Positivism is a philosophy doctrine. In its theory of learning it follows empiricism; in the theory of objective reality it declines the possibility of the answer to the question about primacy of matter and consciousness because the answer to this question cannot be received from the experience. That is why positivism allows both agnosticism and dualism. This theory suggests existence of the only one-self and the rest is simply the feelings or a dream.

In the following assignment I will firstly look at the sociologist who put forward the idea of Positivism, Auguste Comte. I will briefly look at his contributions to sociology, and the social changes and developments that surrounded him, leading him to develop such a theory as positivism. I will also take a look at Comte’s Laws of 3 Stages, which is the cornerstone in Comte’s development of positivism, and then discuss positivisms relevance as a sociological theory and its usefulness to today’s society.

As a result of the Industrial Revolution in the 1820’s, old feudal estates began to give way to a free labour moving into industry in urban areas and as new forms of government began to break the hold of monarchies, the foundations of society – employment and income, living arrangements, community, family, and religion – were being altered forever. In other words, inequality began to develop. As might be expected, people were worried about the new order that was starting to emerge, and they began to think more systematically about what all the changes meant for their future.

The resulting intellectual movement is sometimes referred to as ‘The Enlightenment’ because the hold of religion, tradition, and dogma on intellectual thinking was finally broken. Science could now emerge fully as a way of thinking about the world, and physics and, later, biology was able to overcome persecution by religious elites and establish them as a path of knowledge. Along with growing influences of science came a burst of thinking about the social universe. Much of this thought was speculative, assessing the nature of humans and the first societies unfiltered by the difficulties of the modern world. Some of this thought was moralistic, but not in a religious sense. Rather, the proper type of society and the fundamental relationship of individuals to one another and to the society were re-evaluated in ways consistent with the economic and political changes shaped by the spread of commerce and then industrialisation.

Another force behind the emergence of sociology and Comte’s development of positivism was the French Revolution of 1789 which accelerated systematic thinking. With this new distribution of knowledge came new thinkers who became known as ‘Social Philosophers’. Due to this change in society, these social philosophers tried to look at society in a critical way, and explain the lack of structure in society. The crucial point for sociology is that there was a great awareness of the level of social change, brought about by the political drama and disorder of the time. The long French legacy of the Enlightenment and the shock waves of the French Revolution led August Comte (1798-1857), also known as the ‘Godfather of Sociology’, in his five-volume Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-1842) to sound the call for an order devoted to the scientific study of society. Comte wanted to name this discipline “social physics” to emphasize that it would study the basic nature of the social universe. He was eventually forced to settle on the Latin-Greek hybrid term, Sociology. This word combined the Latin word Socius, meaning Society, and the Greek word Logus, meaning knowledge.

The central problem for sociology was the one that had been expressed by earlier thinkers in the Enlightenment: How is society to be held together as it becomes larger, more complex, more varied, more differentiated, more specialized, and more partitioned? Comte’s answer was that common ideas and beliefs – a consensus universalis, in his terms – needed to be developed to give society a “universal” morality. Influenced by counterrevolutionary Catholics, he developed a much more sophisticated theoretical system than his predecessors, adequate enough to shape a good portion of early sociology.

In his view, disorder and negative philosophies were spreading through French society and he developed sociology as means of combating this. He believed that by applying the same methods and assumptions of natural sciences would produce a ‘positive’ science of society and this would reveal that the evolution of society followed ‘invariable laws’. It would show that the behaviour of humans was governed by principals of cause and effect that were just as invariable as the behaviour of matter – the subject of natural sciences. In simpler terms, positivism is a way to understand the social world in a scientific way. Therefore, positivism would make us look at the world in a very structured way, and help us understand our social world in a scientific way.

Comte did not push for revolutionary change, as he felt that the natural evolution of this positive sociology would make things better. Reforms were needed only to assist the process a bit. This leads to the earlier mentioned cornerstone of Comte’s approach of his evolutionary theory, or ‘The Law of 3 Stages.’ This theory proposes that there are three intellectual stages through which the world has gone throughout its history.