#18 Comte on the relationship between Order, Progress and Social Science
The ancients used to suppose Order and Progress to be irreconcilable: but both are indispensable conditions in a state of modern civilization; and their combination is at once the grand difficulty and the main resource of every genuine political system. No real order can be established, and still less can it last, if it is not fully compatible with progress: and no great progress can be accomplished if it does not tend to the consolidation of order. Any conception which is so devoted to one of these needs as to prejudice the other, is sure of rejection, sooner or later, as mistaking the nature of the political problem. Therefore, in positive social science, the chief feature must be the union of these two conditions, which will be two aspects, constant and inseparable, of the same principle. Throughout the whole range of science, thus far, we have seen that the conditions of combination and of progress are originally identical: and I trust we shall see, after looking into social science in the same way, that ideas of Order and Progress are, in Social Physics, as rigorously inseparable as the ideas of Organization and Life in Biology; from whence indeed they are, in a scientific view, evidently derived.
In the present chaotic state of our political ideas we can scarcely imagine what must be the irresistible energy of a philosophical movement, in which the entire renovation of social science will be directed by the same spirit which is unanimously recognized as effectual in all other departments of human knowledge … As to its operation upon Order, it is plain that true science has no other aim than the establishment of intellectual order, which is the basis of every other. Disorder dreads the scientific spirit even more than the theological, and, in the field of politics, minds which rebelled against metaphysical hypotheses and theological fictions submit without difficulty to the discipline of the positive method. We even see that while the mind of our day is accused of tending towards absolute scepticism, it eagerly welcomes the least appearance of positive demonstration, however premature and imperfect. The eagerness would be full as great if the idea were once formed that social science might also be conducted by the positive spirit. The conception of invariable natural laws, the foundation of every idea of order, in all departments, would have the same philosophical efficacy here as elsewhere, as soon as it was sufficiently generalized to be applied to social phenomena, thenceforth referred, like all other phenomena, to such laws. It is only by the positive polity that the revolutionary spirit can be restrained, because by it alone can the influence of the critical doctrine be justly estimated and circumscribed.
Finally, the positive philosophy befriends public order by bringing back men's understandings to a normal state through the influence of its method alone, before it has had time to establish any social theory. It dissipates disorder at once by imposing a series of indisputable scientific conditions on the study of political questions. By including social science in the scientific hierarchy, the positive spirit admits to success in this study only well-prepared and disciplined minds, so trained in the preceding departments of knowledge as to be fit for the complex problems of the last. The long and difficult preliminary elaboration must disgust and deter vulgar and ill-prepared minds, and subdue the most rebellious. This consideration, if there were no other, would prove the eminently organic tendency of the new political philosophy.
Comte depicts the intellectual journey of humankind as historical transitions in Western Europe from ‘theological polities’ to ‘metaphysical polities’ and, finally, to the scientific or ‘positive polity’. Though the categories of ‘theological’ (i.e. religious) and ‘positive’ (i.e. scientific) may be self-explanatory, the ‘metaphysical’ is not. Therefore the passage below is included to provide some clarification.
Turning now to the Metaphysical polity, we must first observe and carefully remember that its doctrine, though exclusively critical, and therefore revolutionary, has still always had the virtue of being progressive, having, in fact, superintended the chief political progress accomplished during the last three centuries, which must be, in the first instance, essentially negative. What this doctrine had to do was to break up a system which, having directed the early growth of the human mind and society, tended to protract that infantile period [of theological polity]: and thus, the political triumph of the metaphysical school was a necessary preparation for the advent of the positive school, for which the task is exclusively reserved of terminating the revolutionary period by the formation of a system uniting Order with Progress. Though the metaphysical system, considered by itself, presents a character of direct anarchy, an historical view of it, such as we shall take hereafter, shows that, considered in its origin, and in its antagonism to the old system, it constitutes a necessary provisional state, and must be dangerously active till the new political organization which is to succeed it is ready to put an end to its agitations … In all its applications, the positive spirit is directly progressive; its express office being to increase our knowledge, and perfect the connection of its parts. Even the illustrations of progression are, at the present day, derived from the positive sciences.
Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Volume II, freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau, Cambridge 2009 [pp. 3-4, 10, 43-4, 46]