ABSTRACT
In the Preface (1851) to the first volume of the System, Comte refers to a letter of 2nd June 1845, as indicating the nature of his ‘regenerated’ moral state (it is given in SPP, appendix, pp. 613-18); and the first effects were worked out in his public lecture course of 1847, and then in his book Discours Sur l’Ensemble du Positivisme (translated as ‘The General View of Positivism’) in 1848. This 1848 Discourse became, with additions, the first of the four volume System of Positive Polity published between 1851-4. The full title of the System was Système de Politique Positive, ou Traité du Sociologie Instituant La Religion de l’Humanité. 1856 saw the first of an uncompleted four volume project, called the Subjective Synthesis. And supplementing these texts he also published two book length popularisations Catéchisme Positiviste (1852), and his Appel aux Conservateurs (1855). This set of substantial volumes published between 1848 and 1856 adds a whole new layer of analysis, on affect, emotion, and gender relations, to the law of the three states which is completely reorganised: ‘Every man, in the successive periods of his life, differs from himself no less than at any one time he differs from others’ he said (cited by Vernon, 1986: 282). In this reconstructed position Comte openly attempted to fuse together his personal and his intellectual life. At the beginning of the System, he wrote, ‘The primary object of positivism is twofold, to generalise our scientific conceptions,
and to systematise the art of social life’ (SPP, I, 2). How did he come to take this immense change of direction, from a project to establish a new universal association, to one of establishing a new universal religion?
