A General View of Positivism

Auguste Comte wrote this book as a compact statement of positivism, the system of thought he had spent his life constructing. He argues that human understanding passes from religious to metaphysical to scientific ways of explaining the world, and that society should now be ordered on the same rigorous footing as the sciences. From this he builds a program for social organization, a morality centered on living for others (a word he coined as altruism), and even a secular “religion of humanity.” The result gathers his mature ideas about science, feeling, and social duty into a single readable argument. It endures as a founding text for sociology, the discipline Comte himself named. Free to read as a PDF or EPUB edition.