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6 - Système de politique positive: Comte's Utopia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2010

Mary Pickering
Mary Pickering
Affiliation:
San José State University, California
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Summary

Every great soul always works for posterity, without being too preoccupied with the present.

Auguste Comte

INTRODUCTION

Comte wrote the final volume of the Système in six months, from January to July 1854. It delineated his utopian vision of the future; in a sense, he assumed the role of a poet, presenting his idealized view of the “normal” society, which everyone should seek to realize in practice. Despite the short time that he devoted to composing the approximately six hundred pages of text, he hoped this work was better written and would be read by more people than the previous three volumes. The lack of attention that the press had accorded to the Système disappointed him, and he thought it might have to do with his poor style. He defensively belittled “littérateurs” who had the time to perfect their writing because they only developed other people's ideas. He, on the other hand, was forced to “elaborate new concepts with an old language,” a challenge that inevitably led to some clunky writing. Nevertheless, beginning with the third volume of the Système, he had already paid more attention to his style, and so by the fourth volume, he was fairly comfortable with the method of writing that he had developed. Indeed, George Eliot found the first chapter of the fourth volume to be the best written. But Comte's new method of composition was hopelessly mechanical and unaesthetic. He limited his sentences to five printed lines and his paragraphs to seven sentences.

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Auguste Comte
An Intellectual Biography
 , pp. 312 - 393
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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