ABSTRACT
Comte’s general view of the crisis can be formulated briefly in this way: his thesis was that any adequate account of modernity had to begin with the social forms of medieval European Catholic Christendom, a form characterised by the separation and ascendancy of a spiritual authority (the papacy) over relatively divided temporal powers (kings and princes). European history has witnessed a fragmentation of this spiritual power and then its usurpation by the temporal powers opening into ‘modernity’. Eventually the Catholic spiritual power was displaced and then virtually annihilated in the course of the French Revolution. The fundamental cause of this decline was not the rise of the critical philosophy of the Enlightenment, but the combined action of industrial and scientific civilisation. The critical doctrines of the eighteenth-century enlightenment philosophy demolished the theological and monarchical edifice, but were not suitable for the task of social reconstruction. He argued that there was an inevitable logic here: society could be seen to move from the theological state to the positive state with an intermediary state dominated by critical metaphysical ideas. The new social science that he called ‘sociology’ has as its central object of investigation this very movement – the progression of these three states of which it becomes itself an essential component of the final stage. Once discovered and confirmed, a new authority built on the new science can claim its legitimacy in a ‘spiritual’ practice which in effect realises and therefore verifies the prediction established in the scientific law bringing the history of metaphysical phase to an end.
