ABSTRACT
Comte's philosophical legacy remains only as part of the rich nineteenth-century sediment out of which grew twentieth-century developments in philosophy, particularly the remarkably revitalised form of positivism that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s in the works of the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle sought to highlight the ways in which their positivism differed from nineteenth-century positivist philosophy by giving their programme the name 'logical positivism'. The logical positivists used the new idea of logical analysis to reformulate the classical empiricism of Hume, following the lead of Russell and what they understood Ludwig Wittgenstein to have meant by the aphorismic pronouncements in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was the focus of many Circle discussions. Within sociology, positivism remained the description of a set of practical techniques for the collection and manipulation of social data, in particular the use of sample surveys to generate descriptive social statistics which are then analysed using multivariate and inductive statistics to induce generalisations or test hypotheses.
