By Guillaume Lancereau
For a political subject born in Western Europe in the 1990s, the main political scene is one where technocratic parties present themselves as the reasonable “golden means” or “middle ground” between extremist forces supposedly united by their anti-system approach. Yet the ability of the extreme-center to redefine politics as a struggle between a center and various extremes is far from a twentieth-century innovation. The French Revolution already staged a continual confrontation between actors legitimizing their power by claiming to defend the new regime both from the counter-revolutionary reaction and the Revolution’s own excesses. The Jacobins positioned themselves as a third term between the moderate Feuillants or indulgents and the exagérés or enragés, only to become the “extremists” themselves after Robespierre’s fall. In the following decades, the notion that “extremes meet” became commonplace across the political field, used to condemn both Jacobin remnants and Ancien Régime nostalgists. The first technocratic form of this dichotomy emerged from positivism, a scientific and political movement developed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Auguste Comte. It was based on the idea that human affairs—political, social, and moral—follow objective, knowable laws comparable to those governing the natural world. “Positive politics” shares with technocracy an emphasis on depoliticizing the masses, a commitment to providing practical guidance to political leaders, and a reliance on empirical data and the predictive power of social science.
There are two ways to present oneself as the third term in an alternative: one is to borrow elements from each side and offer a balanced synthesis; the other is to transcend them by appealing to a higher level. Comte and his successors did not conceive positivism as a politics of compromise. For them, both “retrograde” and “revolutionary” politics were not merely inadequate in political terms, but historically obsolete from a scientific standpoint. Comte’s “positive philosophy” denounced the actual state of nineteenth-century societies as “pathological” by comparison a theoretically “normal” development of human history. The future, therefore, should not depend on individual desires, revolutionary fantasies, or retrograde resentment, but on the very laws inexorably leading humanity toward the “positive age.” In that age, the mind would be free from theological and metaphysical categories and would concentrate exclusively on the phenomenal world—the world of empirical facts, observable scientifically. Applied to the social world, positive knowledge would harmonize relationships between classes, genders, and groups by moralizing private and public life and disciplining emotions. Positivism thus removed the definition of the future from the domain of political conflict. The new conflict was no longer between conflicting opinions and interests, but between all sorts of opinions and interests and the science that claimed to resolve them. Political opinion had to yield to the necessary conclusions of social science, just as one submits to the necessary conclusions of astronomy or physics.
Spontaneity and Subjugation
In a little-known 1819 essay, Comte, then secretary to the Count of Saint-Simon, asserted: “There exists more uniformity than is ordinarily imagined in the political will of a nation.” In France, he claimed, only few individuals from the former privileged classes sincerely desired the return of the Ancien Régime institutions, while the vast majority simply sought “liberty, peace, and economy.” (Comte, Écrits de jeunesse, 1816–1828, 1970). Outside this small group of fanatic reactionaries, “everyone” shared more or less the same political desires. In these conditions, only the means, not the ends, were contested. Yet the liberal revolution of 1830 and the bloodily repressed republican insurrection of 1832 demonstrated that divergent desires were far more numerous than he had once estimated. After breaking with Saint-Simon, Comte began publishing the six volumes of his major work, the Course of Positive Philosophy. In the fourth volume, issued in 1839, Comte no longer described society as united around common desires save for a handful of reactionary extremists, but rather as torn between “retrogrades” and “revolutionaries”—those conspiring to drag the present back to an anachronistic era and utopians seeking to project society into a fantasized democratic and social republic by revolutionary means. It became clear that unanimity would not be achieved spontaneously but had to be produced deliberately.
The most effective way to achieve this result was to elevate the positivist worldview into a scientific principle to which all individuals must “freely submit,” renouncing any desire contrary to the necessities of history. Later generations of positivists would seek to transform social desires by uniformizing opinions, sentiments, expectations, and knowledge. For them, most social tensions stemmed from the coexistence of minds located at different stages along the trajectory of progress: those disciplined by the conclusions of positive social science and those who refused to reshape their feelings and minds accordingly. In 1898, during a ceremony honoring Mexico’s first positivist, Gabino Barreda, the author of the country’s most important education reform, his disciple Ezequiel Chávez declared:
“Mexicans had contradictory ideas because their levels of culture were different, because they were at various stages of progress, and each harbored a different conception of the world… Dr. Barreda… saw that their ailment lay in the fact that their souls were far apart and belonged to different centuries: he became convinced that, in Mexico, there simultaneously existed prehistoric souls from the Stone Age, ankylosed by centuries of tyranny, souls of sixteenth-century conquistadors, spirits of medieval condottieri, and select children of the nineteenth century.” (Discursos y poesía en honor del Dr. D. Gabino Barreda, 1898)
To realize the positivist program, all individuals had to become contemporaries in both knowledge and will. Everyone had to share a common practical and ideal horizon, desiring only what they were meant to desire. As Barreda himself put it, practical actions can only align with society’s real necessities if it rests on a shared foundation of truths (Barreda, Opsculos, discusiones y discursos, 1877). Positive politics thus consisted above all in regulating public opinion. In contrast with other nineteenth-century ideologies, positivist politics were bound to be pedagogical—and perhaps nothing beyond pedagogy.
The World’s Teachers
From the outset, positivists positioned themselves as standing apart from the world, occupying a sphere of pure knowledge and teaching. In 1819, Comte had already warned that rulers were “the most incapable of forming a just and elevated opinion on general politics, since the more one is immersed in practice, the less one is able to have a clear view of theory.” Hence, “publicists,” i.e., the positivist militants of the following years, were expected to refrain entirely from public office or employment, based on the assumption that one could not simultaneously be an actor and a spectator. Positivists intended to remain spectators—a specific kind of spectators who, in a permanent state of scholè, could meditate on the world’s deepest questions, away from its turmoil. As such, positivists stood at the intersection between eighteenth-century learned circles and “philosophical societies” on one side, and late-nineteenth century “intellectuals” on the other. They often referred to themselves as a “contemplative class,” as in the words of Chilean positivist Luis Lagarrigue who characterized this class as “the source of teaching, counsel, prevision, and judgment… destined to coordinate the conceptions of the world, society, and humankind, to consolidate affections and guide human actions” (Lagarrigue, Incorporación del Proletariado a la Sociedad Moderna, 1920).
From Comte’s early writings to the dissolution of the movement after the Great War, positivists aimed to illuminate public opinion through their social theory, applying their knowledge and framework to all facets of human history—ancient, recent, or immediate. They produced a vast body of historiographical works aligning the interpretation of the past with Comte’s philosophical construction, as in the collective work México: Su Evolución Social, published between 1900 and 1902 by the most visible figures of Mexican positivism. They applied the same categories to current events, whether to explain the new waves of colonial expansion, the intensification of class tensions, or the growing confrontation between freethinkers and defenders of theocratic dogma. Whatever the phenomenon, the society concerned, and the time period, they could discern signs of Comte’s “law of the three stages”—often with the same rigidity that later characterized Stalinist intellectuals distinguishing between primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, and capitalism.
Positivists aspired to totality, assuming everyone would ultimately come to accept their conclusions. Hence their deep commitment to popular education. Comte himself lectured on popular astronomy for seventeen years and designed a Proletarian Library in the Nineteenth Century, composed of 150 volumes of philosophy, morals, religion, poetry, science, and history that any person wishing to be initiated into positivism had to become familiar with. Some later initiatives took institutionalized forms, such as Anton Nyström’s Arbetareinstitut in Stockholm or the sociology, music, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and history classes offered at the turn of the century by the London Positivist Society in working-class neighborhoods. In some regions, positivism first took root at the turn of the century through pedagogical undertakings, as in Kyiv and Iaşi, where Ivan Lučickij and Panait Zosin delivered the first lectures of the Course of Positive Philosophy in their own apartment, or in Budapest, with Sámuel Kun’s Circle of Positivist Studies. Elsewhere, positivist projects resembled missionary enterprises, for instance when engineer Agustín Aragón and physician Porfirio Parra taught science and history in Michoacán while Henry Edger and William Frey delivered positivist sermons in the utopian communities of Modern Times and New Odessa.
Although all these educational undertakings were inherently political, their function was not to politicize the masses, but rather to depoliticize them. Knowledge provided to the primary target audience, the “positivist proletarians,” served no other purpose than to moralize private life and professional conduct. The objective was less to prescribe or dictate political action than to encourage abstention from it.
The only political action left to the great mass of the people was to judge—to “watch” and to “evaluate.” At the 1876 Workers’ Congress in Paris, French positivist Isidore Finance elaborated on this theory of “appreciation,” assigning the proletariat the task of a “careful examination of all phenomena concerning the human family and judgment of the acts of all public officials” (Séances du Congrès ouvrier de France. Session de 1876 tenue à Paris du 2 au 10 octobre, 1877). This recalls the role assigned to the press, popular societies, and clubs—such as the Cordeliers, who adopted the all-seeing eye as their emblem and defined themselves as a “society of defiance and surveillance”—during the French Revolution. There is, however, one essential distinction: the republicans of 1790 or 1793 never considered that the people should merely oversee political action from a distance without participating in it. In contrast, Chilean positivist Jorge Lagarrigue, addressing French workers in 1888, declared:
“O workers! What you must strive to make effective, is your precious general duty of monitoring and overseeing political power. It is you who must form the essential and irresistible force of public opinion. Destined necessarily to be the governed and not the governors, what you must take to heart is that political power be exercised in the interest of the public good—which chiefly includes your own happiness.” (Lagarrigue, La dictature républicaine d’après Auguste Comte, 1888)
“The people” or “the workers,” in short, were no longer meant to be anything more than “public opinion,” and public opinion was to do nothing more than opine—to exercise its faculty of judgment without transforming this judgment into political action.
Advisors and technicians
To ensure that the conduct of political affairs would provoke as little dissent or reaction as possible, positivists sought to guide rulers, reduced to mere executors, by prescribing the correct course of action in each new configuration. They regularly condemned the “empiricism” of rulers, once excusable during the revolutionary turmoil of 1792, when decisions had to be improvised without the benefit of positive knowledge, but intolerable now that the true theory of social and moral phenomena had been revealed to Humanity.
A significant part of positivist writings revived the tradition of “mirrors for princes,” offering rulers practical advice on how to govern society according to scientific and moral principles. Comte composed a series of open letters to the Jesuits, the conservative party, and former Ottoman vizier Mustafa Reşid Pasha. His 1852 letter to Tsar Nicholas I called for the abolition of serfdom, the dismantling of the oversized Russian Empire, official patronage of positivist philosophy, and a transformation of the Russian monarchy into a republican dictatorship. Numerous public interventions followed, with letters from Brazilian positivists to the Chinese ambassador in London on the issue of Chinese coolies in Latin America and dozens of letters by Juan Enrique Lagarrigue addressed to heads of state and prominent intellectuals he believed capable of influencing political rulers—including Bergson, Gustave Le Bon, Kropotkin, Romain Rolland, Jules Guesde, Tolstoy, and Maurras.
To guide these rulers-executors properly, positivists had to foresee the societies’ inevitable trajectory with maximal certainty. As a relative science, positivism demanded that general laws be adapted to each specific case, which required extensive empirical data. “To know is to foresee”: the positivist maxim expressed deep faith in the predictive power of social science. Based on data from the national Statistical Yearbook of 1871–1880, Chilean scholar Valentín Letelier asserted in De la ciencia política en Chile that if one had sufficient information about a country’s demography, economic prosperity, and foreign relations, one could predict next year’s number of marriages or suicides.
It is therefore no surprise to find positivists among the early pioneers of social and economic inquiry in the late nineteenth century—from Frederic Harrison’s studies of the London working class to James Geddes and Henry Cotton’s investigations within the Indian Civil Service, and the French positivists, including the abovementioned Isidore Finance, who became among the first experts at the Office du Travail, the Labor Office. This institution produced extensive data on workers’ associations, wages, industrial working hours, and a general statistical account of strikes.
The goal of this empirical accumulation was not merely to inform the independent action of decision-makers, but rather to demonstrate that, in each of these scientifically examined cases, there was only one correct course of action, dictated by the facts themselves. In this sense, positive politics is indeed another name for technocracy.
A delayed ideology?
Positivism presents a familiar image—not that of centrist politics per se, but of all bourgeois politics claiming a monopoly on reason and attributing any criticism and opposition to a lack “pedagogy” of the ruling class or to the corrosive influence of “extremist” ideologues. In nineteenth-century positivism, as in today’s political spectacle, the ultimate objective remains the suppression of political action. In the ideal scheme animating positivist politics, social labor was divided among a scientific caste of advisors, an executive power in the full sense of the term, and the great mass of the governed, either expected to submit deliberately to these scientifically grounded decisions or to express approval or disapproval.
Two questions remain. What would have happened if positivists actually came to power, despite their own principle? The case of Castilhismo in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in the early twentieth century, was perhaps the only instance of a genuinely positivist regime and suggests one outcome: a republican dictatorship implementing education and industrial reforms from above. Aside this example, and whatever influence it may have had on the worldview of turn-of-the-century rulers, positivism failed to become the dominant ideology of its own time, perhaps because its methods of action were already anachronistic, attempting to shape public opinion with eighteenth-century tools just as the first mass political parties were emerging. The deeper question is thus whether this ideology that failed to become dominant in its own time might be better understood as a delayed ideology—the technocratic ideology of the past half-century.
Guillaume Lancereau is a historian of nineteenth-century Western Europe and Russia with a particular interest in transnational intellectual history. After graduating from Sciences Po Paris and the École Normale Supérieure and defending his PhD on the historiography of the French Revolution at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He is now working as a research affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute on the global history of positivism as a technocratic ideology.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
