Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte aka Auguste Comte

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Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte was a very important man in the field of sociology. He was a French philosopher that is considered the founding father of sociology. He is also credited with founding the field of positivism. Sociology is a social science that studies human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them. It does this by examining the dynamics of constituent parts of societies such as institutions, communities, populations, and gender, racial, or age groups. Sociology also studies social status or stratification, social movements, and social change, as well as societal disorder in the form of crime, deviance, and revolution. Positivism is any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations. Some of Comte’s most popular works include Course on Positive Philosophy, the System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity, and the Early Writings (Auguste Comte).
Comte was born in the south of France in a city called Montpellier on January 19, 1788. He was the eldest of four children. His father Louis-Auguste Comte was a tax official and his mother, Félicité-Rosalie Boyer was twelve years older than his father. His parents were both of Roman Catholic faith and royalists. He attended the Citadel of Montpellier and the University of Montpellier. Comte also attended the École Polytechnique. While attending the Citadel of Montpellier, he abandoned the beliefs of his parents and picked up the beliefs of a movement called republicanism. “From 1818 to 1824 he contributed to the publications of Saint-Simon, and the direction of much of Comte's future work may be attributed to this association...

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...the natural sciences were dependent on each other, to show they were cut from the same cloth. Comte divided the study of sociology into two parts. The first part was social statics. The second part was social dynamics. He only dealt with these issues in passing though because his interests were more in the laws that govern the transition of a society from one condition to another, not the characteristics that are found in all human societies.

Works Cited

Auguste Comte. (2013). Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, 1.
Bourdeau, M. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/comte/
Everett, G. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/comte.html
Faurot, J. (2000). The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. World Philosophers & Their Works, 1-4.
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte

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