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sophy that could serve as a map for their society. Comte, popularly known as the “father
of sociology,” has passed from fashion and now resides mostly in footnotes, overshad-
owed by others who built on his ideas, such as Marx and Darwin. But his influence on
nineteenth-century thought was great in Latin America, and he prefigures many stage
and evolutionary theories that appear later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in
biology and cultural history.
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Comte's“thirdway”betweenrigidmonarchyandredistributiverevolutionhadthepo-
tential to keep the social structure (and its attendant wealth and privilege) intact, while
changing the political apparatus to make it more responsive to economic change and to
the rising urban entrepreneurial classes. It was not a liberal democratic philosophy, but
it was reformist. Since Comte posited a kind of rational scientific priesthood as the van-
guardofreform,itisnowonderthattheyoungBrazilian cadets thrilled tohisideas,see-
ing in the Positivist program the contours of their future.
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Comtesoughttointegratesciencewithreligionandrevolutionarythoughtwithsocial-
istutopianideas.Whileitwouldbeimpossibletosummarizehisideasindetailhere,two
threads of his social analysis were especially important in the Brazilian variant of Pos-
itivism, indeed so important that they constitute the motto on the Brazilian flag: “Order
and Progress.”
First, Comte argued that predictable laws underpin the functioning of the natural
world, and this can be revealed by objective scientific methods and observation—hence
the use of the term “Positivist experimental science” to describe most laboratory meth-
odologies even today. Comte extended this view by arguing that human history likewise
followedtheactionsofdeepstructures,andthesecanbeunderstoodthroughanimpartial
analysis of society and social history, the arena of study that he called “sociology.” It
is “objective” observable nature rather than the issues of theory and final causes that
concern Comte. In his sociology, Comte examined the structures of sociopolitical sys-
tems—the
orde
r or deep “laws” in his evolutionary schema—and saw human history in-
volving the three stages of civilization: it begins in superstition, evolves to abstraction,
and ends, according to him, in positive rationalism. The question of social dynam-
ics—
progress
—is revealed once a science of society emerges and its inherent laws
are unveiled. In Comte's view, deep processes in society were equivalent to “laws of
nature”: they were universals and acted everywhere the same. With deeper knowledge
of these social laws, human beings could create a just society through proper guidance
and interventions, rather as we might imagine that a missile trajectory can be adjusted
through correct applications and control of thrust.
Comte's program would be anchored by a scientifically informed secular “priest-
hood”—a technocratic elite—with the intellectual and spiritual tools for the creation of
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