ABSTRACT
The period of the 1840s was one in which the first epistemological wars over the social sciences in the modern sense were to be fought. Nietzsche was certainly wrong to think Comte was a ‘great honest Frenchman beside whom, as embracer and conqueror of the strict sciences, the Germans and English of this century can place no rival’ (Nietzsche [1881], 1982: 215), since Peirce (1982: 205-23) at Harvard was far nearer the truth in reporting in 1865 the main protagonists were clearly Comte, Mill, and Whewell. In 1866 Marx wrote to Engels that he was reading this ‘shitpositivism’ because it was so in vogue (Marx, 1979: 213), and in the same year 1866 Whewell himself wrote a ferocious attack on Comte stung perhaps by Mill’s jibe that he had never understood the basic threestate law (1988: 117-18). Mill rejected Whewell’s exclusion of the scientific method from social analysis and festooned his massive study of logic with quotes from Comte only to delete after his break with Comte virtually all references to him in later editions. I am not going to examine these controversies here, or the differences between these writers on social experimentation (Brown, 1997), but rather to examine the idea Comte had of his own project in writing on the sciences as preparation for founding a new science.
