Sociology as Institution and as Spiritual Authority: Languages of Belief in the Work of Auguste Comte

In the following three chapters, I will investigate how these shifts within the sociological discipline concretely materialized in the work of two of the most famous positivist sociologists, Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim. In this first of these three chapters on positivism and its engagement with the category of belief, I will focus on the work of Auguste Comte. Three distinct meanings can be extrapolated from Comte’s engagement with the term: (1) it presented a means of reading the condition of modernity and the role of the sociologist; (2) it constituted a concrete problem of spiritual government and the loss of institutions; and (3) finally, it functioned as a crucial heuristic for understanding the complex historicized and socialized nature of Man. As I will argue throughout this chapter, this accumulation of belief’s meanings was no coincidence: for Comte, the proliferation of ways of believing and its lack of communication, calibration and spiritual government constituted a central problem for the so-called sociologist-priest, a problem which necessitated the use of multiple tactics for tackling it. In the three sections of this chapter, I will discuss each of these meanings and Comte’s tactical approaches of them.