The education of Auguste Comte: Social science, political economy, and secular religion in early nineteenth-century France

To a remarkable extent, the geography of Auguste Comte's education corresponded to the geography of a fundamental transformation in the eighteenth-century concept of la science sociale. First among the doctors at the medical school in Montpellier, then among the engineers at the Ecole Polytechnique, and finally as a student of Henri Saint-Simon, Comte encountered a language that privileged organic totality over the individual, utility over liberty, and historical laws over an essentially open future.;From these elements emerged sociological positivism. This transformation did not automatically entail a clean break with Enlightenment liberalism. Indeed, much like the ideologues, Comte and Saint-Simon initially replaced revolutionary politics with political economy. Where the visible hand had failed to secure the new regime, an invisible hand would spontaneously transmute material civilization into moral culture.;By 1820, Comte and Saint-Simon had reversed their original expectations. Now, for Saint-Simon, the liberal insistence on the absolute right of private property left industry organized for individual profit not the general welfare. For Comte, economic rationality was undermining traditional morality only to replace it with an inherently disappointing cycle of conspicuous consumption.;From 1824 to 1826, these differences hardened into two rival secular religions. On the one hand, Saint-Simon's New Christianity called upon an avant-garde of artists to redirect industry to its proper philanthropic mission--the improvement of the conditions of the poorest and most numerous class. On the other hand, Comte looked to a clerisy of savants "to reestablish in society something spiritual able to counterbalance the attractions of the material realm." Along one path lay Marx and the secular millenarianism of socialism, along the other the secular theology of sociology and the modern communitarian critiques of liberalism.