p The idea that politics had to become as positive a science as physics was first expressed by Saint-Simon, who also made an attempt to draw an analogy between life in nature and in society. This was no more than a presentiment of the need to produce a social science as a foundation for politics. These ideas were used by Comte, who first described social science as “social physics" and then as “sociology”. This term, consisting of Latin and Greek roots, was first met with scepticism, but Comte’s system satisfied the requirements of the liberal bourgeoisie and the term was accepted as his views spread.

p Another idea Comte borrowed from Saint-Simon was that social science was to look to the future society, but Comte abandoned all of Saint-Simon’s socialist ideas and preferred to speak of a future mankind, by which he meant the unification of all men in a single society under the guidance of “positive philosophers”. That society was not to be based on socialist principles. Positive philosophy was to introduce firm moral rules in relations between workers and employers, with representatives of the industrialists advanced to the helm of the state. These representatives would be led by bankers on the “philosophical” ground that they had to perform the most general, abstract functions. The political organisation of society would take the form of a republic. All of this, according to Comte, would mean mankind’s complete maturity and its domination over the forces of nature. That was a great step back as compared with Saint-Simon. But Comte’s bourgeois admirers spoke at length about Comte’s influence on Saint-Simon.

p Although Comte did call his sociology “social physics" he held that society was a social or collective organism that was in a sense a continuation of animal development. He was unable to show the basis for the social connection between men and spoke of their interaction, never going beyond superficial analogies about the influence of the component parts of an organism on each other. Harmony was the normal state of all the parts of the social organism, with the family, its basic cell, verging on the biological and the social. From this came such social entities as the gens and the people. Naturally, Comte failed to see the dialectics of the biological and the social.

p Comte recognised progress in human society and even believed this to be a law of social development, but he did not explain the source of its 314 self-movement. Natural conditions in which society lived and the growth of population, the division of labour and cooperation were either retarding or accelerating factors in progress. But it was the human spirit that gave social change its direction, and mankind’s ideological and social development coincided. From the spirit came impulses for the development of industry, politics and every other sphere of social life. This most clearly revealed Comte’s idealism. The power of ideas constituted the basis of the social order, of harmony and the movement of all the elements of society. The “mechanism” of social change was as follows: changes were first worked in opinions, then in mores and, finally, in social institutions.

p Whenever Comte sought to indicate any regularities underlying the activity of spirit, being apprehensive that his pseudo-scientific edifice of sociology would be upset by allowing a boundless arbitrariness of spirit, his arguments are especially impotent. In order to limit the arbitrariness of spirit he falls back on the first law of motion, the law that action and reaction are equal, and the principle connecting motion and equilibrium. Comte’s crude idealism was combined with an equally crude mechanicism, and the laws of mechanics were made to regulate the activity of spirit. It is hard to believe that all this was written after Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

p Comte held that the world developed from the simple to the complex, the two “laws” governing social development being the organic differentiation of social functions and their coordination. Comte’s sociology amounts to a superficial connection between phenomena, their outward description, without any penetration into the substance of the historical process, with idealism and mysticism going hand in hand with mechanicism and metaphysics in the assessment of social phenomena. Comte introduced a distinction between social statics and social dynamics, borrowing the concepts from physics instead of biology. Social statics was a consideration of constantly operating factors and established social phenomena like mores, ideas and institutions. But social dynamics did not at all show the motive forces of social development, being no more than an attempt by means of abstraction to describe and assess the course of social development. Harmony was the overall direction of this development, being a state in which all the forces of society and all its members were component parts of a single “social whole”. He held that the epochs of social development were determined by the development of ideology, but he was no longer dealing with the rebellious reason of the French Enlighteners of the 18th century, impelling men to advance, but a reason that had been pacified and fettered by metaphysics and agnosticism.

p From Saint-Simon Comte borrowed the idea of three stages in the development of society. The first—theological—stage was dominated by the priesthood and the military; the second—metaphysical—stage 315 was dominated by legislators and lawyers; and the third—-positive—stage was dominated by industrialists and scientists. But Comte gave his own reading to the positive stage, by combining the development of thought with agnosticism and the expulsion of the critical and revolutionary spirit.

The whole purpose of Comte’s sociology was to defend “order” and block the path of the forces of “anarchy”, and this purpose is served by all the historical material he used, together with the idea of alternating destructive and harmonious epoch which he borrowed from SaintSimon. Positivism was to carry society to a state of final stability and harmony, with all the destructive forces of history overcome. In this way, Comte’s positivism is crowned with the idea of a world development completed. One Soviet scientist says: “The theory of progress, inherited from the 18th-century enlightenment, fitted into these contours. It continued to be fed from the same impressions of growing industrial and scientific development, but in the new formulation it lost, together with the vagueness of its expectations, the concept of an endless advance."  [315•7  This is a good characteristic of the spirit of the 19 thcentury positivism.