ABSTRACT
Although once widely esteemed and expressly controversial, the name Richard Congreve (1818–1899) rarely appears in contemporary scholarship. The theme ‘Modernity: Frontiers and Revolutions’ presents an opportune moment to recall the lifework of this Oxford don and ex-Anglican minister. Calling for a ‘moral revolution’ Congreve sought to redress the Darwinian crisis of faith and the structural contradictions of the Victorian era. Baptism in 1830, Palais du Costume, Paris 1900. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429399831/18b1c3e6-5914-408a-bfea-b333a29c5630/content/fig63_4.jpg"/> https://exposition-universelle-paris-1900.com/Image:BAL05PAV_19F.jpg.
Using an intellectual history method, this essay will show that Congreve developed and widely disseminated the Positivist practices of applied sociology and the Religion of Humanity. Before outlining the contours of Congreve’s emergence as a globally-connected figure at the centre of the Positivist movement, however, we will trace the origins of these practices to the early nineteenth-century utopian ideas of the French philosophers, Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. Congreve and his British Positivist Society developed their practices to promote anti-imperialism and to unite and defend the poor, unemployed and working-classes as a form of moral socialism. With the intention to realise a Positivist utopia of harmonious self-governing city-states that enable all to live, in the Aristotelian sense, ‘the good life’, Congreve produced a systematic policy of culture to break up despotic imperialist regimes. This essay accordingly situates Congreve as a revolutionary humanitarian who sought to harmonise international and urban-regional affairs as the basis of ethical community-making.
