Few names of philosophical currents have passed into everyday language as completely as “positivism,” and few have been used in so many different senses. For historians of republican Brazil it is the body of ideas behind the motto on the national flag. For sociologists it is the method that proposes to treat social facts “as things.” For philosophers of science it is the program of the Vienna Circle, which condemned metaphysics as meaningless. For the Frankfurt School it is above all an attitude: accepting the given and reducing reason to technique. This article traces these senses, beginning with the man who coined both the word and the doctrine: Auguste Comte.

A methodological warning comes first: “positivism” does not name a single doctrine. There is (1) Comte’s positivism, with its philosophy of history, classification of the sciences, sociology, and, in its final phase, a religion; (2) English positivism, of Mill and others, which shares part of the spirit but rejects parts of the system; (3) positivism in Brazil, where Comtism took on a distinctive and political form; (4) logical positivism, or logical empiricism, of the Vienna Circle, heir to certain empiricist theses of Comte but formed in another context, with other tools and other problems; and (5) a polemical use of the term, applied by critics to positions their defenders did not accept as positivist. Separating these senses is the first condition for understanding the debates.

Comte: The Man and the Project

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte was born in Montpellier in 1798 and died in Paris in 1857. He studied at the École Polytechnique, from which he was dismissed, and worked as secretary to Henri de Saint-Simon until he broke with him around 1824. From Saint-Simon he inherited the conviction that post-revolutionary society, disorganized by the crisis of the Old Regime and the French Revolution, needed a new “organic doctrine” grounded in science and industry. In his temperament and his work the political question and the epistemological question never separate: for Comte, social anarchy has its root in intellectual anarchy, and only a philosophy unified by the scientific method could restore order. For the biographical and conceptual outline, see the profile of Auguste Comte and the glossary entry on positivism.

His principal works are the Course of Positive Philosophy (Cours de philosophie positive, six volumes, 1830–1842), the Discourse on the Positive Spirit (1844), the System of Positive Polity (Système de politique positive, four volumes, 1851–1854), and the Positivist Catechism (1852). It is customary to speak of a “first Comte,” of the Course, more scientific, and a “second Comte,” of the System, more moral and religious. Comte always maintained the unity of his thought, and some commentators defend the continuity between the two phases; others, since the nineteenth century, regard the second as a break, as will be seen below with regard to Mill.

The Positive Spirit

For Comte, “positive” has several meanings that he enumerates: the real (as opposed to the chimerical), the useful, the certain, the precise, the constructive (as opposed to the merely critical), the relative. The epistemological core is this: legitimate knowledge is limited to observable phenomena and to the laws, constant relations of succession and resemblance, that connect them. The search for ultimate causes, essences, and absolute origins belongs, according to Comte, to earlier states of the human mind and should be abandoned. Science does not explain the ultimate “why” but the “how,” and such knowledge is valued for what it allows us to foresee and, on that basis, to do. Comte summed up this articulation of science, prediction, and action in a formula that became famous in his school: from science comes prediction, and from prediction, action.

This position has clear antecedents in the empiricism of Hume, whose analysis of causation as observed regularity rather than hidden power anticipates the Comtean idea of law (see Hume: Empiricism, Causation, Induction), and in the French Enlightenment, of which Comte declared himself heir, particularly Condorcet with his philosophy of progress (see the article on the Enlightenment). But Comte also departs from classical empiricism: he rejects introspection as a method (hence his distrust of psychology as an autonomous science) and holds that observation is scientific only when guided by theory.

The Law of Three Stages

Comte’s most famous thesis is the law of three stages, which he presented in early texts of the 1820s and developed in the Course. According to this law, each branch of knowledge, and the human mind as a whole, passes successively through three stages:

  1. The theological (or fictitious) stage: phenomena are explained by the action of supernatural agents. It unfolds as fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism.
  2. The metaphysical (or abstract) stage: supernatural agents are replaced by abstract entities (forces, essences, “nature”), conceptual personifications that serve as ultimate causes. Comte regards it as a transitional stage, essentially critical and dissolving.
  3. The positive (or scientific) stage: the mind renounces the absolute and investigates the laws of phenomena through observation and reasoning.

The law is at once a thesis about knowledge and a philosophy of history: Comte correlates it with forms of social organization (the theological-military society, the metaphysical-juridical transition, the scientific-industrial society). Sciences do not pass through the three stages at the same time: the simplest and most general reach the positive stage first (astronomy), the most complex later (social physics, or sociology, being on the verge of doing so through Comte’s own work).

The debate over this law is old. Critics observe that the scheme is simplifying and partly circular: the positive stage is defined as the only valid one and history is interpreted as the road toward it. They also note that it presupposes a unilinear view of progress, now rejected by much of anthropology and the history of science. The law was nevertheless important as one of the first systematic attempts to think of science as a historical and social fact.

The Classification of the Sciences

The second piece of the edifice is the hierarchy of the sciences. In the Course, Comte orders the fundamental sciences by decreasing generality and increasing complexity: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology. Each science depends on those before it and adds more complex and specific phenomena; and the logical order coincides, broadly, with the historical order of their positive constitution. The classification has a double function: it organizes knowledge and grounds the thesis that sociology is the crown of the edifice and also the most necessary science, since the unification of knowledge around the human standpoint is the condition for a remedy to the social crisis.

Two particularities should be noted. First, Comte does not include psychology among the fundamental sciences: mental phenomena would be treated partly by biology (he accepted, in his own terms, Gall’s phrenology) and partly by sociology. Second, in the final phase the series is crowned by morals, treated as a seventh science, and positive philosophy becomes a “subjective synthesis” around Humanity.

Sociology: Statics and Dynamics

Comte first treated the new science as “social physics” and, from volume IV of the Course (1839), began calling it sociology, a neologism combining Latin socius and Greek logos. Even if the term has marginal precedents, the discipline under this name spreads from him. Comtean sociology divides into two parts:

  • Social statics: the study of the permanent conditions of existence of societies, of their order: the family, political society, language, religion as a bond of consensus;
  • Social dynamics: the study of the laws of historical development, of progress: the field in which the law of three stages applies.

The celebrated association of order and progress arises from this division: they are not antagonistic but complementary aspects of a single reality. Comte also proposed, within social life, a distinction between spiritual power (belonging to scholars and philosophers) and temporal power (industrialists and rulers), analogous to the separation he saw in medieval Catholicism between Church and State.

Comte’s influence on nascent sociology is undeniable, though its extent is disputed. Émile Durkheim (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895) made the demand to treat social facts objectively a methodological principle, but he himself criticized aspects of the Comtean philosophy of history. German interpretive sociology, for its part, reacted: Wilhelm Dilthey, in the Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), contrasted with the naturalist model of Comte and Mill the specificity of the human sciences, which aim not to explain (erklären) but to understand (verstehen).

The Religion of Humanity

The final phase of Comte’s thought is the most disconcerting for those who know him only as an epistemologist. In 1844 he met Clotilde de Vaux (1815–1846), with whom he fell in love; she died of tuberculosis two years later, and the experience deeply marked his later work. In the System of Positive Polity and the Positivist Catechism, Comte proposes the Religion of Humanity: a non-supernatural cult whose object is the Great Being, Humanity, understood as the totality of human beings, past, present, and future, who have contributed and contribute to the betterment of the human condition.

The positive religion has a priesthood (of intellectuals), secularized sacraments, a calendar honoring figures from history, temples, and a formula that sums up the spirit of the system: love as principle, order as basis, progress as goal. Comte gives centrality to altruism (a term he coined) as the engine of morality: social life rests on the subordination of egoism to love for others, and reason plays the role of guide, not foundation.

Interpreters are divided over this phase. For some it is the logical continuation of the project of social reorganization: without a moral and affective bond, science is not enough to unite human beings. For others it is a relapse into the theological stage that the law of three stages itself would condemn; this was the position of many of his European disciples, who split between “orthodox” followers faithful to the religion and “heterodox” ones who kept only the scientific philosophy. It should be noted in any case that Comte saw his religion as entirely human, without God, and at the same time as the realization of what positive philosophy aimed at: reorganizing intellectual and moral life around a center.

Mill and English Positivism

In England Comtism had a mixed reception. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), in A System of Logic (1843), shared with Comte a commitment to the inductive method and to a science of society, and acknowledged in Comte an influence regarding the analysis of historical method and the idea of a social science. But Mill independently developed his own empiricism (induction as the foundation of knowledge, including mathematics and logic) and an associationist psychology that Comte rejected.

In Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), originally published as two articles in the Westminster Review, Mill praises the Course and defends positivism against common prejudices, while criticizing several points: the exclusion of psychology, the insufficiency of Comte’s method in analyzing scientific reasoning, and above all the political-religious system of the final period. According to Mill, the System of Positive Polity envisaged an organization of society that subjected the individual to a spiritual and temporal control incompatible with liberty; it is hard not to see in the contrast the opposition to his own liberalism in On Liberty (1859). For Mill’s ethical ideas, see Utilitarianism.

In England positivism was also spread by Harriet Martineau, who condensed and translated the Course (1853), and by a group of disciples, such as Richard Congreve and Frederic Harrison, who adopted the Religion of Humanity. Herbert Spencer, often associated with positivism, explicitly rejected the label and marked his differences with Comte.

Positivism in Brazil

Brazil is perhaps the country in which positivism had its greatest political and symbolic resonance. Comtism reached the country in the second half of the nineteenth century, spread among teachers, engineers, and military men, particularly at the Military School, where Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães (1836–1891) was one of its chief promoters. In 1881, Miguel Lemos and Raimundo Teixeira Mendes founded in Rio de Janeiro the Positivist Church of Brazil, linked to the Positivist Apostolate of Brazil, an orthodox strand faithful to the Religion of Humanity, with its temple on Benjamin Constant Street in the Glória district. The group had few adherents but exerted great intellectual and political influence through publications and public action.

Orthodox positivists and their allies played a role in the republican movement and in the early Republic. The national flag, adopted soon after the proclamation of 15 November 1889, bears the motto “Ordem e Progresso” (“Order and Progress”), which recalls Comte’s formula (love as principle, order as basis, progress as goal). The design is attributed to Teixeira Mendes, with the collaboration of Miguel Lemos, Manuel Pereira Reis, and the painter Décio Villares. Historians note that the positivists promoted the association of the flag with Benjamin Constant, who presented it to the provisional government, although his role in conceiving the design was minor.

Outside Rio, the political positivism of Júlio de Castilhos (1860–1903) stood out in Rio Grande do Sul; his state constitution of 1891, strongly centralizing power in the executive, is often linked by historians to the Comtean matrix. Positivist influence is also felt in the defense of the separation of Church and State, in the idea of a “republican dictatorship” (the defense of a strong, enlightened government in the transition), and in the conduct of military men formed in this tradition, of whom Cândido Rondon is often cited as an example. On interpretations of the topic see, among others, João Cruz Costa, Contribuição à História das Ideias no Brasil, and José Murilo de Carvalho, A Formação das Almas. Assessments diverge: some historians stress the authoritarian and doctrinaire character of political positivism, others its contribution to secularization and modernization. A methodological observation is that Brazilian positivism is generally more “political” and “religious” Comtism than the scientific positivism of Europe.

The Vienna Circle: A Distinct Heir

The term “positivism” reappears in the twentieth century with logical positivism, also called logical empiricism, associated with the Vienna Circle, a group gathered around Moritz Schlick in the 1920s, with Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn, and others. The affiliation with Comte is partial and indirect: the name was borrowed, but the tradition that influenced them is chiefly that of Hume, that of the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (whose version of positivism made science an economy of thought oriented to sensations), that of the new logic of Frege and Russell, and that of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

The group’s manifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (1929), signed by Hahn, Neurath, and Carnap, set out the program: a scientific conception of the world, the unity of science, and the rejection of metaphysics through logical analysis of language. The characteristic thesis is the criterion of empirical meaning, sometimes called the verification principle: a proposition has cognitive meaning only if it is analytic (tautological or logical) or verifiable by experience. Carnap, in “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” (1932), argued that many metaphysical propositions, such as Heidegger’s about “the Nothing,” are pseudo-propositions, formally ill-constructed. His earlier work, The Logical Structure of the World (1928), attempted to reconstruct scientific concepts from elementary experience. A. J. Ayer spread the program in the English-speaking world in Language, Truth and Logic (1936). On Carnap’s trajectory see the profile of Rudolf Carnap.

The differences from Comte are important. Logical positivism has no philosophy of history with a law of three stages and no religion; it uses formal logic as its central instrument; and it concentrates on semantics and the analysis of the language of science rather than on the classification of the sciences and social reform (although Neurath, in particular, was politically engaged). For this reason historians of philosophy prefer the name “logical empiricism” and avoid treating it as a mere prolongation of Comtism. The group dispersed with the rise of Nazism and the death of Schlick (murdered in 1936 by a former student), and its main members emigrated to the United States and elsewhere.

The Critiques

Popper

Karl Popper, who moved in Viennese circles without being a member of the Circle, formulated in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) a critique of the verification criterion and of induction. He proposed the criterion of falsifiability not as a criterion of meaning but as a criterion of demarcation between science and non-science: a theory is scientific if it can, in principle, be refuted by experience. For Popper, metaphysics is not “meaningless” but can be meaningful and historically fruitful for science. Popper also rejected the idea that pure observation grounds science: all observation is theory-laden. The details are in the article on the philosophy of science: Popper and Kuhn. Note the irony: although often described as a critic of positivism, Popper was called a “positivist” by his adversaries in the Frankfurt School, a label he rejected.

Kuhn and the New Philosophy of Science

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn presented an image of science as a historical process marked by periods of “normal science” under a paradigm and by revolutions, in which observation and evaluative criteria are in part relative to the paradigm. The cumulative and logical image of scientific progress associated with positivism became hard to sustain. Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos developed the debate in different directions. Within the analytic tradition itself, Quine’s critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 1951) and Wilfrid Sellars’s critique of the “myth of the given” (1956) struck central presuppositions of logical empiricism; Carl Hempel, for his part, showed the difficulties of the verifiability criterion. Over time, the most common assessment among historians is that the program of logical positivism, as formulated, failed on its own terms, although it left an important legacy of logical rigor and argumentative clarity.

The Frankfurt School and the Positivist Dispute

Well before the Positivist Dispute, Critical Theory had formulated its own critique. Max Horkheimer, in “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), contrasted traditional theory, oriented to description and prediction, with a theory that reflects on its social embeddedness and its emancipatory interest. For the Frankfurt thinkers, positivism, by treating the social fact as given, uncritically reproduces the existing order and naturalizes society (see the article on the Frankfurt School).

The most famous public discussion was the Positivist Dispute (Positivismusstreit), which began at the German Sociological Association congress in Tübingen in 1961, with lectures by Popper and Theodor Adorno on the logic of the social sciences. The debate continued with Jürgen Habermas, who in 1963 published a critical essay in a volume honoring Adorno, and with Hans Albert, who defended critical rationalism; in 1964, at the Heidelberg congress, the discussion took place mainly between Habermas and Albert. The texts were collected in 1969 in the volume The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie), with contributions from Adorno, Dahrendorf, Habermas, Pilot, and Popper, among others.

The name is controversial: it was the Frankfurt thinkers who called the critical rationalists positivists, though they, like Popper, considered themselves adversaries of positivism. The axes of the dispute were the relation between natural and social sciences, the place of values, and the possibility of a critical social theory. Habermas later developed the idea that positivism ignores the knowledge-constitutive interests (in Knowledge and Human Interests, 1968), denouncing as “scientism” the identification of knowledge with empirical-analytic science. The dispute remained a paradigm of two ways of conceiving reason in the social sciences.

Assessment

The path from Comte to the Positivist Dispute shows a concept that multiplies as it transforms. What remains of Comte as a common core is confidence in scientific knowledge as the paradigm of legitimate knowledge, distrust of speculative metaphysics, and the idea that science bears on social life. The controversies concern the extent of this confidence: is science the only valid knowledge (scientism)? Can there be a science of society that is not modeled on physics? What is to be done with values, history, and interpretation? Sociology, philosophy of science, philosophy of law (in which “legal positivism” has its own sense; see Philosophy of Law: Positivism and Natural Law), and Brazilian political history continue to engage this debate. To study positivism is thus to study less a school than a family of problems.

Essential Readings

  • COMTE, Auguste. Discourse on the Positive Spirit (Discours sur l’esprit positif, 1844).
  • COMTE, Auguste. Cours de philosophie positive. 6 vols. Paris, 1830–1842.
  • COMTE, Auguste. Système de politique positive. 4 vols. Paris, 1851–1854.
  • MILL, John Stuart. Auguste Comte and Positivism. London, 1865.
  • KOŁAKOWSKI, Leszek. Positivist Philosophy: From Hume to the Vienna Circle (also published as The Alienation of Reason). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
  • WERNICK, Andrew. Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  • AYER, A. J. (ed.). Logical Positivism. Glencoe: Free Press, 1959.
  • CARNAP, Rudolf. “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache.” Erkenntnis, 2, 1932.
  • ADORNO, Theodor W. et al. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. London: Heinemann, 1976.
  • CRUZ COSTA, João. Contribuição à História das Ideias no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1956.
  • CARVALHO, José Murilo de. A Formação das Almas: o Imaginário da República no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990.

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