Meaning of COMTE, AUGUSTE (1798-1857):
Rarely read now, Comte performed the signal service to the discipline of coining the term ‘sociology’ which first appeared in his 1838 Cours de Philosophie Positive. For Comte, sociology was an empirical observation based comparative science which would dominate the highest stage of human evolution. He believed that thought developed through the stages of the theological, the metaphysical and the positive Societies evolved from the primitive through the intermediary to the scientific. Comte saw the increasing division of labour making societies more complex, specialised and internally differentiated. Like Emile Durkheim later, he saw modernisation as paradoxical; increased division of labour made people more dependent on each other and thus increased social solidarity but it also created class divisions and a gulf between the public and private worlds.