The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

In attempting to assess the significance of Comte for Sociology, and as one of the forerunners of Anthropo-sociology, it is perhaps wise not to go into too much detail. Comte himself was so confident of the rightness of his conception, worked out with such exceptional consistency for a whole lifetime, that he did go into considerable detail of his plan for the immediate reorganisation of the West and the World. He would no doubt have been wiser to allow pupils and colleagues to work out the details, to begin to take over the extension of his work, and to prepare for direct succession to himself in authority. As it was, he left too much in apparently rigid form of instructions, and no one whom he was prepared to recognise to fill the supreme position which he had undertaken himself. He sometimes reminds us of the Christians of the early Church, who confidently expected the Last Judgment in their own lifetime, for he estimated as no later than the end of the XIXth century the time when the largest nations of Europe would be Portugal and Ireland. Yet the significant point here is not the timing, which he may even have adopted deliberately as a way of dynamising his followers, but the soundness of his principle. It required some prescience in mid-nineteenth century to foretell that there would be a separate Irish nation within a century, as indeed came to pass. His view that within the same time France would have become seventeen small republics is not a crazy delusion but an indication of a very sound principle, fully supported by Sir Patrick Geddes in the present century, that a federation of Swiss-type cantons, representing a modern form of the Greek city-state, would be a great deal healthier and more human than the bigger and bigger Leviathan states and blocks with which we have, in general, been afflicted. The break-up of the AustroHungarian Empire was indeed a step in Comte’s direction, and the possibilities of such movements are far from being exhausted. As Geddes put it—and this is fully in the spirit of Comte—we should aim at making communities more individualised and individuals more socialised. We see an example of this in the nation of Yugoslavia—emerging from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today consisting not of a unitary state but a federation of six Republics and two Autonomous Regions. Our current newspapers in this country tell us of a Government proposal to set up a

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