The development of the conception of spiritual power in the writings of the young Auguste Comte: The critical role of Adam Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’

From closing the French Revolution to regulating the division of labour: Comte’s developing understanding of the modern crisis

In order to grasp more fully how the young Comte came to use a reading of Adam Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ to elaborate the sociological grounding for his understanding of spiritual power, we need insist on more conceptual clarity in the account of how Comte’s understanding of ‘spiritual power’ itself changed as his diagnosis of what he called the ‘modern crisis’ changed. This part of the argument requires some detailed exposition because one by-product of the contemporary interpretive consensus on the unity of Comte’s career is to mute the full dynamism of his intellectual life in the years 1817–1826. Mary Pickering’s intellectual biography of Comte is typical in this regard. To be sure, she appreciates quite well the creativity of the French generation of 1820, and she observes Comte discovering new intellectual affiliations and shifting his emphases in his early writings. But she relates all these changes to a fundamentally static conception of the modern crisis that Comte was addressing. That crisis, for Pickering, was the political problem of how to close the French Revolution (Pickering, 1993: 2, 8, 691, 705; 2009b: 580–586, following Baker, 1989). This first section of the present essay argues that Pickering’s approach to Comte’s intellectual development can be usefully complicated. Indeed, this first section discerns several distinct stages through which Comte’s understanding of the modern crisis unfolded in the early writings: what indeed remained conceptually a political problem – in the sense of a problem in ‘a system of explicit rules and . . . immediate material sanctions’ – across several reformulations in the years 1815–1820 had become a social problem – in the sense of a problem in a system of collective faith and moral sanctions (Terrier, 2017: 73; Wolker, 1987) – by the time Comte completed what he called his opuscule fondamentale, ‘Plan of the Scientific Work Necessary for the Reorganisation of Society’, in the years between 1822 and 1824. A more rigorous charting of these stages in Comte’s understanding of the modern crisis is critical to this essay because only from within the context of an understanding of the modern crisis as a social problem would a reading of Adam Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ be meaningful for the development of Comte’s conception of a new spiritual power.

To be clear, there is little question that the young Comte’s initial point of departure was the political legacy of the French Revolution. The very young Comte, in the years between his expulsion from the École Polytechnique in 1816 and the beginning of his collaboration with Henri Saint-Simon in 1817, presented himself as an instinctual republican and ‘friend of liberty’. We find him reading Girondin accounts of the Revolution, ‘immersed in political studies, especially the history of constitutions’, and aligned with idéologues like Destutt de Tracy, who believed that the Revolution would be completed once France received a rational constitution guaranteeing citizens the fullest exercise of their natural rights. However, the continuing political turmoil of the years 1815–1816 undercut the optimistic expectation that, given the right institutions, the people might simply shake off the burden of their old superstitions and yield to the ‘gentle yoke of reason’. The idéologues, as Ozouf (1987a: 430–431; 1987b: 219–222) explained, now abandoned their belief in the spontaneous generation of the new man for a conception laborieuse of the revolutionary regeneration of humanity, in which they imagined themselves as less the representatives of public opinion than a tutelary knowledge elite. Likewise, the very young Comte began to lament the political incapacity of the French and, in the first iteration of a conception of spiritual power, sought leadership in a saving remnant that he variously called ‘honest republicans’, ‘France’s best citizens’, or ‘men accustomed to thinking for themselves and not accepting appearances’ (‘Mes Réflexions’ [June 1816], in Comte, 1970c: 417–418, 423, 426).

The beginnings of Comte’s collaboration with Henri Saint-Simon in late 1817 and early 1818 marked an important new orientation in his thinking. While, again, it is true that his conception of the modern crisis remained centred on the political legacy of the French Revolution, his conception of the means of closing the revolution no longer turned on a study of constitutions. Instead, Comte immersed himself in the study of political economy – his first encounter with Adam Smith dates from these years – and he now emerged as a publicist for the ‘industrial doctrine’. The ‘industrial doctrine’ had taken shape in tacit cooperation between Saint-Simon, working at the time with the young historian Augustin Thierry on their new journal L’Industrie, and Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, working on the journal Le Censeur européen. ¹ Amid the continuing turmoil of the first Restoration, the Hundred Days, and the beginnings of the Second Restoration, Saint-Simon and Thierry, and Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, shook off an earlier ‘infatuation with political scaffolding’. In short, they took up what Hirschman (1977) famously called the doux commerce thesis: organise society for production and the political order necessary to guarantee the industrious the full exercise of their faculties and the peaceful enjoyment of their prosperity would follow as a necessary consequence. The young Comte, taking over for Thierry as Saint-Simon’s secretary in the third volume of L’Industrie, now reached a similar conclusion. The establishment of order in post-Revolutionary France was no longer a problem of political-philosophical speculation about individual rights and how best to guarantee them in a structure of law, but one of the ‘positive facts’ of the history of civil society (To Valat, 17 April 1818, in Comte, 1973: 26; To Valat, 15 May 1818, in Comte, 1973: 37). Indeed, the young Comte went even further and presented the industrial doctrine as a new terrestrial morality. Where Christianity had once located fraternity in an otherworldly city, henceforth it would be grounded in the ‘palpable, certain, and immediate interests’ of the industrious in what can bring man the greatest happiness on earth (‘Sur la morale’ [1817], L’Industrie, vol. 3, in Comte, 1970c: 91–96).

This expectation that the divisiveness of post-Revolutionary politics might be sublimated into a natural harmony of interests did not survive the demise of the journal L’Industrie. In subsequent projects, the journals Le Politique (1819) and L’Organisateur (1820), Comte and Saint-Simon began to deploy what Hirschman (1986) called the ‘feudal shackles’ thesis. The vestiges of old regime institutions and practices (which they collectively called ‘feudalism’) were pre-empting the promised douceur of commercial sociability. In the journal Le Politique, for example, Saint-Simon and Comte combined the rhetoric of the abbé Sieyès’s What is the Third Estate? (1789) with Jeremy Bentham’s recently published Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817) to question the composition of the French Chamber of Deputies. The present Chamber, they maintained, was filled with idle propriétaires and servile placemen who used their political access to protect their prerogatives and appropriate public revenues to their own benefit. As a result, investment capital was diverted from producers and the prodigality of unproductive consumption corrupted the healthy frugality of industrial mores (Saint-Simon, 1966 IIa: 84–88, 102–106).

This same understanding of the modern crisis carried over into yet another journal, L’Organisateur (1820), and the ‘Summary Appraisal of the General Character of Modern History’ that Comte published (under the name of Henri Saint-Simon) in April 1820 in this journal’s letters eight and nine. What made history modern, Comte argued here, was a spiritual and temporal division of labour. All modern history, Comte continued, had subsequently unfolded as the mutual antagonism of two incompatible systems – one of ‘powers’, the other of ‘capacities’ (Comte, 1970c: 205–209; 1998: 5–9). From the enfranchisement of the commons in the 11th century and the introduction of the positive sciences into Europe by the Arabs, scientific and industrial capacities had gradually supplanted theological and feudal powers. In place of a military aristocracy and a pontifical authority, which had mandated passive obedience and mental submission, had come industrial leaders who eschewed command for cooperation and positive scientists who eschewed revelation for demonstration. ‘The admirable character of industrial combinations’, Comte explained, is ‘that those who participate in them are . . . all collaborators, all associates, from the simplest labourer to the richest manufacturer and the most enlightened engineer’. Likewise, it was not those with theological ideas but those with positive knowledge who contributed to ordinary manufacturing work. Indeed, the people ‘took to getting into contact with those who had positive knowledge’; they were ‘eager for instruction . . . because their work brings its necessity home to them at every moment’; ‘wherever they found the opportunity to study, they have studied’ (Comte, 1970c: 234, 235–236; 1998: 39–40). Now that public opinion had become scientific and industrial, Comte concluded, only the ‘ensemble’ of society – by which Comte meant the control of national education and the formulation of the national budget – remained under the yoke of the old theological and feudal powers. To end the modern crisis, an avant-garde of publicistes must take ‘the final step’ (Comte, 1970c: 240; 1998: 46), and equip the scientific and industrial capacities with the knowledge of the means to take charge of this ‘ensemble’ (‘General Separation of Opinions and Desires’ [July 1819], in Comte, 1970c: 201–203; 1998: 1–4).

To a large extent, Comte’s (and Saint-Simon’s) continuing confidence that if only France’s legacy of feudal shackles were cast off, a new regime of doux commerce would emerge was sustained by the more liberal turn that the politics of the second Restoration had taken when, in September 1816, Louis XVIII broke with the ultraroyalists. The assassination of the duc de Berry, the younger son of the comte d’Artois, Louis XVIII’s presumptive heir, in early 1820 returned the ultraroyalists to power and abruptly ended any pretence that post-Revolutionary France might be stabilised around the institutions of a ‘commercial constitution’. For Comte (and, again, for Saint-Simon), this foreclosure of the possibilities of politics was a decisive moment: it revealed a new motivating centre for understanding the ‘modern crisis’. Amidst the ‘positive facts’ of political economy, there appeared a new and more fundamental social problem. But whereas Saint-Simon and later the Saint-Simonians would increasingly move to develop the feudal shackles thesis into an understanding of this new social problem in terms of economic structure, Comte more and more understood the ‘modern crisis’ in terms of moral attitudes and intentions. Even as he continued to collaborate with Saint-Simon in the period between September 1820 and June 1824, his worries that modern society faced ‘a long and terrible agony’ of ‘egoism and isolation’ (Comte, 1970c: 271, 293; 1998: 85, 111) deepened. It was these worries that shaped how Comte in his opuscule fondamentale, the ‘Plan of the Scientific Work Necessary for the Reorganisation of Society’ (first published in 1822 and then republished in a new and slightly expanded edition in 1824), began to place a third ‘transitional’ state of metaphysicians and jurists (légistes) between the theological and military state of the old regime and the scientific and industrial state of his imagined new regime. Metaphysicians, according to Comte, had unleashed the ‘dogma of the unlimited freedom of conscience’, while jurists limited the ‘collective life of the social body’ to protecting the ‘guarantees’ for the ‘arbitrary will of the individual’. Once essential to the critical deconstruction of the theological and military state, these social classes and the ideas they embodied now blocked any new system of general ideas or public morality. They necessarily placed the social realm in a ‘state of constituted anarchy’ (Comte, 1970c: 245–248; 1998: 54–57).

Already, when Comte had, with Saint-Simon, embraced a ‘feudal shackles’ thesis, he had warned that the industriels might be content to remain within the metaphysical and legal transition and use the vestiges of the old theological and military system to secure their own short-term profits. The ‘Plan’ amplified this warning and provoked a bitter break with Saint-Simon. Theoretical orientation, Comte proclaimed, always proceeded practical execution, and ‘yet’, he added in a clear repudiation of his former mentor, ‘we want the reorganisation of society to be a purely operational matter which can be entrusted to merely practical men!’ (Comte, 1970c: 257; 1998: 69). The primacy of theory – both in Comte’s understanding of the social problem and in his approach to its solution – became clearer still in two essays that he submitted to the Saint-Simonian journal Producteur – the essay ‘Philosophical Considerations on the Sciences and Scientists’ that appeared in three instalments in November and December 1825 and the essay ‘Considerations on the Spiritual Power’ that appeared in February 1826. The prevalence of purely material considerations, the licence of an ‘unrestrained individuality’ and a predilection to ‘apathy’ all might compound the ‘excesses of egoism’ in a vicious cycle (Comte, 1970c: 368–371; 1998: 196–199). To explain the origins of this moral anarchy, Comte returned again to Adam Smith. Specifically, he discerned that Smith was a far more complex thinker than a simple industrialist apologist for the douceur of commerce.

Smith, Comte acknowledged in the essay ‘Considerations on the Spiritual Power’, presented the division of labour ‘from a more elevated view than any of his successors’ (Comte, 1970c: 380, note 1; 1998: 209, note f). An oft-cited passage from Book V of the Wealth of Nations qualified the picture of the division of labour as a principle of economic productivity and social integration that Smith had offered in Book I. ‘The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations’, Smith famously observed, ‘has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention . . . . The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment’ (Smith, 1976a II: 782). We saw above that, in the essay ‘Summary Appraisal’, Comte found that scientific and industrial mores – habits of economy and order, a respect for property, an eagerness for instruction, a disposition to assent only to what could be verified – had come to prevail in contemporary public opinion. To be sure, in the essay ‘Considerations on the Spiritual Power’, Comte continued to acknowledge that these developments could be natural consequences of the division of labour. But now what was more decisive was the fact that ‘from another angle’, ‘equally natural’, the division of labour could also prove to be an agent of moral deterioration and social dissolution. Echoing Book V of the Wealth of Nations, Comte wrote, ‘So if on the one hand the mind is stimulated, on the other hand it grows narrower . . . . What sociability gains in breadth, it loses in energy. By this means, men . . . feel increasingly prompted to isolate their particular cause from the common cause, as the latter from day to day becomes less perceptible’ (Comte, 1970c: 381–382; 1998: 211).

As Comte’s new understanding of the modern crisis took shape around the manner in which the division of labour might increase social distance and so weaken social integration, it had profound consequences for Comte’s conception of the workings of spiritual power. ‘In the positive realm’, Comte now proclaimed, ‘social organisation . . . is nothing other than the regularisation of the division of labour’ (Comte, 1970c: 380; 1998: 209). Where previously he had filled the category of spiritual power with a vanguard party of ‘honest republicans’ or with the publicistes for a commercial humanism or with an avant-garde of industriels, he now conceived of spiritual power as an adversary culture. The social consequences of the division of labour, Comte argued, could entirely cancel out and undercut the economic advantages of the division of labour unless contained and combatted by a ‘spiritual government’ whose function it was ‘to recall to the general point of view minds which by themselves are always disposed to diverge’ (Comte, 1970c: 382; 1998: 211). But such a conception of spiritual government as an adversary culture presented a potential, and serious, dilemma to the positive philosopher. On the one hand, the spiritual power could not be an arbitrary invention of the imagination, a kind of great legislator standing outside history and society. Spiritual power had to emerge from within the observed ‘positive facts’ of history and society – the same realm of ‘positive facts’ that was also attesting to the ‘modern crisis’. On the other hand, spiritual power had to possess the relative autonomy that could allow it to resist or have some leverage against these ‘positive facts’. A long footnote that Comte added to the expanded edition of the ‘Plan’ that he published in 1824 signalled the problem. While the text of ‘Plan’ emphatically assigned ‘the scientific work necessary to reorganize society’ to ‘the class of scientists’, the note worried that scientists were ‘too absorbed by their particular occupations and even still too affected by certain pernicious intellectual habits, which today result from this specialization’, to play an active role in the formation of ‘the new social doctrine’. That active role would have to be played by ‘men who, without devoting their lives to the special cultivation of any science of observation, possess an aptitude for science and have made a sufficiently close study of the general shape of positive knowledge to be penetrated by its spirit’ (Comte, 1970c: 263, note 1; 1998: 75, note f). These ‘men’ were Comte’s ‘savants’. ² Such men, however, were ‘still too few in number’; furthermore, given the ever-accelerating refinements in the division of labour, where these men would come from remained at best obscure. The next section of this essay will argue that Comte was able to find a solution to this dilemma through his reading of Adam Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’.

The significance of Adam Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ for Comte’s conception of spiritual power: From the generalisation of specialisation to specialists in generality

Smith’s essay on the ‘History of Astronomy’ is not one of his better-known works. It had first appeared in 1795 when Smith’s literary executors Joseph Black and James Hutton published the volume Essays on Philosophical Subjects. The Essays brought together several of Smith’s shorter published works, previously unpublished essays that Smith had chosen not to destroy shortly before his death in 1790, and Dugald Stewart’s ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith’. Two years after the first English edition appeared, the prominent Genevan scientist and intellectual Pierre Prévost prepared a French translation of the Essays that the editors of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith still identify as ‘the most adequate edition’ (Smith, 1980: 28–29). It is this edition that Auguste Comte owned (Laffitte, 1897: 133).

That what Comte called ‘a work too little known on the continent’ would have come to his attention is less surprising than it might seem at first. The French translator Pierre Prévost had followed a complex intellectual itinerary that had important points of contact with the intellectual movements that shaped the young Comte. Not only did Prévost have extensive connections with the scientific movement in Comte’s native Montpellier, Prévost also had extensive connections with the liberal movement of the late Empire and early Restoration to which the young Comte had initially gravitated. Most important were Prévost’s close connections to the Ecole Polytechnique, where Comte was a student between 1814 and 1816. In particular, Prévost had made significant contributions to Joseph Fourier’s kinetic theory of heat. Fourier, in turn, was one of Comte’s most reliable early supporters (Weiss, 1988: 68–76 and 267–276). The young Comte’s own developing interests also made an encounter with Smith’s essay more likely. As we saw above, it was in 1818, early in his association with Henri Saint-Simon, that Comte had read Smith’s Wealth of Nations. And in 1821 Comte had begun to attend the lectures of the astronomer Jean-Baptiste Delambre at the Collège de France. A former supporter of Saint-Simon’s journal L’Industrie, Delambre gave lectures that were based on his own classic five-volume history of astronomy.

Whatever the route by which the ‘History of Astronomy’ had come to Comte’s attention – he first explicitly referenced the essay in the ‘Philosophical Considerations on the Sciences and the Scientists’ of November and December 1825 – it left a profound and enduring impression on him. Comte repeatedly emphasised that the ‘History of Astronomy’ had been ‘very useful’ to his ‘initial philosophical education’ (Comte, 1975 II: 575; To Mill, 21 October 1844, in Comte, 1877: 275). This section turns first to establishing how Comte might have detected general resonances between his project and Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’. This discussion lays the foundation for building the case that Comte could then proceed from these general resonances to finding the ‘History of Astronomy’ directly relevant both to reinforcing his sense of the ‘modern crisis’ and, most importantly, to resolving the potential dilemma that the ‘Plan’ had revealed in conceiving of a new spiritual power as an adversary culture.

As the young Comte read the ‘History of Astronomy’, he could easily discern rudiments of a Smithian project that might seem to parallel in ambition the one that he was also beginning to conceive. Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ was the most finished surviving part of a planned larger work – the other, shorter surviving parts on ‘Ancient Physics’ and ‘Ancient Logic and Metaphysics’ were also known to Comte through the Prévost translation. The purpose of the larger work, which Smith had begun as a young student at Oxford and continued to contemplate through his final years, was to distill ‘the principles which lead and direct philosophical inquiry’. To be sure, Comte and Smith used very different languages to describe the development of natural philosophical inquiry. Where Comte identified a ‘law’ relating three modes of explanation, Smith, in the ‘History of Astronomy’, described a progress of three sentiments (Smith, 1980: sections I and II, 34–47). The sentiment that Smith called ‘Surprise’ arose from the experience of the unexpected: a violent and sudden change in our situation occasions a violent and convulsive movement in our emotions. What is new and singular gives rise to the sentiment of ‘Wonder’. Wonder occurs when we have an experience that ‘refuses to be grouped’ with other familiar experiences or that refuses to ‘fall in with’ our ordinary association of ideas. Memory and imagination ‘hesitate’, ‘uneasy’ and anxious, ‘uncertain’ what to think and ‘undetermined’ what to do. ‘The stop which is thereby given to the career of the imagination’, Smith wrote, ‘the difficulty which it finds in passing along such disjointed objects, and the feeling of something like a gap or interval betwixt them, constitute the whole essence of this emotion’. Smith also identified a third sentiment. The experience of the great or the beautiful excited what he called ‘Admiration’.

This very different progress of sentiments could, nevertheless, provide Comte with a history of the science of astronomy that had affinities with his own account of the emergence of the positive philosophy (see, e.g. Comte, 1975 II: 222). Indeed, Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ received praise in the Cours precisely for anticipating ‘the true sentiment of rational positivity’ (Comte, 1975 II: 575) and, in January 1831, when Comte initiated his own popular course in astronomy, he did so, again in a way that parallelled Smith, because he believed that the science of astronomy offered the most convenient means to illustrate the principles that lead and direct philosophical inquiry – in this case the principles of his own positive philosophy (Brenner, 2018). Comte could find a particularly clear affinity with the manner in which Smith in the ‘History of Astronomy’ moved back and forth between the principles that lead and direct philosophical inquiry and the sociological principals – or, to use Comte’s word, the savants – who lead and direct philosophical inquiry. In ‘the first ages of society’, Smith had argued, when ‘subsistence is precarious’ and when society is ‘unprotected by laws’ and exposed to every danger, the ‘savage’ alternated between ‘terror and consternation’ on the one hand and ‘reverence and gratitude’ on the other hand. In Smith’s terms, the sentiment of surprise predominates. And as we initially tend, according to Smith, to explain things to ourselves by analogy to those phenomena with which we are most familiar, the ‘savage’ models a polytheism on his vigorous but thwarted will. He conceives every object of an unmastered nature as the manifestation of the anger or the favour of capricious gods (Smith, 1980: 48–50) or, as Comte might put it, theologically. With the rise of civilisation, however, subsistence grows less precarious, the law establishes greater security, and the magnanimity and cheerfulness – the douceur – of society grow apace. In Smith’s terms, surprise now gives way to wonder. ‘Men of liberal fortune’ have the leisure to contemplate ‘the great objects of nature’ and they seek to ‘render the whole course of the universe consistent and of a piece’ (Smith, 1980: 50–51).

Greatest among the objects of nature are the phenomena of astronomy. According to Smith’s history, Aristotle first brought coherence to these phenomena in a ‘system of concentric Spheres’ (Smith, 1980: 55f.). Explanation became more abstract or what Comte would call ‘conjectural’ or ‘metaphysical’, but it remained anthropocentric with the sun, moon and stars revolving in constant velocities around the earth. The discovery of the planets required the introduction of ever more spheres, while the appearance of retrograde motions perplexed the imagination. Ptolemy’s System of Epicycles mitigated this perplexity, but, as the Ptolemaic System became ever more ‘intricate and complex’, it became ever more difficult for ‘the imagination to rest in it with complete tranquillity and satisfaction’ (Smith, 1980: 59f. and 61–62, 63–64, 70 on these systems’ inadequacies). The reason, Smith explained, is that ‘systems’ are like ‘imaginary machines’. It is not enough that they merely work. They may be improved to do the same work with fewer motions (Smith, 1980: 66).

Go into a workshop, Smith urged, in all likelihood drawing this metaphor of society from the Encyclopédie of d’Alembert and Diderot. ³ For the ‘common artisan’, the familiar operations of a particular art excite little curiosity. Yet to the ‘practised thought of a philosopher’, custom had obscured the connecting principles. Likewise in music, there may be an agreeable harmony and measure to the ‘careless’ listener where to the ‘practised ear’ the most exact time, the most perfect coincidence, is missing (Smith, 1980: 44–45). Implicit in these dramatisations a reader might find two subtle shifts in Smith’s account of the history of astronomy. Once ‘leisured’, the philosophers are now ‘practised’ professionals. At the same time, they begin to operate in the arena for the third of Smith’s sentiments. Where, initially for Smith, philosophers had served more to calm the surprise and wonder of an anxious imagination, now they served more to call an ‘indolent imagination’ to the sentiment of Admiration for the great and the beautiful. The collapse of the Roman Empire, and the ensuing subversion of law and order, Smith observed, had entailed an entire neglect of the study of the connecting principles of nature and an enslavement to the authority of ancient systems. The great figures who dominate the familiar history of the rebirth of the science of astronomy in 16th and 17th centuries now progressively upset these deferential habits of thought and expectations (Smith, 1980: 67–68, 75, 85–86, 91). Copernicus and Galileo proposed a heliocentric System that challenged an instinctual anthropocentrism. Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion that challenged a traditional belief in the perfection of circular motion. Descartes advanced a System of Vortices that challenged the idea of natural inertness or rest.

Most importantly of all, Newton provided a law of gravity that challenged a familiar mechanics of impulse. Yet, Smith noted in conclusion, even as Newton’s principles acquired such ‘a degree of firmness and solidity’ that they might be taken for ‘the real chains that Nature makes use of to bind together her several operations’, they nonetheless remained ‘mere inventions of the imagination’ by which astronomers connected together their otherwise disjointed and discordant observations (Smith, 1980: 105). Here, in Smith’s interpretation of Newton’s System, Comte might find support for a theme that remained constant even as he transitioned first to the Cours and later to the Système: a definitive understanding of the universe will always elude us; instead we must be content with agreement between the extent of our intellectual needs and the necessarily limited compass of our knowledge (Comte, 1975 I: 304). Not surprisingly, then, the final accolade that Comte offered Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ came in the Catéchisme positiviste (1852) where it was included among the works of synthesis in the Positivist Library (Comte, 1970b: 38).

This section has spent some time reviewing the general resonances or affinities that Comte could find between his contemporary concerns and Smith’s essay because they serve as a series of warrants for his more dedicated application of Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ both to the problem of the ‘modern crisis’ and most importantly to the construction of the social bases for a new spiritual power. In the first instance, Comte clearly discerned the important connections between the ‘History of Astronomy’ and the complex reflection on the dynamics of a market society that he had found in the Wealth of Nations. Comte’s reference to the ‘History of Astronomy’ in the ‘Philosophical Considerations on the Sciences and the Scientists’ referred to a critical passage in which Smith invoked the ‘invisible hand of Jupiter’ (Smith, 1980: 48–50). In the Wealth of Nations, of course, Smith had written in an oft-cited passage, ‘Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . . . He is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society’ (Smith, 1976a I: 456). Yet, in the ‘History of Astronomy’, Smith associated the invisible hand with the ‘vulgar superstition’ of that ‘savage’ and ‘pusillanimous’ polytheism which, as we saw above, attributes the apparently more irregular events of nature to capricious agents. These two passages might appear to present ‘exactly reversed’ evaluations of the invisible hand and so a problem in interpretation (e.g. Macfie, 1971: 595–599). But Emma Rothschild argues persuasively that they reflect the same complexity that Smith’s presentation of the division of labour provided. On the one hand, Smith did use the invisible hand as an image for the unintended consequences of action and the spontaneous orderliness of economic phenomena. In this sense, the invisible hand was an ‘obviating device’: legislators might well foster the public interest more effectively if they simply do nothing and allow individuals to employ their capitals as they believe most advantageous. On the other hand, Smith exploited the ironic association of the invisible hand with both arbitrariness and blindness to warn us not to fetishise the market and immediate interests. There can be order without design, Smith was arguing, but the absence of design does not necessarily imply order (Rothschild, 2001: 144, 135–136). Comte agreed.

If Comte’s conception of the ‘modern crisis’ could draw further support from the connections between the ‘History of Astronomy’ and the Wealth of Nations, even more significantly these connections now also pointed the way to a solution to the dilemma in the conception of a spiritual power that the ‘Plan’ had begun to reveal. In the discussion of the division of labour in Book I of the Wealth of Nations, Smith observed that philosophy becomes, ‘like every other employment, the principle or sole trade and occupation of a particular class of citizens’; it is then further ‘subdivided into a great number of different branches’. This process had a paradoxical consequence: there appeared an occupation the particularity of which was to be attached to no occupation, or, in Smith’s words, there appeared ‘philosophers or men of speculation whose trade it is not to do anything but observe everything; and who, upon this account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects’ (Smith, 1976a I: 21–22). In short, it was out of the division and subdivision of philosophical labour that came the practised professionals in connecting principles that Smith introduced in the ‘History of Astronomy’. Again, as in the ‘History of Astronomy’, we can encounter those practised in connecting principles in the ‘workshop’ of society. In Book I of the Wealth of Nations, they contribute to the simplification of the labour process or the improvement of machinery. Yet, as the ‘workshop’ of the Wealth of Nations was no less free than the ‘workshop’ of the ‘History of Astronomy’ from the artisans’ immersion in particular operations, those practised in connecting principles return in Book V of the Wealth of Nations with responsibility for the education of youth and a ‘comprehensive view of the whole society’ (Smith, 1976a II: 783). To use the terms of the ‘History of Astronomy’, they elevate the indolent imagination to the Admiration of the Great and Beautiful.

Thus, Comte could find in the ‘History of Astronomy’ and the Wealth of Nations two works that supplemented one another and could answer both the question of how a methodology that relied on observable positive facts could provide critical purchase on those very same facts as well as the question of who educated the educator. From the ‘History of Astronomy’, he might take a genealogy of the social vocation of the group he was calling the savants; from the Wealth of Nations, he might derive a sociology of how such an adversary culture could form amidst an accelerating technical division of labour. Put simply, the paradoxical consequence of Smith’s discussion of the division of labour was that the very generalisation of specialisation could generate specialists in generality.

Comte’s ‘Philosophical Considerations on the Sciences and Scientists’ clearly makes use of this paradox. The ‘social existence of the scientists’ (Comte, 1998: 171 and 175f. where Smith’s essay on the ‘History of Astronomy’ is tacitly referenced; Comte, 1970c: 345 and 349f.) proceeded from a primary social division of labour between theory and practice to an ever more detailed technical subdivision of labour as the intellectual system became increasingly positive. Indeed, the positive sciences, Comte emphasised, ‘required’ this ‘subdivision’ of labour: it was what had allowed them the space to develop from within the theological and metaphysical systems. Thus, ‘there could be no question’, as Comte had earlier seemed to suggest in the ‘Plan’, of ‘stamping scientists with a character of generality . . . by a universality of works analogous to that of the sacerdotal classes’. Rather, in the manner of Smith, Comte now contended that ‘it is [only] by a fuller application of the principle of the division of labour that this indispensable progress [toward generality] can be achieved’ (Comte, 1970c: 355; 1998: 181–182, my emphasis). To the extent that each new science in the encyclopaedic scale depended on the sciences that had preceded it, each new class of scientists is progressively better formed in the general shape of positive knowledge. The advent of a positive science of society would, therefore, complete this process and provide the keystone of a new spiritual power necessary to contain the dispersive specialisation of a modern industrial society. It would create a new corporation of scientists dedicated, by the very nature of their specialisation, to general education.

From ralliement to réglement: The distinctiveness of Comte’s conception of a new spiritual power

We have seen that towards the end of his life, Auguste Comte urged his readers to return to the early writings of the years 1817–1826 if they wished to understand the connection between his sociological and religious positivisms. Much recent scholarship has followed Comte’s urging and this essay is no exception. Like Pickering’s intellectual biography, for example, this study has situated Comte’s ‘original evolution’ within the context of an engagement with the liberalism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Where this essay initially diverges with recent scholarship is in its account of the discontinuities in Comte’s formulations of the ‘modern crisis’ and the spiritual power necessary to respond to it. The failures of a series of attempts to imagine a solution to the political problem of closing the French Revolution gradually revealed to Comte a social problem. An ever more intensive and extensive technical specialisation might deplete society’s moral capital even as it tended to confine actors to the instrumental rationality of maximising material self-interest. In short, Comte came to understand the modern crisis as a social problem of moral orientation; his response was to begin to imagine the spiritual power as a ‘re-entry’ strategy of moral education. ⁴

It was in the context of considering this social problem and its solution that Comte combined his reading of Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ with what he saw as Smith’s ‘elevated’ treatment of the division of labour in the Wealth of Nations. Comte recognised that Smith had known that even if a market society might subsist, and maybe thrive for a time, through ‘mercenary exchange’, it ultimately risked the corruption of its moral sentiments. At the same time, Comte recognised that Smith likewise understood that market societies required cultural intervention to preserve their moral foundations and that a strategy of cultural intervention had to address the dilemma of who educated the educator. Where this essay next diverged from recent scholarship is in the significance it attaches to Comte’s reading of the ‘History of Astronomy’. This reading gave Comte an answer to the dilemma that strategies of cultural intervention faced and allowed him to ground the possibility of his religious positivism in the positive facts of his sociological positivism. As we just saw in the previous section, Comte could follow Smith in arguing that from the generalisation of specialisation might emerge the specialists in generality who could become the agents of moral education in modern market societies. This conclusion is in line with the observation of Bourdeau (2016: 103–107) that Comte continued to acknowledge mechanisms of spontaneous order: here, for example, the problem that was at the root of the ‘modern crisis’ contained the potential for its own solution.

Comte’s reading of the ‘History of Astronomy’ was, therefore, a catalyst for the conception of spiritual power that he developed in the years 1817–1826. But however great the correspondences that Comte could detect between his requirements for a modern spiritual power and the resources of Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’, Comte ultimately parted ways with Smith on the agency of a new spiritual power. ⁵ This third and concluding section examines how Comte came to differ from Smith on the agency of moral re-entry in a market society. It does so to complete the story of the development of the young Comte’s conception of a new spiritual power and to offer, by way of contrast, an interpretation of this conception’s distinctiveness.

Spiritual power, as Comte came to present it in the Système, had two modes. It could ‘regulate’ in the sense of providing authoritative norms, or it could ‘rally’ in the sense of providing aspirational ideals. In other terms, spiritual power might work – to be sure, socially and not (in any strict sense of the term) politically – in the mode of push or in the mode of pull, or, yet again, in terms that would be familiar to a reader of the ‘History of Astronomy’, in the mode of impulsion or in the mode of attraction (Smith, 1980: 97–98). One of the more remarkable aspects of the young Comte’s engagement with Adam Smith is that while, as we have seen, Comte could be a sensitive and precise reader of the five books of the Wealth of Nations or the relatively less well-known ‘History of Astronomy’, he apparently did not know Smith’s second major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976b) – this, despite the fact that the text was available in a 1798 translation by the marquise de Condorcet, Sophie de Grouchy. This work, however, provided essential context for interpreting Smith’s intentions: it most closely aligned the conception of the role of philosophers and the programme of moral education that Smith had developed in the ‘History of Astronomy’ and the Wealth of Nations with a preference for the strategy of pull or ralliement. The origin of our moral sentiments, Smith had argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, lay in a human capacity for sympathy that allows us to place ourselves imaginatively in others’ situations and judge the propriety of their actions. The same capacity also allows us to judge the propriety of our own actions, viewing ourselves in or adjusting ourselves to the pull of the ‘looking glass’ of others’ judgements. We divide ourselves, in effect, into two persons: we are both the person whose conduct is under scrutiny and, having internalised through social experience and moral education the standards of taste of those with whom we live both in time and over time, we are also the judge and examiner of our own conduct. We become thereby ‘impartial spectators of our own character’. We desire not only the praise of the world; we are also drawn to know ourselves worthy of that praise, and, if worthy, ‘we can be more indifferent about the applause, and in some measure despise the censure of the world; secure that, however misunderstood or misrepresented, we are the natural and proper objects of approbation’ (Smith, 1976b: 25–26, 110, 112, 114).

No less than the Smith of the ‘History of Astronomy’ or the Smith of the Wealth of Nations, the Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments worried about the social consequences of occupational specialisation: the atomising effects of the division of labour might pre-empt the dialectic of interpersonal sympathetic reflection or civilised conversational exchange, from which the impartial spectator originally derived. For the Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, therefore, a commercial civilisation opened onto two roads (1976b: 62, 117, 212–217, 247 – all passages that Smith added to the sixth edition of 1790). Along one road travelled the prudent and the frugal who, confining themselves to their own affairs, anticipate the social isolation that Smith so eloquently lamented in Book V of the Wealth of Nations. Along the other road travelled the wise and the virtuous who dedicate themselves to disinterested magnanimity and equitable justice. The choice – and here Smith is paradigmatic of the preference for pull – lay with the autonomous individual who emerged alongside the rise of commercial civilisation. The role of the philosopher, for which the Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments was also tacitly a model, was to redirect the imagination and persuade the prudent and frugal to turn to the road of the wise and the virtuous. ⁶ Not surprisingly, given this voluntaristic dynamic, myriad were the modes of moral re-entry – for, in other words, the elucidation that moral education might bring to the impartial spectator. These choices included some establishment for a network of primary and secondary education, encouragement for participation in those religious denominations that promoted moderation and responsibility, the greater ‘frequency and gaiety of public diversions’ including ‘painting, poetry, musick, dancing, [and] all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions’, and even some provision for the value of martial exercises (however much the division of labour had rendered professional armies more effective than traditional militias) (Smith, 1976a II: 785–788, 796).

Comte’s ‘Smith’ did not include the Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and, in the end, Comte came to attach the understanding of ‘specialists in generality’, for which his reading of the ‘History of Astronomy’ had been decisive, to a conception of spiritual power that increasingly acquired the more regulatory structure of authoritative norms. To be sure, on occasion we can run across moments in Comte’s ‘original evolution’ when he worked with pull. For example, in the ‘Plan’, Comte assigned the spiritual power ‘the task of gradually raising the minds of reflective men to the elevated point of view from which one can embrace at a single glance both the vices of the courses hitherto followed in the reorganisation of society and the character of the course which must be adopted today’. The spiritual power, Comte remarked later in the same essay, could instil popular enthusiasm and satisfy ‘the moral need for exhilaration’, only if it employed ‘the quick and rousing conviction produced by ideas which move passions’ and if it provided ‘a vivid picture of the improvements which the new system . . . must bring’. It was these means that could stifle ‘egoism’ and ‘drag society out of its apathy’ and that consequently would induce men ‘to bring about in themselves’ the moral revolution that would allow ‘the full and free development of their faculties’ (Comte, 1970c: 267, 292–293; 1998: 80–81, 110–111).

Nevertheless, such appeals to pull were the exception, even in the ‘Plan’. After all, as we have seen, the ‘Plan’ had made the freedom of conscience and the rights of the individual hallmarks of the ‘constituted anarchy’ of the metaphysical transition stage. Indeed, by the time Comte published the ‘Considerations on the Spiritual Power’ in February 1826, he was arguing that these appeals to anticipatory ideals amounted to little more than a ‘vague philanthropic intention incapable of exerting any real influence on the conduct of life’ (Comte, 1970c: 369; 1998: 197). Furthermore, as Comte proceeded from the ‘Plan’ to the two Producteur essays, he increasingly confined the space for individual autonomy, which was critical for the ralliement mode of spiritual power, by collective ‘impulsions’ – both the necessary consequences of humanity’s physiological organisation and, even more, the ‘natural laws’ that prescribe ‘unequivocally’ the ‘invariable’ course of human history. This emphasis on collective impulsions shaped, in turn, Comte’s conception of his specialists in generality or savants. They now subordinated the imagination to observation and rhetorical exchange to ‘rigorous’ ‘determinations’. In Smith, the appeal to pull had accommodated his robust sense of human fallibility and his deep suspicion of ‘system’. Now, again, as Comte’s sense of the modern moral crisis, and even of an imminent self-destruction of Western civilisation, grew ever stronger, so too did his passion for ‘system’ (Petit, 2016: especially 13–17 and 349) and his desire for the ‘necessary’, the ‘inevitable’, the ‘definitive’, ‘the permanent’ and the ‘final’.

More and more Comte became enamoured of yet another of Hirschman’s views of market society: feudal benefits. Hence his elective affinity for the work of the French Roman Catholic theocrats and especially Joseph de Maistre’s Du Pape (1819) (Comte, 1970c: 375–376, 379–380; 1998: 203–204, 208–209). We saw above that, in the ‘History of Astronomy’, Smith had associated this theological precedent of the mediaeval papacy with a long dark age of enslavement to the authority of ancient systems. Again, in the Wealth of Nations, Smith characterised this moment in the religious history of the West as ‘the most formidable combination that ever was formed against . . . the liberty, reason, and happiness of mankind’ (Smith, 1976a II: 802–803). By contrast, Comte now took the theological precedent of the mediaeval papacy as the model for the new ‘positive’ spiritual power of the savants. On this model, according to Comte, every society must collectively close on a single goal, and the task of spiritual power consists in the moral ‘regulation of opinions, propensities, [and] wills’ around this goal (Comte, 1970c: 255, 376–377; 1998: 66–67, 205–206). Thus, we should also not be surprised that ‘total’ ‘unity’ is the mode of moral re-entry for Comte. To contain the profound tendency to ‘anarchic’ dispersion that ‘torments’ modern society requires subordination to a new organic direction and ‘unanimous adoption’ of the positive general doctrine. ⁷ A new spiritual power must restore ‘moral communion’ and coordinate ‘uniform education’, because, Comte emphasised, ‘dogmatism is the normal state of the human mind’ (Comte, 1970c: 385; 1998: 214) and because without such unity, there can be no society.

Why, the philosopher Eric Voegelin once asked, had the ‘two parts’ of Comte’s career been of such interest to contemporary liberals such as John Stuart Mill, and why had they insisted so adamantly on a break between them? For Voegelin, the answer was that the classical liberals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries took the state of the contemporary church under the old regime to be also an invalidation of any faith or collective purpose (Voegelin, 1975: 142, 140). For these liberals, Voegelin contended, it was better to live disenchanted among the fragmentary play of the passions and the interests. This essay suggests that even the young Comte knew better. The use that he made of Adam Smith’s essay on the ‘History of Astronomy’ in formulating the response to the ‘modern crisis’ makes clear that the divide between Auguste Comte and the classical liberals was not one between the ‘religious’ and the ‘sociological’ – that is, between those who understood the social problem as a loss of moral legacy and so discerned the need for a ‘spiritual power’ and those who did not. Rather this essay suggests that the fundamental divide was between those classical liberals who imagined moral re-entry within the voluntaristic exchange of ralliement and those, like Comte, who, in the end, were not able to imagine a spiritual power in any way other than through a strategy of réglement and a nostalgia for feudal benefits.