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THE WORLDS OF
POSITIVISM
A GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, 1770–1930
Edited by Johannes Feichtinger, Franz L. Fillafer, and Jan Surman

The Worlds of Positivism
Johannes Feichtinger · Franz L. Fillafer
Jan Surman
Editors
The Worlds
of Positivism
A Global Intellectual History, 1770–1930
Editors
Johannes Feichtinger Jan Surman
Austrian Academy of Sciences University of Erfurt
Vienna, Austria Erfurt, Germany
Franz L. Fillafer
Department of History and Sociology
University of Konstanz
Konstanz, Germany
ISBN 978-3-319-65761-5 ISBN 978-3-319-65762-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65762-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951535
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: Cover image courtesy of Nadia Shira Cohen
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
The original version of this book was revised: Belated corrections
have been incorporated throughout the book and an acknowledgement
has been included in Frontmatter.
Acknowledgements
This book originated in the Vienna-based international research pro-

ject Positivism–Power–Enlightenment which was generously funded by
the Austrian Academy of Sciences whom we thank for its support. We
are extremely grateful to all contributors for their patient and dedicated
work as well as for their kind forbearance during the gestation of the
present volume. The excellent infrastructure provided by the University
of Konstanz greatly facilitated the work of the editors, and the research
assistants of Sven Reichardt’s Chair for Contemporary History deserve
special praise for their committed copy editing before the submission of
the manuscript.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Particularizing Positivism 1

Franz L. Fillafer, Johannes Feichtinger and Jan Surman
Part I Empires of Positivism
2 Striking a Chord: The Reception of Comte’s Positivism

in Colonial India 31
Geraldine Forbes
3 Positivism, Revolution, and History in Brazil 53

Elías José Palti
4 Positivism in the Late Ottoman Empire: The “Young

Turks” as Mediators and Multipliers 81
M. Sait Özervarlı
Part II Positive Knowledge and the Making of Positivism
5 An Enlightened Path to Positivism? Reflections on

the Institutionalization of Science in Bourbon Spain 111
Jorge Fernández-Santos Ortiz-Iribas and
Sara Muniain Ederra
ix
x Contents
6 Trading Epistemological Insults: “Positive Knowledge”

and Natural Science in Germany, 1800–1850 137
Denise Phillips
7 The French Philosophical Crisis of the 1860s and the

Invention of the “Positivist School” 155
Nathalie Richard
Part III The Liberal Politics of Science and Society
8 Habsburg Positivism: The Politics of Positive Knowledge

in Imperial and Post-Imperial Austria, 1804–1938 191
Franz L. Fillafer and Johannes Feichtinger
9 The Contexts of Early Polish Positivisms, 1840s–1900s 239

Jan Surman
10 Positivism in Late Tsarist Russia: Its Introduction,

Penetration, and Diffusion 273
Thomas Nemeth
Part IV Positivist Aftermath
11 Positivism in the Northern Peripheries: Generations of

Positivist Philosophers in Sweden and Its Neighboring
Countries 295
Johan Strang
12 Dilthey and Carnap: The Feeling of Life, the Scientific

Worldview, and the Elimination of Metaphysics 321
Eric S. Nelson
Contents xi
Part V Epilogue
13 The Worlds of Positivism: An Analytical Synopsis 349

Franz L. Fillafer and Johannes Feichtinger
Index 357
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Johannes Feichtinger is Senior Research Associate at the Austrian

Academy of Sciences and Visiting Professor for Modern History and
the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Vienna. His
publications include Wissenschaft zwischen den Kulturen: Österreichische
Hochschullehrer in der Emigration 1933–1945 (Frankfurt and New York:
Campus Verlag, 2001), Wissenschaft als reflexives Projekt: Von Bolzano
über Freud zu Kelsen: Österreichische Wissenschaftsgeschichte 1848–1938
(Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010). Among the 15 collected vol-
umes he co-edited are Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg
Central European Experience, ed. with Gary B. Cohen (Oxford and New
York: Berghahn Books, 2014), Deploying Orientalism in Culture and
History: From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe, ed. with James
Hodkinson, John Walker, and Shaswati Mazumdar (Rochester, New
York: Camden House, 2013), and The Academy of Sciences in Vienna
1938 to 1945, ed. with Herbert Matis, Stefan Sienell, and Heidemarie
Uhl (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2014).
Franz L. Fillafer is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary History at the

Department of History and Sociology of the University of Konstanz. His
main fields of study are eighteenth and nineteenth-century Central Europe,
the global history of positivism, and Eurocommunism in the twentieth
century. His most recent publications include “A World Connecting? From
xiii
xiv Editors and Contributors
the Unity of History to Global History,” History and Theory 56 (2017),

3–37, “Österreichislam,” in Johannes Feichtinger and Heidemarie Uhl
(eds), Habsburg neu denken: Vielfalt und Ambivalenz in Zentraleuropa—30
kulturwissenschaftliche Stichworte (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016), 163–70, and,
co-written with Jürgen Osterhammel, “Cosmopolitanism and the German
Enlightenment,” in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of Modern German History, 2nd edn, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 119–43. He is currently finishing a monograph on the
Enlightenment and its aftermath in the Habsburg Empire.
Jan Surman is a visiting scholar at the Max Weber Centre for

Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt. His pub-
lications include Habsburg Universities 1848–1918: Imperial Space
and the Circulation of Knowledge (West Lafayette: Purdue University
Press, forthcoming), Language as a Scientific Tool: Shaping Scientific
Language across Time and National Traditions, ed. with Miles MacLeod,
Ekaterina Smirnova, and Rocío G. Sumillera (New York: Routledge,
2016), Nomadic Concepts in Biology, ed. with Katalin Straner and Peter
Haslinger as a Special Panel in the Studies in History and Philosophy
of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 48 B, 2014, and The Nationalization of
Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848–1918, ed. with
Mitchell G. Ash (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Contributors
Jorge Fernández-Santos Ortiz-Iribas was educated at Cornell

University, KU Leuven and the University of Cambridge. His research
has been funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Düsseldorf, and the
Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. He currently teaches at
the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain). His monograph on
the seventeenth-century Spanish polymath Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz,
entitled Juan Caramuel y la probable arquitectura (Madrid: CEEH,
2014), represents a contribution to the understanding of the Spanish
pre-Enlightenment from the standpoint of architectural theory.
Kulturtransfer between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries constitutes a central concern of his publications, cover-
ing areas such as architectural history, urbanism, diplomacy, and scientific
and artistic patronage.
Editors and Contributors xv
Geraldine Forbes is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita in the

Department of History and program in Women’s and Gender Studies at
the State University of New York at Oswego. Her first book, Positivism
in Bengal (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1975), was selected for the
prestigious Rabindra Puraskar Award. A pioneer in researching and writ-
ing women’s history in colonial India, she was series editor of Foremother
Legacies: Autobiographies and Memoirs of Women from Asia, Africa, and
the Middle East. Her publications on women in colonial India include:
Shudha Mazumdar: Memoirs of an Indian Woman (Armonk: M. E.
Sharpe 1989), Manmohini Zutshi Sahgal: An Indian Freedom Fighter
Recalls Her Life (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), Women in Modern
India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Women in
Colonial India: Essays on Politics, Medicine and Historiography (New
Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2005) as well as several articles. “Because I am
a Woman”: Child Widow: A Memoir from Colonial India (New Delhi:
Chronicle Books, 2010) was published in collaboration with Tapan
Raychaudhuri. She is currently working on a number of projects includ-
ing “Mahatma Gandhi and Saraladevi Chaudhurani,” “Women and
Family Photographs in Colonial India,” and “An Early Missionary in the
Naga Hills.”
Sara Muniain Ederra is Professor of Art History and Architectural
History at the School of Architecture of the Universidad San Jorge
(Zaragoza, Spain). As a cultural historian, she has focused on the wide
range of artistic relations between the Iberian and Italian peninsulas in
the eighteenth century. She has written a monograph on the royal resi-
dence of the new Bourbon dynasty built in Madrid after the Habsburg
Alcázar burnt down 1734, focusing on the Enlightenment agenda
according to which it was conceived and erected: El Palacio Real de
Madrid en el marco de la Ilustración española (Madrid: FUE, 2000).
Other publications include “Arquitectura de la Arcadia y crisis de la
magnificencia: las exequias de Luis I y Felipe V en Roma,” Römische
Historische Mitteilungen, 47 (2005), 279–334) and (with Jorge
Fernández-Santos) “Pendre modèle sur Télémaque: The Fénelonian
Underpinnings of ‘Cultural Policy’ at the Court of Philip V of Spain,”
in Fénelon in the Enlightenment: Traditions, Adaptations, and Variations
(New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 129–46).
Eric S. Nelson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology. He has published over 70 articles
xvi Editors and Contributors
and book chapters on Chinese, German, and Jewish philosophy. He is

the author of Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century
German Thought (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) and is currently work-
ing on a GRF funded project on the early modern German reception
of Chinese philosophy. He is the co-editor with François Raffoul of
the Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)
and Rethinking Facticity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008). He has also co-
edited Between Levinas and Heidegger (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014),
Anthropologie und Geschichte. Studien zu Wilhelm Dilthey aus Anlass
seines 100. Todestages (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), and
Addressing Levinas (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
He has edited special topic issues of Frontiers of Philosophy in China and
the Journal of Chinese Philosophy.
Thomas Nemeth is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the Jordan
Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University. He is
the author of Kant in Imperial Russia (New York: Springer, 2017) and
a volume examining the early works of Vladimir Solov’ëv entitled The
Early Solov’ëv and His Quest for Metaphysics (New York: Springer, 2014).
Nemeth has also published a critical translation of Solov’ëv’s Justification
of the Moral Good (Springer, 2015). He has authored numerous arti-
cles on nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian philosophy as well as
pieces on Kant, Husserl, and Italian philosophy. His translation of Gustav
Shpet’s 1914 treatise Appearance and Sense remains the only complete
English translation of any of Shpet’s books. Nemeth has contributed
entries on Russian neo-Kantianism and specific Russian philosophical fig-
ures to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He has also translated
Shpet’s lengthy essay “Consciousness and Its Owner” and continues to
pursue studies of Shpet, Solov’ëv, and the influence of German philoso-
phy on classical Russian idealism. He is also a member of the editorial
board of the Russian journal Coлoвьeвcкиe иccлeдoвaни/Solov’ëv Studies.
M. Sait Özervarlı is Professor of Intellectual History at Yildiz Technical
University, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. He has pub-
lished several journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries.
Among his books in English are Aspects of Ottoman Intellectual History
(Istanbul: Kent Publications, 2009). He is also the co-editor of Istanbul
as Seen from a Distance (Istanbul: The Swedish Research Institute,
2011). He is currently contributing to the new edition of Friedrich
Editors and Contributors xvii
Ueberweg’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie with chapters on

pre-modern and modern Ottoman philosophy.
Elías José Palti obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California
at Berkeley in 1997. He pursued postdoctoral studies at El Colegio de
México and Harvard University. He currently teaches at the University
of Buenos Aires and the University of Quilmes, Argentina, and has
taught as an invited professor at universities in Europe, the USA and
Latin America. He is also a researcher at the National Research Council
of Argentina and has been recently appointed as the director of the
Center for Intellectual History at the University of Quilmes. He is the
author of 14 books. His latest one is An Archaeology of the Political:
Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2017). He currently serves on the editorial
board of the Journal of the History of Ideas. In 2009, he was awarded the
Guggenheim Fellowship, among other prizes and fellowships.
Denise Phillips is Associate Professor of History at the University of
Tennessee, where she teaches European history and history of science.
Her first book, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany,
1770–1850, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012.
She also co-edited New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and
Agriculture (New York: Springer, 2015), and has published numerous
articles. The relationship between knowledge and social order has been a
prevailing theme in her research, and she is currently completing a book
about Kleinjogg, an eighteenth-century peasant who became a hero of
the enlightened Republic of Letters.
Nathalie Richard is Professor in Modern History at Le Mans University
(France). She is a member of the Centre de recherches historiques de
l’Ouest (CERHIO, CNRS). Her research themes are the h istory of
human and social sciences and the history of a rchaeology in nineteenth-
century France. She has recently published Hippolyte Taine. Histoire,
psychologie, litterature (Paris: Garnier, 2013) and La Vie de Jésus de
Renan: La Fabrique d’un best-seller (Rennes: PUR, 2015), and edited
(with Hervé Guillemain) “The Frontiers of Amateur Science (18th–20th
Century),” Gesnerus 73(2) (2016).
Johan Strang is Lecturer at the Centre for Nordic Studies at the
University of Helsinki. Interested in the intellectual and political his-
tory of twentieth-century Scandinavia, Strang has published extensively
xviii Editors and Contributors
on the history of analytic philosophy, Scandinavian legal realism, and

Nordic democracy (Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy, Finnish Literature
Society 2010). Recently, he edited the volume Nordic Cooperation: A
European Region in Transition (New York: Routledge, 2016). Together
with Stefan Nygård he has also contributed to the discussion on trans-
national history from the perspective of small states with the arti-
cles “Facing Asymmetry: Nordic Intellectuals and Center–Periphery
Dynamics in European Cultural Space,” Journal of the History of Ideas,
1 (2016), 75–97 and “Conceptual Universalization and the Role of the
Peripheries,” Contributions to the History of Concepts, 1 (2017), 55–77.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 The Paris statue of Auguste Comte. This monument was

erected to commemorate Auguste Comte as the founding father
of sociology and philosophy of science, on the Paris Place
de la Sorbonne in 1902. Designed by the sculptor
Jean-Antonin Injalbert, the monument also features a
figure embodying the working class immersed in intellectual
self-perfection and Clotilde de Vaux as a Virgin Mary-like
allegory of Humanity whose worship Comte had pioneered.
She gratefully adorns the pedestal with a palm of glory.
John Heseltine/Alamy Stock Photo 7
Fig. 2.1 The Bengali Goddess of Humanity. This Bengali incarnation
of the Goddess of Humanity, painted by Hari Charan
Mazumdar in the mid-1880s, was designed for meditation
on the progress of man. Modeled on Raphael’s Madonna,
this Goddess wears a red-bordered white sari and other
symbols of a respectable married Bengali woman. First
published in Geraldine Forbes, Positivism in Bengal:
A Case Study of the Transmission and Assimilation
of an Ideology (Calcutta: Minerva, 1976) 44
Fig. 4.1 Ahmed Rıza. Rıza, an Istanbul-born statesman whose studies
as agriculturalist and interpreter had acquainted him with
French culture, became the chief Ottoman adherent of Auguste
Comte’s philosophy during his exile in Paris in the 1890s.
Edward Frederick Knight: The Awakening of Turkey.
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1909 84
xix
xx List of Figures
Fig. 4.2 Positivist lawmakers. This Greek-Ottoman lithograph is an

allegory of the constitution of 1908. Ahmed Rıza is pictured
left among the leaders of the Committee of Union and
Progress, while co-positivist Abdullah Cevdet can be
seen at the very right of the group. Wearing a fez,
scarlet sash and multiple decorations, Rıza holds the
right hand of a female figure who personifies the
empire liberated from its shackles 90
Fig. 7.1 Higher Mammals. Alluding to Émile Littré’s partisanship
for Charles Darwin’s evolutionism, this 1874 caricature
by André Gill shows Littré sitting astride a tree, his ancestors’
dwelling place, while composing his Philosophie positive.
A monkey, having traded places with his descendant,
is reading his ABC in the background, probably in
preparation for devouring Littré’s Dictionnaire de
la langue française. L’Eclipse, October 18, 1874 164
Fig. 8.1 Mill’s Liaison Man. The Viennese classicist Theodor
Gomperz initiated and orchestrated the German edition
of John Stuart Mill’s Collected Works. Thereby Gomperz
shaped the scientific and intellectual framework of Austrian
liberalism which remained predicated on Mill’s oeuvre.
Briefe und Aufzeichnungen ausgewählt, erläutert und zu einer
Darstellung seines Lebens verknüpft. Edited by Heinrich
Gomperz, vol. 1 (1832–1868). Vienna: Gerold, 1936,
Vorsatzblatt 199
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Particularizing Positivism
Franz L. Fillafer, Johannes Feichtinger and Jan Surman
The worlds of positivism were an unintended creation. Positivists

imagined one world, but their efforts spawned many. Universalist by
ambition and design, positivism was contingent upon local and cultural
circumstances. This volume connects and compares the variegated con-
cepts, scientific cultures, and sociopolitical contexts of positivism on a
global scale. This inquiry results in an overdue reappraisal of what was,
together with Marxism and historicism, one of the three major intel-
lectual formations of the nineteenth century. Today positivism may
seem passé, evoking the skirmishes of the 1960s, when the Frankfurt
School opened fire on Popperian critical rationalism, or recalling
Marxist anti-positivist diatribes. Other than in the realm of international
F.L. Fillafer (*) 
Department of History and Sociology, Universität Konstanz, Konstanz,
Germany
J. Feichtinger 
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
J. Surman 
University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany
© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. Feichtinger et al. (eds.), The Worlds of Positivism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65762-2_1
2 F.L. FILLAFER ET AL.
jurisprudence, where the critical legal positivism pioneered by Hans

Kelsen retains a formidable presence, positivism appears as defunct and
marginalized.
Yet it seems too early to bury positivism. Positivists unraveled the
rules nature and society obeyed and they claimed that social progress
and moral regeneration across the planet depended on the success of
their doctrines. The key epistemic and political problem nineteenth-
century positivism raised has lost nothing of its urgency. The universality
of knowledge about the world remains a burning issue wherever global
theories surreptitiously arbitrate between, adjust to, or repudiate rival
knowledge and validity claims, and particularly so when it comes to the
sprawling debates on human rights, cultural relativism, and constructiv-
ism. The practitioners of positivism aspired to universality, but their sharp
disagreement about wherein universality was to be based cut to the very
heart of their project: Are there discoverable, general laws of nature and
society, or does universality reside in a set of methods whose applicabil-
ity extends to all cultures and disciplines? Or is there no such universality
at all, given the increasingly widespread contention that not only knowl-
edge but also its very claim to universal validity are culturally condi-
tioned? What have scientists since made of this pledge, and how do they
deliver on their promise in present-day societies?
It is time for a reappraisal of positivism that situates it in its global
intellectual and political frameworks. This permits us to recover the con-
ditions surrounding the emergence and the political objectives of an
intellectual program that claimed to be universally valid, free of ideology,
and secularist. Positivism was predicated on an all-encompassing science-
based and normative vision that should make it applicable to every soci-
ety. The science positivists envisaged and practiced relied on an epistemic
merger between nature and society: the laws of nature and the laws of
society were perceived as analogous or identical, requiring related meth-
ods of inquiry. The universalism positivists professed was all-embracing
in a double sense: it aimed both at the planet in its entirety and at com-
prehensive knowledge of this world. Many acolytes of positivism believed
that the validity of their findings was detached from all cultural connota-
tions as well as immune to disciplinary specificities.
This universalist premise constitutes the point of departure for the pre-
sent book. Adopting a global and comparative perspective, our volume
1 INTRODUCTION: PARTICULARIZING POSITIVISM 3
seeks to dismantle positivist universalism. In what follows, the authors

particularize positivism by looking beyond its French and English iter-
ations in order to demonstrate how it evolved from a bricolage-like
merger of Comtean and Millean ancestries. At the same time, the book
offers a fresh view of the politics of scholarly disciplines. It locates the
sites and settings in which positivist doctrines and methods were for-
mulated and propagated, explores how they received their universalist
imprint, and analyzes how they became part of the traffic in concepts
between distinct branches of scholarship as they emerged. The study
of the selective appropriation and reinvention of positivism across and
beyond Europe gives us a fine sense of its intersection with pre-existing
local traditions. It also alerts us to the struggle over positivist knowledge
between imperial elites and those intellectuals who forged the scientific
aspirations of nascent nations within these empires. The nineteenth-cen-
tury transmission of positivist doctrines and practices shows how brittle
and fluid the frontiers of Europe were and how the “West” was con-
structed in a process whereby “positivist” knowledge was deracinated,
tweaked, and readjusted while being transplanted. The global intellectual
history of positivism is not a history of local adaptations of a pristine uni-
versal body of knowledge, instead it lays bare the local origins of these
apparently universally valid conceptual resources and traces how they
were reparticularized elsewhere.
This book explains the relevance positivism acquired across the globe
and across disciplines from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth
century. Its time frame spans the period from the 1770s to the 1930s,
while its geographical scope ranges from India to France and from Brazil
to Russia. The chapters that follow are not simply case studies of self-
contained national movements, nor are they confined to the reception
of the ideas of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, the two pivotal fig-
ures of positivist thought. Instead the authors of this book respond to
an overarching question: How was a set of ostensibly universal concepts
and methods inflected to serve concrete scientific and political purposes
on local, national, and imperial levels around the world? By studying
positivism in regions outside of the North Atlantic archipelago, the book
shows how its Millean and Comtean versions were updated, conceptu-
ally refashioned, and amalgamated to fit local needs. Thereby the book
contributes to the ongoing debate about the benefits and discontents of
global intellectual history.
The Promise and Perils of Global Intellectual History

“Global intellectual history” is a burgeoning cottage industry within the
discipline, but its key premises remain ill-conceptualized.1 Recent work
on matters cognate and adjacent to the theme of the present book, for
instance on global Spencerism and Darwinism,2 amply demonstrates that
a transnational perspective is stimulating because it helps dispel ingrained
Eurocentric prejudices, while mitigating some of the less salutary effects
of the contextualist paradigm in the history of political thought.3 The
claim that a given utterance can only be exhaustively understood by sit-
uating it in a specific framework of contemporary concerns, that is, by
establishing its context of emergence, has acted as an antidote against
perennialist conceptions, some of whose adherents traced the life cycles
of coherent and self-sufficient ideas over the centuries. Yet contextual-
ism has also reinforced assumptions about the authenticity of pristine and
primordial ideas, suggesting that these ideas, while pure at their sources,
were skewed and garbled once appropriated beyond the narrowly defined
environments in which they originated.4 This presumption in favor of
the autarky of contexts—often understood in national terms—has made
it exceedingly difficult to trace larger chains of filiations across time and
space.
This volume embraces the stimulating advances promised by the
emerging design of global intellectual history. Superficially, positivism
may lend itself to a classical diffusionist history of the sort that traces
how European thinkers civilized and enlightened the rest of the world.
In the diffusionist model,5 transfers are self-propelling, dispensing the
historian from the arduous task of clarifying who acts for what purpose
and under what constraints. Here a set of benignly liquid, mellifluous
metaphors (“flows,” “influences”) conceptually sustains lubricant-like,
smoothly all-permeating “transfers.” In contrast to the diffusionist model,
the chapters of this volume combine an interest in positivism as an intrin-
sically universalist program tied to a specific mode of “world-making”6
with a focus on its agents and on their strategies of appropriation across
the globe.7 What emerges from the following pages are the “brokered
worlds”8 of positivism. Comtean positivism can be seen as the first mod-
ern organized movement that systematically sought to spread its world-
view and techniques of knowledge-acquisition across the globe. Comte’s
liaison men, like Gustave D’Eichthal, acted to that effect across Europe
as well as in the Americas. Scholarly and political go-betweens traveled to
the centers of positivism to creatively appropriate the messages enunciated
there. For example, Young Turk intellectuals like Ahmed Rıza flocked to
Paris to study with Comte’s heir Pierre Laffitte while Austrian philologist
Theodor Gomperz’s English sojourn was punctuated by meetings with
John Stuart Mill and George Grote. Spanish adherents of the German phi-
losopher Krause received his adaptation of Comte’s philosophy refracted
through the French renderings of Krause’s works, while Polish promot-
ers of positivism became acquainted with John Stuart Mill’s works at the
imperial hub of St Petersburg and prepared their Polish versions of his
writings on the basis of Russian translations.9 The English disciples of
Richard Congreve, the leader of the Religion of Humanity in the British
Isles, who served as officials in colonial administration, mediated between
Comte’s philosophy and Hindu activists in Bengal.
The context-sensitive study of purposeful appropriations permits us to
reassess the universal validity and scope of positivism. Positivist universal-
ism was conditioned by and geared toward local circumstances. It did
not produce a coherent “global” entity but a multi-pronged, polygonal
structure of scientific-political pursuits. The perspective adopted by the
authors of this book renders the dichotomy between a creative European
center and a receptive, emulative extra-European periphery obsolete.
This decentering of the history of positivism clarifies that there was no
clear-cut, stable “doctrine” that could be “disseminated” from Europe
to the wider world. The European “center” crumbles, revealing a pro-
cess of blending and appropriation that was in no way superior to or dif-
ferent from those taking place elsewhere in the world. “Positivism” was
fabricated at the interstices of Millean and Comtean philosophies in the
1860s, a program whose immediate appeal was not only due to its strong
sociopolitical promise but also to its malleable philosophical content.
The following chapters unveil the sociopolitical aspirations, infrastruc-
tural prerequisites, and daily reality of these adaptations. The book repar-
ticularizes the universalist aims and global structure of positivism. The
laboratories of positivism explored on the following pages are imperial
and regional spaces rather than “nation states,” thereby the book also
restores zones of contact and interaction obliterated by twentieth-cen-
tury national historiographies of science.
The Fabrication of Positivism:

Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill in Context
Auguste Comte’s quest for positive knowledge was inextricably con-
nected to the crisis of France that permeated all spheres of its social,
political, and scholarly life since the Revolution of 1789. Born in 1798
in Montpellier, Comte started off as a secretary of Count Henri de Saint-
Simon in Paris. He imbibed the pure milk of radical Saint-Simonianism
when seeking to construct a “new unified system of knowledge for the
modern, industrial era.”10 While eking out a living as an adjunct exam-
iner of the Paris École Polytechnique, Comte worked on a philosophy of
knowledge and society that should be “positive,” that is based on scien-
tific ideas, and devoted to the common good. Between 1830 and 1842,
Comte published his six-volume Cours de philosophie positive.11 Here,
Comte identified the famous three phases of lawful development all sci-
ences invariably passed through, moving from the theological through
the metaphysical to the positive stage. The havoc and turmoil experi-
enced by France epitomized the general misery and social disarray of the
modern world, so Comte’s aim was to formulate a science of society that
would propel the study of the social and moral realm onto the “positive
stage” that other branches of knowledge had already achieved. This new
science of society, which Comte called “sociology” in 1838, was univer-
sal in a twin sense: it “would unite all knowledge” and encompass all of
humanity. “Humanity would be the object of study of all the sciences.”
Once all knowledge was based on scientific laws, everyone would agree
on the most essential intellectual and, by implication, political princi-
ples.12 This social dimension was far from fortuitous: once the sciences
reached “positivity,” Comte argued, they could no longer be cultivated
for their own sakes; rather they should be predicated on a moral-political
agenda to uplift society. Comte’s new science was supposed to cure the
ills of society: it was to guarantee stability and spiritual authority in an
age of untrammeled political radicalism and capitalism. By combining the
clarification of the relationships that obtained between objects of inquiry
with the cultivation of the spiritual and affective bonds between human
beings, Comte aimed at an “altruistic”—another one of his neologisms—
regeneration of society (Fig. 1.1).
In the 1840s and 1850s, Comte grew increasingly convinced that
his science constituted a novel type of religion that dispensed with the
belief in God but was instead based on “demonstrable principles” and
on positive knowledge about the world that would reintegrate society.
Fig. 1.1 The Paris statue of Auguste Comte. This monument was erected to
commemorate Auguste Comte as the founding father of sociology and philos-
ophy of science, on the Paris Place de la Sorbonne in 1902. Designed by the
sculptor Jean-Antonin Injalbert, the monument also features a figure embodying
the working class immersed in intellectual self-perfection and Clotilde de Vaux as
a Virgin Mary-like allegory of Humanity whose worship Comte had pioneered.
She gratefully adorns the pedestal with a palm of glory. John Heseltine/Alamy
Stock Photo.
Comte’s passionate and unrequited love for Clotilde de Vaux which had
begun in 1844 and ended abruptly with de Vaux’s early death two years
later. Clotilde’s example inspired Comte to make the social equilibrium
he yearned for hinge on spiritual values. “Humanity” was elevated on a

pedestal, becoming the object of veneration, with Clotilde acting as the
saccharine heroine and patron saint of the novel Religion of Humanity.
She was likened to Isis and Mary when depicted as the Virgin with
child in the religion’s shrines and on the monuments that commemo-
rated Comte.13 Comte began to advertise his Religion of Humanity14
in the mid-1840s and worked indefatigably for the spread of “intendan-
cies” and “foyers,” associations that would form a “Positivist Society” to
promote his philosophy. Its “militant diffusion” took on apostolic and
encyclopedic guises.15 The Society churned out “positivist calendars”
and compiled a library of 150 great books. The Comtean Religion of
Humanity, whose temples were erected from Latin America through
Victorian Britain to the Indian subcontinent, administered its “sacra-
ments”—baptisms, marriages, funerals—to aspiring local devotees.16
Chastising radicalism (particularly of the Right) in his 1848 Discours sur
l’ensemble du positivisme which would later constitute the first volume of
the Système de la politique positive,17 Comte remained politically versa-
tile himself. While he had sought to curry favor with the restorational
Ultras in the 1820s, he turned to Napoleon III in the early 1850s, hop-
ing to convert him to positivism, and, after this plan proved abortive,
to the revolutionary socialists Proudhon and Blanqui.18 Comte’s disciple
Émile Littré initiated and organized the “Positivist Subsidy,” a fund-rais-
ing organization for the positivist doctrine, before quitting the Society
appalled by his teacher’s authoritarian and sacerdotal leanings.
Comte was acutely aware that his universal scheme had to be pred-
icated on global support, so he dispatched letters and missives to
Nicolas I and former Grand Vizier Mustafa Reşid Paşa.19 Comte’s
“positive” philosophy would reconcile East and West. He considered
Constantinople, not Paris, the rightful capital of positivism,20 a predic-
tion colored by his fascination with the Orient as a counter-model to the
West, which he regarded as marked by avarice, greed, and spiritual desic-
cation, and by his admiration of “pure,” “practical,” and “reasonable”
Islam.21 Comte relentlessly criticized colonial rule, slavery, and Christian
missions,22 and strenuously denied the racial inferiority of China and
Japan.23 He publicly rejected the British oppression of China, its colo-
nial rule over Ireland and India, and chastised French domination in
Tunisia and Algeria.24 According to Comte, there was no moral justifica-
tion for Europe’s world supremacy and control of subject populations
across the globe. His anti-imperialist pronouncements were grist to the
mill of colonized populations who aspired to self-rule. The conceptual

arbitrators between the universal and particular forged by these critics of
empire, as well as their recirculation of positivist doctrines, are discussed
in greater detail in the chapters of this volume.
John Stuart Mill’s creative refashioning of Comte is highly relevant
to the establishment of “positivism” as a philosophical stance and viable
sociopolitical agenda, and it also illuminates the vicissitudes of the pro-
cesses of translation investigated in the present volume. Comte’s Cours
hit the English audience in 1853, when Harriette Martineau’s abridged
translation appeared,25 but John Stuart Mill had become acquainted with
Comte’s early writings already in the 1820s. Mill was a child prodigy,
trained by his father James Mill, the radical philosopher and close associ-
ate of Jeremy Bentham, to become the head of English utilitarianism.
John Stuart Mill read Comte’s Saint-Simonian works when he began
to rebel against his upbringing and against the arid, morally depleted,
philosophy of his father.26 Young Mill’s philosophical parricide involved
his turn to Romantic visions of society, and he found Comte’s writings
supportive and salutary in this shift. Mill’s critique of jejune Benthamism
was far from all-encompassing, as he retained the Benthamite repudia-
tion of eighteenth-century abstract universal rights rhetoric and con-
tractualism, a critique shared by Comte and the Saint-Simonians more
broadly. Indeed, Mill used the writings of the Saint-Simonians to dissoci-
ate himself from the Enlightenment moral and social philosophy under
which he now subsumed the philosophical radicals, Bentham and his
father. For Mill, this Anglo-French philosophical cross-pollination sup-
plied a set of devices that permitted him to revamp the utilitarian tradi-
tion in which he had been reared, invoking foreign authorities to mend
and surreptitiously alter its central doctrines.27 It was for good reason
that the Saint-Simonian account of the French Revolution as the end of
an exhausted “metaphysical stage” of politics and social science appealed
to Mill, since it permitted him to tarnish the Benthamites as adherents of
an obsolete, anachronistic doctrine. What Mill adopted from Comte was
a strenuous critique of utility and egotistical pleasure-maximizing as the
basic scheme for explaining all human desires and for attaining the great-
est happiness of the greatest number in society. Mill also applauded the
Saint-Simonian attack on economic liberalism; he rejected the idea that
the protection of private property and inheritance was the indefeasibly
supreme aim of society, and he shared Comte’s critique of the pervasive
idolatry of the freedom of production and exchange.28
Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill repudiated “metaphysics”

both in the natural and social realms: they rejected the ideas of natu-
ral, abstract rights, and of a preordained plan of nature that arranged
a purpose for mankind. Both sought to uncover observational meth-
ods that would allow for the accurate analysis and prediction of causa-
tive sequences. By the same token, they became trailblazers for a novel
conception of scholarship. Comte and Mill subscribed to programs of
scientific objectivity that did not amount to impartiality, to a detach-
ment from political life, but instead envisaged scholars as pacesetters of
sociopolitical progress, as they developed panaceas to cure the moral,
economic, and spiritual ills of their age. While the line of attack was com-
fortably clear, there was little agreement as to what should replace the
pernicious remnants of the bygone “metaphysical age.” In the hands
of Comte’s and Mill’s adherents, “metaphysical” became a multipur-
pose term of attack, used by champions of either camp to ostracize and
dispossess the other of “positivism” proper. Already in 1829, Mill had
voiced guarded criticism of Comte’s work: he rejected what he perceived
as Comte’s partisanship for all-encompassing, invariant laws of social
and historical development29 and the paternalist, elitist conclusions that
Mill took to result from this premise. Mill also cast doubt on Comte’s
account of unbridled human instinctuality, which to Mill curtailed free
will, and he reiterated that self-perfection through education was the
only way of ensuring moral and intellectual advancement.30
Mill told his readers in 1873 that Comte had reinforced his early
belief that the methods of political science should be modelled after
physical science,31 but from the beginning there was no consensus
about which science should supply the “foundations for the whole doc-
trine of the conditions of human knowledge”32 positivists promised.
While Comte advocated phrenology and excoriated psychology, Mill
championed the latter: to him and his adherents, the facts of internal
consciousness, memory, and self-observation were amenable to direct
scientific study.33 Mill acknowledged his debt to Comte when it came
to his theory of induction,34 but also found that he lacked the solicitude
required for a positive philosopher, as Comte neglected causative analy-
sis.35 We have already touched on Mill’s critique of universal laws and on
his qualms about Comte’s paternalism, but Mill’s skepticism extended to
the status of technocratic guardianship in society more broadly. Comte
held that the mass of mankind would forever remain forced to rely on
the authority of experts not only in the technical, but also in the social
and moral domains,36 a view that cut against Mill’s advocacy of indi-
vidual liberty. It was to the establishment of individual liberty through
education, to its preconditions and safeguards in the realm of science,
that Mill devoted much of his work.37 The rule of experts, Comte prom-
ised, would make politics with its piecemeal engineering and inherited
animosities superfluous, whereas Mill maintained that conflict was indis-
pensable for moral and material progress.38
While Mill was a failure as a follower, a wayward and refractory dis-
ciple who diluted Comte’s work before making it percolate in England,
he arrived at his full stride as a founder. With his 1865 Auguste Comte
and Positivism, Mill fashioned a scientific and political agenda. He down-
played Comte’s significance to the “positivism” he elaborated by inte-
grating his philosophy into a sequence of liberating advances in what
seems a pastiche of the French philosopher’s law of inexorable progress.
“The philosophy called positive,” Mill stressed in 1865, “is not a recent
invention of M. Comte, but a simple adherence to the traditions of all
the great scientific minds whose discoveries have made the human race
what it is.”39 “Positive” and “positivism,” Mill continued, have become
“symbols of a recognized mode of thought” which induces “almost all”
who discuss the great problems of the age to take it “into serious consid-
eration, and define their own position, more or less friendly or hostile, in
regard to it.”40 “Positivism,” in Mill’s concise recapitulation, denotes the
inductive examination of observable phenomena and of the regular caus-
ative sequences that connect them, which in turn permits generalization:
The fundamental doctrine of a true philosophy, according to M. Comte,

and the character by which he defines positive Philosophy, is the following:
— We have no knowledge of anything but Phaenomena; and our knowl-
edge of phaenomena is relative, not absolute. We know not the essence, nor
the real mode of production, of any fact, but only its relations to other facts
in the way of succession or of similitude. These relations are constant; that
is, always the same in the same circumstances. The constant resemblances
which link phaenomena together, and the constant sequences which unite
them as antecedent and consequent, are termed their laws. The laws of
phaenomena are all we know respecting them. Their essential nature, and
their ultimate causes, either efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable
to us.41
This crisp summary turned “positivism” into a comfortably capa-

cious category, an umbrella term for “anti-metaphysical,” “universal,”
and “positive,” that is empiricist, agendas. What can be learned from our
skeletal outline is that positivism emerged as a linkage between two par-
ticular, local arrays of concerns, a linkage that was philosophically brittle
but politically and socially potent in its empirical, anti-metaphysical, and
universalizing significance. Two intermediary results follow from this,
one regarding the conditions and functions of the Anglo-French amal-
gamation of “positivism,” and one concerning the complex solvents that
lay beneath the apparently solid crust of positivist “universalism.”
First, in analyzing Mill’s appropriation of Comte and the adaptation
of Mill’s œuvre by Comte’s disciples in France, we can grasp the cultural
prestige associated with such “translations.” Advance praise, anxieties of
influence, and a set of auto-stereotypes about the English “empirical”
and the French “systematic” philosophical cultures interacted here.42
Mill, as we have sketched above, used Comte’s system from the 1820s
onward to demolish the utilitarian schemes of his father, while suspect-
ing that it was just another incarnation of the very doctrines he tried to
shake off.43 In France, by contrast, Mill’s System of Logic was welcomed
in the 1860s by critical disciples of Comte such as Émile Littré who used
it as a tool for revising the message of the founder himself. Littré’s 1864
re-edition of Comte’s Cours emphasized the logical and epistemologi-
cal aspects of positivism, curtailing Comte’s religious and political ideas
and turning the Cours into the French equivalent or archetype of Mill’s
Logic, supplying “a general system of sciences classified according to the
nature of their objects, and no longer according to the abstract principles
of faculties of the mind.”44 The second aspect, the intricacies of positivist
universalism, deserves a fuller exposition.
Rival Universalisms
The Anglo-French traffic of slogans, templates for social analysis,45 and
prestigious founding figures highlights the glimmering promise and glar-
ing contradictions contained in the universality of positivism. Positivists’
frameworks of universality were themselves dependent on and attuned
to local conditions, and this insight is highly illuminating for positivist
world-building, for its vision of globality. Comte’s universalism was pred-
icated on humanity’s co-productive, shared discovery of laws of develop-
ment as well as on the recruitment of global elites as future guardians of
“regeneration.” Comte staunchly rejected colonialism, slavery, and civi-

lizing missions (including the spread of Christian religions), alloying his
scheme for the discovery of the laws of nature and society with a full
recognition of cultural diversities. Contrary to what the often-reiterated
handbook cliché about Comte as partisan of immutable laws of social
and natural development suggests, he acutely appreciated that scientific
laws were products of specific milieus whose social and epistemic needs
they served.46 When analyzing the past and present of world develop-
ment, Comte contended that all three stages of his far-flung scheme
coexisted in every age of mankind and formed different patterns of
dominance and subordination.47 Comte’s recognition of cultural specifi-
cities was also crucial when he turned to planetary progress: these spe-
cificities constituted pristine, “fetishistic”—another term Comte invested
with social-analytical potential—traits of primordial worldviews common
to all mankind. Equally crucial, these worldviews permitted those who
held them to “leapfrog” to positivism. These pristine social configura-
tions opened potential shortcuts from primeval “fetishistic” stages to the
“positivist” stage, skipping the intermediary “metaphysical” level.
Mill found Comte’s confidence in primeval fetishism “repugnant to
the fundamental principles of positive philosophy” because it was retro-
grade, obscurantist, and nativist. It degraded feeling, intelligence, and
conduct because it abandoned the task of enlightening less fortunate,
“primitive” peoples about nature beyond their modes of experience.
Mill disputed the existence of Comtean universal, immutable laws48 but
grounded his claim about the ubiquitous and unlimited validity of “posi-
tive philosophy” across space and disciplines in his universal method.
While Mill tied this universalism to an eloquent defense of individual lib-
erty, including equal rights for women, he clearly distinguished between
civilizational dispositions, between barbaric savages and advanced
Europeans, thereby conceptually sustaining imperialism and colonial
rule.49
Auguste Comte’s universalism was grounded in laws of development
whose discovery was a social process that reflected the needs and procliv-
ities of the respective law-making milieu. By contrast, in Mill’s scheme
the method applied to attain knowledge about this world created uni-
versality. What does this imply for the recognition of cultural differences
and for imperialism? Comte and his followers recognized and appreciated
cultural distinctions while Mill affirmed the superiority of European civi-
lization and regarded cultural divergences as something to be gradually
suspended. For Mill, the universality of method was both epistemic and
sociopolitical. There was only one avenue for humanity’s emancipation:
its enlightenment through European liberalism and education.
Brokerage
The study of “brokered” philosophies and their sociopolitical resonances
breaks much-invoked “transfers” down into their small-scale catalysts
and conduits, it recovers the blockages, suspensions, and feedback loops
that marked these processes. An example from Comte’s early proselyt-
izing for his philosophie positive encapsulates the intricacies of these pro-
cesses. For Comte, the spread of his doctrine was part and parcel of his
universalizing agenda for a world beset by the “great crisis” the French
Revolution had inaugurated. In the 1820s, Auguste Comte’s emissary
and propagandist Gustave D’Eichthal scoured the university towns of the
Germanies, trawling local learned journals for news on recruitable public
intellectuals. D’Eichthal was one of Comte’s intermediaries: his recon-
naissance mission to the Germanies was aimed at finding positivist liaison
men.50 D’Eichthal first picked Friedrich Buchholz in Berlin as mouth-
piece for Comte’s philosophie positive. Buchholz was a late Enlightener,
a longtime adherent of Adam Smith, who had set his stakes on the
study of contemporary history and the editing of liberal periodicals.51
D’Eichthal approached Buchholz since he was a nodal figure in the net-
work of European liberal journals that satisfied the insatiable appetites of
readers across the continent, and because he was an “admirable genius”
who had the whole system of positive philosophy in his head.52 Buchholz
had already acquainted German readers with Saint-Simonianism53 and
Comte was thrilled to learn that Buchholz would translate and publish
extracts from the Système de politique positive in his Neue Monatsschrift
für Deutschland.54
However, Comte’s enthusiasm rapidly cooled in 1824, when
Buchholz committed an unforgivable gaffe: he suggested that the philoso-
phie positive merely repeated ideas he, Buchholz, had already presented
to the public more than twenty years before.55 This insolence was outra-
geous, and indeed Buchholz lost the rank of key promoter of positive
philosophy; now he would act as a “porter” for the German headquar-
ters of Comteanism, whose leadership should be confided to none other
than Georg F. W. Hegel.56 This story about D’Eichthal’s headhunting
foray demonstrates that the mediation of positivism possessed three
levels. First, there was the construction of cross-cultural genealogies and

the alignment of pre-existing traditions, that is the demonstration that a
hitherto distinct line of enquiry prepared “positivism” and was destined
to merge with it. D’Eichthal’s letters to Comte presented Buchholz as a
kindred spirit, as the heir to the anti-metaphysical evolutionary thought
of Johann Gottfried Herder and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon.
Thereby, Buchholz assigned him the role of a predecessor of positive phi-
losophy proper that was comparable to Condorcet’s function in France.57
Second, the novelty and prestige of positivism depended on the intel-
lectual and political demand for its ideas and techniques among poten-
tial recipients within as well as outside of France. Buchholz’s disclaimer
about the novelty of Comtean thought challenged this model. The third
dimension concerned the politics of publicity that animated the strate-
gies of recruitment, Buchholz’s experience as a gifted media man added
to his credentials. After Buchholz’s fall from grace, D’Eichthal proposed
Hegel as the front man for the philosophie positive in the Germanies. Here
content-based agreement was secondary; instead fame, crowd-pleasing
success, and the expected arousal of public debate were of overriding
importance.
Our second vignette concerns universality and its bearing upon
Comte’s Religion of Humanity. Wherever the Brazilian flag curls on a
flagpole, it shows the Comtean national slogan adopted in 1890s. The
motto ordem et progresso58 is emblazoned on a celestial globe set in
the center of a golden rhombus on a green field. The phrase is derived
from Comte’s slogan L’amour pour principe et l’ordre pour base; le pro-
grès pour but (Love as the Principle, Order as the Base, Progress as the
Goal). Designed by the mathematician Raimundo Texeira Mendes,
the motto featured on the Brazilian flag also adorns the Paris chapel of
the Comtean Religion of Humanity, situated at the heart of the Marais
quarter. In 1903 the Brazilian chapter of the Church of Humanity had
acquired the seventeenth-century hôtel located next to Clothilde de
Vaux’s last Paris residence and turned its first floor into the Parisian tem-
ple. Texeira Mendes took a leading part in this undertaking. As an ardent
pacifist, Texeira Mendes maintained that warfare and militarism delayed
the inevitable brotherhood of humankind and forestalled the develop-
ment of infrastructures beneficial for the citizens of Brazil.59 In 1905, he
travelled to Paris to celebrate the opening of the Temple of Humanity.60
The printed version of his inaugural address features three chronolo-
gies: July 1905 for the “normal era”; the 117th year of the Grande Crise
Occidental which had begun in 1789, the year of the French Revolution;
and the 61st year of religious positivism. This occasion—a Brazilian
mathematician delivers the opening lecture of the Parisian temple on
the triple dates presented on the title page of the celebratory booklet—
encapsulates two key features of positivism: its diagnosis of permanent
planetary crisis, which only scientific positivism was able to overcome,
and the feeling of a global-universal manifest destiny to elevate all man-
kind. Many European thinkers of the nineteenth century lamented a
post-revolutionary crisis and concocted “universal” remedies. Comte’s
diagnosis was distinctive in that for him the universality of the crisis con-
cerned the planet as a whole, and that its only possible solution would
also have to encompass the globe in its entirety.
Five Key Themes

The promoters of positivism saw it as a universal panacea that promised
to establish objective laws of scientific discovery and social development.
Its adherents also took it to be all-encompassing because its methodo-
logical premises were valid in every field of scholarship. Departing from
this challenge of positivism, the authors of this book pursue five avenues.
First, they explore the scientific core of positivist methods, the plethora
of rival “positive,” that is empirical, and anti-metaphysical, modes of
inquiry that vied for pre-eminence within positivism. These methods are
not treated as self-sufficient and self-propelling. Instead, the contributors
to this book detect their practical prerequisites and explore the scholarly
procedures and academic infrastructures that determined the success of
epistemologies. Second, the volume offers a fresh perspective on the rela-
tionship between the sciences and the humanities in the nineteenth cen-
tury. The book shows how positivists sought to bridge the emerging rift
between the humanities and the natural sciences which they simultane-
ously deepened by asserting the higher certainty of inquiries into nature.
Third, all contributors look at the practices of social engineering positiv-
ists pursued and at the visions of political order they supported. Fleshing
out the trans-regional fortunes of positivism, many of the chapters show
how positivist doctrines and toolkits curried favor among the functionary
elites of empires; positivism became an important and contested marker
of reformist self-enhancement, an apple of discord between imperial and
national activists. Fourth, all chapters shed new light on the relationship
between positivism and religion. Notwithstanding their anti-metaphysical
stance, Comtean positivists preached the Religion of Humanity and

offered a gamut of rituals that catered to votaries across the planet,
imparting believers’ everyday life with a spiritual trajectory toward the
unity of humankind. But the book also shows that there was another
side to the connection between positivism and religion, namely the role
religions played as mediators between positivism and their believers. By
shining a spotlight on Catholic Enlighteners, Muslim reformers, and
Hindu educators, the authors discover a rarely studied world inhabited
by religious promoters of positive knowledge. Fifth, this book’s focus is
cross-cultural in several respects: it refracts the universalistic purpose and
agenda of positivism through a variety of lenses. It also offers chapters
on several imperial and pluricultural contexts such as the Habsburg and
Ottoman Empires, Russia, and India. These cases expose the political
significance and contestability of positivism. The book reconstructs the
tensions within multilingual and multi-religious epistemic communities
of scientists that were in the process of being dismantled and disentan-
gled along national lines. Likewise, the volume shows that the study of
positivism is particularly revealing for the rediscovery of confrontations
between imperial scientific designs and anti-colonial agendas.
Scope of the Volume

The chapters do not provide an exhaustive and comprehensive gen-
eral account of the global fortunes of positivism. This would require a
library of its own.61 Instead, the chapters should be read as a represent-
ative survey of the worlds of positivism along the lines sketched above.
The book is organized in four parts. As stated above we aim at disman-
tling the dichotomy between the “inside” and the “outside” of positivism.
In order to de-naturalize the trajectories of dissemination that underpin
diffusionist histories and to effectively scrutinize their inbuilt narrative
conceit and spatial metrics we have opted for a specific arrangement of
chapters. Instead of moving from an apparently solid core of European
ideas to Europe’s docile latter-day apprentices, we start by highlighting
the function of positivism in the imperial societies of India, Brazil, and
the Ottoman lands before turning to the production sites of positivism in
Europe.
The first part, “Empires of Positivism,” links three studies on British
India, Brazil, and the Ottoman Empire. In her study on colonial Bengal,
Geraldine Forbes presents a group portrait of Hindu activists who
appropriated Comtean ideas that allowed them to believe in a scientific

future without disrupting the inherited social and religious hierarchies.
Forbes fleshes out how these intellectuals used Comteanism to refurbish
Hinduism conceptually while articulating a forceful critique of colonial rule.
Elías José Palti’s chapter on the vicissitudes of positivism in nine-
teenth-century Brazil locates the power bases of Comteanism in the
intellectual and military elites of the empire and follows his protago-
nists through the Revolution of 1889 into the republican era. Weaving
together the history of belle époque Brazilian society, political life, sci-
ence, and literature, Palti reconstructs how positivists scrapped the
rose-colored and socially conservative accounts of the country’s alleg-
edly interwoven plural cultural heritages which an earlier generation of
Romantic scholars and literati had provided. Instead, the positivist sci-
entific image of post-monarchical and post-slavery Brazil threw the
insurmountable rifts within its society into sharp relief. Palti’s positiv-
ists, like Euclides da Cunha, whose Os Sertões from 1902 he discusses
prominently, explained the deviations, irregularities, and regressions of
Brazilian development from the tectonics of its many geological-climatic
and social layers. Ardently believing in the immutable natural laws of
development that were immanent to history, Brazilian positivists came to
find them partially suspended in their own country, belied by the nature
of Brazilian society.
The third piece in this section by M. Sait Özervarlı is devoted to the
Young Turkish adaptation of Comtean philosophy and Durkheimian
sociology in the Ottoman Empire. Özervarlı’s protagonists embraced
Comtean positivism as a scientific and educational system that would
create solidarity within society, unify the teetering empire under Turkish
leadership, and rebuff Western imperialist ambitions. As Özervarlı dem-
onstrates, the Young Turks sought to reconcile Islamic faith with sci-
entific progress. This synthesis was accompanied by an assimilationist
political program. Resistance to the Young Turk program targeted these
agendas separately or rejected the entire package, mobilizing regional,
national, and religious loyalties to that end.
The second part of the book, “Positive Knowledge and the Making of
Positivism,” features three contributions on the protracted and piecemeal
fabrication of positivism. The three essays on Spain, the German lands,
and France show how earlier strategies of inquiry that aimed at “positive
knowledge” were arduously and selectively integrated into “positivism”
once the latter had been ensconced as a legitimate scientific and political
agenda in the 1860s. They also chart how the acquisition of “positive
knowledge” was gradually tied to the natural sciences. Jorge Fernández-
Santos Ortiz-Iribas’s and Sara Muniain Ederra’s chapter on eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Spain analyzes how empiricist imperatives in
various forms were melded together in the crucible of Bourbon enlight-
ened reform. They illuminate that Spanish novatores took their cues from
Bacon, Gassendi, and Newton. The chapter discusses how this eight-
eenth-century formulation of the empirical-pragmatic style of inquiry,
which tried to reconcile religious belief and scientific method, prefigured
and preconditioned the nineteenth-century appropriation of positivism,
particularly in the blend of Krausism and positivism. Fernández-Santos
and Muniain Ederra link the fabrication of this “Krausopositivism” with
the anti-utopian thrust of the Bourbon restoration after 1875, locat-
ing its social basis in a newly emerging learned elite of surgeons and
naturalists.
Denise Phillips’s chapter on the scope and subtexts of “positive
knowledge” in the Vormärz German lands also refrains from treating
her protagonists as precursors of positivism proper. In Phillips’s essay the
quest for positive knowledge in the Germanies before 1850s is no mere
set of signposts and premonitions for subsequent Millean and Comtean
programs. Instead, she shows that the association of natural-scientific
inquiries with “positive” knowledge was first voiced as an insult rather
than praise. Neohumanist critics of the natural sciences used this term as
a justification for assigning Naturwissenschaft a lower status in the edu-
cational, civic, and intellectual hierarchies of their time. This, in turn,
prompted natural scientists to defend the epistemic and cultural bene-
fits of positive knowledge as well as its distinctiveness from the humani-
ties. German naturalists thus slowly internalized what had been a hostile
ascription, turning the insult into a competitive advantage toward the
middle of the nineteenth century.
Nathalie Richard’s chapter carries the story of the gradual piecing
together of positivism to France. Richard recovers the philosophical and
political debates of the Second Empire in the 1860s, reconstructing how
the notion of a “positivist school” was, similar to the Germanies, coined
by its detractors who in this case rejected anti-metaphysical science, lai-
cism, and republicanism. These critics targeted Hippolyte Taine, Ernest
Renan, and Comte’s maverick disciple Émile Littré. As Richard clarifies,
this process coincided with Littré’s own refashioning of the positivist leg-
acy. Linking Comte’s Cours with Mill’s System of Logic, Littré highlighted
the logical-epistemological and objectivist-naturalist core of positivism

and pruned it of Comte’s religious calls for universal regeneration, mak-
ing Comte and Mill parts of one venerable ancestry.
The third part of the book, “The Liberal Politics of Science and
Society,” connects three studies on the Central and East European for-
tunes of positivism in the nineteenth century. All three chapters show
how local appropriators and multipliers in Russia, in the Habsburg
Monarchy, as well as among the Polish intelligentsia deployed “positiv-
ism.” In all three cases, liberal positivists blended the establishment of
scientific infrastructures with a program of anti-metaphysical scholarship
that arranged observational evidence around normative injunctions—
namely civic liberty and social betterment—and derived their claims to
political leadership of their respective empire or to autonomy within it
from this very combination. Franz L. Fillafer and Johannes Feichtinger
analyze the epistemic and political functions of positive knowledge in
the Habsburg lands from the early nineteenth century to the 1930s. In
contrast to the Germanies of Denise Phillips’s neohumanists, the scholars
and savants of the Habsburg restoration before 1848 actively promoted
the acquisition of positive knowledge about the laws that governed the
world, but they also stressed the inscrutability of the origins and purpose
of these laws. Liberal scholars and intellectuals appropriated this anti-
speculative and anti-revolutionary program since the 1820s. Seeking to
de-legitimize the Newtonian, statist, and classicist cosmology of the res-
toration as well as Hegelian idealism, liberal scholars inserted the socio-
political ascendancy of a new class of educated and self-reliant citizens
into the objective order. They imparted this order with evolutionary laws
of surreptitiously unfolding progress that could be studied inductively.
In the 1850s Mill’s version of positivism was translated to the Austrian
lands by the classicist Theodor Gomperz. The chapter traces the rival
varieties of positivism across scientific domains (the natural sciences,
philology, philosophy, history, law). It demonstrates how Mill’s model
of inquiry was refashioned by Ernst Mach and Franz Brentano, by the
Vienna Circle (Schlick, Carnap, Neurath), as well as by Hans Kelsen’s
critical-democratic legal positivism. Positivist universalism became a
potent tool for Austro-German liberals to camouflage their exclusionary
strategies within the empire and to assert their civilizing mission vis-à-
vis the Monarchy’s “nationalities.” The final section analyzes the fin de
siècle shipwreck of positivism in conjunction with the collapse of Austrian
liberalism whose vision of benign imperial rule, social order, and scien-
tific inquiry it had provided.
Jan Surman’s chapter revisits the different milieus in Habsburg
Galicia, Russian Poland, and the Prussian Duchy of Poznán in which
Polish-speaking intellectuals and writers fabricated their positivism. The
Polish positivists of the 1860s tapped older models of “organic work,”
of economic rationalization, social welfare, and public education which
had been elaborated in the Duchy of Poznán and Habsburg Galicia since
the 1830s. Bearing a strong artistic imprint, Polish positivism was inti-
mately tied to the realist and naturalist repudiation of poetic Romantic
Messianism and Hegelian idealism, which were held responsible for the
crushing defeat of the 1863 Polish uprising. Polish positivism, and its
Warsaw strand in particular, remained intimately connected to realist and
naturalist belles-lettres, its shibboleths and slogans came from the works
of Mill, Buckle, and Spencer, while Comte remained a marginal presence.
Spencerism loomed large here because of its scientistic, anti-imperialist,
and strenuously egalitarian ingredients. Millean positivism was a center-
piece of the widespread liberal Anglophilia among Habsburg and Polish
intellectuals.
Written by Thomas Nemeth, the last chapter of this part gives a fresh
account of the ramifications of positivism in Russia with particular empha-
sis on its predominant Comtean variety. Nemeth shows how calls for a
new science of society that would treat its regularities as parts of the laws
of nature took root in Russia from the 1840s, and continued to prolifer-
ate despite rigorous censorship. As in Poland and the Habsburg lands,
“positivism” undermined Hegelian idealism both culturally and politi-
cally. Positivism should enable its adherents to arrive at the objective anal-
ysis and rational treatment of social ills. Here Russian Comteans faced the
demanding task of reconciling their stated aim, the liberation of individu-
als from the irrationalist restraints imposed by social tradition and insti-
tutions, with the concomitant presupposition of immutable and eternal
sociohistorical laws. Discussing Russian sociology, historiography, legal
theory, psychology, and philosophy, Nemeth follows the ramifications of
this dilemma, showing the conservative and progressive implications of
the positivist conceptions of lawfulness and the ensuing skirmishes over
scientists’ roles as active participants in the reformation of society.
In the fourth and final part of the book, “Positivist Aftermath,” Johan
Strang and Eric S. Nelson offer a revisionist perspective on the transfor-
mation from nineteenth-century positivism to “analytical philosophy.”
Both chapters demystify “analytical philosophy” by unearthing its local,

“continental” foundations. Like Fillafer and Feichtinger, who recon-
struct the sequence from Mill through Mach to the Vienna Circle,
Strang and Nelson unravel the origins and self-derivation of “analytical”
philosophers. Strang traces how the pioneers of logical empiricism in
Scandinavia related novel ideas to their domestic philosophical traditions
in the 1930s. He studies how ostensibly self-sufficient lofty philosophi-
cal ideas are produced, selectively redescribed, and “indigenized”. Strang
discusses how Swedish logical positivists made their agenda dovetail with
the older Uppsala positivist tradition with which it had few philosophi-
cal points of contact, while the Finnish acolytes of logical empiricism
presented it as a foreign innovation that supplanted local positivist phi-
losophizing in Finland. Strang surveys the turf battles and generational
conflicts among Nordic philosophers, discusses their self-fashioning as
“peripheral” thinkers,62 which allowed them to dodge dogmatism and
to enjoy intellectual freedom; Strang shows how “analytical philosophy”
was invented as a Cold War paradigm by proponents who advertised its
objectivity, neutrality, and scientific impartiality. In this key, Strang links
the Swedish construction of analytical philosophy as an autochthonous
yet universal mode of philosophizing to Alfred Ayer’s parallel incorpora-
tion of logical empiricism into a native British tradition.
Eric S. Nelson’s chapter complicates the conventional juxtapo-
sition between allegedly obscurantist Lebensphilosophie and logical
empiricism by retrieving the connections between Rudolf Carnap and
Wilhelm Dilthey. Carnap adapted Dilthey’s advocacy of an empiri-
cal scientific inquiry as the expression and articulation of a “feeling of
life” (Lebensgefühl) which was grounded in a specific “worldview” rather
than being a universally valid truth; Nelson shows how Carnap used
these Diltheyan impulses in his critique of metaphysics and of Martin
Heidegger’s philosophy. Nelson recovers the political contexts of
Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie, arguing against distorting readings that asso-
ciate it with an “irrationalist” reaction against liberal modernity, science,
and the Enlightenment. Instead, Nelson demonstrates that concepts
like the feeling of life, worldview, and life stance became crucial for the
critique of traditional authorities because they allowed for an emphasis
on experience as well as on an experimental scientific and artistic spirit.
Nelson contends that Carnap’s interest in developing a logic of the sin-
gular and the cultural indicate the possibility of articulating his project as
a logical empiricist hermeneutics that aimed at furthering “life” through
clarifying it. Carnap’s philosophy, firmly placed here in the context of

the Vienna Circle’s educational and reformist designs, emerges from
Nelson’s essay as a social-political project formulated in an apolitical lan-
guage. The two chapters by Nelson and Strang invite us to reappraise the
fate of logical empiricism: both reveal the obliteration of the far-flung
social-political reformist agenda of the Vienna Circle that occurred when
logical empiricism was transmuted into “analytical philosophy.”
The chapters presented in this book offer a nuanced mapping of the
worlds of positivism. They recover the elaboration and dismantling of
conceptions and practices that were designed to generate universal knowl-
edge. By untangling the intricate web of positivism, they highlight the
potential of a novel type of intellectual history pursued on a global scale.
Notes
1. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (eds) (2015) Global Intellectual History
(New York: Columbia University Press); c.f. the critical remarks of Sanjay
Subrahmanyam (2015) “Global Intellectual History beyond Hegel and
Marx,” History and Theory 54, 1, 126–137; Martin Mulsow (2015)
“Vor Adam: Ideengeschichte jenseits der Eurozentrik,” Zeitschrift für
Ideengeschichte, 9, 1, 47–66.
2. Bernard Lightman (ed.) (2016) Global Spencerism: The Communication
and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist (Leiden, Boston: Brill);
Thomas F. Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, and Rosaura Ruiz (eds)
(2001) The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World (Dordrecht,
Boston: Kluwer).
3. Quentin Skinner (1969) “Meaning and Understanding in the History
of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, 1, 3–53; revised reprint in id. (2002)
Visions of Politics, I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 57–90, see Franz L. Fillafer (2015) “Auszug aus
Cambridge,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 9, 1, 115–118.
4. See Martin Jay (2011) “Historical Explanation and the Event: Reflections
on the Limits of Contextualisation,” New Literary History 42, 557–571;
Peter E. Gordon (2013) “Contextualism and Criticism in the History of
Ideas,” in Samuel Moyn and Darrin McMahon (eds) Modern Intellectual
History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century
(New York: Oxford University Press), 32–55.
5. Walter M. Simon (1963) European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century:
An Essay in Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
6. Duncan Bell (2009) “Making and Taking Worlds,” in Moyn and Sartori
(eds) Global Intellectual History, 254–279.
7. For the intricacies of appropriation see Manolis Patiniotis (2007)

“Periphery Reassessed: Eugenios Voulgaris Converses with Isaac
Newton,” British Journal for the History of Science 40, 4, 471–490.
8. Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo (eds)
(2009) The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–
1820 (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications).
9. See P.G. Usenko (2011) “Iniciativi Z. Serakov’skogo u sferi reform 1860-
kh rr.,” [Zygmunt Sierakowsi’s reform initiatives in the 1860s] Problemi
Istoriiї Ukraїni ХІХ—pochatku 18, 207–222, here 209.
10. Mary Pickering (1993–2009) Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 3 vols., vol. 3, 2.
11. Auguste Comte (1830–1842) Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols. (Paris:
Bachelier).
12. Pickering, Comte, vol. 3, 3.
13. Annie Petit (1998) “Auguste Comte et Clotilde de Vaux. Les Confidences
de ‘l’année sans pareille’ (avril 1845–avril 1846),” in Simone Bernard-
Griffiths and Christian Croisille (eds) Difficulté d’être et mal du siècle dans
les correspondances et journaux intimes de la première moitié du XIX siècle
(Clermont-Ferrand: Nizet), 303–328.
14. Annie Petit (2003) “Les disciples de la religion positiviste,” in Michel
Bourdeau (ed.) Auguste Comte et la religion positiviste (Paris: Vrin),
75–100; Pickering, Comte, vol. 3, 346–347.
15. Annie Petit (1989) “La diffusion des savoirs comme devoir positiviste,”
Romantisme 17, 65, 7–26, here 26.
16. See the chapters by Geraldine Forbes and Elías J. Palti in the present vol-
ume, c.f. John E. McGee (1931) A Crusade for Humanity: The History
of Organized Positivism in England (London: Watts & Co); T.R. Wright
(1986) The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on
Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
18. Ibid., 8–9, 11.
19. Ibid., 9, 79–80
20. Ibid., 522–523.
21. Ibid., 81–82, 582.
22. Ibid., 271, 268 (fetishism).
23. Ibid., 240.
24. Ibid., 272.
25. Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (2001) “Harriet Martineau and the Positivism of
Auguste Comte,” in Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (eds)
Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives (New
York: Routledge), 169–189.
26. Alan Ryan (2004) “Introduction,” in John Stuart Mill and Jeremy
Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. by A. Ryan, 2nd edn
(London: Penguin), 34–36; William Thomas (1979) The Philosophical

Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817–1841 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press), 147–205.
27. Pickering, Auguste Comte, vol. 1, 192–245, 505–538; George G. Iggers
(1970) The Cult of Authority: The Political Philosophy of the Saint-
Simonians, 2nd edn (Dordrecht: Springer), 38–67.
28. John Stuart Mill (1873) Autobiography, 2nd edn (London: Green, Reader,
and Dyer), 166–167.
29. See Franz L. Fillafer (forthcoming) “Positivist Worldmakers: Auguste
Comte’s and John Stuart Mill’s Rival Universalisms on the Zenith of
Empire,” in Johannes Feichtinger, Anil Bhatti, and Cornelia Hülmbauer
(eds), Transgressing Difference: New Methodological Perspectives for
Understanding Knowledge Production (New York: Springer).
30. Pickering, Comte, vol. 1, 511; Alan Ryan, “Introduction,” 40. Universal
social regularities also seemed shaky to Mill, who continued to abide by
the environmental-climatological teachings inherited from his father’s cir-
cle of philosophical radicals, c.f. Ryan, “Introduction,” 21.
31. Mill, Autobiography, 165; Pickering, Comte, vol. 1, 514.
32. John Stuart Mill (1866) Auguste Comte and Positivism 2nd ed. (London:
Trübner & Co.), 53.
33. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 65.
34. Mill, Autobiography, 210–211, on the “inverse deductive method, as
the one chiefly applicable to the complicated subjects of History and
Statistics; a process differing from the more common form of the
Deductive Method in this—that instead of arriving at its conclusions by
general reasoning, and verifying them by specific experience (as is the
natural order in the deductive branches of physical science), it obtains its
generalizations by a collation of specific experience, and verifies them by
ascertaining whether they are such as would follow from known general
principles. This was an idea entirely new to me when I found it in Comte:
and but for him I might not soon (if ever) have arrived at it.”
36. Mill elided passages in which he acknowledged the inevitability of this def-
erence from the draft version of his Autobiography; Pickering, Comte, vol.
1, 518 (“in mathematics and physics … liberty of conscience, or the right
of private judgment is merely nominal”).
37. Mill, Autobiography, 213.
38. John Skorupski (1998) “Introduction,” in John Skorupski (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
1–34, here 19.
40. Ibid., 1–2.
41. Ibid., 6.
42. Pickering, Comte, vol. 1, 510–511.

43. Mill devoured the Cours with great enthusiasm while composing his own
1843 System of Logic, but in the 1860s he was at pains to minimize his
erstwhile admiration of Comte. Here Mill stressed the “independence”
of his logical work, although its first version conceptualized the mind–
body relationship in reliance on a Comtean scheme; Pickering, Comte,
vol. 1, 525. Mill, Autobiography, 245*: in the first edition of the Logic,
all of the four states of mind (volition, emotion, thought, sensations)
are influenced by bodily states, the conceptualization of the mind–body
relationship fleshes out the significance of the brain as a repository of
corresponding faculties, see Adelaide Weinberg (1982) The Influence
of Auguste Comte on the Economics of John Stuart Mill (London: E.G.
Weinberg), 56–57.
44. Compare the chapter by Nathalie Richard in the present volume.
45. See Mill’s remark on the limited applicability of Comte’s analysis of social
and political life to Britain: while Comte’s rejection of abstract principles
such as those enshrined in natural jurisprudence was laudable, English
legal culture hinged on “general expediency,” Mill, Auguste Comte and
Positivism, 70–71. In Britain, Mill added, arguments from “abstract
rights” were only put forth by the “radical portion of the working class
demanding universal suffrage.”
46. See Fillafer, “Positivist Worldmakers”.
48. John Stuart Mill (1909) Principles of Political Economy, ed. W.J. Ashley
(London: Longmans, Green and Co.), 795–796; Weinberg, The Influence
of Auguste Comte on the Economics of John Stuart Mill, 32.
49. Uday Singh Mehta (1999) Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-
Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press),
97–106, c.f. Lynn Zastoupil (1994) John Stuart Mill and India
(Stanford: Stanford University Press).
50. Comte to Emile Tabarié, 22.8.1824, in Lettres d’Auguste Comte à divers,
publiée par ses testamentaires, 1850–1857, 3 vols, vol. 3: Lettres antérieures
à 1850 (1905) (Paris: Fonds typographique de l’Exécution testamentaire
d’Auguste Comte, 1902–1905), 25.
51. See Iwan Michelangelo D’Aprile (2013) Die Erfindung der Zeitgeschichte:
Geschichtsschreibung und Journalismus zwischen Spätaufklärung und
Vormärz. Mit einer Edition von 93 Briefen von Friedrich Buchholz an
Johann Friedrich Cotta und Johann Georg Cotta, 1805–1833 (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag).
52. D’Eichthal to Comte, 11.5.1824, La Revue Occidentale philosophique,
sociale et politique. Organe du positivisme, ed. by Pierre Laffitte, Seconde
Sèrie, Tome XII, Premier semestre (Paris: Société positiviste, 1896): 186–
276, 206.
53. Jörn Garber (1991) “Politische Revolution und industrielle Evolution.

Reformstrategien des preußischen Saint-Simonismus (Friedrich
Buchholz),” in Otto Büsch and Monika Neugebauer-Wölk (eds) Preußen
und die revolutionäre Herausforderung seit 1789 (Berlin and New York:
De Gruyter), 301–330.
54. Friedrich Buchholz [tr. from the French original by Auguste Comte]
(1824) “Nicht-metaphysische Staatswissenschaft,” Neue Monatsschrift für
Deutschland historisch-politischen Inhalts, 14, 314–351; 15, 52–85.
55. Comte to d’Eichthal, 24.11.1824, quoted in: D’Aprile, Die Erfindung der
Zeitgeschichte, 76.
56. D’Eichthal to Comte, 22.8.1824, La Revue Occidentale philosophique
(1896): 245.
57. D’Aprile, Die Erfindung der Zeitgeschichte, 74.
58. The Comtean mathematician Raimundo Texeira Mendes (1855–1927)
proposed the motto and fine-tuned the design after the founding of
the Brazilian republic in 1890. See Mozart Pereira Soares (1998) O
Positivismo no Brasil. 200 anos de Auguste Comte (Porto Alegre: Age), 98.
59. Todd A. Diacon (2004) Stringing Together a Nation: Cândido Mariano
Da Silva Rondon and the Construction of Modern Brazil, 1906–1930
(Durham: Duke University Press), 90.
60. Raymundo Texeira Mendes (1905) Inauguration de la chapelle de
l’humanité qui a été installée à Paris dans la maison de la rue Payenne,
n° 5 …. Paroles prononcées à cette occasion par R. Teixeira Mendes (Rio de
Janero: Apostolat positiviste).
61. Pickering, Comte, vol. 3, 575–579. For studies on regions not covered
by the present collection see Thomas R.J. Havens (1970) Nishi Amane
and Modern Japanese Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press),
110–113; Gillis J. Harp (1995) Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and
the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1920 (University Park:
University of Pennsylvania); Maria Donzella (1999) Origini e declino del
positivismo. Saggio su Auguste Comte in Italia (Naples: Liguori); Erich
Sartori (2014) “Les Positivistes et la Chine,” Monde Chinois 40, 4, 116–
129; O.M. Bogdashina (2013) Pozitivizm v istorichniі nauci v Ukraini.
(60-ti) [Positivism and the historical sciences in Ukraine (1860s–1920s)],
2nd edn (Kharkiv: KhNU).
62. See Stefan Nygård and Johan Strang (2016) “Facing Asymmetry: Nordic
Intellectuals and Center–Periphery Dynamics in European Cultural
Space,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, 1, 75–97; Nygård and Strang
(2017) “Conceptual Universalization and the Role of Peripheries,”
Contributions to the History of Concepts 12, 1, 55–75.
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Introduction: Particularizing Positivism

Chapter · January 2018

Franz Leander Fillafer Johannes Feichtinger

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Edited by Johannes Feichtinger, Franz L. Fillafer, and Jan Surman

ISBN 978-3-319-65761-5 ISBN 978-3-319-65762-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951535

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: Cover image courtesy of Nadia Shira Cohen

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This book originated in the Vienna-based international research pro-

1 Introduction: Particularizing Positivism 1

Part I Empires of Positivism

2 Striking a Chord: The Reception of Comte’s Positivism

3 Positivism, Revolution, and History in Brazil 53

4 Positivism in the Late Ottoman Empire: The “Young

Part II Positive Knowledge and the Making of Positivism

5 An Enlightened Path to Positivism? Reflections on

6 Trading Epistemological Insults: “Positive Knowledge”

7 The French Philosophical Crisis of the 1860s and the

Part III The Liberal Politics of Science and Society

8 Habsburg Positivism: The Politics of Positive Knowledge

9 The Contexts of Early Polish Positivisms, 1840s–1900s 239

10 Positivism in Late Tsarist Russia: Its Introduction,

Part IV Positivist Aftermath

11 Positivism in the Northern Peripheries: Generations of

12 Dilthey and Carnap: The Feeling of Life, the Scientific

13 The Worlds of Positivism: An Analytical Synopsis 349

About the Editors

Johannes Feichtinger is Senior Research Associate at the Austrian

Franz L. Fillafer is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary History at the

the Unity of History to Global History,” History and Theory 56 (2017),

Jan Surman is a visiting scholar at the Max Weber Centre for

Jorge Fernández-Santos Ortiz-Iribas was educated at Cornell

Geraldine Forbes is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita in the

and book chapters on Chinese, German, and Jewish philosophy. He is

Ueberweg’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie with chapters on

on the history of analytic philosophy, Scandinavian legal realism, and

Fig. 1.1 The Paris statue of Auguste Comte. This monument was

Fig. 4.2 Positivist lawmakers. This Greek-Ottoman lithograph is an

Introduction: Particularizing Positivism

Franz L. Fillafer, Johannes Feichtinger and Jan Surman

The worlds of positivism were an unintended creation. Positivists

© The Author(s) 2018 1

jurisprudence, where the critical legal positivism pioneered by Hans

seeks to dismantle positivist universalism. In what follows, the authors

The Promise and Perils of Global Intellectual History

The Fabrication of Positivism:

he yearned for hinge on spiritual values. “Humanity” was elevated on a

mill of colonized populations who aspired to self-rule. The conceptual

Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill repudiated “metaphysics”

The fundamental doctrine of a true philosophy, according to M. Comte,

This crisp summary turned “positivism” into a comfortably capa-

“regeneration.” Comte staunchly rejected colonialism, slavery, and civi-

levels. First, there was the construction of cross-cultural genealogies and

Five Key Themes

stance, Comtean positivists preached the Religion of Humanity and

Scope of the Volume

appropriated Comtean ideas that allowed them to believe in a scientific

Fig. 1.1 The Paris statue of Auguste Comte. This monument was

Fig. 4.2 Positivist lawmakers. This Greek-Ottoman lithograph is an

The Promise and Perils of Global Intellectual History

The Fabrication of Positivism:

Scope of the Volume

7. For the intricacies of appropriation see Manolis Patiniotis (2007)

42. Pickering, Comte, vol. 1, 510–511.

53. Jörn Garber (1991) “Politische Revolution und industrielle Evolution.