Positivism as the Sequel to Revolution

Comte divides the great crisis of Western society into a negative phase and a positive phase. The negative phase — the destruction of the old theological and feudal order — is complete. But tearing down the old system was never an end in itself; it only cleared the ground. The second, constructive phase, in which a new social order is actually built, is only beginning, and it is this phase that Positivism claims to direct.

Ancient thought, Comte notes, had no real concept of Progress — Aristotle and his contemporaries regarded social order as essentially static. It took the shock of revolution to make continuous historical development visible as a fact, giving Positivism the empirical basis Sociology needed: without the felt experience of a society transforming itself, the theory of Progress could never have been formed.

Comte's own motto — Order and Progress — is his answer to a revolution that, in his view, achieved plenty of the second and almost none of the first. A purely destructive politics cannot build anything; a purely conservative one cannot adapt to anything. Positivism's task is to supply the constructive phase the Revolution never reached: a settled intellectual and moral order capable of directing progress rather than merely surviving it.

Drawn from Chapter II of A General View of Positivism (1848), on the social aspect of Positivism and its relation to the Revolution.