Herbert Spencer and the Spectre of Comte
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7534276 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sydney Eisen (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1967 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 48-67 |
| Publication date | 1967-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of British Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1086/385544 |
| OpenAlex | W2054419199 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 10 |
It is very interesting to compare Spencer and Comte,” wrote George Sarton in an essay lauding their efforts to embrace all knowledge in a grand synthesis. The comparison, indeed, was tempting for contemporaries, as it has been for students of ideas. Both Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer were authors of new philosophic systems which, they believed, had been built on the firm foundations of science, and both were convinced that society should be reconstructed in accordance with the truths of their philosophies. The insistence of Positivists and some who were not Positivists that Spencer, consciously or not, had been influenced by Comte, and Spencer's repeated and fervent denials, made for a series of controversies that extended over half a century and ranged from the minutiae of priority to the more important issues of the classification of the sciences and the nature of religion. The eclipse of both the Positive Philosophy of Comte and the Synthetic Philosophy of Spencer in the twentieth century hardly suggests the interest they aroused in the nineteenth. The unification of knowledge and the discovery of the laws of man and society were dreams which nineteenth-century science and philosophy hoped to realize. Comte and Spencer made their contribution in this area; and while both were attacked for erecting systems on questionable assumptions, and for their weakness in details, their extraordinary ability to amass quantities of information and to come up with penetrating generalizations attracted admirers and disciples. Few of their critics thought that what they had set out to do was not worth doing, or could not be done
Apothecary · Art history · Epistemology · George (robot · Logical positivism · Philosophy of science · Positivism · Sociology · Unification · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Legal and Social Philosophy · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment
Victorian Politics and Politics Overseas
The Historicity of Peirce’s Classification of the Sciences
From ‘circumstances’ to ‘environment’
Scientism in the history of management theory
The Sociological Usages of “Pure Sociology”
Hope in the Sociological Thoughts of some Founding Fathers
Auguste Comte
Erasmus Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the Origins of the Evolutionary Worldview in British Provincial Scientific Culture, 1770-1850
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,22 |
| Citation span | 1990 - 2023 (34) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |