Auguste Comte Flashcards
Who was Comte’s mentor and what did he study?
Saint Simon and he was a utopian positivist.
Comte was a social positivist, what does that mean?
He advocated for using the scientific method as a means to identifying scientific laws and principles to govern society.
What were Comte’s Law of Three Stages and what did they mean?
Comte believed that every civilization passed through the three stages and each stage would inevitably lead to the other. The stages were theological, metaphysical, and positive.
Explain each stage of Comte’s three stages.
Theological was believing in magic or invisible beings/deities to explain the natural world. Metaphysical is questioning the natural world and thinking of philosophical explanations. Positive is using experimentation and scientific methods to explain the natural world.
How did Comte divide sociology?
He divided sociology into two parts: social dynamics and social statics.
What is social dynamics and social statics and how does it relate to society?
Social dynamics is the study of change or social progress. Social statics is the study of social order or stability. He wanted to find out what makes a society functional, how will it progress while maintaining stability and order.
What is the knowledge hierarchy and how are they ordered?
The knowledge hierarchy is the order of various disciplines achieved scientific knowledge. They are ordered from stability to change.
What did the enlightenment philosophy suggest that Comte disagreed with?
The Enlightenment philosophy assumed that the society was equivalent to its parts or the individuals. In other words, that we can understand society by studying the individual’s characteristics.
What did Comte believe instead of the enlightenment’s view of the social system?
Comte believed that society is more than the sum of individual characteristics. In other words, he believed that although the social world is composed of individuals it is not identical to those individuals. SO you cannot understand society by attempting to understand individuals’ behavior.
What are other reasons you cannot base society off individuals alone?
Individuals behave differently when they are alone versus in groups and norms vary among groups. There is also basic insight which basically explains that if the individual were to disappear the principles that govern society would still exist without them.
What is the unit of sociology?
groups
What is the definition of functional theory?
Society must be understood in terms of functional relationships
What are functional relationships?
Where parts of a whole mutually support and maintain one another (society is an organism). The various parts make the whole work harmoniously.
What is society like as a functional unit?
Society as a functional unit only exists as a consciousness. In other words people only think of society as a functional unit.
What is the functional theory’s critique?
The parts of society are never fully integrated. Society moves toward equilibrium.
