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Auguste Comte
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Auguste Comte Article

Auguste Comte summary

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Below is the article summary. For the full article, see Auguste Comte.
Auguste Comte
Auguste ComteAuguste Comte, drawing by Tony Toullion, 19th century; in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Auguste Comte, (born Jan. 19, 1798, Montpellier, France—died Sept. 5, 1857, Paris), French thinker, the philosophical founder of sociology and of positivism. A disciple of Henri de Saint-Simon, he taught at the École Polytechnique (1832–42) but gave free lectures to workingmen. He gave the science of sociology its name and established the new subject on a conceptual (though not empirical) basis, believing that social phenomena could be reduced to laws just as natural phenomena could. His ideas influenced John Stuart Mill (who supported him financially for many years), Émile Durkheim, Herbert Spencer, and Edward Burnett Tylor. His most important works are Cours de philosophie positive (6 vol., 1830–42) and Système de politique positive (4 vol., 1851–54).

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Sociology, a social science that studies human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them. It does this by examining the dynamics of constituent parts of societies such as institutions, communities, populations, and gender, racial, or age groups. Sociology also
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