Auguste Comte And Sociology.Born in Montpellier, France, in 1798, Auguste Comte was responsible for the first efforts to define the field of study of Sociology. Having been deeply influenced by the great events of his time, such as the unfolding of the French Revolution and the growing Industrial Revolution, Comte became known for his work based on ” positive philosophy” or positivism.
Positivism
Positivism, which is the dominant line of thought in Comte’s work, is based on the idea that true knowledge can only be obtained through experimentation and scientific measurement. According to this perspective, science should be based only on careful observations made from sensory experimentation. This would be the only possible way to infer laws that would explain the relationship between the observed phenomena.
Scientific development allowed for the great technological advances that followed during the Industrial Revolution. These advances, in turn, became agents of profound change in European societies. The urban centers, swollen and overcrowded due to the enormous rural exodus (migration from the countryside to the city) that was taking place at that time, were the scene of social phenomena never seen in agrarian and fragmented societies of earlier times.
Comte saw the emergence of these new problems and phenomena as symptoms of a disease to be cured. He believed that social problems and societies, in general, should be studied with the same scientific rigor as the other natural sciences treated their respective objects of study. Social phenomena should be observed in the same way that a biologist observes specimens from his studies. Comte proposed a science of society, capable of explaining and understanding all these phenomena in the same way that the natural sciences sought to question their objects of study.
Three State Law
Comte understood that the history of human thought went in stages. In his philosophy of history, he drew up the law of the three states , in which he stated that human thought and spirit developed through three distinct phases: theological, metaphysical and positive.
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In the theological phase , positive observations and the use of science as a way of building knowledge were precarious. In this way, individuals clung to the most imaginative ways of explaining the world’s phenomena. Faced with the complexity of events in the natural world, the human being is only able to understand it by resorting to religious beliefs or the ideas of gods and spirits.
In the metaphysical phase , which has as an example the historical period of the Renaissance, human thought began to see the world in natural terms. Even though these were abstract problems, metaphysics replaced imagination with argumentation, that is, human thought strove to understand by questioning, and no longer by accepting explanations based on supernatural notions.
The positive state , in turn, according to Comte, is characterized by the subordination of imagination and argumentation to observation. Therefore, the process of construction of human knowledge must occur from the experimentation proper to the scientific method. This, however, does not mean that Comte stands in favor of empirical reductionism, that is, to reduce all knowledge to the apprehension of isolated observable facts. Comte understood that, as much as it was possible to apprehend laws of general rules of a phenomenon, the constant relations between phenomena are diverse. Therefore, even if immutable laws are established in the relations of different phenomena, fixing them based on the pretension that everyone behaves in the same way is a mistake.
It is in the positive state that Comte assigns to Sociology the leading role of the social world. For him, sociology would be responsible for addressing the social problems of our world, understanding the laws that would govern their functioning and producing solutions to these problems.
