon), to the philosophical stage (where reified ideas were employed in causal explanation), to, ultimately, the thoroughly empirical positive stage. Comte's hierarchy of the sciences built upon this "science of history"; he believed that each field of study had attained the positive level at a different time. Comte ranked mathematics first (as the most general and independent), then astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and, finally, sociology, the "queen of the sciences." The latter, truly a science of society, was the last to attain the positive method.
Because he held that the social instability of nineteenth-century Europe was rooted in intellectual chaos, Comte developed a detailed social blueprint founded upon his empiricist philosophy in the Système de politique positive (1851–1854). Comte's so-called "second system" included an institutionalized religion of humanity headed by a priestly scientific class. He believed that worship was an essential part of human nature but that religion had been mistakenly based on theology, rather than on positive science. Accordingly, Comte identified a host of secular scientific saints in his church's calendar and offered himself as the first "Supreme Pontiff of Humanity."
European Followers and Critics
Comparatively few European intellectuals embraced all of Comte's controversial social and religious ideas. Yet, by the 1870s, some sort of positivism was accepted by a broad spectrum of thoroughly naturalistic thinkers. At one pole stood Comte's few orthodox disciples such as Pierre La-fitte and (in England) Richard Congreve. Nearer the center of the spectrum were those who broke with the official cult but who shared many of Comte's social and political concerns and who believed that the empiricist epistemology and philosophy of history did have social ramifications. One could include in this group G. H. Lewes (and his wife, the author George Eliot) and Frederic Harrison. Finally, there emerged a more generic school of positivists at the other end of the spectrum who, like John Stuart Mill, had been profoundly influenced by the theory and method of the Cours but were repelled by the Système, which Mill dismissed as despotic. Another generic positivist, T. H. Huxley, who combined positivist empiricism with evolutionary theory, aptly characterized Comte's religion of humanity as "Catholicism without Christianity." Still, even these critics shared Comte's thoroughly naturalistic assumptions and his hostility to theology, and, like Comte, they attempted to employ a strict empiricism in their methodology.
American Positivists
All three of these points along the positivist spectrum had representatives in Gilded Age America, although historians have often ignored the first two groups. English émigré Henry Edger embraced orthodox positivism in 1854 and corresponded with Comte, who soon appointed Edger "Apostle to America." Edger settled in a small perfectionist commune on Long Island known as Modern Times. From there, he sought converts in neighboring New York City. A tiny clique of sectarian Comtists coalesced around the New York World editor David G. Croly in 1868, but it soon broke away from Edger and official Comtism and fractured further as the years passed.
Arguably, the major American thinker most influenced by Comte's Cours and some of the French philosopher's social ideals was Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913). Indebted to the political principles of the American Whigs, Ward used Comte's ideas to articulate the first naturalistic critique of William Graham Sumner's political economy. Drawing upon Comte's interventionism, Ward stressed that the mind was a key "social factor" that laissez-faire systems—like that proposed by Sumner—had overlooked or misunderstood. Social science, properly applied, could enable humanity to control the human environment and thereby ensure social progress; it was neither unnatural nor unscientific for the state to intervene in the private economy.
The other American advocates of a more generic positivism during the late nineteenth century included John William Draper, Chauncey Wright, and Henry Adams. Draper, president of the medical faculty at New York University and a popular author, read Comte in 1856 and adopted a modified form of Comte's "law of the three stages" in his work; he had even visited Croly's New York group during the 1860s. Wright, a philosopher of science and a mathematician, was one of Mill's most important American followers; he rejected any sort of metaphysical argument and attacked Herbert Spencer as not being an authentic positivist in terms of method. Adams encountered Comte by reading Mill's influential essay Auguste Comte and Positivism. He wrote in his autobiographical Education that by the late 1860s, he had decided to become "a Comteist [sic], within the limits of evolution" (p. 926).
By the 1890s, grand theorists such as Comte and Spencer and their monistic systems were decidedly out of favor both in the emerging social science disciplines and in academic philosophy. "At the end of the nineteenth century," notes Maurice Mandelbaum, "the earlier systematic form of positivism had to all intents and purposes lost its hold upon the major streams of thought. What had once seemed to be the philosophic import of the physical sciences no longer carried the same conviction" (Mandelbaum, p. 19). Although Ward finally obtained an academic appointment at Brown University in 1906, his approach had by then begun to look decidedly outmoded. Other, younger pioneering sociologists such as Albion Small at the University of Chicago and Edward A. Ross, first at Stanford and then at Wisconsin, moved away from a reductionistic explanatory method. Yet their meliorism and interest in social control also evidenced their early reading of Ward and, indirectly, the impact of Comtean assumptions. In the final pages of Social Control (1901), Ross portrayed the sociologist as a sort of priestly technocrat who would carefully guard the secret of social control but would "address himself to those who administer the moral capital of society—to teachers, clergymen, editors, lawmakers, and judges, who wield the instruments of control" (p. 441). The historian Robert Bannister describes American sociology growing into two distinct types of scientism in the early twentieth century and explains this development as a bifurcation of "the legacy of Comtean positivism: the one [branch] adopting the emphasis on quantification as the route to positive knowledge, and the other, Comte's utopian program without the mumbo jumbo of the Religion of Humanity" (Bannister, p. 6).
Meanwhile, Charles S. Peirce and William James in philosophy softened positivism's harsh rejection of religious experience by the close of the nineteenth century. They both recognized the limitations of science in a way that some of their critics feared would open the door to metaphysics. James poked fun at the "block universe" of Spencer and, by implication, at the pretensions of all-inclusive systems. James and John Dewey were both influenced by the neo-Kantian revival in philosophy and came to stress the dynamic organizing function of the mind. Pragmatism may have been influenced by positivism but much of its approach diverged from Comte's assumptions.
On a more popular level, the journalist Herbert Croly, son of orthodox positivist David Croly, blended German idealism and a Comtean concern for social order and coordinated social progress. In Promise of American Life (1909), Croly called upon Americans to leave behind the provincial negative-state liberalism of the Jeffersonian tradition and embrace a more coherent national life. As Croly biographer David Levy has shown, Croly's organicist understanding of society owed much to his father's positivism. In a 1918 article supporting the establishment of a school of social research (which later became the New School), Croly referred to Ward and explained in Comtean terms that "the work of understanding social processes is entangled inextricably with the effort to modify them" (Croly, quoted by Harp, p. 201).
A New Variant
By the 1920s a new stream, styling itself logical positivism, emerged in Vienna. It represented a more radical sort of empiricism that stressed the principle of verification. Logical positivists dismissed arguments as metaphysical unless they could be verified on the basis of convention or with reference to empirical phenomenon. They called upon philosophy to be as precise a discipline as mathematics. In 1935, Rudolf Carnap came to the United States from Europe and joined the University of Chicago the following year, thereby becoming one of the key American proponents of this variety of positivism, especially after World War II. Aspects of this movement proved to have a long-lasting impact upon American academia in general.
Positivism shaped the intellectual discourse of the late nineteenth century. Combined with Darwinism, it contributed significantly to the secularization of Anglo-American thought, to the undermining of classical political economy, and to bolstering the cultural authority of science. While varieties of philosophical idealism weakened its appeal by the end of the nineteenth century, it continued to influence the methodology of philosophy and of the social sciences well into the post–World War II era. In particular, its hostility to metaphysics marked American philosophy and social science until the end of the twentieth century.
Bibliography
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Cashdollar, Charles D. The Transformation of Theology, 1830– 1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.
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Hawkins, Richmond L. Auguste Comte and the United States, 1816–1853. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.
———. Positivism in the United States, 1853–1861. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938.
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Ross, Dorothy R. The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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