Tea at Trianon: Before Fauci, There Was Comte

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, November 13, 2022

Before Fauci, There Was Comte

From Compact:

Comte was born in 1798, which meant that he missed the paroxysms of Revolutionary Terror by a few years, but came of age in a time of instability: By the time he was 32, he had lived under six or so regimes, depending on how you count them. “Colorful” is too euphemistic a word to describe his life, which is rivaled only by Rousseau’s among French philosophers for its bizarreness and melodrama. Indeed, so wild was Comte, and so interwoven was his life with memorable characters, that Mary Pickering’s three-volume biography is almost a beach read.
We can only give a few highlights here. The son of traditionalist religious parents, Comte was sent to Paris to train at that temple of applied science, the École Polytechnique. He was expelled for misbehavior, however, and went on to marry a woman of no means or connections, who may or may not have been a prostitute. He experienced numerous manic episodes and severe depression, which induced him on at least one occasion to set things on fire and nearly to drown himself and his wife.
Nonetheless, Comte acquired a formidable intellectual reputation and carried on an extensive correspondence with the era’s great minds, although most of these friendships broke down due to his erratic conduct and incessant pleas for money. After more than a decade of loveless marriage, he fell for a younger woman, Clotilde de Vaux, who rebuffed his advances but developed a profound emotional connection with him before wasting away of tuberculosis. After her death, her sexual refusals of him went from a source of frustration to a reason for exaltation, and he developed a cult around Clotilde’s memory, which now stood for chastity and purity of sentiment. Such are just a few of the high (or low) points of Comte’s remarkable career.
Despite his ignominious stint at the Polytechnique, the young Comte, horrified by France’s unremitting political upheaval, had become fervently convinced of the socially beneficial potential of science. He latched on to the eccentric theorist and fallen aristocrat Henri de Saint-Simon, who sought to shore up the emerging industrial society he believed was struggling to come into its own. To this end, Saint-Simon aimed to establish a scientific elite, propagate a post-Christian religion, and harness the natural sciences to resolve social problems. This program provided the basis for many notions later elaborated more fully by Comte, but Saint-Simon’s personal eccentricities meant he had trouble getting his ideas in order. Eventually, master and disciple split acrimoniously.
After breaking with Saint-Simon, Comte began a decades-long project to unfold a system of thought that could integrate the sciences and furnish the keys to a “true social order.” He and his acolytes referred to his system, which he named Positivism, as at once “a philosophy, a religion, and a polity.” Among its central components were a new classification of knowledge; a hierarchical ordering of the scientific disciplines; a theory of the development of the human mind across history, accompanied by an account of the corresponding evolution of social forms; and a blueprint of the political, social, and economic system toward which history was pointing. The last of these had as its capstone a program of beliefs and rituals he called the “religion of humanity.”
The society Comte believed would arise at the end of humanity’s mental and social evolution was characterized by a division of labor between temporal power, which would reside in bankers and captains of industry, and “spiritual power,” vested in a scientific elite. The latter would direct not only education, but also public opinion, and would serve as the priests of the post-theological religion in which worship of humanity itself would replace the worship of a divinity. These priest-scientists would also admonish and correct the temporal leaders when they fell afoul of the dictates of science and morality. For Comte, science and morals constituted a single body of thought: The moral rules propagated by the elite drew their sanctity from their scientific origin, and science was respected because it could be shown to increase human welfare.
Members of Comte’s priesthood of scientists would not possess property, and would wield strong disciplinary powers, including public condemnation and exclusion from the Positivist religion. Since Comte conceived of this religion as coextensive with the polity, their position effectively entailed the power to ostracize. Comte’s logic was unrelenting: In the scientific-confessional state, it was ultimately for scientists to define the boundaries and terms of belonging in the moral community. (“Experts” who endorsed the use of social exclusion to enforce Covid mandates rediscovered this vocation.)
This was nobody’s idea of democracy, let alone Comte’s. He saw himself offering “sociocratic evolution” as an alternative to the “democratic revolution” that threatened to take over Europe. In his last decade of life, he was willing to back Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 coup, which overthrew the Second Republic, judging it necessary for keeping republican radicalism at bay—and hoping he could win the soon-to-be Emperor Napoleon III over to his program. (Read more.)