Comte Quotes

“Auguste Comte, in particular, whose social system, as unfolded in his Systeme de Politique Positive, aims at establishing (though by moral more than by legal appliances) a despotism of society over the individual, surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers.”
― John Stuart Mill

“In a famous passage, Mill explained

Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

Yet, ironically, Mill himself could not tolerate unconventional men such as Comte, who often referred to himself as an 'eccentric thinker.”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume II

“I soon graduated to Comté, a hard, fruity cheese that when aged has the sweetness and flake of Parmesan, and tête de moines (literally, "a monk's head"), made from sheep's milk. Bleu d' Auvergne, my favorite blue cheese, had nothing much in common with the crumbs I'd seen at home on a California Cobb salad. It was so dense it resembled a hunk of butter, coursing with violet veins.
For the wedding, Gwendal also wanted Salers, a cheese from Cantal with an almost peppery after-bite. It is made in huge tomes that, when you cut a slice, leave crags as in the side of a cliff. Monsieur Gilot kindly suggested a milder entre-deux (literally, "in between"), but Gwendal held his ground.
As a last choice, we took a tomme de chèvre frais, a round of fresh mild goat cheese the color of newly fallen snow.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“Although Condorcet emphasized the free, inherently rational individual, he was at the same time concerned with the way in which each person was formed by external authorities. Revealing a tension in his thought between democratic liberalism and intellectual elitism, he implied that those who controlled the educational system and shaped public opinion possessed the real power in the state. This concept would later be taken up by Comte in his formulation of the spiritual power, which would exhibit a similar tension.
More dynamic than Montesquieu's view of development, Condorcet's picture of history affirmed the possibility as well as the desirability of change. He believed progress could be accelerated by the philosophers, who had a unique ability to propagate truth. Just as they had been crucial in instigating the French revolution, so too they would be in the vanguard of the inevitable revolution that was to embrace all of humanity once the moral and political sciences were established. Comte could hardly have failed to be profoundly struck by Condorcet's description of the role of the philosopher and his assertion that 'everything tells us that we are approaching the epoch of one of the greatest revolutions of the human species.”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume I

“Condorcet's elitist inclinations are evident in his theory that to prevent wasting time and effort, it was necessary to unite scientists under a common direction. This plan seems to make the scientists a very powerful authority fee of all controls. Frank Manuel states that Condorcet's plan was particularly evident in the 1804 edition of the Esquisse. Appended to this edition were extra sections on the scientific organization of society as well as Condorcet's commentary on Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, which concentrated on the need for scientific authority. Manuel asserts that Comte was deeply influenced by this edition. But Comte's library contains the 1797 edition, which was more concerned with the freedom of the individual than with scientific power.”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume I

“Uncannily echoing the criticism that Tocqueville was soon to make of the French in the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, Comte wrote that social reformers ran into the danger of sacrificing 'true liberty to a chimerical equality.' Like Tocqueville, Comte considered the pursuit of both liberty and equality to be absurd. Both had been useful tools in the battle against the ancien regime but now their 'natural incompatibility' had become more apparent. he wrote, 'For, a free growth develops necessarily all kinds of differences, especially mental and moral ones; as a result, if one wants to maintain the same level, one must always repress evolution.' Indeed, whereas liberty encouraged the emergence of superiority and advanced regeneration, Comte believed subverted sociability and progress. Too much social solidarity would lead to the end of society.”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume II

“In truth, Comte did not have much regard for literary culture. Chairs of literature and literary associations would be suppressed in the positivist era. He even seemed to discourage writing and reading anything after one's formal education was completed. A 'veritable positivist' - even a positivist priest - should reduce his library to one hundred volumes. Half of that library would be 'more historic than dogmatic' and thus would have 'little need to be reread.' People should read chiefly great poets pondering the human condition to enlarge their understanding. In the Catéchisme, he maintained that there were only thirteen great writers: Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Caldéron, Corneille, Milton, Molière, Thomas à Kempis, Cervantes, and Walter Scott. There were perhaps another seven writers worth reading. Almost all the works of the others could be destroyed as harmful to the heart and mind, although he did allow for some of these works to be preserved as historical documents. At one point, Comte went so far as to announce that 'all of human knowledge' could be condensed into ten volumes. Moral activity now was most important to him”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume III

“Morality was supreme because it joined male and female characteristics. Blending the best characteristics of both sexes and the 'opposite' races - the characteristics of intelligence and compassion - Comte claimed the legitimacy to act as the spokesperson for the collective being Humanity and to regenerate society. As a completely unified and moral person, he could create within society the solidarity necessary for progress. In a way, he was challenging the two androgynes who had captured the imagination of his contemporaries: Joan of Arc and George Sand. Comte appeared to heed the words of a feminist journal. La Voix des Femmes, which proclaimed in 1848 that 'Woman must ... emancipate man by making him a woman.”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume III

“If Saint-Simon had been a megalomaniacal verkannte Genie (196), at least he had enough personal charm to attract a following. In comparison Hayek’s second protagonist, Auguste Comte, a founder both of socialism (through his collaboration with Saint-Simon) and, in his own writings, of positivism, was a “singularly unattractive” individual. Grandiose, pompous, ever confident of his own brilliance (early in life he decided he had read enough, and thereafter practiced a “cerebral hygiene,” refusing to read anything new), he felt he had discovered laws governing the development of the human race that were “as definite as those determining the fall of a stone” (258, 269). He was prolix: his first work, the Cours de philosophie positive, took over a dozen years to complete and ran to six volumes, while his second, the Système de politique positive, took up four. Only his death prevented the world from receiving a planned third set of volumes. His work, perhaps unsurprisingly, was almost completely ignored in his own country during his lifetime.”
― Bruce Caldwell, Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950

“Grandiose, pomp- ous, ever confident of his own brilliance (early in life he decided he had read enough, and thereafter practiced a “cerebral hygiene,” refusing to read anything new), he felt he had discovered laws governing the development of the human race that were “as definite as those determining the fall of a stone”.”
― Bruce Caldwell, Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950