Comte named sociology only after someone else took social physics
Auguste Comte first called his science of society social physics. When the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet adopted that phrase, Comte coined sociologie in 1838, unaware that Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès had already used the word in 1780. He also founded positivism, a secular Religion of Humanity, and possibly the word altruism.
Comte was born in Montpellier on 19 January 1798, during the First Republic, into a Catholic, monarchist family he soon broke with; a Protestant teacher had already weaned him off Catholicism. He studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris until it shut for reorganisation in 1816 and did not go back when it reopened. In 1817 he became secretary and disciple of Henri de Saint-Simon, publishing essays in Saint-Simon's journals before quarrelling with him in 1824; how much Comte borrowed from his mentor is still argued over.
He never secured an academic post and lived on sponsors and friends. Married to Caroline Massin in 1825, he suffered a breakdown the following year and was stabilised, though not cured, by the alienist Esquirol. Between then and the couple's divorce in 1842 he produced the six volumes of his Course in Positive Philosophy, issued from 1830 to 1842.
The Course ranked the sciences by how exactly their phenomena can be pinned down: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and, last and hardest, the study of society, which he saw as the crowning science. He also proposed a law of three stages, in which human thought moves from theological explanation through a metaphysical phase of abstract rights to a positive, scientific one, among the first theories of social evolution. Critics later found it too tied to classical physics. He once remarked that the solar system was obviously badly designed.
In 1844 he fell in love with Clotilde de Vaux, a Catholic still married to her first husband; their bond was never consummated, and after her death in 1846 his devotion turned almost religious. With input from his friend John Stuart Mill he devised a Religion of Humanity that foreshadowed secular humanist groups. His ideas influenced Mill, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, and ultimately Émile Durkheim's academic sociology. He died of stomach cancer in Paris on 5 September 1857; his last flat on rue Monsieur-le-Prince is preserved as a museum.
Source: Auguste Comte
