About this episode
The episode discusses the controversial figure of August Comte, his contributions to sociology, and his personality traits.
Did you take a sociology class in high school or college? Did you know sociology’s founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren’t bad enough, other biographers say he was a megalomaniac, cruel, and downright nuts. Comte, on the other hand, considered himself a relevant man, to put it modestly. He was born at the end of the Enlightenment and fully embraced its ideals, [1] which Isaiah Berlin summarized as: 1. Every genuine question can be answered. If it can’t be answered, it’s not a genuine question. 2. The answers to the questions can be discovered, learned, and taught. 3. All the answers are compatible with one another. Those ideals are captured perfectly by science. Science is the discipline of power: it answers questions and puts them into neat boxes. Physics is especially good at this. Comte concluded that the principles of physics could be applied to society: “social physics” is what he initially called it before calling it “sociology.” By…
Topics covered
- sociology
- August Comte
- Enlightenment
- science
Keywords
- sociology class
- social physics
- science
- history
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