ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most significant of the early sociological commentators for our analysis would be Auguste Comte, if only because he was the nominal founder of the discipline of sociology in 1838. Comte's work can be viewed as complementary to that of Montesquieu and Condorcet. Complementary to Montesquieu, Comte believed that he had developed his predecessor's enquiry, The Spirit of Laws, into a positive science through the discovery of the ‘evolutionary principle’. For Comte, developing this idea from Condorcet, evolution was essentially a development of the human mind. The stage of social organization was determined by the progress of civilization. This replaced Montesquieu's principle of social determination – the role of the government – with a process of the natural evolution of civilization which culminated in industrial society. In making his analysis, Comte was not only teleologically elevating his contemporary industrial society to the beginning of analysis and the end of historical development; he was also attempting something far more concrete. This was to produce an ideological basis for the re-establishment of social order in the Restoration period after the destruction of many of the more traditional bulwarks of that order during the Revolutionary age.
