Long 19th c. · 1798–1857
Who influenced Auguste Comte?
Influences and legacy
Positivism's lawgiver: sociology as the queen of sciences on physics' strict terms.
Auguste Comte was influenced by Montesquieu and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and went on to influence John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. That is 4 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Johan Hendrik Hoffmeister, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Auguste Comte?
Auguste Comte formulated positivism and is often called the first philosopher of science in the modern sense. He also coined the word sociology and treated that discipline as the crown of the sciences. Influenced by Henri de Saint-Simon, he wanted a new social doctrine built on science to end the disorder he blamed on the French Revolution.
John Stuart Mill and George Eliot drew on him, and his ideas about social evolution set the tone for Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer. His later "Religion of Humanity" anticipated the secular humanist groups of the 19th century, and he may have coined the word altruism.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Auguste Comte?
2 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Montesquieu 1689–1755
- Étienne Bonnot de Condillac 1714–1780
Who did Auguste Comte influence?
2 thinkers on this map draw directly on Auguste Comte.
- John Stuart Mill 1806–1873
- Herbert Spencer 1820–1903
The line of teachers behind Auguste Comte
The longest documented line of influence ending at Auguste Comte runs 17 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
Two steps away from Auguste Comte
Indirect influences
- Through Montesquieu: Ibn Khaldun, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Locke
The second generation
- Through John Stuart Mill: Henry Sidgwick, Bertrand Russell, John Rawls
Contemporaries of Auguste Comte
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Auguste Comte, with no direct line between them.
- Gustav Fechner 1801–1887
- Pyotr Chaadayev 1794–1856
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
- Ludwig Feuerbach 1804–1872
- Aleksey Khomyakov 1804–1860
- Alexis de Tocqueville 1805–1859
- Max Stirner 1806–1856
- Ivan Kireyevsky 1806–1856
Auguste Comte by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 2
- Direct followers
- 2
- Thinkers upstream
- 61
- Thinkers downstream
- 25
- Wikipedia languages
- 101 — #10 of 47 among 19th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Legendary
Questions about Auguste Comte
- Who influenced Auguste Comte?
- Montesquieu and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac.
- Who did Auguste Comte influence?
- John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.
- When did Auguste Comte live?
- 1798–1857. The map files Auguste Comte under the long 19th century.
- How rare is the Auguste Comte card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Auguste Comte in 101 languages, which makes it a Legendary card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 19th-century philosophers
- Karl Marx 1818–1883
- Charles Darwin 1809–1882
- Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910
- Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821–1881
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
- Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831
- Friedrich Engels 1820–1895
- Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855