Comte’s posthumanist social science

A polymathic pursuit

It may seem an obvious thing to say, but Comte didn’t embark on his intellectual life as a positivist or sociologist. By this I mean there wasn’t a well-defined school of thought called positivism or a field named sociology that he was trained in. Comte began his education in mathematics under the tutelage of Daniel Encontre, a mathematics professor who was also a Protestant theologian. Encontre introduced his love for science, literature and theology to the young Comte as part of a holistic education (Pickering, 2009a: 497). In 1814, when he was just 16 years old, Comte gained entry into the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris, having ranked fourth in the country on the university’s admissions list. There he studied calculus, geometry, chemistry and physics with some of the best minds of the scientific community. Comte was most passionate about mathematics and astronomy, subjects he also excelled at. In fact, throughout his career he would regularly give public lectures on astronomy to supplement his income, lectures so popular, especially among members of the working class, that hundreds were said to be in attendance at any one time (Gane, 2006: 59).

In 1816, Comte was expelled from the École Polytechnique for participating in a student rebellion. Despite having to return to his hometown, Montpellier, he was determined to continue with his education. By this stage he had developed a keen interest in physiology and anatomy and so enrolled in the famous École de Médecine. Georges Canguilhem (1994) tells us that from this point on, Comte actually played a significant role in the development of biology as a science:

From 1848 to 1880 in France, there was no biologist or physician who, in order to situate her own research in the concourse or the clash of ideas, to define for herself the meaning and scope of her work, did not deal either directly with the themes of the Comtian philosophy of biology, or indirectly with themes deriving from it. (p. 241)

In George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science, Sally Shuttleworth (1984) reinforces Canguilhem’s views of Comte’s forgotten role in the history and philosophy of biology. Shuttleworth highlights that for Comte and other social philosophers of his generation, science was not simply a ‘uniform demonstration of law’ (p. 3). Rather, any theorization of the human milieu was inextricable from the young science of biology as this was an era, following the turbulence of the French Revolution, that was especially ripe for the growth of organic conceptions of society and ideas about the interdependence between part and whole. In this regard, Comte was not alone in arguing for the entwinement of the physical, physiological, and social. All around him, theorists of very different views and persuasions were hopeful that the fledgling field of biology and its attendant theory of organic life could provide the ethical foundations for new principles of moral duty and social cohesiveness. As Shuttleworth explains:

The idea of organic interdependence and growth suggested a different theory of the ‘natural.’ The fundamental attraction of the organic conception lay in the fact that it appeared to offer a model that could reconcile the eighteenth century ideals of individualism with the newly perceived demands of social order. (p. 3)

This biographical sketch, while brief, captures something of the rich and interesting diversity in Comte’s intellectual trajectory – both his interdisciplinary educational experience and his inquisitiveness about how different knowledge domains come into being, intersect with, or move away from each other. While such biographical elements are not typically mentioned in commentaries of his work, keeping them in view goes a long way to helping us appreciate Comte’s staunch desire for bringing together the principles of historical and philosophical analysis and empirical inquiry. At the very least, they should serve as a reminder of his impressive polymathic pursuits. It is no small feat that for someone who was not a practicing scientist at an academic institution, Comte wrote and spoke authoritatively about such fields as mathematics, astronomy, physics and biology, and in a way that the specialists of his day recognized as a good working view of what was going on in their respective domains (Bourdeau et al., 2018). As Pickering (1993) notes, Comte was primarily driven by a ‘search for interrelationships, inspired by his training in mathematics. Biology and history also attracted his attention because they too were based on filiations. To Comte, nothing could be studied in isolation; everything had to be related to the whole’ (p. 185). Relational thinking was the lifeblood of the positive method.

Critical historical reflexivity

If interconnectedness is the real basis of Comte’s thinking, it makes sense that his ideas about finding connections across different fields emerged early on in his career. In 1818, more than a decade before the publication of his magnum opus, Course of Positive Philosophy, Comte had already started to formulate his perspectives on a history and philosophy of science. Importantly, this was also a history and philosophy of mind. In fragments written while working with the political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, the young Comte insisted that a sound theory of knowledge must begin with ‘a view of the whole’. This was to be the germ of positive philosophy: an exploration of the interplay between the life of the mind, the development of human history, and the nature of the universe itself.

Significantly, ‘mind’ for Comte is never an entity contained inside, or possessed by, any one individual. Always an embodiment of collective thought and cosmic evolution, the mind is already larger than it knows, in that what it assumes to be ‘its’ conceptions are in fact instantiations of a wider network of viewpoints or ways of being. As Comte) puts it, ‘the individual mind is not only an illustration, but an indirect evidence of that of the general mind’ (in Thompson 1976: 41). In Comte’s hands, the mind becomes an expanded mind, fundamentally social, deeply historical.

To a greater extent than is normally acknowledged, then, Comte advances the significance of history and inheritance well before he even creates a philosophical program or a social science. The past is never simply over or behind us. Rather, historical understanding is important because we are that history; we are the effects of the history we are trying to understand. Keeping the past at the forefront of present concerns is a crucial means by which to recognize, analyze and ultimately reinterpret the complex truths of our tradition. In this vein, one of Comte’s favorite assertions is that ‘no idea can be properly understood apart from its history’ (1988: 1). In the manner of a diligent science studies scholar, Comte emphasizes this point throughout his writings, anticipating Ludwik Fleck and Thomas Kuhn’s argument that scientific thought is itself shaped and reshaped in ways that parallel broader shifts in history, society and culture. According to Pierre-Olivier Méthot, what is distinctive about the tradition of history of science, especially its French variety, is that it has ‘almost always been a philosophical project…an historical epistemology [that goes back] to Auguste Comte’s (1869) saying that “we do not know completely a science if we do not know its history”‘ (2013: 116).

It is this largely forgotten aspect of Comte’s motivations – his critical historical reflexivity – that I am most interested in reviving. ¹ Robert Scharff (2002) helpfully comments on the implications of finding this reflexivity in the latter’s work: ‘Above all, Comte construes it self-referentially. One must recognize not just in general that every orientation in thinking is inescapably shaped by its inheritance, but also that this is true of one’s own orientation specifically’ (p. x). Because we are always embedded in our knowledge practices and inherited ways of thinking about those practices, any analysis of ‘thought’ or ‘idea’ must begin – indeed, it has already begun whether we like it or not – from the perspective of an enlarged sense of mind rather than that of a discrete and individuated entity. Another way of getting this Comtean-sociological point across is to say that we can only work with/in our inheritance even if the aim might be to challenge and to rethink it. Émile Durkheim, Comte’s more successful successor in the eyes of many, captures the essence of this profound dilemma like so: ‘We cannot visualize existence being called into question, since we see it at the same time as we see our own’ (1982 [1895]: 63). To my mind, this is one of the most remarkable insights derived from reaching back into the archives of classical sociology, namely, that existence takes itself as an object of inquiry – an object that includes us. When Durkheim says we can only visualize existence as we live it, it is because we are it. A science of social existence is an instantiation of life’s understanding of itself for itself, or indeed, even as itself. Perhaps in ways that didn’t always or overtly occur to him, Comte had built his entire project on this revelation of the fundamental inseparability of knowing and being.

If historical reflexivity, the interplay of mind and world, and the affinity between knowledge and life are all core elements of Comte’s ambitions to create a positive philosophy/science, they are striking for a number of reasons. For one thing, they are notably at odds with received interpretations of positivism that see it as a narrow and conservative doctrine promoting scientific observation as detached and impartial. For another, Comte’s attentiveness to relational thinking goes against the common assumption that his theories endorse a simplistic and linear narrative of human progress. As Vincent Guilin (2006) notes, ‘Comte’s emphasis on the connectedness – both diachronic and synchronic – characteristic of social phenomena, and the synthetic outlook he accordingly advocated for their positive study, is hardly reconcilable with some of the central heuristic tenets of the “positivist persuasion,” namely its nominalism and its atomism’ (p. 12).

Crucially, as will become clear in the second half of this paper, reading for Comte’s sense of critical historical reflexivity is for me an entry point to navigating the role of classical social theory in contemporary ‘post’ schools of thought such as that of posthumanism. Beyond the academic exercise of demonstrating Comte’s continued relevance, my larger motivation is to rethink the common-sense assumption that contemporary questions require contemporary thinkers, theories or methods to bring about innovative solutions. In an institutional and intellectual climate that increasingly encourages and even privileges the novelty of the ‘new’, this move seems to me especially fitting. My aim, then, is less about reading Comte ‘correctly’ and more to do with seeking out generative ways to reconsider aspects of his argument such that (his) theory is not just deciphered for theory’s sake but tested for its discovery potential, emerging perspectives and openness to ambiguity and contradiction.

By attending to what appears excluded, peripheral, or even unworkable in Comte’s thought and legacy, my hope is that we will gain a fresh and affirming appreciation for his perspectives on science, knowledge and life. These are themes consistently discussed in contemporary posthumanist and STS quarters but for which Comte’s name rarely makes an appearance. Revisiting Comte’s forgotten approach to critical historical reflexivity and relational thinking is thus as much a theoretical exercise as it is a pedagogical one. John D. Caputo expresses this sentiment nicely in the following observation:

It is the texts that are not time bound, not restricted to the original intentions of the author, that have a shot at becoming a ‘classic’. What is a classic if not a text that is indefinitely recontextualizable, able to speak again and again to ever-new audiences, in ever-new contexts that the author could never imagine? (2018: 99–100, emphasis original)

If I had to reorient the significance of Comte’s project to an uninitiated group of students, I might say this. Picture someone, someone living in the 19th century, who embarks on a mission to study everything there is to study in his time. He begins in mathematics, then proceeds to learn the most important concepts in astronomy, and then does the same with physics, chemistry, and biology, in that order. Now imagine this same person stepping back to consider what he has learned. Several questions go through his mind. Why and how did these fields of study come about? What are the criteria for something being called scientific? What was ‘before’ science? Are there a general set of rules that define the relationship between the different sciences? And what comes ‘after’ biology (which, at the time for our scholar, was the youngest and not-quite-yet emerging science)?

Reflecting on these questions, our learned man begins to construct a set of working hypotheses. He comes up with two. Comte’s first hypothesis is that human history and the development of mind occur in tandem. This parallelism is manifest in the changing worldviews that humankind has embraced and rejected at different moments along the course of its own history. The theory Comte proposes to go with this first hypothesis is called the ‘law of three stages’. A common depiction of the theory/law goes something like this. The mind evolves from the theological to the metaphysical and then to the positive or scientific stage. ² In the theological phase, people believe in the sovereignty of supernatural beings. They might worship objects or natural things like trees, mountains, and rivers, believing them to have a mysterious power not subject to human will. The metaphysical stage, which Comte (1988) argues is ‘only a simple general modification of the first state’, functions as a transitional period between the theological and positive stages. Here, ‘supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces, real entities or personified abstractions’ (p. 2). Dissatisfied with an over-reliance on superstition and accounts of hidden forces behind things, the metaphysical period paves the way for the mind to learn and value the power of reason, abstraction and logical argumentation. Following this, in the positive or scientific stage, ‘the human mind, recognizing the impossibility of obtaining absolute truth, gives up the search after the origin and hidden causes of the universe and a knowledge of the final causes of phenomena’. In this stage, Comte says, the mind learns to ‘look upon all the different phenomena observable as so many particular cases of a single general fact’ (p. 2).

In a bid to make more tangible the personal relevance of his theory, Comte sometimes resorts to an analogy between child development and human evolution. As Shuttleworth (2010) notes, this analogy reads ‘in the life of the child the history of the race’ (p. 282), an example of how Comte readily shifts perspectives across different levels and scales to illustrate the importance of relational thinking. According to Comte, ‘Whoever observes the development of the child, the passage to adolescence, to maturity, and all our metamorphoses until old age, is witnessing an abridged version of the history of the human race, which also has its childhood, its adolescence, its prime, and its maturity’ (in Shuttleworth, 2010: 282). Extrapolating from this, the theory of the three stages posits that the human mind goes through a ‘childhood’ of theological and superstitious belief, followed by an ‘adolescence’ of abstract and metaphysical speculation, and eventually an ‘adulthood’ involving observation-based theorizing and technological application. Importantly, although Comte introduces the three stages as if they were a linear sequence, his writings and examples often tell a different story. I will come back to this point in a moment.

Comte’s second hypothesis proceeds closely from his first and relates to the question of how forms and methods of thinking come to be ‘scientific’. Here, Comte suggests a series of classifications into which scientific fields of study are said to develop – from simple to complex, general to specific, independent to dependent. He explains his second proposition in this manner: ‘since all superstitious beliefs have man as their object, the sciences that first escaped from their influence had to be those whose subject matter was the farthest away from man’ (Comte in Pickering, 1993: 149). Comte surmises that scientific fields of study develop at different rates; they evolve through the three stages of mind at different times, depending on the ‘distance’ between the mind and the sorts of phenomena under contemplation. Remember that ‘mind’ for Comte is both narrow and wide, at once traversing the boundaries of an individual and that of sociality and history. Comte’s second hypothesis thus posits that fields of study like mathematics, astronomy and physics had the opportunity to ‘become’ scientific first, compared to their younger siblings like chemistry and biology, because of the tendency for the human mind to look ‘outside’ itself to contemplate the general laws of nature before turning ‘inward’ to consider the laws of life pertaining to its own existence. And so it happens that the language and utility of mathematics, in expressing and manipulating abstract concepts of numbers, quantity and space, emerged first as humanity’s ‘tool’ for thinking and making sense of the natural world. Then came astronomy, with its study of celestial objects, and physics, with its interest in properties of matter and energy. Taken together, these older fields of inquiry gave human beings the opportunity to build the foundations for understanding the workings of the physical universe. Only by starting this way, Comte (1988) says, with phenomena that ‘can be determined by their degree of generality, of simplicity, and of reciprocal interdependence’ (p. 10), could the sciences of nature have prepared the human mind to be interested in contemplating its own conditions of existence.

The question of ‘progress’

As one might expect, Comte’s claims concerning science and human progress have invited some steep and serious criticism over the years. More often than not, the theory of the three stages is highlighted to readers in a bid to expose the problems with positivism: it is reductionist, scientistic, formalist, anti-subjective. And as Michel Bourdeau (2008) suggests, it is usually the only thing known about Comte. Critics of progress theories also argue that there is something troublesome about Comte’s portrayal of human evolution as a linear pattern of unfolding that begins with a notion of the ‘primitive’ (religious, animal, child) and ends with the ‘civilized’ (scientific, man, adult). It does not help that Comte himself tends to be rather inflexible and single-minded in the way he delineates his theory before inviting his readers to question its linearity.

Admittedly, then, there is a dogmatism in Comte’s style of reasoning and writing that is not always easy to appreciate. This dogmatism, even when Comte emphasizes the relative and relational nature of all knowledge, can still appear rigid, stubborn and difficult to reconcile with more generous renditions of his argument. However, it remains one of the biggest paradoxes of reading Comte that his account of the three stages actually regards these different ‘moments’ not as discrete points in time but expressions of a complex system of relations. Often overlooked, this insight calls upon an altogether different appreciation of what Comte means when he appeals to progress in the name of science. Consider the following passage, taken from the very first lecture of the Course, in which Comte (1988) explicitly warns against reducing his theory to a linear interpretation:

For there is not a single science that has today reached the positive stage, which was not in the past…composed mainly of metaphysical abstractions, and, going back further still, it was altogether under the sway of theological conceptions…even the most perfect sciences retain today some very evident traces of these two primitive states. (p. 4)

As Gane writes, ‘[Comte] by no means holds to a view that society as a whole is permeated by a single mode of thought at any one time. He opens the problem of how different modes of thought co-exist together at any one time, in any one society’. Crucially, Gane continues, ‘the paradoxes of the law’ are ‘rooted in [its] conception from the start: although Comte presents a series, the three states are not equivalent to one another nor is there a single uninterrupted progressive movement’ (p. 27). That is, Comte’s tendency to describe phenomena in terms of occurrence and succession is often thwarted by his own logic: whenever he begins to explain the significance of the three stages, he would almost always offer some breach or seam in that explanation. He ‘confesses’ something that contradicts the narrative he has created. Following Gane, I want to suggest that however we judge the foibles of Comte’s theory, the latter’s emphasis on relational thinking and historical reflection prevents us from reducing his argument to a simple linear account. Despite his rather inelegantly named ‘law of three stages’, it is the complex interrelations of nature, history and humanity’s quest for self-understanding (of which scientific inquiry is an example) that remain Comte’s utmost preoccupation.

We can glean something of this in a more mundane example Comte offers in one of his lectures, essentially a chicken and egg riddle: Which comes first, theory or observation? The common assumption, says Comte, is that good theory develops from one’s observation of tangible facts. Any description of reality must begin with presumably ‘raw’ or unbiased observations. Yet, Comte argues that without a theoretically driven indication of what to look for, nothing meaningful is ever observed. There must be a hunch, some guidance however slight, of some expectation of what one might find. After all, etymologically, theory comes from the Greek theōria, which means both ‘to look at’ as well as ‘things looked at’. Observation without theory is impossible, and theory without observation is meaningless. On this account, Comte avers, ‘science’ was always there, present before it began. It begins, already, in conjecture, speculation, and even religious revelation, in that the discovery of factual evidence or empirical ‘truth’ is not only not separate from but enabled by what it has tried to supersede – metaphysical thought, religious imagination, or whatever is deemed ‘non-scientific’. In Comte’s rather telling assertion, it is not possible to ‘assign any precise date’ to the beginnings of positivism (science) because ‘like everything else, [it has] been always going on’ (2008 [1896]: 32).

In a statement that sounds remarkably contemporary and captures a certain pragmatism in his thought, Comte (2008 [1896]) insists on the necessary contingency of knowledge, including and especially of scientific truths:

It must be understood that I advocate simply a suspension of judgment where there is no ground for either affirmation or denial. I merely desire to keep in view that all our positive knowledge is relative; and, in my dread of our resting in notions of anything absolute, I would venture to say that I can conceive of such a thing as even our theory of gravitation being hereafter superseded. I do not think it probable; and the fact will ever remain that it answers completely to our present needs. It sustains us, up to the last point of precision that we can attain. If a future generation should reach a greater, and feel, in consequence, a need to construct a new law of gravitation, it will be as true as it now is that the Newtonian theory is, in the midst of inevitable variations, stable enough to give steadiness and confidence to our understandings. (p. 199)

I hope the picture that is emerging thus far provides a stimulating counterpoint to routine critical perceptions of Comte’s work. To be clear, I am not suggesting that critics of Comte and his positivist outlook have simply gotten things wrong, for the question of why the ‘standard view’ of Comte persists is an interesting one that merits further attention beyond this paper. My sense of this, though only a hunch, aligns with what the feminist scholar Kathy Davis (2015: 126) has identified as a pervasive intellectual habit associated with the politics of ‘turns’, that is, the habit of making a ‘definitive break with what has gone before and a leaving of the past behind in favor of a new, different, and presumably better alternative’. ³ Or, in Georges Canguilhem’s (2008: 26) pithy summation, ‘[s]omething is considered an error because it is from yesterday’.

In my view, a much more interesting angle to pursue in relation to the theory of the three stages is to understand something of why it mattered to Comte, and to the social and political context he was writing out of. This approach has the added benefit of showing us how his concerns might remain relevant today. A revitalization of Comte’s thought in the manner I am suggesting raises two fundamental points. First, positivism need not be interpreted, as it often is, along lines of debates about whether a scientific age presents a more sophisticated mode of understanding the world than pre-scientific means. Rather, as Comte insists, it is the perceived difference between science and whatever is considered to be its ‘other’ that should interest, above all, the positivist. A robust theory of knowledge is one that is radically open yet sensitive to the historicity of ideas, their generational shifts, rifts and transformations. This sense of inclusiveness would also appreciate how apparently ‘prescientific’, ‘religious’, or ‘primitive’ modes of thought are not jettisoned by, but in fact create the conditions for, the establishment of something called science.

Here, Norbert Elias (1971) offers an important observation about the trouble with linear thinking. Elias skillfully points out that even critical appraisals of progress narratives can remain tethered to a model of linearity as their departure point. This is when criticism is ‘posed in terms only of static alternatives, and so prescientific or non-scientific findings and forms of knowledge are bound to be “wrong” and “untrue”, while the scientific forms are “right” and “true”‘ (p. 53). Extrapolating from this, the same binary problem is at play in criticisms of Comte that understand him to be advocating for a simplistic view of progress, because opposition to positivism in order to present a better, more innovative alternative relies on a similar unquestioned dichotomy. For this reason, Elias recommends engaging with Comte’s criterion for progress as less about distinguishing right from wrong, true from false, than about relating so-called new knowledge to presumably old or outmoded ones.

In this vein, I suggest that a more promising way to rethink the relevance of Comte’s three stage theory is to see it as asking a fundamental yet very contemporary set of questions about what it means to be human at a time in history that people have increasingly come to describe and inhabit as scientific. Why should a style of thought called ‘scientific reasoning’ emerge at this moment in this cultural context – bearing in mind, of course, that the historicity and temporality of the ‘this’ may not herald the exact same concerns for Comte as for us? As Michael Halewood (2014) helpfully comments:

Comte gave us a new problem, one which still pertains today. Too often this is reduced to the simple question, ‘Is sociology a science?’ For Comte and his contemporaries this was only part of the problem. The real question was, and still is, ‘What is the status of scientific knowledge and its relation to the new kind of societies which seemed to arise in the nineteenth century, and how are these related to the possible kinds of lives that we can now live in such societies?’ (pp. 6–7)

On this point, Scharff (2002) contends that the 19th-century Comte did not see himself existing in a post-metaphysical world, if by ‘post’ we mean something coming after or moving beyond. Rather, given that the sciences were only ‘becoming conscious of themselves as sciences’, the issue of their ‘epistemic superiority’ remained a debatable one (p. 8). Comte was not only cognizant of this detail, but he actively tried to make it his theory’s (self-referential) departure point. To broach the notion of the three stages in this manner allows us to see that Comte’s concern with the ‘progress’ of science is not simply about its forward movement, so to speak, but also and importantly to do with delineating a historical epistemology that, to cite Lorraine Daston (1994), raises ‘the Kantian question about the preconditions that make thinking this or that idea possible’ (p. 284). For Comte – and this is key to any genuine engagement with his work – the Enlightenment-inspired project of science is itself woven into the unresolved weight and questioning of existence as so many different modes of knowing. Whatever the spirit of a positive ‘age’ might herald, science (and progress) cannot be explained through something it is not.

Science in the making, or, positivism revisited

If Comte’s ideas sound rather ambitious and unwieldy, they are. But it is also illuminating to see how they have anticipated a number of prominent thought styles across the contemporary landscape of the humanities and social sciences. For the remainder of this paper, I want to bring to our discussion a frequently overlooked kinship between Comte’s positivist legacy and the body of research we have come to celebrate as science and technology studies (STS). Why this connection has been elided is in itself a curious phenomenon since the evidence for it is neither concealed nor lacking. As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, there is an important link between Comte and Latour that helps us recognize the forgotten legacy of the former’s thought in contemporary debates about the relationship between science and society and, by implication, the social and the natural.

STS is by no means a uniform field and does not conform to a single set of assumptions. Yet, there is little question that whatever it names, this field has profoundly transformed the way we understand scientific practices and epistemologies. ⁴ To appreciate its successes, one need only look at how STS has brought together diverse research traditions and created specialist academic journals, professional associations and university degree programs. The idea that finding effective solutions to complex social problems involves traversing the know-how of multiple disciplines across the science-humanities divide, or that scientific research is inseparable from social structures and practices, has become the bread and butter of justifications for new interdisciplinary formations and methodological approaches across the academy. And all this because STS takes as its object of study the constructed nature of (scientific) knowledge.

One whose name is near synonymous with the field, Latour has made some of the most significant contributions to the success of science and technology studies. Crucially, his work has paved the way for a sustained critique and re-examination of the concept of ‘the social’, and by implication, that of ‘the human’. Although he needs little introduction, it is worth noting that Latour’s position within and beyond STS has often been a delicate one. For instance, he has had to marry the value of scientific research with his discipline’s focus on the subjective, historical and social dimensions of knowledge production. As a consequence of this precarious balancing act, perhaps, we see different versions of Latour depending on the context of inquiry and argumentation. There is the Latour who champions constructionist approaches to scientific facts, but also the one who moves away from naïve critiques of science in order to underline the intrinsic value of empirical research and science-in-the-making. There is the Latour who pays close attention to the role of nonhuman ‘actants’, and the one who makes a case for Gabriel Tarde as the forgotten father of actor-network sociology (contra Durkheim). More recently, Latour has also been dubbed ‘the post-truth philosopher’, a title given to him by the New York Times Magazine (Kofman, 2018) for his role in science communication on the politics of alternative facts and climate change.

There is, however, one other facet of this boundary-defying sociologist that is not commonly discussed, the one who unequivocally defends Comte’s positivism. This is the version of Latour I would like to make more visible. To help us consider the particular provocations of tracing this lineage, let me take you back to an interview Latour gives to the Belgian philosopher of science Werner Callebaut. In Taking the Naturalistic Turn, Or How Real Philosophy of Science is Done (1993), Latour is one of 24 participants Callebaut approaches to discuss and debate a variety of questions pertaining to the then burgeoning field of science studies. ⁵ As Callebaut puts it in his introduction, the idea for the book is to try to make sense of the (re)turn to naturalism as a perspective that ‘implies that matters of fact are as relevant to philosophical theory as they are relevant in science’ (p. 1). For Callebaut, Latour’s work is especially interesting because of the latter’s attempts to revitalize naturalism according to ‘the view that there is nothing “given” to us cognizers in nature. We, who are a part of nature, help construct her’ (p. 3).

In their interview, Callebaut poses the following question to Latour: ‘People involved in empirical science studies often use the label “positivists” in the sense of “the bad guys.” You are a spokesperson for an important approach to science studies, Bruno, and yet you object to this. You feel the positivists had a point’ (p. 28). Here is Latour’s response:

I do not agree with this, because there is a deep positivism – in Comte’s sense – in science studies: science can’t be extended further than its own means of proof and instruments. So in a sense the old definition even of logical positivism, is not very different from what we in science studies do. If by ‘positivism’ we mean that it is always a practical or a logical limit that is imposed on the extension of science, then the people who study the networks of science are positivists in Comte’s sense. After all, Comte was a good sociologist of science, in the sense that he made the link between states of science and states of society. So I don’t think positivism should be made a bad name…we are good disciples of Comte. (Latour in Callebaut, 1993: 28)

Furthermore, we see striking parallels between Comte’s description of the ‘positive method’ and Latour’s career-long development of a methodological approach which attends to the processual and to what is in the making: ‘science in action’. This approach, arguably the foundation of STS-inspired scholarship, holds that any sound analysis of scientific activity must take into account the various social and institutional contexts within which scientific practice works or is put to work. The guiding assumption here is that scientific endeavor is a messy business, never free of socio-political circumstances, biases and interests. There is no neutral objectivity, no removed perspective from which to observe ‘truth’ as it really is, or to discover ‘facts’ as they really are, immutable and timeless. Even the name of Latour’s Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on STS is tellingly titled ‘Scientific Humanities’ (Latour, 2011). As the description of the course reads, scientific humanities is ‘the extension of interpretative skills to the discoveries made by science and to technical innovations. The course will equip future citizens with the means to be at ease with many issues that straddle the distinctions between science, morality, politics and society’.

Given this, it is very compelling to me that Comte’s account of what is most distinctive about positivism as a method directly echoes Latour’s stated goals for STS methodologies. According to Comte, positivism, insofar as it can be considered a distinct methodology, is not a method in the usual sense of applying pre-existing procedures to the object or concept under investigation. There is no system that exists as a template independent of the interpreter, the measuring apparatus or the thing being studied. This point he makes very explicit in the Course:

For when we want not only to know what the positive method consists in, but also to have such a clear and deep knowledge of it as to be able to use it effectively, we must consider it in action…The method does not admit of being studied apart from the researches on which it is employed; or, at all events, it is only a lifeless study, incapable of fertilizing the mind that resorts to it. (1988: 23)

Here, too, as an interesting aside, Latour’s endorsement of Comte comes to life in a different orientation when he himself embarks on a series of interviews with his mentor, the influential philosopher Michel Serres. In Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, Latour (1995) engages Serres in a wide range of debates on such topics as the connection between science and the humanities and the interplay between language and things. When asked about the significance of writing a history and philosophy of science, Serres’ wholehearted acknowledgement of Comte’s legacy is striking:

Now then, in rereading him in detail, I found Auguste Comte to be more profound than his successors, first as the inventor of sociology, and for having been the first to ask the question about the relations between science and society, and, more important, between the histories of science and religion. In this he remains unequaled; none of his successors, in any language, go as far on this decisive point. (Serres and Latour, 1995: 30)

Comte’s posthumanist social science

Positivism is routinely equated with scientism, or an excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques. However, as we have seen throughout this paper, Comte’s own writings often suggest otherwise in their cultivation of a relational approach more closely aligned with current ways of thinking in the theoretical humanities and interpretive social sciences. With this in mind, I want to conclude with a few observations about why it matters that we read for unexpected moments of affinity between the classical standpoint of someone forgotten like Comte and the contemporary view epitomized by ways of thinking such as we find in posthumanism and STS.

In What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe (2010) contends that the ‘post’ of posthumanism does not mean an ‘after’ in the linear progressivist sense of moving forward or going beyond (p. xxv). Wolfe’s crucial insight is that arguments made in the name of posthumanism need not, and do not, replace concerns regarding the human condition. In a similar vein some two centuries ago, Comte highlighted the inadequacy of thinking in such bifurcated terms as human and nature, social and physical, subject and object. For Comte, there is little meaning in the view that the natural world can be carved up into preexisting domains to be handed over to designated specialists. This is in fact reflected in the original name he chose for his new science: social physics.

Before social physics was restyled as sociology, the posthumanist and ecological sentiments underpinning it were unmistakable. Is physics (the physical universe, physical phenomena) social? Is there something about sociality (living in relation, identifying as members of a species, a group, an organization) that finds expression in the physical, material world? More crucially, where to begin the carving out of this domain of study if its distinctiveness relies on nothing less than demonstrating the intra-dependence of all natural and life sustaining phenomena, and therefore of all the sciences of such phenomena? Gane (2006) likens Comte’s move to a ‘double hermeneutic’ (p. 95). At once the inquirer and focus of inquiry, the identity of positivism/social physics/sociology (as a discipline, an ontology, a methodology) is caught in an interplay that both produces a subject-object dichotomy yet also puts its apparent separation into question.

Andrew Wernick (2017) remarks that ‘Like Hegel’s Encyclopedia with its circle of circles, Comte’s system of systems has no privileged point of entry. It somehow asks to be grasped as a whole’ (p. 11). Presumably, this characterization is not meant as praise. Yet, it is precisely because the difficult itinerary of Comte’s logic defies linear summary that his work achieves its richness and complexity. What makes Comte such a fascinating figure to think with is the impossibility of containing his oeuvre within set disciplinary parameters, conceptual frameworks, or intellectual traditions. If the present era of the posthumanities is one informed by ‘a growing effort to rework the role of the humanities and their relation to science, technology and contemporary society’, as Rosi Braidotti and Matthew Fuller (2019: 3) have recently argued, it seems apt, now more than ever, to give some serious thought to Auguste Comte’s aspirations to do exactly that. In Comte’s 19th-century project, we witness a twin formulation of positive philosophy and social physics as the yin and yang of how to think the history of the quest for human self-understanding (and this includes the ‘advent’ of scientific inquiry) alongside the history of the quest for knowledge of/with the natural world.

Pickering (1993) tells us that ‘[a]bove all, Comte was preoccupied with linking the two great subjects of philosophical speculation – man and the universe’ (p. 590). Of course, this preoccupation is not unique to Comte, its lineage as old as human thought itself and its relevance as enduring as present-day ecological debates indicate. Nevertheless, and precisely because of how abiding this issue is, it is curious that Comte’s iteration of the problem seldom comes into our purview despite the fact that his ‘system’ of positive philosophy was founded entirely on trying to reconcile the peculiarities of subjective experience with a thought style that confronts that experience as uniquely individual, human, or God given. It is by attending to what appears peripheral or even unworkable in Comte’s thought and legacy that we may gain a fresh and affirming appreciation for his still relevant perspectives on the interplay of science, sociality and life.