ABSTRACT
Auguste Comte was a remarkable figure. Loved or loathed, like Dali’s liquid modernity in ‘The Persistence of Memory’ no one who has heard of his utopian schemes and his imagined place in them can ever forget them. Contributions which lie on the continuum between the brilliantly inventive and genial to the absurd have a power of resistance, because as Claude Lefort once said, ‘absurdity is stubborn’ (1988: 263). He is of course well known as being the founder of sociology in the sense that he coined the word and gave it its first content, the so-called ‘law of the three states’. He is also widely known for his important position in the history of philosophy as one of the key founders of positivist philosophy, even if his own position on positivism which differs from later logical positivism is not now widely understood at all in its own right. He was a major figure in the history of science, prefiguring the work of Bachelard and Serres, and Kuhn and Laudan. He played an important role in the early formation of biology as a science. He was the founder of a cult, the Religion of Humanity. He played an important role with Emile Littré, in the production of dictionaries (of science, medicine – forerunners of The Littré – the standard French dictionary). But it is also known that Comte contributed to ethics, and indeed coined the word ‘altruism’.1 He is also known for having introduced into sociology, the sociology of gender and
the emotions. Why, however, has there been an uneven relation, ups and downs of fashion, in relation to Comte’s work?
