The Intelligentsia and the Religion of Humanity
1960; Oxford University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1849405
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Political Theory and Influence
ResumoSHORTLY before his death, Auguste Comte, regarded by many as the most rational and progressive thinker in Europe, amazed friend and foe alike by addressing two flattering letters to Czar Nicholas I of Russia, the recognized leader of reaction and obscurantism. Comte appealed to the Czar to be the first to accept his new System of Positive Politics, insisting that Russia's very insulation gave it a unique potential for bypassing the atomized parliamentary stage of European development and adopting directly an integrating new religion of humanity. The incongruity of the situation was illustrated by the fact that the recipient had not yet even adopted the Gregorian calendar, while the sender had already overthrown it, dating his letters 19 Bichat 64 and 20 Archimedes 65.1 John Stuart Mill and most of Comte's early admirers viewed his appeal as a senile abberation not logically related to his earlier works. The Czar, for his part, seems to have paid no more attention to Comte than had the leaders of the Holy Alliance paid to the appeal addressed to them. earlier by Comte's teacher, St.-Simon, in his last work, The New Christianity.2 Yet, through. the sobering perspectives of the past century, it may appear that there was a certain logic in the admiration of the founder of modern sociology for the autocrat's wise firmness in keeping his country free from retrograde empiricism and Western agitation and anarchy.3 Few will deny an element of
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