Auguste Comte on the Natural Progress of Human Society

摘要

"Progress" is not a term found in contemporary social science, though its disdained teleological connotation is not much different from that of "development" or (in a non-Darwinian sense) "social evolution." Belief in human progress perhaps reached its peak in revolutionary France with Condorcet's Esquisse (1795), which described the stages of societal advance from savagery to a yet-to-he-attained perfect civilization (and, incidentally, which provoked Malthus to pen his contrary Essay,). But a muchmore elaborate treatise on the subject came a few decades later in the work of the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857).