Auguste Comte

Biography

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was a French philosopher and sociologist who founded the philosophical movement of positivism and is widely regarded as the father of sociology. Born in Montpellier, Comte studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris and served as secretary to the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon before developing his own systematic philosophy. His major works, the Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–1842) and System of Positive Polity (1851–1854), argued that human knowledge progresses through three stages: theological, metaphysical, and scientific (positive). Comte coined the term “sociologie” and proposed that society could be studied with the same scientific rigor applied to the natural world.